Top Albums of 2010
I try to do a Top Tracks post every year, but this time I'm going to try something slightly different. As much as I wonder whether albums make sense anymore, it's still how the bulk of music is released, and many of my favorite artists choose to bundle their tracks this way. So I end up buying and loving albums in spite of myself, and my top tracks can easily get dominated by a few grade-A albums. This was a particularly good year for albums, and I'm feeling the need to split them out on their own, which will let me focus on standout standalones in a separate top tracks post. Rather than try to rank them, it makes more sense to me to list them chronologically through the year; a really good album is so full of goodness that it monopolizes your listening for a least a month, so a list like this tells a certain story of the year for me:
Vampire Weekend - Contra
I really wanted this album to be great, and I wasn't the least bit disappointed. I loved their debut album without reservation, but it would have been so disappointing to have that be all there was. Instead, like the Strokes before them, they came with a follow up that presses all the same buttons but makes you love it even more. It's wittier, prettier, and happier all the way around. This album is a fixer; it can rescue you from bad moods and bad tempers, chasing away worldly concerns in the way all the best music does.
Francis and the Lights - It'll Be Better
In some sense this was a year of Francis for me. I had never heard of him at the start of it, but Arthur was kind enough to put me on to the albums, EPs, and shows, and I ate them all up with a spoon. This album is definitely a mainstreaming effort; he is writing simpler songs to appeal to a wider audience, without question. That seems to have left some of his fans cold, but there's room in my heart for Francis to go pop. He's already pushing such a Bright Lights, Big City / Less Than Zero aesthetic that pop seems like part of the point; singing over heavy synths while wearing sunglasses with just can't be underground. This album is the best album that Phil Collins never made, and I love it for that.
Mux Mool - Skulltaste
I've been checking for more from this guy ever since I heard "Night Court" on the Ghostly Swim compilation. That one's a world-class thumper (diminished only slightly by use as the intro music for the GDGT podcast), and this album keeps up the pace. It's a slow, deliberate pace, but it's undeniably forceful, like a tank rolling down 5th avenue; you can't ignore it, and you damn sure can't stop it.
Javelin - No Más
In some ways this album is the opposite of Skulltaste; instead of darkness and lasers, it brings sunshine and horns to the neighborhood block party. The helium-hopped freaktalk of "Oh Centra" might be the oddest thing you hear this year, but just try to stifle a smile all the way through it, and if you can't find joy in the deranged steeldrums on "C Town", well then God, Jed, I don't even want to know you.
Arcade Fire - The Suburbs
I'm a little hesitant about this one, but I think only because I might not love it quite as much as everyone else calling it Album of the Year. That said, I can't pretend I didn't listen the hell out of it; the songs are full of surprises and some are just impeccably constructed. Plus The Wilderness Downtown is at least runner-up for Video of the Year (competing with Sour's Mirror).
Cee Lo Green - The Lady Killer
Truly saving the best for last. "Fuck You" is a triumph by any estimation (even Gwyneth Paltrow can't hurt it), and it's barely first among equals here; he absolutely murders Band of Horses's "No One's Gonna Love You", for one. Now, I've been a Cee Lo fan since the days of Goodie Mob, and I celebrate his entire catalog, but if you had asked me what he needed to do on his next album, I would have said get back to the rappin'. The Soul Machine had its bright spots, but there was a distinctive undercurrent of weak-sauce neo-soul, and then Gnarls Barkley ran out of ideas but still put out that second album. So I thought it would be nice to be reminded of Mr. Green's ability to spit hot fire 8 bars at a time. Instead he went all in on the soul tip, and he pulled it off brilliantly. The arrangements are all gorgeous, and if there are points where Cee Lo's voice doesn't quite seem like it's up to the task at hand, he still pulls it off, just because he's got it like that. I still want him to rap a bit, but if he can keep making albums like this, then he shouldn't be giving a shit about what I think.
There may or may not be an Amazon widget with all these albums right here, depending on what Wordpress decides to do today. In any case, Top Tracks not on any of these albums coming in a couple of days...
Google Voice: too good not to fail
"If you wanna to be a phone company, you can't go dead."*
Ok, but then you have to be a phone company. You have to roll out your own physical circuit-switched infrastructure that's managed at every junction. The phone network was evolved slowly over a century with reliability as one of the only concerns (since, as a regulated monopoly, they were only competing with not having a phone). For all its other faults, it delivered that dial tone, pretty much every minute of every day.
