Gotham Gal

Freize and Pulse

This past week was all about the art shows.  We went out to the Freize on Saturday and the Pulse on Sunday decided to bag NADA.  The art world has made a few changes over the past decade.  The first is that the art shows are one of the main sources of income for galleries.  Those shows let the consumer see a lot of art in one setting and the gallery owners get to touch a lot of art lovers in a few days. 

There are pros and cons to the whole system.  It is expensive to take out a booth at these fairs.  You also have to have a gallery to have a booth which means that the game has just changed.  You are paying rent for your gallery and a very high price for the rent of the booth.  There are certainly a bunch of websites that are trying to bring the purchasing of art online but I still believe that when someone wants to buy an expensive piece they want to see it in person and build a relationship with the gallery.  You want to make sure the gallery is going to support and nurture that artists career. Yet I do love that the sites that are more accessible in terms of price point making the point that everyone can own art which is a good thing. 

I liked the Frieze more last year.  Who knows why. I will say that the food vendors were incredible.  Robertas, Frankies, Sant Ambreous, Fat Radish and more.  Maybe I wasn't in the mood but I found the works just not as interesting as years past or maybe just not as accessible.  The Pulse I found easier to take in. 

Here are my highlights from the Freize.  Tom Friedman had made these large sculptures that made me laugh.  A pizza.


White Bread.

Running shoes.

Rebecca Morris at Harris Lieberman.

Damien Hirst.

Barbara Kruger.

Do Ho Suh

Streams of black and white ribbon formed into a scultpure and then set inside a glass box.  Janaina Tschape

Pillow Talk by Jonathan Horowitz.  54 pieces of display but the piece is actually 96 pieces. Each piece had the opposite on one side.  Very clever. 

Nickel plated nylon sculpture Antony Gormley

Eroded Payphones, Daniel Arsham

Not sure who this artist was but this sculpture was awesome at the Gagosian Gallery.

The highlights from the Pulse below.

Grocery ladies, Will Kurtz, Mike Weiss Gallery

San Marco People, Jan De Vleigher

Hawaiian Surfer, Nick Carter.

Department Store, Gordon Parks.  LOVE this.

Deep Area Christine Flynn.

We came, we left and we bought nothing.  Will see what sticks in my head over the next few weeks. 

 

Sarah Tay, Tay Clean and Pure Skincare, Woman Entrepreneur

I knew of Tay Skincare before I got the chance to meet the entrepreneur behind the products.  I was speaking with Gloss 48, 3 women entrepreneurs up in the Boston area about their new site.  A site the carries unique independent skin/cosmetic products.  They sent me a gift of Tay products to thank me for talking with them.  When Sarah approached me at the Womens Entrepreneur Festival I knew exactly who she was.  I liked what she had built and when she later reached out to me through email I was happy to get together and talk. 

Sarah grew up in CA, in the valley.  Her mother was an accountant for the postal office and her father also worked for the postal service on the processing side and is involved in real estate too.  Both of Sarahs parents were born in Bangkok so Sarah is the first generation being raised in the US.  She was born in Los Angeles.  Sarah said as a kid they traveled summers in Asia, Europe and Australia.  She also grew up with an organic garden in her back yard so a lot of their travel included camping.

After graduating high school Sarah did not go that far but down the freeway to UCLA.  While she was at UCLA she would come out to NYC at least once a year to see friends and fell in love with the city.  When she was at UCLA she knew that she also wanted to go to art school.  She spent two years building her portfolio and then applied to Pratt where she got into their graduate school design program.  That was her first foray into living in NYC. 

Sarah interned for Abon the entire time she was at Pratt.  That internship is how she landed in the beauty industry.  She did not even know what Avon was when she was growing up.  She had never heard of it.  While she was there she worked in graphic design doing layouts and catalogs for them and through that began to understand the business.  It was 2002.

Sarah graduated and landed a job at L'Oreal as an art director.  She worked on in store packaging.  She loved it.  One day she stood up and looked around the office from her cubicle and saw a woman sitting over the way who was 47 and a guy standing next to her talking who was 50 and she thought I do not want to stay here and become them.  It was a wake-up call.  She was 26.  She took a step back and began to think about doing something new.

She was offered a job at OmniCom in their creative agency.  She began to work with large clients and it was there where she learned to run a business.  She was responsible for her own profit and loss statement which included staffing and profitability.  Although it was a challenging job she felt that she was still looking for something else. 

