My friend, Dan Caruso, CEO of Zayo is hiring.  And unlike many companies, he is looking for recent college grads.  Dan is a great guy and the folks that I’ve meet at his company are as well.  In his words:

“Amazingly, in this economy it is hard to fill key positions.  Zayo occasionally looks to fill senior positions.  Usually though, we are looking to complement our veteran team with recent grads who have engineering, IT, construction project management, and finance backgrounds.  We are looking for ambitious, hard working and entrepreneurial people, especially women and minorities as well as Iraq/Afghanistan veterans.  We are an ideal home for those who want to accelerate their career development and hone their entrepreneurial skills.

We are looking for the following positions:

1. Senior Product Management
2. CFO for internal business units
3. Recent grads in engineering (learn how the Internet really works)
4. Recent grads in IT (learn Salesforce.com and GIS)
5. Recent grads with an interest in operational finance
6. Construction/project management who understand telecom projects (or recent grads)
7. Recent grads with an interest in technical sales”

If you are interested, send your resume to Kellie Lemmel at Kellie.Lemmel at Zayo dot com.

In this day and age where Democrats and Republicans both do their best to distort any real facts in the tax and deficit debate, I think that I’ve come up with a way to increase revenues (yes, increase taxes) that everyone should love.

Kill IRS Section 409(A) and allow companies to issue stock to employees at any price that they wish until such company is public.  If you need a refresher on what 409(A) is, check out this post which will get you there.

When 409(A) forces companies to raise their option strike price, who wins?  Certainly not the employees who have higher strike prices.  Certainly not the company who will have  trouble incentivizing employees as the option price increases and not even the IRS! Because of the heightened price, there is less gain at a liquidity event.  So even the IRS loses money every time the price is raised.

Let’s be controversial for a moment and suggest that if all strike prices were set to 1 penny, then the employees make a lot more money, the IRS receives more tax revenue on a bigger gain and the company doesn’t have to worry about 409(A) valuations and timing of material events and fundraising affecting their option grants.

I realize that this will not work in the public company setting given the market’s need to see option expensing in the financials, but for private companies, who really cares?  It’s just a made up number at the end of the day, anyways.

I probably need to think a little more deeply on what happens if a public company acquires a private company, but I’ll get there.  The main point is that doing away with 409(A) leads to both more money being put in consumers’ hand and more money in the IRS coffers and it’s essentially “free.”

For anyone not familiar with mergers, if you sell a company, you rarely get the full purchase price at the closing. Some of it is usually held in an escrow account for a year or so to allow the buyer to see if there are any issues related to the acquired company that would entitle it to some of its money back. The deal might also be structured so that the purchase price is effectively paid in installments called earnouts based on how the company performs after closing. There are a million varieties of these formulas, and they can get very complicated very quickly.

In the past, there was little information about what the parties to a merger should expect related to these post-closing terms. Much of it is deal specific, but we still wanted to have some analytics around what happens in the marketplace on average. It just never existed.

Last week, Shareholder Representative Services released a study that is the first to do a deep dive on analyzing these questions and to give some insight on what actually happens. It goes into detail in investigating the issues around indemnification claims and eventual payouts. This is critical to understanding both the anticipated economics of a deal and how much total work you might expect before the transaction is fully behind you. This information is tremendously valuable to entrepreneurs, investors and buyers of companies and I believe it’s the first time it has ever existed. SRS is in a unique position to do this sort of analysis because of the high volume of escrows and claims that it manages.

The full study is only being made available to customers and business partners of SRS, but for a copy of the summary of the study, click here

Two local entrepreneurs I know just started Techployment, which is a simple idea, but goes after a growing problem in the local tech arena: tech companies finding great tech professionals, and vice versa. Techployment helps solve this problem by vetting the best local tech opportunities and and sending a daily email highlighting them in a succinct way. And while most employment sites/blogs/posts tend to get visited by only those actively looking for a job, Techployment is primarily focusing on those that already have a job, but want to stay up to speed on local opportunities. The grass could be greener at a company across town, and this is an easy way to find out about it.

So if you are looking for a job or just want to know what is out there, go to Techployment and sign up. No username. No password. Just your email and you’re good to go.

And if you are a tech start-up looking for some key hires, using Techployment will get you to some eyeballs that traditionally don’t see/look for exciting new opportunities/greener pastures.

About 4 years ago, I founded the Boulder Open Coffee Club.  It’s been a massive success with about 50-70 people attending each event.  The popularity of it, in fact, has led to the creation of a Denver Open Coffee Club by local entrepreneur Michael Sitarzewski.

The Coffee Club has become a real local hub where we’ve gotten to know each other and help each other learn from each other’s experiences.  It’s been a ton of fun, too, and we’ve even got some airplay on TV recently.

From time to time, I get an email from another open coffee club telling me about what they are doing.  I’ve done a poor job keeping track of all the OCCs in the US and I am wondering whether or not it would be worthwhile to create a network between them.

If you participate in an OCC, drop me a line or leave a comment.  I’d like to see who else is out there.

For all of you out there interested in metrics-based marketing (and if marketing is your thing, you should be interested), here is a must attend event.

Sponsored by Trada, Silicon Flatirons, CU Marketing Department and SendGrid, this event promises to share their collective knowledge along with a host of great speakers.

Tickets are limited to 75 people.  This is going to be an intimate event.

The website for the event is here.

I read a lot of M&A deal term summaries.  While I really appreciate the knowledge gleaned from these reports, they all suffer from the same problems:  They are usually biased toward publically filed transactions and those particular deals serviced by the particular bank or law firm whom is author of the report.

