Jim JamesFounder, UnNoticed Ventures · Hi, what's on your mind? I'd love to know.

Trailer: Innocent Entrepreneurs fail to manage their biggest risk; with Jotham Stein

24 Aug 2022 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

1:11

In this trailer, Jotham Stein warns that many first‑time entrepreneurs overlook the critical need to understand the language and interests of investors and co‑founders. While founders are often deeply focused on building their product, they frequently lack knowledge about how investors communicate, what they seek, and how contractual terms can affect control of the company. Stein advises founders to learn investors' terminology, identify co‑founder interests, and negotiate a robust agreement—what he calls a "professional prenuptial agreement"—to safeguard their ownership and prevent being forced out of the business they created.

Chapters

So the first thing they need to know is the language of investors or who they're doing contracting with. So they have full information. And what I find is many entrepreneurs don't have that information. They're wonderful at what they're doing, what they're creating, and they're 100% focused on what they're creating, but they don't understand the language of, let's say, investors. Or if they're starting out with co-founders, what they need in their contracts to protect themselves going forward so they don't get forced out of their own company. And the next question is who they're talking about. You need to know the language that they use and what their interests are and what they want to do to put themselves in a position of being able to have control over you, the founder. And you don't want that. So you need to know what their interests are so you can negotiate and have a contract, which I call a professional prenuptial agreement, to protect you, the founder, so you stay in control of your company.