Sarah got recruited to CVS to work in their retail marketing department.  She worked on the creative side doing ad campaigns, broadcast and instore radio ads.  They had brought in a woman from Target who began to transform the stores.  BTW, if you have not been into the new CVS stores they are brilliantly designed.  The woman they brought in did an amazing job.  Regardless of that success a year into the job the company layed off a bunch of employees and Sarah was part of that.

The day she was laid off she had got a call from Cover Girl.  She did not know that she was laid off yet but that call made her think did she really want to be drawn back into the corporate world.  The answer was no.  She turned down the job and then found out about being laid off.  The answer no with now no job propostions she was empowering so she decided she was going to do something on her own.  Skincare sopke the loudest to her. She has saved some money so why not.  Tay Skincare was born.

Sarah knew what she wanted in the ingredients.  At first she spend a lot of time on the packaging.  She did a lot of research and tested everything.  She worked with different woods and to see how water contacted with it.  She chose bamboo.  Then she began working on the product.  The whole process took about a year and a half. All and all she went through 80 rounds of testing. 

Sarah called in help from former L'Oreal employees who wanted to help her.  She outsourced contacts who understood social media.  She first sold to Bigelow, Birchbox, Fred Segal and Alchemist in Miami.  She also signed on with a few distribution sales people.  She has her own ecommerce site that is about to be launched. She has made progress but not enough which is why she came to talk to me. 

The products are great but what is more impressive is Sarah.  She is building a business the old fashioned way, with her own sweat and determination.  We talked at length about how to build her business without taking any money.  My advice was simple, dial for dollars to the right people.  Eventually you will get your foot in the door in the right location that will give you a big order and through that you can factor your business and build. 

I got a nice note from Sarah in the mail a few days later telling me that it was so good to hear someone tell her she was doing the right thing as she is a one person act and sometimes it is hard to know if you are going down the right path.  A little positive feedback can go a long way.  But the best part is she got a call the day after we spoke from Harrods who gave her a nice order so she is off to the races.  Congratulations Sarah!  I keep thinking about Sarah.  I love that she has built a business with no money but her own.  Perhaps at one point she will bring in some investors but she could also continue to finance her business through sales.  TIme will tell but I am sure she must feel pretty damn good. 

Moms are big influencers

Moms influence their daughters (and sons) at every level.  My Mom, Judy Solomon, had more than a handful of careers.  She started out as a teacher because for her generation being a teacher or a nurse were top on the list in regards to a career path.  After having me, her first child, she stayed home to be a Mom.  I am pretty sure she never embraced being home with the kids.  She was always looking to do something else and the opportunities were not endless.  Once her kids were in school full time she began on an entrepreneurial path of starting a variety of businesses.  She had a head for business.  Growing up, her father owned a shoe store in Bakersfield.  After he died her brother took over the shop and within less than two years he had run it into the ground.  We used to say that if she took over the shoe store it would have become a chain. 

Her first venture was opening up a plant store in Georgetown called The Green Scene.  It was the early 70's.  Geraniums, macrame plant hangers and house plants were big.  She always had a nose for the future.  I am not so sure how the store did financially because her location should have been about three blocks south of where it stood. No doubt that was based on the fear of a rent too high to meet.  She grew the business from the back end working with home owners and businesses putting plants in their spaces.  For a variety of reasons particularly because her partner wanted out she had a couple of year run and then closed the store.

Her next business was working with a few crazy women starting a magazine geared towards teens.  Again she was on to something.  The articles were honest and dealt with the issues of the time.  If only the Internet was around she could have built a large content business. That was a short term business.

My parents got divorced and she knew that she needed to bring in a real income.  She took a class at night getting some type of masters.  After that she landed a job as the head of sales for a trade magazine.  She loved what she did and she was really good at it but hated the management.  She began to make a name for herself and was offered an opportunity to work with a company that was from Japan expanding their industry focused magazines into the US.  She was savvy.  She got a contract with them insuring her job for a full year with a golden parachute to kick in if they weren't able to get the company off the ground.  Smartest thing she ever did.  She quit where she had been working and two weeks into the new company they decided not to expand in to the US which left her with a nice chunk of change to figure out what she wanted to do next without the pressures of having to jump back into the game quickly.

She liked the industry that she was in and had plenty of contacts.  She decided to build a company that she called JSA (Judy Solomon Associates) where she would represent a variety of industry trade magazines selling their ads.  She built that into quite a business.  By the time she retired she was financially well off which is something that really drove her.  She wanted to live her life a particular way and she knew it was up to her to make that happen...and she did.

