Make sure your angel round doesn’t make you walk off a pier, advises this post on the IBD BlogAngels tend to have higher valuations than venture firms. The angel investment instrument is often a bridge loan to the close of the Series A round. The problem with high valuations is they may stop the VC from investing. Angels must feel comfortable that a Series A will close. Otherwise, a bridge that doesn't get finished is called a pier, and you don't want to walk off of a pier.
While I knew the one line description "Vinod Khosla was the founding CEO of Sun Microsystems and was earlier part of the founding team at Daisy Systems", I hadn't come across a more detailed version of Khosla's pre-KPCB exploits before Joe Kraus talked about it on his blog .
Here are some extracts from the Harvard Business School case study (by Dr. Amir Bhide) that I found interesting:
How a Stanford secretary "linked up" SUN's co-founders:
I'm probably more of a conceptual engineer, and I can draw block diagrams for almost anything I can think of, but I can almost never implement them. So I started looking for someone who had done this kind of stuff before. I heard of a project at Stanford called the Stanford University Network, or Sun.workstation project. I called the computer science department, and some secretary who did not want to bother a professor gave me the uame of a graduate student from Germany, Andy Bechtolsheim.
Apparently,...