The Soul of the Deal

Told with a musician's perspective and through a startup lens, The Soul of the Deal provides mentoring on how to listen, what to listen for, and how to effectively present and communicate uncomfortable information when selling or negotiating. For fans of Reid Hoffman's The Lean Startup, Jerry Kaplan's Startup, and Brad Feld's Venture Deals, readers can build confidence in their ability to knowledgably conduct their own transactions. Deal structures will change. Communication modalities and technologies will change. What won't change is what drives and motivates people to make, buy, or sell decisions. Crisscrossing the entrepreneurial worlds of more than 400 early-stage deals and negotiations, door-to-door encyclopedia selling, and following the Grateful Dead for a lifetime, veteran dealmaker and investor Marc H. Morgenstern shares his unique practical and pragmatic business negotiating philosophy that took him from trailer parks and Yale to Day One of OfficeMax, and to co-founding leading digital healthcare software company Within3. Critical takeaways--many captured as "Morgenstern's Maxims" in the book--are woven into a narrative as much thriller as business book. The Soul of the Deal is markedly different from most entrepreneurial and startup businesses books. It's about the human, emotional, and tactical aspects of business deals looking at the negotiating, financing, and exiting from these types of companies rather than how to scale and operate them. Readers with less experience in the deal and business world will find roadmaps and vocabulary to quickly advance their understanding and capabilities. More experienced readers will benefit from organizing principles for thinking, deepening and consolidating their knowledge base, and adding more sophisticated approaches to their existing abilities. Told with humor, empathy, and insight, Morgenstern's authentic and entertaining Maxims and authentic deal stories (replete with conversational dialogue) will intrigue, inform, and amuse entrepreneurs, investors, buyers and sellers of companies, and deal and business professionals.