What's happening with Skype and Google Voice is that people are beginning to negotiate whether more features and less cost is worth trading in some of the POTS network's legendary reliability. In some ways, it's been an ongoing process since the Great Broadening of cellphone ownership in the 90s. All of a sudden, we could imagine life without a landline, and many of us decided that was the life to live. Now we have a nice handful of options for voice communication, and a metric ton of non-voice options.
One of the most fundamental attributes of the Internet is that things can fail, from the physical layer all the way up to the "business layer," and that has produced not only a staggering pace of innovation, but also an impressive kind of meta-reliability through redundancy. Things don't always work, but there are almost always other ways to do said things. Of course reliability is a feature; often it's one of the most important ones. If we hold out for perfect reliability, though, we will most likely have to wait for Ma Bell 2.0, and there are plenty of reasons we shouldn't want that. Instead, we should recognize all the options we already have; our own personal array of redundant communication channels, suited to our tastes.
*-I recognize the linked post is a couple of years old, but Arrington reiterated the sentiment in a post last week, which is what got me going here.
Overheated innovation and the World Cup
That's the Jabulani, the brand new super-duper official ball of the 2010 World Cup. Plenty has been written about its characteristics and whether or not players and coaches like it. Engadget Alt recently posted on the news that NASA has found the ball "unpredictable at speeds above 44mph." Ironically, when I heard some of the designers interviewed, they touted "consistency" as their main goal, i.e. the ball should not skew the results away from the skill level of the player. Even if they may have fallen short of that goal, I think the goal itself implies a fairly robotic view of sports. We don't only care about "skill," i.e. the ability of a player to kick/hit/run furthest, fastest, and with the most precision. That's why we don't just watch that guy who can make thousands of consecutive free throws all day. The mechanics are no doubt important, but we care about sport because of the drama of adaptation, the players who can step their game up against an opponent everyone expects to crush them. In that sense, whether we got one or not, I don't think a "better" ball is necessarily what we want for the sport of soccer.*
But the World Cup is the merchandising and promotional opportunity heard 'round the world, and it only comes but every four years, so there must be new things to sell. According to the WSJ article linked above, Adidas sold 15 million of its official ball for the 2006 World Cup. Personally I'd guess that they'd sell just about as many if they only changed the branding, not the structure of the ball, but I can understand the desire to add perceived value by changing the structure too. There's nothing particularly wrong with that motivation, but it shouldn't be confused with other motivations we value differently when thinking about public policy, e.g. innovation. We tend to think of innovation as a universal good; we always want more of it, and we want to encourage it whenever possible. We want this because innovation is a primary component of our notion of progress, and we all want to leave the world a better place than we found it. I don't think we're nearly as universally optimistic about capitalizing on promotional opportunities; sure, that may drive some economic growth, but by and large policymakers should probably be neutral on whether or not there is a new official branded thingamajig for the latest big international hullabaloo.
The Jabulani highlights the problems that arise when we equate change with innovation. You have to imagine that patents were applied for on its design and structure, and there's no reason to suspect they won't be granted. In theory, those patents are supposed to represent a bargain between Adidas and the rest of us: Adidas produces some innovation, and in return we give them exclusive rights. The problem is that we don't do a good enough job distinguishing change from innovation. Obviously it's a hard line to draw, and the patent system can still be a good thing on balance even if some non-innovations get patented, but if we keep the bar very low, then we're providing a hopped-up incentive to just change things. Pam Samuelson et al. have termed this "overheated innovation", to be distinguished from product-enhancing innovation. While I might prefer we just raise the bar on what we're willing to call innovation, Samuelson's term does have the nice feature of avoiding that fight and focusing on the motivations of the innovators involved, which cuts to the important point: we should focus our regulatory incentives (like IP protection) on getting people to create better products, not just different ones. The controversy around the Jabulani provides a good opportunity to talk about honing that focus. No doubt we'll still get a shiny new ball in 2014, but maybe we won't bother to subsidize it with patent protection.
*- we might actually want a "trickier", less predictable ball, if play had gotten too easy and routine with the existing ball, but that's just not a credible explanation for the Jabulani.
Is Verizon the real reason I can haz iPhone 4?
