Acceleration Startup Law Book Title and Cover Design

Last Updated on April 12, 2026 by Ryan Roberts

Thought I might take some time to explain the origin of the title and the book cover design for “Acceleration: What All Entrepreneurs Must Know About Startup Law“.

The Title: Acceleration

Quite often, a new client starts our first meeting with something like: “We messed up the legal at our last startup, so we want to use you.” Then we get into what happened, and it is usually something basic in terms of startup legal. Most of the time it is an early issue, like missing vesting schedules, not addressing co-founder dynamics, or letting an advisor take too much. It is rarely a sensational story about a terrible term in a Series Seed or Series A financing.

So I started asking: why do so many entrepreneurs have to learn these lessons the hard way? A lot of the early-stage issues are not rocket science, and you should not have to learn, by painful experience, that vesting matters or that granting 20% to an advisor is usually a mistake. Many of the most common traps show up long before a startup ever gets to a seed financing.

That is why the first two parts of the book focus on setting up the entity, vesting schedules, and how to anticipate and deal with issues involving co-founders, hires, and advisors. The last part focuses on financing, including how these early decisions can affect later fundraising.

“Acceleration” is the title, and it is based on a simple idea: if you read the book, you may (no guarantees) avoid some of the early startup legal mistakes that can derail a first company. Put differently, the goal is to help founders move faster past avoidable legal landmines.

There is also a second meaning behind the title. “Acceleration” is a concept that is near and dear to most co-founders as it relates to vesting schedules, for example, double trigger acceleration and single trigger acceleration.

The Cover: Acceleration

For the cover I was inspired by a few things here.

First, I really like the design of psychology and math textbooks of the 70s and 80s (and earlier), so I wanted sort of a funky retro classic design.

Second, I was a big fan of the ‘choose your own adventure books’ as a kid growing up in the 1980s — and isn’t launching a startup the greatest choose your own adventure book of all time? Like your own personal career “bandersnatch“. So I wanted to pay a little hommage here to this series of books.

Finally, I wanted it to take the concepts of the old school psychology/math books and the choose-your-own adventure books but make it look modern and crisp.

And the way I thought best to do that was to picture this startup law book on a coffee table in a mid-century modern house in Palm Springs, California….in 2019.

Now, growing up in Palm Springs, I figured I had some insight on this but certainly some pictures helped.

So in the end, I was very pleased with the end result.

Ryan Roberts Startup Lawyer

Ryan Roberts is a startup lawyer at Roberts Zimmerman PLLC with more than two decades of experience advising startups and venture capital investors. He is the author of “Acceleration” and StartupLawyer.com.

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