Hello and welcome to a special interview edition of Slate Money with Scott Cooper who's

here with me in Brooklyn. Welcome. Thank you. You have a new book out called Secrets of Sand Hill Road, which is about venture capital and we have a long and fascinating conversation, especially if you are interested in this whole venture capital industry we are going to talk

about how companies are funded and why VCs insist on board seats for their

general partners and why they insist on this crazy stuff called Preferred Stock and whether you should even accept cash from them at all, which apparently according to Scott, there is some reason somewhere.

He'll hold your hand and he will sprinkle magical

pixie dust on you.

So it's going to be a fun conversation.

And all of that is coming up on Slate Money Extra.

Scott Cooper, welcome to Slate Money.

You have a book.

It is called The Secrets of Sand Hill Road.

Sand Hill Road is a very boring road in Palo Alto.

I had no idea it could have secrets. But apparently it has

secrets behind the low-slung beige buildings along Sand Hill Road.

That's exactly right.

Live.

You would be very disappointed.

Anybody who come out to Sand Hill, right?

Who apparently control billions of dollars.

And you have a statistic here in this book,

which says that if you look at the US stock market,

63% of the market capitalization of the stock market comes from companies which were founded

...