Today, Shareholder Representative Services (SRS) is releasing their 2010 SRS M&A Deal Terms Study, which is a comprehensive analysis of deal terms from a sample of the more than 100 transactions for which SRS serves as the shareholder representative. 

The underlying pool of deals differs in important ways from those analyzed by other similar studies.  The transaction agreements analyzed by SRS generally were not publicly filed and are a good representation of what is happening today in venture-backed M&A.

This study will be the first of a series of information products from SRS designed to leverage their expertise and knowledge to help their customers in their deals.  Future offerings will include data regarding what actually happens, long-term, with escrows and earnouts along with an analysis of claims made against the target company.

You can view the full report here.

One of the questions that I’m asked the most is “how do I find a business partner in Boulder?”  I always liken it to dating – it’s really not that much different.  Thanks to the hard work of Tracy DeCicco, we now have a founder matching event in Boulder. Here are the details:

Come Meet Your Match at the first-ever FounderMatch event!

The event will be held on Wed., Nov. 3, from 6-9pm, at the TechStars Bunker in Boulder.

· Do you have an idea but need a partner(s) to help get it off the ground?

· Do you have a strong desire to form a startup but don’t necessarily have an idea?

· Do you want to hear awesome startup ideas and brainstorm with like-minded people?

If you answered yes to any of the above, check out the first FounderMatch event.  Signup is through our partner site, startupSQUARE.com.

To signup, go to STARTUPSQUARE.COM/foundermatch

BE SURE TO COMPLETELY FILL OUT THE PROFILE INFORMATION ON THE SITE!

We’ll need to understand your skills and interest areas to help you meet your match!

Space is limited so SIGNUP NOW to get in on the action!  Attendees will be selected to ensure balanced mix of people.

I’m asked all the time to play matchmaker between folks and companies that we’ve invested in.  Sometimes it’s someone looking for a job, sometimes it’s one company looking to partner with one of our investments and other times it’s something completely different.  I’m always happy to do so long as I think it could be a mutually beneficial relationship.

Lately, however, I’ve seen an increase in behaviors that do nothing but turn me off.   I feel almost silly writing this post.  These should be obvious.  Perhaps this will help someone?  Or at least, I’d love to hear some other stories which will make me laugh.

Poor behavior #1:  Expect me to do all the work.  This is the person who wants an intro to a company, but it is like pulling teeth trying to get them to write something that I can send along to the company.  First, the askee should have a better idea than I do why there is a good reason to connect.  Second, if I’m going to take time to make an intro, then why would you want to wait for me to get around to writing an email?  I could end up getting so busy that I never get around to it.  And it’s just nice etiquette, too, I think. 

Poor behavior #2:  Be overly aggressive to get directly connected to the company.  This is the person who wants me to introduce them to an executive at a company, before I check in the with the company to see if they are interested.  Our companies are really busy building businesses and if they don’t have an interest, I’m not going to force them (or guilt them, as an investor) to meet with someone.  When I say that I’ll make the intro if the company is interested and the askee becomes aggressive wanting a direct intro, it really turns me off.  Remember, it takes me more time to check in with the company and then get back to the person than an instant intro, so it isn’t like I’m not trying.  I’m just attempting to be respectful of our portfolio companies’ executives time. 

Poor behavior #3:  Insult my company in an attempt to show your worth.  This is my favorite.  This is the person who tells me that the reason our portfolio company needs to meet with them is because our company sucks in some capacity.  Insults will get you nowhere.  This isn’t the case where a person says “Hey, I can help your company do X better.”  This is the person who says “I can fix your company’s debacle” or “Your company has no idea how to monetize.  They suck at revenue.”  (I am very lightly changing actual quotes sent to me).  Every startup company has issues.  Actually, every company has issues and can be better at some things, but acting as a know-it-all and being arrogant and thinking that an outsider is smarter than anyone inside one of our companies is probably a bad strategy.

Okay, rant over.  Am I missing any good ones?

Today, I was called for jury duty.  Upon arrival, we sat for 30 minutes, then we watched a 12 minute video for juror orientation. The voiceover kept cracking me up, however, as they were unable to pronounce “voir dire” correctly.  (Think “vor dire” as in Dire Straits).  If you don’t believe me, watch the video.

Anyways,we kept moving rooms, filling out forms, being segregated into different piles of humanity and I thought “couldn’t this be simpler?” and made some snide comment under my breath about the efficiency of government.

While I was sitting there being frustrated, I realized that over complicated things, maybe more than anything, really ruin my day.  Then I realized that I was an arrogant ass, because I’m not sure my ecosystem is all that more simple or efficient most of the time, either. 

I could write tomes on all of the efficiencies that I see every day – the same ones that I’m sure you don’t like either.  I think all this artificial complexity probably plays back into our lives in that we start to overcomplicate things that don’t need the added brain damage.  This includes both professional and personal contexts and the sad thing is that we have so little control on most of these situations.

But we should rethink about how we do things when we do have control. 

Thinking back over my career – and specifically even if I just think deeply about the last few  weeks of meetings that I’ve had -I think the number one piece of advice that I’ve given is “keep it simple.” Whether it’s a business model, financing plan, product user interface, or a plan to deal with human conflict, simple is best the vast majority of the time. 

And likewise, when I think back to those seminal moments of mentorship that I’ve been fortunate to receive, there has usually been a component to simply what I was trying to accomplish.

So, there’s my fortune cookie advice for the day: “keep it simple.”  Likely you and those around you will be happier for it.