I cofounded a company called Sawhorse Media that's making sense of Twitter (Twitter was founded by past Venture Voice guest Ev Williams).

We decided to launch a new site called Venture Maven to make it easy to follow what VCs and angels are tweeting about. For example, if you were pitching Spark Capital, you could have checked Venture Maven yesterday to see one partner was at the dentist and a principal just got off painkillers after a knee surgery. Better open the meeting with a good joke.

Please let me know your feedback. We're also thinking of launching a similar site for founders and CEOs.

You can find Venture Voice on Twitter at @VentureVoice and me personally at @Gregory.

It's great to hear stories like the one where Andy Bechtolsheim handed the Google founders a $100,000 check before they even set up their bank account. Convince an angel to invest and you're off to the races! However, what many aspiring entrepreneurs don't know is that after the one or two page term sheet there are dozens of pages of documents that go into even an angel financing.

Since law firms have templates for these deals you might think it's no harder than copying and pasting. The problem is there are lots of different templates floating around law firms, and a countless number of terms that could be changed. Many of these terms really don't make too big of difference, or if they do their effects are so hard to anticipate that arguing over them isn't worth the time. Lawyers get paid by the hour so they have an incentive to find terms they don't like (and there are always terms to not like). So lawyers will often spend weeks bickering over trivial issues, racking up $10,000s of legal fees, delaying the financing and putting the deal itself at risk.

Enter angel fund Y Combinator, which has just released the financing documents it has standardized and used with dozens of entrepreneurs. If these documents get a reputation for being fair (which is likely given the Y Combinator's good reputation), they could save million of dollars in legal fees for startups. The key is that both the entrepreneur and the investor trust that the Y docs are a fair deal for all, and trust enough to tell their lawyers not to mark it up! This could do to angel investing what Creative Commons did to copyright or what McDonald's did to hamburgers.

UPDATE (8/14): Scott Rafer (a past VV guest) posted his convertible debt note (direct link to doc) he's using for his current company, Lookery. Rafer did a convertible debt deal, which has many advantages as my friends at Venture Hacks have argued. On the other hand, Josh Kopelman has argued against it, pointing out several disadvantages. It seems to be the type of issue that could go either way depending on the dynamics of the particular company, oppertunity and investors -- but if we had a standardized set of docs for each verified by a trusted third party it'd be very powerful. The NVCA did this for later stage docs (of course they're funded by the VCs). Who could do this for convertible debt rounds?

The folks at Uncensored Interview were nice enough to turn the tables on me by interviewing me on their show. You can watch all the clips here. Here's me talking about what makes a good interview:

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In our last round of questions on this blog, we asked each former guest about his or her first time (raising money). What should our next question be?

Give us your ideas in the comments or via our contact page.

We've got a number of new audio interviews scheduled. To support the show, please consider becoming a Venture Voice member by clicking here. (Just like NPR, but for entrepreneurs and without the tote bags.) More members = more interviews.

This is part of a series on Venture Voice where we ask a bunch of past show guests a simple question and post their answers.

How'd you raise your very first round of financing?

David Sacks: I asked Peter, Max and Elon to finance "Thank You For Smoking" with me. I didn't have to do too much selling since I had worked with them at PayPal and was putting in my own money.

This is part of a series on Venture Voice where we ask a bunch of past show guests a simple question and post their answers.

How'd you raise your very first round of financing?

Kelly Perdew: I raised my first round of financing ($500K in equity) from friends and family while I was still in business school. Be very careful about taking money from friends and family... while it is easier to access, if things don't go well, you tend to stay in the deal much longer than is good for you to try and save their money!

This is part of a series on Venture Voice where we ask a bunch of past show guests a simple question and post their answers.

How'd you raise your very first round of financing?

Ev Williams: I asked my mom for $10,000. She gave it to me.

This is part of a new series on Venture Voice where we ask a bunch of past show guests a simple question and post their answers.

How'd you raise your very first round of financing?

Jay Adelson: The first round of financing I ever raised was from angels. I was working with Al Avery, who co-founded Equinix with me in 1998. A good friend of mine, who had founded a company in Silicon Valley in the mid-nineties and sold it to Cisco, was mentoring me to avoid going initially to the VCs.

From his perspective, nothing could be worse; Showing up at VC with a business plan, with no executive team, no execution, amounted to no valuation, and the VC taking way too much of the company for a series A.

Instead, he felt, do everything you can to bootstrap or angel fund it, then go back (even a month, or six months later) to the VCs with something they can't argue is as risky.

This friend of mine went to two friends of his, and we raised $100,000.00 to start. We followed his instructions to the letter; We hired some executives, we started the process of operating our business, got an office, etc. We made the business real. Most importantly, we found a great corporate law firm to start all the paperwork, who later would help us negotiate and deal with the VCs.

Three months later we gave away roughly 40% of the business for $12 million dollars. The $100k was set up to convert to essentially $200k worth of stock at the close of Series A. I think they did quite well, and we're all still good friends.

This is part of a new series on Venture Voice where we ask a bunch of past show guests a simple question and post their answers.

How'd you raise your very first round of financing?

Joel Spolsky: I put in a very small amount of money (I think it was about $50,000) from my own savings. That carried us to profitability.

This is part of a new series on Venture Voice where we ask a bunch of past show guests a simple question and post their answers.

How'd you raise your very first round of financing?

Fabrice Grinda: The first time I had to raise money was for Aucland, a copy of eBay for Southern Europe which was my first Internet startup. I was lucky not to have to raise seed money. While in college at Princeton, I built a company exporting high end computer equipment to Europe (motherboards, memory, CPUs, hard drives, etc.). Given its profits, I left Princeton in June 1996 with $50,000 in cash.

When I joined the McKinsey New York office as a consultant in September 1996, I ran a sophisticated real estate rent versus buy model. The model and my rule of thumb analysis (see Rent … unless you want to buy) were screaming BUY! I bought a large 1 bedroom apartment on 54th and 2nd for $115,000, putting $25,000 down.

With the other $25,000, I bought 4 stocks: Yahoo, Microsoft, Amazon and Intel. When I decided to create Aucland in July 1998, I sold the 1 bedroom apartment for $185,000. I sold all the stock I owned. After taxes, I was left with around $300,000 in cash. I invested 100% of it in Aucland.