Venture Capital Firms. They won’t grant you a meeting. If you do get a meeting they won’t sign your nda. And you’ll be lucky if your startup gets any funding. Making matters worse, they could be about to commandeer federal grant money earmarked for small businesses like your startup.

Federal agencies earmark 2.5% of their research and development budgets for grants to stimulate innovation among small businesses. To qualify, your company can’t have more than 500 employees and must be independently owned and controlled (51% owned by individuals). Thus, some Venture Capital-backed firms are locked out of the Small Business Innovation Research program (”SBIR”). Using the 2.5% set aside by the federal agencies, the SBIR offers about $2 billion each year in grants to high-tech firms. Currently, these grants are handed out in three phases. The first two phases are reserved for small businesses. In the final phase, applications from entrepreneurs funded by large Venture Capitalists and other corporations are accepted.

But that may all change. The Senate is now considering legislation that would change the definition of “small” business and expand access to set-asides now reserved for independent entrepreneurs. This bill is called the Small Business Investment Expansion Act (”SBIEA”).

In the SBIEA, VCs are trying to end the rule by which the SBA counts all employees of any company affiliated with the applicant - including the Venture Capital firm and other startups in the VCs portfolio - toward the 500-employee limit. This would allow VC-backed firms to compete for grants in all three phases of the SBIR, instead of just the final phase.

A new online marketplace for buying and selling companies officially launched this week: BizTrader.com.

I believe BizTrader will be a strong competitor to the current company marketplace juggernaut, BizBuySell.com. Both BizTrader and BizBuySell charge customers monthly fees to list their business for sale starting at $39.95 per month for BizTrader and $59.95 per month for BizBuySell. Both also offer ancillary services, such as valuation services and help finding financing opportunities.

BizTrader will compete with BizBuySell by taking a global focus and pushing its listings with broad search-engine exposure. For an extra $20 a month ($59.95), BizTrader will promote your listing to broader search services like Google, Oodle, and Craigslist.

BizTrader also looks to be a step ahead of BizBuySell when it comes to referring professional help to their customers, such as accountants and attorneys. BizBuySell referrals seem to be limited to business brokers.

Check out BizTrader and let us know what you think.

Think back to the last time you wrote a business plan for a startup. Do you recall your estimated expense for legal fees? $1,000? $10,000? $0?

How much to spend on legal fees is a common issue for startup companies with more than one correct answer. However, there are a few factors that suggest your startup should loosen up the purse strings.

Back in my college days (post-Prodigy, pre-Google), I wrote a business plan for a Web 0.01 startup company and allocated a meager $500. I had no idea what I’d be getting for that $500, but I figured my business plan software included the “legal fees” entry for a good reason and I did not want to leave it blank.

Fast forward to today. Going to law school, running my own startup company, and now representing dozens of other startup companies hasn’t led me to the exactly-how-much-to-pay-your-startup-lawyer magic number. Instead, I’ve learned to spot the issues that suggest a startup company should be spending more rather than less on legal fees:

(1) Number of Founders: If your startup is going to have more than one founder, this would indicate you’ll need to add to your legal fees total. Establishing and documenting the co-founder relationship is one of the most important aspects of a having a successful startup company. I wrote a previous blog article regarding startup co-founders.

(2) Raising Capital: If you plan to raise capital from any third party, whether from your mother or Oak Investment Partners, your must increase your legal fees. No exceptions.

(3) Public Company - No, I don’t mean a “publicly-traded” company. Rather, the more your startup will have a public presence, the more you will need to spend protecting your startup company from infringers (such as trademarks, etc.) and other 3rd parties.

Guy Kawasaki provides us with a real-world example of how much startup legal fees may run. Guy paid $4,824.13 in legal fees when he started Truemors. And his legal fees included the following:

-Trademarking Truemors
-Drafting a Terms of Use
-Discussion of copyright, liability, infringement, IP, and insurance issues
-Organizational resolutions and bylaws
-Stock purchase agreements

Guy’s post also has some wise advice about how much to spend on startup legal fees:

You could do less legal work and do it cheaper, but if you ever want to raise venture capital much less go public or get acquired for more than scrap value, this is not the place to save a few thousand bucks.

While Guy paid $4,824.13, I do not recommend using his number as a benchmark for your legal fees. There are too many variables to consider which are both internal and external to your startup company. Thus, I am hesitant to even provide a range of estimated startup fees. But if you consider the three issues (number of co-founders, raising capital, and public company), you will know whether paying your startup lawyer a larger amount is warranted.

A frequent issue entrepreneurs, myself included, deal with is having to handle negative situations with due care and class so as to not erode startup company goodwill, not to mention other business tangibles and intangibles.

You can create goodwill for your startup company many ways. And most are fairly obvious. But truly great entrepreneurs have the knack for turning potentially bridge-burning situations into positive ones for their startup company.

Click on the following link to read a Craigslist ad that showcases how one startup entrepreneur likely changed a usually negative situation–laying off employees–into a positive one, both for his startup company and the developers he had to lay off:

Three Amazing PHP/MySQL/Perl Developers Now Available - Story

(I must credit the Hacker News at YCombinator for this find…)