Like many folks these days, I rely on the interwebs to discover how to do certain things. Change the battery in my home alarm system? YouTube. Learn how to create a smokey eye? Instagram. Grill a turkey for Thanksgiving dinner? Jimmy-D’s Thanksgiving Turkey BBQ 2010

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The pursuit of non-correlated, investable, high-returning assets has led private funds to consider ever more esoteric asset classes for possible investment. Merchant cash advance transaction contracts (“MCATs” for short), are one of those receiving the attention of the hedge and private equity industries. MCATs are, in their basic form, an unregulated futures contract for the present purchase of a portion of a merchant’s future receivables. Properly structured, they provide the benefit of discount pricing in the purchase of a financial asset (similar to a factoring arrangement), where that asset — the receivables to be created — does not yet exist

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My April article focuses on the two different types of pitches managers must understand: to get capital to build a business, and to get capital to run as a business. I provide the important differences in content between the two, because: Framing the capital ‘ask’ conversation is vital to a new manager’s success, yet is too often an opportunity lost, as managers bog a conversation down in the myriad of technical investment details they find themselves most comfortable describing

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The world appears to be suffering from a shortage of entrepreneurs. The main reason is the very risky nature of entrepreneurship: Society pays average founder millions of dollars but pays nothing to the median founder. We could build a financial fix (a founders’ mutual) to ever so slightly reduce this risk. This would move hordes of talent from their safer BigCo jobs into entrepreneurship. It could also give society more innovation per venture dollar risked

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