When Disco decided to raise venture capital, I benefited from a variety of blog posts by venture capitalists (especially Fred Wilson, Brad Feld, Mark Suster, and Jeff Bussgang), company executives (especially Gabriel Weinberg and Rand Fishkin), lawyers, and others (especially Paul Graham). I also read several books about venture capitalists and the venture capital process and benefited from many of them (especially Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson’s Venture Deals).

This is my effort to pay it forward. Disco does not have Moz’s culture of transparency or anything like it, so I won’t be sharing our deck or the details of our numbers, other than in general terms. But I will describe what it was like to raise money, how we went about it, and how we undertook the negotiations.

As background, Disco makes ediscovery software that helps lawyers find evidence faster in the…