Venture Capital Due Diligence: A Guide to Making Smart Investment Choices and Increasing Your Portfolio Returns (Wiley Finance)

Camp, Justin J.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0471126500 ISBN 13: 9780471126508

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, 2002

The first book to offer a comprehensive framework for conducting the venture capital due diligence process Venture capitalists and other professional investors use due diligence to uncover all of the critical aspects of a company in which they are considering investing in an attempt to estimate the ROI of this decision. The state of the market, management expertise within the firm, legal concerns, location, and environmental issues are just a few of the factors investors include in their due diligence analyses. This book is the only guide to provide investors with a rigorous due diligence framework that can be customized to fit the practice of the firm. The book provides readers with a clear and complete understanding of the due diligence process and formalizes the process for the VC community. The book is structured around key criteria presented in the form of questions. Each question is followed by in-depth explanations and analyses that incorporate the best practices of today's top VCs, including John Doerr, Don Valentine, Kevin Fong, and Ann Winblad.

From the Back Cover:

Performing Venture Capital Due Diligence the Right Way

Venture Capital Due Diligence provides a clear and complete explanation of the venture capital (VC) due diligence process and shows you how to use it to assess investment opportunities, make smart investment decisions, and increase the return on your overall venture capital portfolio.

This comprehensive guide offers a full explanation of the VC due diligence process, from using screening mechanisms that sort out potential opportunities, to assessing the management qualities, business models, legal issues, and even intangibles of target companies. Structured around a number of carefully crafted questions that venture capitalists often ask when performing due diligence, this book puts you-the reader-in the position of a VC conducting due diligence on a particular company.

In-depth discussions of these questions and their possible answers pull together opinions from many of the major players in today's venture capital industry, including . . .
* Richard Testa of Testa Hurwitz & Thibeault
* Ann Winblad of Hummer Winblad Venture Partners
* John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
* Craig Johnson of the Venture Law Group
* Don Valentine of Sequoia Capital
* Kevin Fong of the Mayfield Fund

. . . and many others who are qualified to comment on the proper methods of performing VC due diligence and making VC investment decisions.

An essential guide for anyone involved in venture capital investing, Venture Capital Due Diligence helps you uncover potential problems, while showing you where to look and what to look for when conducting VC due diligence.

About the Author:

JUSTIN J. CAMP is a founder and general partner of Camp Ventures (www.campventures.com), a Silicon Valley-based seed-stage venture capital firm. Formerly, he was a corporate attorney with the Wall Street law firm of Cravath, Swaine & Moore. He graduated with honors from the University of California, Los Angeles, with a BA in economics and political science, and received his JD degree (also with honors) from the University of Pennsylvania Law School. While working on his law degree, Mr. Camp spent a year studying venture capital and entrepreneurship at The Wharton School, where he created an Early-Stage Venture Capital Due Diligence Framework. This framework has been used in two of Wharton's graduate-level MBA courses and constitutes the basis for this book.