My Mom was multi-talented.  She was an artist (there was a point where she painted), a great cook, she loved to read and do the NY Times crossword puzzle daily and stay on top of politics.  She loved to work, be challenged and use her brain to think about voids in the marketplace.  She had many careers while keeping balance in her life and challenging her intellectually.  There is no question that I learned from that.  I could use a variety of words to describe her but I think she would have liked to be described as an entrepreneur. She probably did not think of herself as one but trust me, she was.

A day on Arthur Avenue

When the kids were young we used to go to the Bronx Zoo when the weather just started to get warm.  We also frequented the Botanical Gardens. Afterward we would go over to Arthur Avenue.  I have not been back in years so it was a real treat going back for a NY outing.

We started at Wave Hill.  What a magical place.  28 acres located in Riverdale sitting on the Hudson.  What is truly amazing is that without traffic you could be in midtown in 15 minutes.  The views are breathtaking.  The grounds are so clean that if you wanted to you could walk around barefoot.

This tree took me in.  As a kid I just loved climbing up as far as I could possibly go.

The flowers were in bloom everywhere. 

Great Performances has been the food vendor there for 20 years.  It would be fun to have Liz ( who is talking to the women in the truck ) to create a time line of all the different food served there over 20 years from lunch to weddings.  Had a killer lemonade to quench the thirst from the truck.

Our next stop was Arthur Avenue.  We began in the Arthur Avenue Retail Market.  Everyone appears to know each other there.  Peter's Meat Market is impressive.  Huge rolls of freshly made sausages.  Even across the way there was a huge vat of capers and sun dried tomatoes.

We strolled by Mikes Deli and although they had quite a list of sandwiches and an eggplant parm that looked pretty delicious we continued to walk over to Cafe Al Mercato for a slice of Sicilian pizza.  Roasted vegetable pizza.

The gourmet stores carry an endless supply of Italian products.  I picked up a few bags of dried pastas from companies that I have never seen or heard of before.  All of the shops carry a variety of treats too.  This was quite good and a perfect appetizer. 

We sat at the bar that sits in the middle of the market place and had a Bronx cider.  I am not sure I have really had a cider before.  Crispy bubbly alcoholic apple juice.

We wandered down the street to Cosenza's Fish Market.  Outside they have a stand for oysters and a stand for clams.  I had one oyster that was a serious treat.  Big briny and fresh.

Teitels is another market that carries fresh sausages, cheese and a variety of products.  This is the stand outside their shop.

Each place we went into carries salted anchovies.  Teitels had the biggest pile we saw.

Casa Della Mozzarella makes fresh mozzarella every day.  I also picked up this treat.

Continuing down the street to Tonys and Tinas pizza shop.  We wanted to get a burek at Giovannis but they only made them on the weekends.  Luckily Tony and Tinas had one.  The dough is more like a fillo dough stuffed with different things.  We had one with spinach.

Our last stop was on 187th street which is the other street with purveyors.  We had a lemon ice at Caffe Egidio that has been around since the 40's. 

I admit we got a little mixed up getting out of the Bronx but spent a fair amount of time driving down the Grand Concourse.  The streets are wide and some of the buildings are beautiful.  The Bronx has gone through many changes and you can not help but wonder what it was like there in the 40's. 

We had a really great day.  Getting out and exploring the different neighborhoods in and around NYC is a treat and a helluva lot easier than getting on a plane. 

Question of the week #29

I am definitely thinking about our future.  Soon we will be empty nesters and what will that mean.  Not only what will our life look like but what opportunities migtht I be tempted to go after. It is fitting that this is the question of the week.

Aside from investments, have you ever been tempted to start a company? In what industry? For what purpose?

I have been tempted to start a company many times.  I still have a passion for the brick and mortar space.  I have always wanted to open a place that is a life style store around food.  A place where people can pick up their goodies to make or buy something already made.  A place that serves three meals included snacks but is mellow and communal.  The restaurant that sits inside a deli/store that also sells art and trays. 

The reality is I know exactly the time and energy that I'd have to put into it.  It might happen it might not.  Never say never.  Right now I am working on the businesses that I have invested in and thinking about how we will have complete flexibility in our lives in another year or so and what will that mean. 

One step at a time. 

National Girlfriends Networking Day

First off I just love the name.  National Girlfriends Networking Day is a nationwide celebration of making connections.  Events take place around the country on June 4th. I am going to be on a panel that day from 12-1 EST with three amazing women; Lesley Jane Seyour the editor of MORE magazine, Taj Williams-Franklin a WNBA coach, player and community activist and Soledad O'Brien Emmy award winning journalist.  We will be taking questions through social media from nationwide participants.  I am really looking forward to it. 

