Guest Post: How I (finally) found a technical co-founder and got accepted to Seedcamp by Steven Renwick. The six biggest legal mistakes startups make. SoftTech’s Jeff Clavier on building a winning team. The Valley is back! Silicon Valley Bank reports it had 120 new startups sign up in the first quarter — the most since the first quarter of 2008. Finding companies worth investing in, though, is as hard as ever. At the recent SVB-sponsored CEO Accelerator summit, Matt Marshall, editor and CEO of VentureBeat, spoke with Jeff Clavier, founder and managing partner of SoftTech VC, about how to build a winning team for your Web business and got a behind-the-curtain look at the world of angel investing.
Clavier is one of the most active seed-stage investors in Web 2.0 startups, having invested in roughly 76 companies since 2004. A portion of the discussion is embedded below, but Noombl CEO Oladayo Olagunju was among those in attendance and compiled the following notes (which shouldn’t be taken as a verbatim transcript) from the fireside chat. Clavier: One needs to beware of the first impressions. How long is the lead-time between first point of contact/pitch and actual term sheet talks? Founder's Dilemmas: Equity Splits. The following is an excerpt from HBS Professor Noam Wasserman’s new book, The Founder's Dilemmas: Anticipating and Avoiding the Pitfalls That Can Sink a Startup. Noam is one of a rare breed of business academics: he studies entrepreneurship using a rigorous empirical approach.
The book taps Noam’s analyses of data on 10,000 founders, plus the personal stories of Evan Williams of Twitter, Tim Westergren of Pandora, and two dozen other founders. As an example of the kind of insight that this data makes possible, take a look at this diagram, which is one of my favorites in the whole book: Noam calls this the Rich vs King tradeoff, and it's a remarkable finding. I was lucky enough to get to read a version of the book when it was still in draft form. "If you're starting a new company, you probably already know that a crazy variety of landmines await you. The following is an exclusive excerpt which sets up a common pitfall regarding equity splits. But such a best-case approach is hazardous. Rédiger un pacte d’associés ou pacte d’actionnaires – 2/2. [je me rends compte que cet article est particulièrement technique, je m’en excuse auprès des lecteurs que ça ne va pas intéresser !] Suite et fin de l’article consacré à la gestion des relations entre associés de l’entreprise et plus précisément sur le pacte d’associés.
On a vu la dernière fois pourquoi je pensais qu’il était important d’en faire un dès le début, même sans lui donner une valeur légale, en partant du principe que lorsque l’on s’associe, c’est pour une durée limitée et qu’on a tout intérêt à déjà prévoir la sortie. Nous allons donc voir aujourd’hui les fameuses clauses d’un pacte d’associés, même si je ne pourrais être exhaustif tant les avocats ont été prolixes en la matière. Mais intéressons-nous tout de même aux principales clauses qui existent et à leur utilité : stabiliser le capital, préparer la sortie et protéger les investisseurs et les associés fondateurs. Et vous, vous avez signé quelque chose avec vos associés ? If I Launched a Startup. Here’s what I’d do in the beginning: Incorporation (1) Entity Choice: Corporation or Corporation (2) State of Incorporation: Delaware (3) Authorized Shares in Charter: 10,000,000 Shares (4) Type of Shares: Common Stock (5) Par Value of Common: $0.0001 (6) Initial Founders Issuance: 8,000,000 Shares (7) Founders Equity Split: Depends on the Team, But Quickly and After the Awkward & Difficult Conversations (8) Vest Founders Shares?
: Hell Yes (9) Vesting Schedule for Founders Shares: 4 years with a One Year Cliff (10) Consideration for Founders Shares: Cash & IP (11) Handling of “Lost Founders”: Lock Down the IP (then Wish Them Well) Raising Capital (1) Length of NDA: 0 pages (2) Fees Paid to Pitch my Startup: $0 (3) Investors: Accredited Investors (4) Structure of First Capital Raise up to $1MM: Convertible Notes 4 Years with a One Year Cliff is the typical vesting schedule for startup founders’ stock.
Authorized Shares is the maximum amount of shares of stock a startup can issue.