Founder Stories: Serial Entrepreneur Karl Jacob Is Up At The Plate Again With Hangtime


If Bo knows football and every other sport, Karl Jacob knows startups. Depending on how you count it, Jacob, a former Apple intern and Benchmark EIR, is on his sixth (or seventh?) startup: Hangtime, which aggregates future events in a single app and database.

In his career, Jacob has raised over $200 million in venture capital across the companies he’s founded, and in this discussion, he shares with us some of the best lessons he’s picked up around reading term sheets, negotiating term sheets, and how AngelList could possibly move to a level of standardization in documentation.

Jacob also shares a wealth of wisdom around how founders should think about the rights to sell their shares, about what “control” means in a legal context of a startup, how to find the right lawyers, and the biggest mistake he’s made as a founder — not having a true outside/independent board member on his BoDs. We also talk about how years of doing startups have helped him evolve on product development philosophies, iteration, and using data. Jacob carries an incredible amount of knowledge about being a startup founder and CEO, so this video would be of interest to all TechCrunch readers.

Editor’s Note: Michael Abbott is a general partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, previously Twitter’s VP of Engineering, and a founder himself. Mike also writes a blog called uncapitalized. You can follow him on Twitter @mabb0tt.