I was one of the true believers who bought the original iPhone on launch day (in a mall in Danbury, IIRC), and so I was stuck only halfway through my two-year contract when the iPhone 3G came out, with no chance for upgrade pricing. That was the only way a law student like myself was going to think about getting one, so instead I soldiered on with EDGE data and faux GPS for another year. The hunger to escape those limitations grew daily; when the iPhone 3Gs was announced I was fully primed, and I pounced immediately. The important thing to note here is that AT&T got their two years out of me, and then got me signed up for another two.
It's now a year later, and I pounced again; I'll be on the SoHo Apple Store line bright and early tomorrow to pick up my pre-ordered iPhone 4. You may wonder how, since I'm in the same position now as I was with the 3G, but AT&T has magnanimously deigned to offer me the full upgrade discount (plus an upgrade fee of $18, but why quibble?). In his keynote, Jobs said customers can upgrade to iPhone 4 up to 6 months early, but many took that to mean that we Day 1 upgraders had to wait until around New Year's. Not so; AT&T clarified to Engadget that it was 6 months early from the upgrade date (a magic number they calculate internally), which means most of us early adopters are ready to go on Day 1 again. Now, I don't want to appear ungrateful, but I really have to wonder why. What did I do to deserve this beneficence?
I do have a theory: AT&T's iPhone exclusivity isn't going to last as long as we think. The word recently has been 2012, but I think AT&T is afraid of a 2011 Verizon iPhone, or even a holiday 2010 one. They would know what's possible under the terms of their agreement with Apple, and they certainly know that a huge number of iPhone users would rather be on Verizon. If they lock us up for another two years now, they're buying themselves much needed time to upgrade their network and rehab its image.
To be clear, I think it is definitely a move designed to keep iPhone customers for the long term, because the actual economics of the deal could be a little shaky. If they just let me ride out my 3Gs contract, they'd get 2 years out of me for the cost of 1 phone subsidy. Now, they're going to get 3 years for 2 phone subsidies. I don't know exactly how AT&T's margins work, but if there's any semblance of competition in the industry (I see you smirking; stop that), then my guess would be that the subsidy would need more than half of the revenues it produces to start generating profit, so adding a contract year by adding a subsidy wouldn't seem like a strong move. Put another way, if there isn't a viable competing iPhone on the way in the next six months or so, why not just get those six months from me, and then let me re-up for two more years?
There's also the HSPA+ rollout to think about, mentioned in this great GigaOm post. As some of you know, the 3Gs and the 4 have radios capable of 3G speeds that AT&T doesn't yet support in most markets, though they claim it's comin' real soon. If that's not going to roll out in a reliable way before a Verizon iPhone drops, which might even be their first LTE phone (though that's currently scheduled for mid-2011), then AT&T definitely has an incentive to lock us onto their soon-to-be inferior network long enough for them to get back to parity.
In sum, I'll be really surprised if AT&T's iPhone exclusivity lasts the full reported term. As a final, sort-of-unrelated note, with the proceeds from the sale of my used iPhone 3Gs on craigslist, I could buy a new iPhone 4 and a new nook. Carrier subsidies and locks make for zany aftermarkets.
You could call me Francis
I saw Francis and the Lights perform at the Bowery Ballroom a couple of weeks ago (thanks to Arthur) and they just popped up in the shuffle to remind me how great that was. Their live show really is such an incredible performance, but it's a sharp contrast between that and the albums. Many of the funkiest tracks are a bit too funky to be truly heard unperformed, while the slower, more delicate numbers from the new album just seem flat on stage.
While there's some doubters out there, I still want to claim that the new album is great in its own right, even if it has a more structured, populist feel to it. It adds a striking amount of beauty to your day, but that's where it lives; on your iPod, in your ears as you go places. To be clear, I think this is a high and noble purpose for music; it is most of what I like and why I care about music. I spend a lot more time sitting/strolling quietly with headphones than I do freaking out on the dance floor with hundreds of my newest best friends, however much fun the latter is. So It'll Be Better is fantastic headphone music, and that's more than enough reason to check it out at their site (and do creep the back catalog if you haven't).
Also, as if they hadn't already been my new favorite band based on the music alone, they structured themselves as a startup and took an angel investment at a very early stage, which makes them kind of a fascinating experiment.
YouTube’s “fair use button” as compulsory license
YouTube posted on their blog recently highlighting the not-actually-new "fair use button" in their Content ID system. The relevant description seems pretty straightforward:
- When you receive a notice in your account via Content ID, we tell you who claimed the content, and direct you to a form that lets you dispute the claim if you so choose.
