Crater – Invoice App

https://craterapp.com

Manage your invoices
on the go!

Send your invoices to the clients instantly, track your payments
or check a detailed client history, Crater App for iOS and Android
let you manage everything from your phone.

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November 27, 2019 at 09:00AM

March 16, 2020

Here’s what happens when you decide to sell your startup

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Joe Procopio
Contributor

Joe Procopio is a multi-exit, multi-failure entrepreneur. Joe is currently building Spiffy, and previously sold Automated Insights, sold ExitEvent and built Intrepid Media.

How to know when it’s time to sell

There are basically four reasons to sell your company.

Things are going poorly. This obviously isn’t good, and unless you’re in a position where you have to sell, I would recommend against it. Instead, I’d do everything in my power to stabilize and reconsider later.
Things are going extremely well. On the other side, this is the best position to be in, but it’s also the time when the founders are least interested in selling. The deal has to be outstanding.
An external factor. Something has happened outside of the company that has made selling an attractive option. For example, I wound up running two companies at the same time, and decided to get out of the small one to focus on the big one.
You’ve taken it as far as you can. This is most often the primary reason why founders choose to sell their company. They see a lot of opportunity down the road, and decide that a specific acquirer can take much better advantage of that opportunity.

Usually, the decision to sell is based on a combination of these reasons.

How to make the decision to sell

There are basically three ways to get acquired.

A larger company. This is someone in your space or close to it. To them, your company represents either an advance in innovation or just a bunch of new customers. This is the most popular option.
Private equity. These firms usually buy out all of the existing owners and investors and may put company leadership on a profit plan to keep them around and motivated. These transactions usually happen at high levels of valuation, like approaching the billions.
A new investment round. At lower levels of valuation, the same kind of transaction can take place where a new investor or group of investors buys out all of the current owners and investors.

There are two things you need to do before you decide to sell. First, consider your negotiating position from strongest to weakest.

Ideally, you should already have at least one offer on the table, or have rejected one or more offers in the recent past. This is the strongest position, as one offer usually attracts more offers.

If you don’t have a solid offer, you should at least be investigating one or more implied offers. These hints and clues will come from partners, customers, competition, even investors and advisors with connections to other investors and PE firms.

If you have none of these, selling the company is going to be a lot more difficult, but not impossible. In this case, acquisition is a lot like fundraising. If you don’t have any offers or leads, you need to build connections and relationships. You’re basically putting together a pitch deck and going door to door. If you’re not patient, you’ll end up giving up a lot of value on your equity.

You might also consider bringing in a fixer, an experienced person who will come in as CEO for a large chunk of equity and get your company into a better position to sell, both operationally and in terms of connections. I rarely see this work, but I have indeed seen it work. Here, you’re trading shares for the hopes of increased value of those shares.

Finally, you might find private money that just wants to take over your company. These transactions happen at much lower valuations. Kind of a fire sale.

The second thing you need to do before you make the decision to sell is talk to your board, your current investors, your executive team, and your advisors. Everyone has to be in line, on board, and the proper expectations need to be set and agreed upon.

Preparing the company to be sold

There are basically three ways to calculate the sale price of your company.

A service-based company is usually valued at 1x to 2x annual revenue. In cases where the company is a hybrid of product or intellectual property that may be spun off, this can creep to 3x or maybe a little more.
A product company is usually valued at 2x to 10x annual revenue, depending on the market for the product, the protected unique differentiators, the higher the tech, and a number of other things, usually related to opportunity.
In cases of extreme opportunity and innovation, a product company can be sold for 20x to 50x.

There are two things you’ll have to do to sell your company: Show you’re worth the sale price and prove the legitimacy of your operation.

To show your worth, if your company is taking in $10 million in revenue and your valuation comes out at 10x, or $100 million, you need to be able to show the acquirer the path to $100 million within a three- to five-year time frame. The more objectively you can show that return, the more likely you’ll get your asking price.

