As a student at Harvard Business School, I wrote a paper questioning a basic idea: are debt and equity the best forms of capital for entrepreneurs? The answer, I concluded, was "not always." In doing so, I promoted an alternative: royalty capital. Over the last year, I've served in my personal capacity as a judge or a mentor to a number of business plan competitions - MIT 100-K, MassChallenge, Hult Prize, among others. To my surprise, many entrepreneurs had never heard of royalty capital. Watching them consistently offer away too much equity has me doubling back to the promise of my paper.