- If you believe your video is fair use, check the box that reads "This video uses copyrighted material in a manner that does not require approval of the copyright holder." If you're not sure if your video qualifies, you can learn more about fair use here.
- Once you've filed your dispute, your video immediately goes back up on YouTube.
- From this point, the claimant then makes a decision about whether to file a formal DMCA notification, and remove the content from the site according to the process set forth in the DMCA.
They're casting Content ID here as a sort of pre-DMCA process, but it's more than that. Notably, it can involve revenue shares for the content owner from the ads shown against the content. This led me to the question of whether or not such rev shares continue along if the user claims fair use, and more abstractly, if they should. I guessed they would, since fair use is only a defense to infringement, which just means that the copyright owner can't stop the use; it says nothing about the copyright owner not making money off of the use. (I've since learned from a knowledgeable person at this month's CopyNight that currently, the whole Content ID claim gets disputed, i.e. all the content owner's options are suspended. Maybe this is a technical choice, maybe it's a policy choice, but I'd be really curious to hear why either way.)
Traditionally fair use and non-payment have gone hand in hand, because those not interested in getting the owner's permission weren't generally interested in giving them any money either, and fair use nullified the owner's leverage, i.e. the power to stop the use. The relationship imposed by YouTube's system here seems more like a compulsory license, where the owner can't stop the use, but they are still entitled to a fee for it. While compulsory licenses are also access-enhancing, they're not the same thing as fair use; interestingly, in some cases they seem more fair. There is usually some acknowledged value from the original copyright owner's contribution to the use, and our societal interest in seeing the use brought forth isn't directly tied to appropriating that value for the fair user, so a process for giving some share of the revenue back to the original owner has some simple justice to it.
In this case, it's YouTube as an intermediary distributor who is in good position to monetize the use, so they're the ones who can enforce such a distribution, i.e. make it a compulsory part of their service. Now, it's important to worry about those fair uses that aim at criticism where the prospect of generating revenues for the original copyright owner might decrease the incentives to make the fair use available, but I would guess those are the minority of the videos we're concerned with here, so I think the revenue share could still be an appropriate default, with an opt-out for those uses where it subverts the point of the use.
What's really interesting about this possible approach is the middle ground it carves out between a full fair use claim, which keeps the original copyright owner out of the equation completely, and a takedown notice, where the copyright owner just stops the use. Right now industry executives and lawyers talk about a space of "tolerated" uses, where they likely could get the use stopped but they decide on balance, at least for now, it's better if the use continues. I think there's potential to grow that space and give it more predictability by enabling some rights for the original copyright owners in potential fair use situations. It's really a very similar idea to Creative Commons, in that it's also talking about a "some rights reserved" position on the spectrum of rights. The difference is that here we're talking about YouTube making choices to structure its own ecosystem, rather than simply offering a licensing option for copyright owners to choose themselves. I think there's serious potential to increase the amount of new uses that can be allowed on sites like YouTube with semi-automated, regularized processes like Content ID if a claim of fair use stalls the owner's blocking power separately from other effects like attribution and revenue shares. It would certainly change the frame of the debate around remixed works "stealing" from the original works they use.
The Curious Case of the $150M Series A
I was reading through the feed for Yokum Taku's excellent Startup Company Lawyer blog, and came across a really interesting post on convertible debt financings with a price cap. Convertible debt is often the easiest way to do a seed/angel stage financing, because it avoids some of the complexity of selling actual equity in your startup; most importantly setting a valuation. Instead of selling shares today, you take the investors' money as debt that can convert into Series A shares, at some discount to that Series A price. So the seed investors punt the valuation decision to the next round and get compensated for their extra risk by getting a lower price when that round comes around. That's why it can be helpful to think about the seed round as a "pre-A" financing (later convertible debt investments between funding rounds that work the same way are called "bridges"). Nevertheless, Yokum says standing alone, they represent a bad deal for the angel investor, which I found a little surprising, because to my knowledge, they have been done like this for quite some time. It may not be standard for every seed deal, but if it were actually crappy, I would expect to barely see it all.