There are a number of ways you can do this, but spreadsheets and hockey-stick charts probably aren’t enough to open the checkbook. For example, in one case we had to actually conduct a one-month experimental project and hit certain milestones dictated by the acquirer. In another, we went through a three month period where we pushed the accelerator to the ground to show 100% month over month growth for three straight months.

To prove your legitimacy, you’re going to have to go through due diligence. This will happen after an offer sheet has been put together and hopefully there’s a penalty clause if the buyer pulls out.

During due diligence, you’ll have to show that the structural integrity of your company is clean. This means you’ll need to:

Show a clean cap table, with all the equity in the company past, present, and future accounted for.

Open your books so they can audit your financials.

Sit your lawyers with their lawyers to sniff out liability and risk, and also make sure your intellectual property is properly protected.

Interview and background check your management team to uncover skeletons in anyone’s closet. And also make sure everyone important will stay on.

There will be no time between the initial interest from the acquirer and microscope time, so you’ll need to have all your ducks in a row before you put your company on the market.

Timeline

Your guess is as good as mine, so make your best guess, then double it.

The fastest I’ve ever been through an acquisition deal was four months, the longest was seven months. Again, it’s like raising a funding round, so the shape your company and the strength of your negotiating position will determine a lot of the timeline, but there will always be external factors to deal with.

For example, one time we had the buyer just drop off the face of the earth for 45 days. At about day 30 we resigned ourselves to the fact that it wasn’t going to happen. Then it did.

Think 1–2 months to prepare and line up suitors, 2–3 months to get a solid offer in place, 1–2 months of due diligence. It is not quick, but it should not drag. Regardless of my anecdote above, both sides have an incentive to move quickly, it just takes time.

Preparing yourself for life after startup

The last thing my friend and I talked about was what she was going to do once her startup was folded into a new company. Even from her early vantage point, in almost all outcomes, she was looking at a comfy VP position at a nice salary. She could do that. The question, of course, was for how long.

The last time my company was acquired was the first time I planned to stick around to hit the next milestone. I didn’t make it. Two years in, I hit a wall that I never recovered from, even after a few more months of soul-searching. It was a mix of internal changes, external factors, and me just being done. I felt like I was dragging a bag of bricks to work every morning.

I’d try to stick around again. I’ve never been one to hop from startup to startup, and I’ve been immersed enough in the corporate world to know I can navigate it. But there’s a reason they usually lock the executive team in for two years. That’s about all either side can take of the other.

The thing is, because it was the first time I planned to stay put after the acquisition, I never developed a contingency plan going into the acquisition, and I paid for it afterwards. When I did leave, it took three months just to find my feet.

I’ve seen other folks take way longer to decompress, and I’ve seen some of them do some crazy stuff along the way, like start that folly of a company they always wanted to start and now that they had the means to start it and no one to tell them no… disaster.

So whether your plan is to stick around or run away screaming, make sure you build in time to think about what’s next. You can do whatever you want after that time, maybe start a new project, maybe take a new position. What you do might not even be startup-related at all.

But chances are it will be. Entrepreneurs are like addicts; we don’t know when to quit.

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November 27, 2019 at 11:15AM

March 16, 2020

Everything You Need To Know About SCOTUS’s Next Gun Case

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VIDEO

The Supreme Court is set to hear oral arguments in a Second Amendment challenge to a New York City gun law on next Monday, and on today’s Bearing Arms Cam & Co. I’ll tell you everything you need to know about the case and why gun control advocates are terrified that the outcome could doom many of their most egregious infringements on the right to keep and bear arms around the country.

The case is known as New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. New York City, and it’s challenging a New York City law that restricted most pistol owners from transporting their legally owned firearm anywhere other than a few pre-approved ranges in the five boroughs. I use the past tense because the city actually changed several provisions of the law over the summer in an attempt to moot the case and avoid any Supreme Court opinion on the issue.

The Court has told both sides to be ready to address the mootness question, but refused requests by New York City to drop the case before oral arguments take place. Paul Clement, the former Solicitor General who’s representing the New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, is expected to argue that the city’s changes to the law haven’t addressed all of the challenges raised in the lawsuit, but that even if they did, the city could simply revert back to the old law once the possibility of intervention by the Supreme Court was off the table.

