World Book Day
The first Thursday in March is World Book Day in the UK:
https://www.icmacentre.ac.uk/wbd-2019
It is a while since I wrote my book “Raising Venture Capital Finance in Europe” (Kogan Page), although I have of course since written my PhD thesis ( a very different exercise and for a very different audience) and I am about to commence writing a monograph on my research into venture capital fund performance and investment practices in UK / Europe and USA.
I wrote “Raising Venture Capital Finance in Europe” as a practical guide to raising VC finance for business owners, entrepreneurs and investors, which is in fact its subtitle. The book is a non-academic guide to the whole process of PE&VC fund raising and investment, with a focus on early-stage technology investments which now forms the basis of my research interests.
The opportunity to write the book arose because I had previously written the “Guide to Private Equity” for the British Private Equity and Venture Capital Association (BVCA). I had met Philip Kogan of the business books publisher, Kogan Page, and he agreed that it would be good to expand this guide into a book on the entire VC investment process. Kogan Page provided me with a contract including an advance on royalties and 12 months to write the book. After two to three months of procrastination I realised that I would need to spend two to three days a week writing if I was to meet the deadline! So I got on with it, and when I was about 1/3 of the way through I could see the light at the end of the tunnel and the writing flowed!
It was fun conducting the interviews with VC investment executives, entrepreneurs and advisors which formed the material for the 18 case studies. These help to bring out the particular feature of the book in that it looks at the topic from both sides – showing what the venture capitalist is looking for as well as detailing how an entrepreneur or business owner can make proposals attractive to investors. A series of `VC tips’ are also interleaved throughout the book. The book received 5 star reviews on Amazon .