And herein is the issue. Yokum's example to show a poor outcome for the investor presumes a $500K angel investment and then a $50M Series A investment at a pre-money valuation of $100M. This means that the angel will convert into a 0.4% ownership stake in the company. Now obviously that is not what the angel had in mind; if a startup is doing that well, it's supposed to be the home run return that makes up for all their other misses, so they want to have a much bigger piece of the upside. But that's just it: that startup is doing absurdly well, maybe even inconceivably well. It means they've taken $500K (and whatever other assets they had lying around) and created $100M in value.
So is this a crazy story, at least for web startups? It's not news that it's gotten much much cheaper to do a web startup, but I think this level of lean must be mostly accounted for by a self-sustaining growth model, where new users each pay for themselves. Now that kind of model is most simply implemented by actually asking users to pay for your product, but I think the more interesting question is if it can be implemented while still making the user experience free of charge, as most web startups do, and I think the answer may be yes. Working backwards through Yokum's example, if you're worth $100M, you probably have crossed a significant inflection point in your user growth, but you had to somehow get there with a total capital raise of around $500K. That's just not that much cash to burn, and you have to pay your people something, leaving not that much to spend on actual service provision, and even less on capital investments like servers. So you had to be able to scale incrementally, and that means this is really a story about the efficient conversion of incremental cloud-computing resources like Amazon EC2 and some quality incremental monetization methods, such that the resources needed to serve each user can be purchased with the revenue from the ads shown to them (there's certainly other ways to monetize, but ads are a good example because they can theoretically be as incremental as the resources).
Framed this way, the story becomes a lot more plausible to me, and it's an interesting example of how cloud computing may actually have affected the kinds of investment deals that get done, not just who gets funded by those deals. Essentially, the traditional venture chain of multiple funding rounds is getting collapsed in some instances, such that you still need a seed round to start, but you may not need anything more until you need a lot, in order to get truly massive scale. The idea of convertible debt then breaks down, because you can't necessarily expect the next round to happen before the value of the company changes too much, so you can't rely on that round to set your share price. If you want to understand how the addition of a price cap solves this issue, you should really go read Yokum's post.
Why Albums?
An album of music is a hefty thing nowadays. It lasts longer than a subway ride, which has started to feel like an awfully long time for something to take. The album form is also weighed down with notions and expectations acquired from over 40 years as the dominant distribution format for music. Because it hit an economic sweet spot between price and quantity for consumers when one had to schlep to a store to get it, it was relieved from any other justifications for its existence. Simply put, we needed 10+ songs to make it worth the trip. Apparently, we didn't really need those songs to form a cohesive narrative, and since the advent of CDs, they haven't even really needed to sound good together in sequence. Hell, they don't even have to all be good songs; they just have to add up to sufficient aggregate goodness to make the whole bundle worth purchasing. To be clear, I'm not claiming that going to the record store was anything difficult or onerous; it was and probably remains a whole bunch of fun, a great thing to do on a Saturday. However, it was still a thing to do; it had to go on your mental to-do list if you wanted to get music as it came out rather than when you passed by a store and had time to drop in.
Now we live in a brave and bold future where the music comes to us through the tubes of lights and sparks. No longer does one even have to schlep to the wallet by the door to get one's credit card, much less to a record store out in the world. My music service of choice has my credit card info ready to charge whenever I click on the Buy button (and then click something else, thanks to Amazon). So now purchasing music need not be a trip, or an event, or really any sort of undertaking at all. If the undertaking of the trip to the store used to set a practical floor on how much music you needed to get a customer to pursue a transaction, then there's a lot of room (i.e. money) below that floor, and the album needs a new reason to exist.
Why does a band need to wait until they've got 10 new songs recorded to release any of them, and why do I have to buy them all at once? The true and correct answers are they don't and I don't. They may, and I may, certainly, but I don't see why either is required now. I don't buy the argument that the songs need to be packaged into something that can be promoted as more of a periodic event; I just don't think that's going to be a successful marketing tactic going forward. Package away, but you'd better have 10 great songs if you want me to buy them all, and if they are all actually great, I bet you would have made more money doling them out to me piecemeal over time. I think the transaction costs have gotten low enough that it might be easier to get me to spend $1 ten times than $10 once, and even if we're not all the way there yet, I think there's a lot more opportunity for engagement with your fans in the former path, which will drive more ticket/merchandise sales in the end.
