(above: NOT Lake Lewisville)

With a title like that how couldn't this be a serious article? Anyway I met a dude named Michael who owns a pontoon boat rental on Lake Lewisville and he offered to let me try it out for a weekend and then write a review of my experience. So that's what I'm doing. Honestly I had an absolute blast out on Lake Lewisville sitting under the canopy of the pontoon boat, drinking beer and taking in the scenery.

I even went fishing and caught some Lake Lewisville crappie and bass. Fishing on this thing is incredible. While this is mostly a party boat it is also great for fishing....

Michael's pontoon boat is a 25-foot pontoon with a sun deck, afore-mentioned canopy area and rear ladder to easily get in and out of the water. It is equipped with a table, sink & comfortably seats 10 adults    

For your stress-free adventure, his pontoon boat comes complete with an experienced Captain and is equipped with all Coastguard approved safety equipment. How cool is that? If you live in the area you gotta check them out.


Children under 14 yrs must wear a life vest while underway 

I've been doing some work for Blossom Street Ventures (blog here), a software venture capital lender specializing in SAAS and early stage investments. This is a little different from the other companies I work with and I wanted to share some insight straight from the experts on how this industry works. It's also a growing industry so why not talk about it. Specifically, what happens when one of the projects you invest in has a death. How do you move on?

​Set expectations. The value of saas venture capital IP is a drop in the bucket of what the organization was originally prized at; it’s maybe ten cents on the dollar if even that. Any purchaser of the IP is unlikely to do an all liquid buyout, so don’t be shocked if the final consideration is a blend of money, stock, royalty, payout, or some other unique structure that lowers the acquirer’s major risk. The sale of intellectual property is going to take a year or more with legal taking ten months alone (we recommend specialized counsel that has M&A experience and experience in bankruptcy/winding down entities). It’s also going to take some money along the way as you spend for legal, preparing the proposal, and other unexpected costs that have to be paid well ahead of the sale. With those expectations registered and accounted for, you need to seriously ponder whether it is worth the hassle and time to sell the IP, what you will really recover, and what the probability of making it worthwhile really is.

Contact everyone. If you’ve decided it’s worth it to try and sell, reach out to absolutely everyone and find someone who knows about software venture capital. That includes old customers, prospects, former clients, anyone who has ever contacted you for acquisition, your cousin, your dog walker, etc. The point is don’t eliminate anyone as a potential sale as you don’t know what’s on someone’s docket and be cool about reaching out to your entire professional network. The buy of the IP in our defunct entity was a prospect who never actually became a customer. We also had interest from very assorted companies.

Talk with the CTO. In order to sell or move code to an acquirer, you’re going to need the tech officer or whoever built a majority of the code to help out. No acquirer is going to take the code as-is, unless you want them to massively reduce and drop the price to hedge their risk. Not how it works. They’re going to want it cleaned up and packaged specific to their use case. It took a founding developer 3 months of rigorous work to get the code packaged just right for our acquirer, and of course, we paid him nicely for delivery of this offering.

You need great knowledge around you. The SAAS code was once part of a platform, and that entity has liabilities, creditors, equity owners, former buyers, and various other debts. All of those parties are probably pretty upset with you that things didn’t work out. Before you embark on a path to cash out the IP, consult with a law firm that can tell you who has a right to any proceeds collected, what the deluge of recipients looks like, who can potentially halt a deal, who you need to get approval from, whether patents are in good standing, etc. 

Make sure the acquirer is fair. The acquirer has to be a person that is negotiating honestly and ethically and in good faith with you. We got very fortunate that our acquirer had an upstanding and highly-regarded CEO. If you don’t trust the acquirer or if they’re being shady, move on as this is not worth it. In our case, had the acquirer been a rude guy, there were many times when he could have taken us for a ride, such as changing the terms of the deal before close, among other things. Given the limited legal help you often have in instances like this, ‘bad boy’ acquirers do it all the time. We got so fortunate finding an acquirer who was honest, forthright, and kept his goals in line. You’ll need to be sure to do the same or risk some backlash.

Be calm and patient. Because the buying cost price will likely be heavily earn-out or royalty based, you’ll need to be patient as the acquirer’s dev team absorbs the code, the sales team gets up to speed on new capabilities, and the acquirer evangelizes your product to the world. Don't expect an all-cash deal. If everything goes smoothly, getting fully paid 18 to 24 months after the day the acquirer bought the code would be highly fortuitous.

Learn more at Blossom Street's website at the top of this page. Or visit Youtube.