The reason why gun control advocates are so concerned about this case isn’t because they have any great affection or even see any need for the New York City gun law in question, it’s that they’re terrified the Supreme Court will use this case to emphatically state that laws concerning the Second Amendment rights of Americans must be treated with the highest level of judicial review.

Over at the website SCOTUSblog, an online symposium on the case has been taking place for the past several days. Dave Kopel, research director at the Independence Institute, and Randy Barnett, professor at Georgetown University School of Law, have an excellent piece documenting the abuse of the Heller and McDonald decisions by lower courts in order to uphold gun control laws, and why the Supreme Court needs to step in now and ensure that gun control laws are subject to “strict scrutiny.”

Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch and the late Antonin Scalia dissented from several cert denials in which lower courts upheld especially egregious violations of the Second Amendment. For example, a San Francisco law prohibits residents from having a firearm available for immediate self-defense in a bedside table while sleeping—or even while changing clothes. A Chicago suburb outlaws many common firearms, including the most widely owned rifle in American history.

Scalia and Thomas denounced the opinion upholding the Chicago suburb’s gun ban as an example of widespread “noncompliance with our Second Amendment precedents.” Regarding the Supreme Court’s refusal to consider the San Francisco ordinance, Thomas and Scalia observed: “Despite the clarity with which we described the Second Amendment’s core protection for the right of self-defense, lower courts, including the ones here, have failed to protect it.” In short, as Thomas stated in his dissent from the denial of certioriari in Silvester v. Becerra, “the lower courts are resisting this Court’s decisions in Heller and McDonald and are failing to protect the Second Amendment.”

The problem is well known. It is time for the Supreme Court of the United States to defend its preeminent role in constitutional interpretation and to address lower-court nullification of the Second Amendment.

The entire piece is well worth a read, and you should check out some of the pieces defending the status quo and New York City’s idiotic gun control law as well. Plus, look for full coverage of the oral arguments here at Bearing Arms on Monday.

Also on today’s program we have the story of a Miami man who defended himself and his family against an robber armed with an AK-47, a career criminal in California who should’ve been behind bars when he allegedly shot three workers at a Church’s Chicken, and a police officer in Hartford, Connecticut going above and beyond to help the city’s homeless.

Don’t forget that you can subscribe to the show at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and the Townhall.com podcast page. We’ll be back with a new show tomorrow with guest Mark Walters from Armed American Radio.

Author’s Bio:

Cam Edwards

Cam Edwards Cam Edwards has covered the 2nd Amendment for more than 15 years as a broadcast and online journalist, as well as the co-author of "Heavy Lifting: Grow Up, Get a Job, Start a Family, and Other Manly Advice" with Jim Geraghty. He lives outside of Farmville, Virginia with his family.

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November 26, 2019 at 03:06PM

March 16, 2020

How to Pick Up the 7-10 Split in Bowling

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Every sport has its own holy grail move or shot. In golf, it’s the hole-in-one. In football, there’s the Hail Mary. For basketball, the full-court buzzer-beater. And in bowling, it’s the 7-10 split. Also known as “bedposts,” the 7-10 split happens when a bowler’s first ball knocks down every pin except the 7 pin and the 10 pin — the rear corner pins. Knocking down one of the pins is simple, but picking up a spare by knocking down both is nearly impossible.

While statistics suggest that there are other bowling shots that are technically harder to pull off, none have the formidable reputation of the 7-10 split. In the history of professional bowling, only a handful have pulled it off.

There are a few ideas on how to pick up the 7-10 split. The first is to use high speed to knock either pin back into the pinsetter machine and have it bounce out, hopefully in the other pin’s direction. But this method fails on most modern pinsetter machines that have curtains which prevent pins from bouncing back out. Some people believe it’s possible to hit the outside of either pin and force it to slide across the lane and into the other pin. But, there is simply not enough room for the bowling ball to hit the far side of these outside pins.