Now I'm (almost) as big a fan as anyone of concept albums, rock operas, whole-album covers and other such things that might have their own reason to still be an album. If a musician wants to put together a meticulously arranged 10-song cycle, then by all means sell it as such, and I'll buy it if it seems sufficiently excellent, though I'd strongly suggest a Lala-esque first-listen-free scheme to get people over the purchasing hump. All I'm arguing against here is the packaging of music in album form because that's how we've "always" done it. Not just because people are cheap and want to buy singles, or because many albums are padded with filler, but because it's simply unnecessary and no longer provides any guarantee of return. It's just a straitjacket, and it's not helping anybody.
The iPad and the digital surplus
“Where’s the opportunity? It’s creating book experiences. It’s taking a cookbook and adding video and author updates. That’s an opportunity, because you can charge extra for that."
-Gartner analyst talking about the iPad before the announcement
This is certainly true for some consumers, but I don't think it's the opportunity that will make the device a success. Sure, some people want to be upsold into a magical zoomy multimedia experience (because that worked so well in the CD-ROM era...), but there's also a (surely larger) group that just wants the same old books for less. Specifically, they'd like to capture the surplus that comes from not having to actually make, print, and ship paper for themselves, thanks very much. After all, I need get my five-to-eight hundred dollars to buy this fun device from somewhere, don't I?
There are plenty of people who will pay a premium just for the convenience of this device, but you can sell so many more if you can make a credible case for saving money. Amazon understands this, obviously; they've been taking a loss on many of their Kindle books in order to present a better value proposition. Apple also understood this when they launched the iTunes Music Store. It had single tracks available and brought the album price down to $9.99 almost across the board.
Personally, the reason I don't buy more books is because they feel too expensive. There's an awful lot of interesting things I can read on the web, most of which doesn't cost me a dime (though most of which I would happily pay a dime for). Fiction is largely absent from that supply, and so I do buy some books there, but even then there's enough other stuff to read that I can certainly wait for the paperback at least. But as the prices of decent, usable digital editions fall, I'm absolutely more likely to pull the trigger on purchasing a book I think might be good.
The problem is that the publishing industry seems to have convinced themselves that we want better books rather than cheaper books, but it's a serious mistake to presume that books are just an old medium, held back from ultimate glory by the restrictions of their form and the practicalities of their production. If all books were destined to be gussied up when they became digital, then we would already have seen a lot more illustrations in today's books than we do; we've had the capability for that for a long time. I think the focus provided by bare long-form text is a valuable feature of books, and a reason why they've so stubbornly resisted format changes over the years. Sure, there are some specialty forms of books that could really take advantage of multimedia and connectivity, e.g. textbooks and travel guides, but I'm not convinced those things are best conceived of as books anymore. Even if they are, then fine, charge me more for an interactive, fancified, self-updating Frommer's. But don't tell me that it will save the current structure of the publishing industry, which is based primarily on selling books that are not travel guides.
I think the most interesting possibility here is the further disintermediation of publishers, because they will not be a necessary gatekeeper in the distribution chain. They will obviously still have a role in the promotion of bestsellers, much like music labels still do; the engine of mass marketing still requires human infrastructure. However, an independently released book will have a real shot at mass distribution, even down to the level of the individual author. We've already gotten some of this benefit from the first wave of e-commerce sites, but the prospect of end-to-end digital distribution and better recommendation algorithms makes this exciting all over again. Netflix has done it for independent films, and with drastically lower production costs, the long tail of books should have even more potential.
A Startup Exit Calculator
I recently came across a post by Brad Feld pointing to a really great option vesting calculator by Simeon Simeonov, wherein Brad asked at the end for a simplified exit analysis calculator. I was inspired to take some cap tables I had lying around and strip them down a bit in Google Docs, which left me with a (hopefully) pretty good quick-and-dirty tool for looking at potential investment rounds and exits for your startup. I'll get around to making it a form like that option-vesting calculator eventually, but no reason to keep it a secret until then. It's best viewed on the Google Docs site; their embed functionality really isn't what it could be:
A few caveats are in order, though:
1. It is just the one spreadsheet shared publicly, so any edits you make will be seen by anyone else looking at it. If secrecy is at all important, download it as an Excel file.
2. For simplicity's sake, I didn't account for anti-dilution protections, so if you put in a down round, the resulting ownership breakdown won't quite reflect what it might be in reality.
3. Finally, and most importantly, IAAL but this is not legal advice. If you actually need some of that, send me an email and we'll talk.
Hope some find this helpful; comments and suggestions always appreciated.
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