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This article evaluates contemporary Cuban economic policy and development prospects after a decade of market experimentation in a socialist context. An introductory historical review assesses the successes and failures of Cuban development policy in the 1970s and 1980s and describes the staggering dimensions of the economic crisis triggered by the abrupt disruption of Cuba's relations with the Soviet bloc in 1989–1991. The next section, “To the market in the 1990s,” examines Cuban efforts to stabilize the economy in the early 1990s while maintaining a strong social safety net. The historic policy shift toward limited market liberalization within a state-dominated economy is analyzed and the key market concessions described. The economic turnaround of the late 1990s and Cuban macroeconomic and industrial performance over the past decade are then examined. The final part of the article evaluates the coherence and sustainability of Cuba's emerging economic model and assesses prospects for the survival of some form of Cuban socialism.

The chapter provides a practical guide to identify and define different funding sources for entrepreneurial and innovation endeavors, including a methodology to describe return on investment expectations from funding sources. Also, the authors provide recommended key performance indicators and valuation methods when pitching to potential investors.

“Tell me the price and I’ll tell you the terms,” is a common axiom among early-stage investors. Investors and seasoned entrepreneurs know that the overall company value is only the half of the valuation story. Investors frequently insist on receiving securities beyond common stock in return for capital financing. Such securities may be convertible debt, or, frequently, preferred shares.

The classic approach to valuing preferred stock as debt frequently understates the value of preferred shares and, accordingly, overvalues the value of common stock. Aside from preferential liquidation rights and dividends, preferred stock frequently carries conversion rights, participation features, antidilution rights, and other enhancements that are designed to give more return to preferred shareholders at the expense of the common shareholders (who are frequently the founders). Preferred share investment terms are so flexible that they can be engineered to completely negate the perceived benefits of a high valuation to incumbent shareholders, and shift the return to the entering, preferred shareholders.

More sophisticated methodologies for allocating equity value among various classes of shareholders are becoming more common in the accounting and regulatory communities, resulting in more robust and credible value conclusions. Such methodologies are discussed in this chapter using specific examples. These methodologies are also expected to eventually propagate to the investment community because of the economic and financial foundations are quite sound. Although some of these techniques are, admittedly, complex, an understanding of early-stage venture valuation is incomplete without, at least, a high-level understanding of such techniques.

U.S. venture capital financings of U.S. entrepreneurial firms with up to 213 observations are consistent with the proposition that convertible preferred equity is the optimal form of venture capital finance. This paper introduces new evidence from 208 U.S. venture capital financings of Canadian entrepreneurial firms. In contrast to U.S. venture capital investments in U.S. entrepreneurial firms, U.S. venture capitalists finance Canadian entrepreneurial firms with a variety of forms of finance. The differences between domestic and international U.S. venture capitalist financing structures are not attributable to differences in the definition of the term ‘venture capital’. The data point to the importance of institutional determinants of venture capitalist capital structures within the U.S. and abroad. Among other things, the data indicate that U.S. venture capitalists often do not choose convertible preferred shares in the absence of tax considerations in favor of that financing vehicle.

We examine three corporate governance characteristics of preferred stock issuers relative to non-issuers: managerial equity ownership, board size, and block shareholder ownership. We find that the preferred issuers have significantly lower managerial equity ownership than their controls. The finding is consistent with our expectation that the use of preferred stock and managerial equity ownership both serve to reduce agency costs and thus, preferred issuers tend to have little incentive to resort to higher managerial ownership to lessen agency costs. Significantly larger board size for preferred issuers is evident, but we find no difference in block shareholder ownership.

In this chapter we concentrate at the most popular model for convertible bond (CB) valuation in a one-factor, stochastic underlying stock price setting. Through the last decade, the Tsiveriotis–Fernandes model (1998) has become a widely commented model that involves the state of default of the issuer of the CB. A routine approach to the solution of this model is the usage of methods of finite difference schemes (FDS). However, for many people trained in finance these methods are not very intuitive and they tend to ignore them and prefer to use binomial-tree approach as more intuitive technique. For that reason, our primary focus is to highlight the answer of the so far unanswered question: Does the binomial-tree approach to CBs provide accurate pricing, hedging, and risk assessment? We show on a set of representative examples that by using binomial-tree methodology one is unable to provide a consistent analysis of the pricing, hedging, and risk assessment. We start the chapter with the basics of CBs and CB market. We then explain the implementation of TF model within binary-tree approach. We conclude the chapter with performance valuation of binomial-tree approach showing unexpected behavior in practice areas such as pricing (profile of CB's price versus underlying stock price), hedging (performance of CB's delta, gamma, and convertible arbitrage strategy versus underlying stock), and risk assessment (Monte Carlo VaR with respect to the underlying).

The purpose of this chapter is to outline the steps involved in obtaining venture capital funding for a start-up business. The chapter first discusses access to Venture Capitalists (VCs) and provides the reasons behind VCs’ preference for investing in a traditional C corporation rather than a limited liability company or other pass-through entity. The chapter then describes both the due diligence performed by VC's counsel and the documentation a start-up must provide to satisfy that diligence need. Next, the chapter addresses typical terms of financing deals with VCs, including the types of securities issued and the rights, preferences, and pricing of those securities. Finally, the chapter concludes with a chart identifying the VC financing terms available before and after a significant market downturn and a sample term sheet summarizing the terms of preferred stock to be issued to a hypothetical VC or VC group investing in a start-up business.