I was introduced to Amy Siskind who is the co-founder of the New Agenda.  An impressive woman who was a highly successful Wall Street executive who decided to hop off the train when kids came into the picture.  Having a daughter made her really think about the importance of networking and community among women.  Amy speaks in college campuses talking about the importance of economic empowerment for women. 

Amy is inspirational and passionate about what she is trying to do at New Agenda.  The title says it all and so does the tag line; a voice for all women.  Women need to encourage each other to network and connect one on one.  We need to applaud each other and the choices we make with the hope that many of us grow into leadership positions.  All of these reasons are why we should celebrate National Girlfriends Networking day.

Hope you tune in and register now. 

The Spiritual Meaning of the Internet

There are not that many friends at my age that are as romanced as Fred and I are with the power of the Internet.  I have one close friend who is as passionate about the web as I am yet her passion is about the spiritual meaning where I am all about how many incredible businesses we can grow.  I love talking to her about this. 

She believes the Internet is a spiritual gift.  This tool has given us the ability to connect with people across the globe.  That the Internet fills us up and gives us each the access to people that we would have never had the opportunity to connect with before. 

This conversation really started me thinking about so many different things.  How people in areas of this world who in the past had limited access to education can now (through the web) use their brain to learn and perhaps think differently.  In turn that might be the key factor in changing what is happening in war torn countries.  How about the artisans in countries that had a very small audience to sell their wares to now has the entire globe.  How through those transactions the income will change the way they live by just putting a roof over their head and food in their belly. 

I have probably told this story before but in the 90's I had a friend who had started an interactive agency.  He understood the power of the net.  He owned more simple one word domain names because he fundamentally knew that each of them would be worth something down the line.  His sister lived in Pittsburgh and had a teenage daughter who felt lost in her own community.  She really did not find a connection among her peers based on her own interests.  That can be incredibly lonely particularly as a teenager.  She happened to be a They Might Be Giants fan.  Their website had a community that had grown around it.  She'd come home and get on the computer and talk to other people around the globe that had that one connection which was being a fan of the music group.  This online community made her feel empowered and connected and that translated to feeling good about herself and the future.  She knew that she would go on to college and find other people who she could connect with.  To me, that is the spiritual meaning of the Internet.

The web continues to transform the way that we live our lives starting with a constant connection in our pocket.  An ecommerce platform to buy anything around the globe, the access to content, the ability to constantly communicate, to share our experiences, photos and thoughts, the ongoing daily flow of new music, to ability to build unique business models that would not existed even 10 years ago, to crowd funding and crowd sourcing the web is an amazing place with powers that most of us just take for granted.  Can we all remember when we did not even have ATM cards or wireless phones.  As we move forward with technology it is easy to forget what life was like before hand.

Thinking about the world wide web as a world wide tool for community is the one piece that not only connects us to each other across many divides but also has given us a reason to take a breath, stand back and connect with the people we see every day at a different level because no matter what the web provides us in regards to finding our way and a community that we connect with, being able to sit around a table and break bread becomes even more important as we all ride this technology train that is taking us to a place that none of us are quite sure of. 

Kitchensurfing dinner

We went to the Kitchensurfing offices/townhouse in Gowanus for dinner to celebrate the closing of their Series A round.  Those dinners are to celebrate the company moving forward and meet all the people who are involved.  What was really great about this dinner is that everyone involved knows each other fairly well which not only makes for a fun dinner but is exciting that a crew that knows each other personally is involved.

Our dinner was prepared and served to us by Chef Robert Compagnon.  He is an excellent chef.  His bio gives you all the info you need to know. 

After studying Japanese at Columbia University, and spending a year cutting fish and working in a ramen shop in Japan, I decided cooking was for me. I moved to Paris after a year of cooking at Ouest on the UWS. In France I worked in both traditional (Alain Ducasse and Guy Savoy), and innovative kitchens like Rino, Spring and Chateaubriand. Five years later, I'm back in NY, working at Brushstroke in Tribeca, brushing up on traditional Japanese Kaiseki cuisine.

The meal was built around lamb after all spring is here (well sorta).  Two pieces of lamb topped with fish roe and tempura lamb brains.  The combo of the lamb with the roe totally worked.  The lamb brains although for many that sounds ghastly but it was absolutely delicious.  It had the same texture as a foie gras and the tempura was airy and crisp. 