If you want to practice the most reliable method of pulling off bowling’s holy grail, here’s the method you’ll want to focus on.

Like this illustrated guide? Then you’re going to love our book The Illustrated Art of Manliness! Pick up a copy on Amazon.

Illustrated by Ted Slampyak

The post How to Pick Up the 7-10 Split in Bowling appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

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November 26, 2019 at 01:05PM

March 16, 2020

Pixelmator has made its flagship iPad photo editing app free for 24 hours

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As a pre-Black Friday teaser, Pixelmator is running an absolute steal of a deal on its flagship photo editing app Pixelmator Photo. For the next 20 hours (as of this article going live), Pixelmator Photo for iPad will be free to download in the iOS App Store.

The deal appears to be a teaser for Pixelmator’s upcoming Black Friday sale, where its desktop Pixelmator Pro program will be 25% off. Pixelmator Photo normally costs $4.99, so free-ninety-nine sounds much more appealing, especially for a photo editing app as feature-rich as Pixelmator Photo, which was recently updated with new support for Apple’s iPadOS.

The deal is available worldwide and currently live in the iOS App Store. For more information about Pixelmator Photo, head on over to Pixelmator’s product page. The deal will and at 9am ET, November 27, so get the app while you can.

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November 26, 2019 at 12:46PM

March 16, 2020

Trix Editor for Laravel

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Trix Editor for Laravel

Trix is an open-source WYSIWYG editor from the creators of Basecamp and it’s designed to be a different editor. Here is how they describe it:

Most WYSIWYG editors are wrappers around HTML’s contenteditable and execCommand APIs, designed by Microsoft to support live editing of web pages in Internet Explorer 5.5, and eventually reverse-engineered and copied by other browsers.

Because these APIs were never fully specified or documented, and because WYSIWYG HTML editors are enormous in scope, each browser’s implementation has its own set of bugs and quirks, and JavaScript developers are left to resolve the inconsistencies.

Trix sidesteps these inconsistencies by treating contenteditable as an I/O device: when input makes its way to the editor, Trix converts that input into an editing operation on its internal document model, then re-renders that document back into the editor. This gives Trix complete control over what happens after every keystroke, and avoids the need to use execCommand at all.

Since Trix is CSS and JavaScript you can already integrate it with Laravel but laravel-trix is a package that makes setting it up a breeze.

First, install the Composer package:

composer require te7a-houdini/laravel-trix

Publish the assets:

php artisan vendor:publish --provider="Te7aHoudini\LaravelTrix\LaravelTrixServiceProvider"

Then, run the migrations:

php artisan migrate

Once you’ve installed the package pretend you have an articles Model and you want the Trix editor on it’s create and update forms. All you need to do is use Blade and it’s included directives:

<html> <head> @trixassets </head> <body> <form method="POST" action="route('article.store')"> @csrf @trix(\App\Article::class, 'content') <input type="submit"> </form> </body> </html>

The package includes a lot more features like handling uploaded files, rendering for existing models, and advanced configuration. You can find out more about this package from the Github page and read the full user guide.

***

This package was submitted to our Laravel News Links section. Links is a place the community can post packages and tutorials around the Laravel ecosystem. Follow along on Twitter @LaravelLinks

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November 26, 2019 at 09:21AM

March 16, 2020

3D White House Cutaways: Did You Know the Oval Office is Not Actually Inside the Main Building?

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I feel like a dope–all these years of looking at the White House, and I never realized: The Oval Office isn’t even in the main building (a/k/a The Residence). I always assumed that the Oval Office’s shape corresponded with the curved facade of the South Portico:

But while there are indeed oval-shaped rooms behind that curved façade…

…none of those rooms are the Oval Office. That latter room is off in a separate-but-connected structure, the West Wing, which I’d probably know if I ever bothered to watch the show.

In any case, 3D renderer Jared Owen has put together this cool video with exploded views of the White House, showing you how all of the spaces of the three-building-compound are utilized: