Investors in startups need to realize what is going on in the companies in which they have invested. To do so, they engage in monitoring activities to find out whether a portfolio company is developing well or whether it needs support or even corrective action. However, monitoring is only possible if the startup provides investors with the relevant information. Monitoring requires regular reports from the entrepreneurs because they are the ones who see how the startup is doing – at least they should. Generally, business reporting takes place on a monthly basis. However, venture capitalists frequently require weekly reporting and will work with the entrepreneurs to establish daily targets that lead to the achievements of the weekly targets. Additional investor reports on specific issues may complement the regular reporting, as well as meetings and calls to discuss important issues. A business report is the lens through which investors perceive and recognize the progress entrepreneurs achieve. Monitoring by investors will succeed or fail based on the quality of the reporting. This quality, in turn, depends directly on the principles and standards entrepreneurs apply when measuring the economic activities and events affecting their startup.

Business angels are private individuals – predominantly cashed-out entrepreneurs – who invest their own money in new and early-stage businesses and, having invested, then draw on their own business experience to support these ventures in a variety of ways. They are often referred to as informal investors or informal venture capitalists. Whereas the attention of scholars and the media is largely focused on institutional venture capital, business angels actually finance substantially more businesses.

In this chapter we explore how and why venture capitalists (VCs) conduct due diligence. We begin by demystifying due diligence and dissecting its objectives. From screening to final legal scrutiny, we explore the due diligence stages, offering insights from academia, experts, and the tools used by VCs. In doing so we blend academic rigour with the street-smart wisdom of industry experts – both VCs and founders. This delivers insights from both sides of the table on how to navigate the intricate dance of due diligence. Continuing in the spirit of offering real-world insights and tools, we include due diligence scorecards shared by VCs, plus noteworthy tales of successes and failures. The chapter closes with a spotlight on key trends shaping the future of due diligence and a practical checklist of the topics to include, and things to look out for, when doing due diligence.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores why the boldest initiative in the sixty-year quest to achieve a borderless Europe has exploded in the face of the EU. A close examination of each stage of the EU financial emergency offers evidence that the European values that are supposed to provide solidarity within the twenty eight-member EU in good times and bad are flimsy and thinly distributed. The book aims to show that it is possible to view the current difficulties of the EU as rooted in much longer-term decision-making. It examines the different ways in which the European Union seized the initiative from the European nation-state, from the formation of the Coal and Steel Community to the Maastricht Treaty. The book concentrates on the role of France and Germany in the EU.

Germany has risen to assume the leadership of the EU. Although it enjoys immunity from the pain of much of the rest of the eurozone, the future of the single currency and perhaps of the wider Union itself seems largely to be in its hands. For much of the crisis, Germany has wished to direct Europe's financial affairs through a form of eurozone governance that primarily benefits Germany irrespective of the damage done to a mounting list of eurozone countries unable to insulate themselves from it. Europhile leaders may have pioneered a European unification concept in the 1950s which gave the EU momentum until the end of the Cold War. But financial crises from that of the Balkans in the early 1990s to the extended financial one have revealed how deep its limitations are in carrying out its own projects or resolving difficulties arising from chronic design faults.

The single currency was overtly designed to lock a newly united Germany into a common monetary union in which it would act in concert with countries possessing less powerful economies rather than dominate them outright. This chapter focuses on the evolution of the crisis in the eurozone and the shortcomings which have impeded the EU from bringing it under control. The financial sector had not become a protected zone of the eurozone overnight. Ever since the passing of the Single European Act in 1986, its perceived needs had come to shape the concerns of EU decision-makers to an increasing degree. EU decision-makers at the centre of a marathon economic crisis are increasingly insistent that there is no way out except for a union adopting full political and economic standardisation.

Among some of its most fervent advocates, European Monetary Union was meant to bring about the final merging of European destinies into a common political entity. This chapter explores the long term preparations that were made to create a single currency encompassing a large part of the European Union. It shows how the impetus was essentially political, to erode the power of the nation-state and speed up the installation of a supra-national alternative through hurtling towards monetary union. For most of the existence of the European Union, the push towards integration has involved political leaders trying to achieve common ground around a uniform monetary policy for Europe. The euro was exposed as top-down political project in the hands of politicians, functionaries and lobbyists who had lost touch with some essential aspects of political reality. From 2009 onwards, the limitations of the euro were exposed by a deepening financial crisis.

This chapter offers a portrait of a European Union in 2013 wracked by mutual suspicions. Elites in that year dropped the pretence that further integration efforts could produce common benefits. The EU had devised such defective processes for managing high-level responsibilities that it remained paralysed when these low-grade forms of management spun large areas of the eurozone into crisis. Southern European political elites shrank from embracing bold remedies for the economic crisis. Most were seen as involving an abandonment of the euro or else a temporary suspension for some members, or a breaking up of the currency union into several workable parts. The EU will become an entity of secondary importance unless it can redesign itself as a force concerned to identify and defend a European common good. This involves burying the Cold War with national states who view a supra-national Europe as both threatening and unworkable.

One of the chief casualties of the extended economic crisis in the EU has been democratic politics. The EU's own mechanisms for decision-making have been set aside at particular moments; a core group of countries has assumed responsibility for crisis management. This chapter examines the increasingly strained relationship between the EU and the democratic process. It argues that ethical standards and competent decision-making are becoming casualties of the democratic deficit. The crisis which rocked the EU at the end of the 1990s briefly brought to the surface the view that the then thirteen-member EU was divided on a North-South basis in its attitude to public morality. The European Parliament, briefly emboldened by having taken resolute action against abuses inside the Commission, slumped back into torpor despite acquiring some increased powers as a result of the Maastricht Treaty.