Tongue raviolis served in a fish dashi broth with grilled scallions.  The ravioli was light yet packed with a wallop of flavors. 

This was insane.  Mushrooms sauteed in brown butter mixed with crispy deep fried parlsey with a lightly poached egg center stage.  Mix it all up (make it messy) and dig in.  The combination of the flavors and the textures were brilliant.

This was a little more dense.  A smoky eggplant mixture where the eggplant had been mashed with rosemary and lemons.  Over the top was pan fried octopus and crispy burdock root.  Octopus is one of my faves.

A saddle of lamb stuffed with watercress that was sliced for each plate sitting on top of a sweet potato puree and little bites of root veggies.  He had wrapped the lamb with fat in order to char and roast throughly.  A little lamb jus poured over the top. Excellent.

This was incredible.  Lamb belly chasyu served in a bowl of white miso soy ramen.  Chasyu is a mixture of a meat (this time lamb) tied up with string and either boiled or baked with a mixture of spices.  The taste of the chasyu was rich and buttery.  The soup was rich and intense with soba noodles sitting on the bottom.  Amazing.

I am sorry that I can not remember the name of his sous chef who made the desserts because she was also extremely talented.  She made two desserts.  The first was a poached lemon earl grey granita with evaporated milk.  Super creative. 

This was a mixture of three things.  A dense layered cake with chocolate ganache.  Just the right amount.  Then she sprinkled this with crispy honeycombs.  On the side was a thyme flavored ice cream that was out of this world.  Each of the flavors mixed together were a total omg. 

The event was great and just showed all of us the brilliance of Kitchensurfing.  These two people came into the Kitchensurfing home to make a sublime meal where we all sat around the kitchen table talking, drinking and having fun.  We were able to enjoy a restaurant quality meal in our own home and hear from the chef about what we were eating and how it was prepared.  An incredible experience that I highly recommend trying.  A game changer. 

Kena Paranjape and Jen Lee Koss, Brika, Women Entrepreneurs

I have said this before that I actually do read all my emails and respond.  I got an email from Jen that gave me an overview of Brika and of course a few of mutual connections.  I really love what both Kena and Jen built but told them about our house rule.  We have a very hard fast rule in this house which is one investment per vertical.  We are investors in Etsy and Brika sits in that space.  She figured so much but just wanted to get some advice.  It took some time as my office was destroyed by Sandy but we finally got together.  Both Kena and Jen are impressive women who have curated a collection of talented makers that celebrate the art of crafting. 

Jen grew up in central NJ.  Her parents are from Korea.  Her mother came over during the Kennedy administration as her Grandfather was the US ambassador for Korea.  Her mother continued her education in the states at Julliard.  Her mother has continued in music her entire life building a program through Julliard to promote and nurture young Korean musicians.  Her father came to the US as a medical student at UPenn studying to be a neuroradiologist.  Her parents met at a wedding and the rest of history. 

Jen embraced her mothers love of music and went to Julliard from age 10-18 to train as a cellist.  After graduating she got into Harvard but deferred for a year to attend the a musical conservatory in Germany.  She always believed she would do something in music.  At Harvard she made a conscious decision to take business classes.  She ended up landing an intern job at Goldman Sachs doing both sales, marketing and working on debt capital markets.  Jen was offered a job there when she graduated but she also had an opportunity to go to Oxford University to get her masters in musicology, a blend of music and performance.  It was the professors at Harvard that recommended she do this and she received a John Paine fellowship through the Department of Music to go.  BTW, on the side Jen played lacrosse at Harvard while she was there too.

Off to England and after graduating from Oxford she stayed in London.  She took a job with the Parthenon Group working on analytic research and strategic advice for retail businesses.  She worked on Kettle Chips, a fitness center group and a few with a bend in the non-profit world.  She decided to move back to Boston and work for the Bridgespan Group which is the non-profit world of Baine Capital.  Jen became concerned that she was backing herself into a corner with the non-profit angle.  She decided to go to Harvard Business School and change directions. 

Jen loved the art of the deal and after graduating HBS she took a job again in London at JPMorgan.  Then as she puts is life got in the way.  She met her future husband who runs Right to Play in Canada.  She took a trip with him to Toronto and now one marriage and two kids later she has settled in to life in Canada.  Until recently she worked at the Ontario teachers plan doing pension plan investing with a $12b fund in private equity and $6b in direct investing.  She worked there with the small retail team.  That is of course until she met Kena.

Kena grew up in Halifax Nova Scotia and at 11 they moved to Newfoundland. Her Mom has a PHd as a linguist where she taught in the local high school and then went back to get her masters to shift into the world of being a librarian.  Both her parents came to Canada in their 20's from India.  Her father came to get his masters and PHd in oceanography.  The area where they live is highly educated as there is a university there so growing up Kena knew nothing else. 

She graduated from high school and went to McGill University.  She started off majoring in chemistry and six months after school began her father passed away.  It made her dislike chemistry and she turned to the environmental sciences which she really enjoyed.  Upon graduation her mother said now you should go get a masters but Kena had other ideas.  She moved to Toronto and landed a job at doing marketing at Indigo.  She stayed there through the merger with Chapters.

Kenas boyfriend now husband got a job in SF to work at a start-up building medical devices.  She decided she would go too and landed a job at the Gap doing marketing.  It was a great job but she could not get her visa.  She wondered if she got a MBA would it be easier to get her visa and the answer was yes.  She went back to Toronto to get her MBA at University of Toronto but returned during the summer to work at the Gap until she graduated.  During that time she met many merchants.  She found that was who she really connected with.  It was crystal clear to her that she wanted to be a buyer, a merchant.  She landed a job buying mens woven bottoms at Old Navy and stayed for a year and a half.  Unfortunately her husband became ill and they moved back to Toronto. 

He slowly got better and Kena took a job managing the womens businesses at Joe Fresh.  Her role was more planning than merchandising but she got to work with Joe and learn a lot.  Kena wanted to have her own business from the time she was 16.  She knew the right idea would eventually come to her.  She decided to start a blog which was a great creative outlet for her.  Starting that blog was a way for her to own something that was only hers and think about what business was out there for her to start.  Kena left Joe and went to work for Pistachio a high end eco friendly brick and mortar store.  There were no buyers when she got there but the owner and Kena got involved and eventually ran the whole thing for two years. 

Jen had started to read a lot of blogs.  She particularly loved consumer retail blogs.  She loved each ones individual voice and aesthetic.  She had been reading Kenas blog and loved it.  Jen decided to shoot Kena and email to see if she would be interested in having a cup of coffee and much to her surprise she said yes.  They were both living in Toronto, they were both at a crossroads in their lives, they both had young kids, they both wanted to do something that they owned and was creative and Jen happened to be on her second maternity leave when they met.

The one coffee turned into a weekly coffee.  They would give each other homework.  Kenas job was working with a lot of makers and was inspired by them.  She would see the customers come in daily and be inspired by each unique piece.  They asked each other is there a place where you can go daily to be inspired and see unique products to buy that also has a community.  The answer was no and so Brika was born.

At the same time they finally figured out their business together Kena was offered a job at Target.  It was a defining moment for the two of them.  At first she said yes to the job and then two weeks later she changed her mind.  Jen had also been offered a job as the director of strategy for Holt Renfrew and she turned it down too.  Brika has been up and running for six months now and they have put their efforts into something they are passionate about. 

The site has grown organically.  It has been incredibly rewarding and challenging for both of them and you can tell that they are having the best time.  The makers love working with them.  There are also off line components that they plan on working on from meet-ups to working with bloggers.  What was inspriing for me is talking to two very smart women who are so obviously excited and engaged in what they have built.  That is exactly what you want to see in an entrepreneur sitting on the other side of the table. 

Transparency in Legal Documents

I had to do something this week that I have never done before which is almost walk away from a verbal commitment I made towards giving money to a company.  It has to do with legal documents and zero transparency.

I can't stress enough the importance of having a company being built on smart legal documents that create transparency for every investor in the company.  Over time there will be more documents drawn up as more money comes into an organization but those first set of documents set a tone for everything going forward. 

Investing in a company is risky but when the documents are anti-investors then there is nothing legally covering your risk.  If you have intellectual property the documents need to be shared.  When a company shares documents with me that are a mess it sends a lot of red flags.  It makes me want to dig deeper to find if there are other deals that I don't know about that might crop up later from employment contracts to advisor shares.  When you start to take money from the first round of investors particularly ones that have seen more documents than they care to, listen to their advice about cleaning up the legal part of the company before moving forward.  It is for the good of everyone.  Documents are not like a diner where everybody gets a different order. 

I felt terrible thinking that I would have to walk away from a commitment but it was the company/entrepreneur that was putting me in a situation where I had no choice.  I can't participate when I know that we will discover information after the closing that will put all the investors in a situation that did not need to take place.