Regardless of how much you know about term sheets, you still need to be able to negotiate a good deal. We’ve found that most people, including many lawyers, are weak negotiators. Fortunately for our portfolio company executives, they can read about everything we know online and in this book, so hopefully in addition to being better negotiators, they now know all of our moves and can negotiate more effectively against us.

There are plenty of treatises on negotiations; however, this chapter walks through some negotiation tactics that have worked well for us over the years. Although this book is primarily about financings, we’ll talk about a range of negotiation tactics that you can use in your life, and we illustrate some of the different types of characters you’ll probably meet along the way.