Mentoring. Adeo Ressi Fights “Atrocities Of Investors” With New Class Of Fo. Adeo Ressi’s Founder Institute, a seed stage incubator and mentoring program that we first covered last month, is set to release a set of legal documents this afternoon that promise to protect startup founders from, as he eloquently puts it, the “atrocities of investors.” The new documents, created by Wilson Sonsini attorney Yoichiro Taku, are posted publicly on the website. They have a variety of novel rights and privileges: Creation of a Class F Founders stock that has 2:1 board votes per founder and 10:1 voting power over normal common stock. These shares vest monthly without a cliff and have single trigger acceleration. The stock grants and any penalty fees paid are put into an exchange fund that all participating founders have ownership in.
Therefore, all companies participating in each class have some stock in all the other companies – a great way to reduce overall risk. Applications for the first startup class are open until May 10. TechStars » Seed capital and mentorship for startups. Neuhaus Partners - Venture Capital für junge Hochtechnologie Unt. Nathan Myhrvold’s Patent Extortion Fund Is Reaping Hundreds Of M.
Don’t blame Nathan Myhrvold for taking advantage of the culture of rampant patent litigation in this country. He is only doing what large companies with vast patent portfolios such as IBM and Microsoft do on a daily basis: use the threat of patent infringement litigation to strike lucrative patent licensing deals. Except Myhrvold, who used to be Bill Gates’ right-hand man at Microsoft during the 1990s, does it through his patent-gobbling fund, Intellectual Ventures. The fund has collected more than 20,000 patents on the cheap from universities, inventors, and bankrupt companies, which it then uses to extract hefty licensing fees from some of the biggest companies in the world.
Since he started Intellectual Ventures eight years ago, he has returned $1 billion in licensing fees to investors, he tells the WSJ. Those investors include some of the same companies who are licensing his patents: Sony, Nokia, Microsoft, Intel, Google, eBay, SAP, and Nvidia. In recent months Mr.