Author: Ryan Roberts
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The Basics of Convertible Debt Financing
Selecting the optimal structure when raising capital for your startup can be a challenging task. When clients ask me for my recommendation, I find myself recommending the convertible debt financing route more often than traditional equity financing (i.e., I’ll give you $100k for 20% of your company’s stock). So what is convertible debt? Convertible debt…
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Preferred Stock: Where “F” in a Class Can Equal Success
If you pay any attention to TechCrunch or Venturebeat, you’ll see stories titled “Startup Raises $X Million in Y-round Financing.” When the “Y” in story is a large number, do not assume that the startup company is tanking. Instead, the startup could be gaining momentum and approaching positive cash flow…but just needs one more round…
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I Got a Term Sheet, Now What?
Getting a term sheet from an investor is like getting an invitation to the Prom in January–you’ve got a long way to go before you dance. When you get a term sheet from a VC or angel investor, you need to decide whether the economics of the deal feel right. And you also have to…
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7 Legal Documents for Your Tech Startup
When launching a startup, you want to make and keep your startup as valuable as possible. But in order to do that, your tech startup needs to ensure that (a) the intellectual property is owned by the startup, and (b) the co-founders who own the startup have proper incentives and rules to handle inevitable contingencies.…
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Don’t Go Crazy with Complex Rounds of Seed Funding
I loved Pitch Camp. Flip Flops. Free donuts and pizza. Hours of “unauthorized” advice from the angel investor, venture capital, and journalism communities. It sure beat the heck out of any legal conference I’ve ever attended. At Pitch Camp, a fund’s partner told the crowd that he turned down a startup simply because the startup’s…
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Par Value for a Startup Company’s Stock
Par value is the minimum price that a corporation can issue its shares. In the US, par value was created during the time of the great depression in order to ensure a shares could not be sold under a certain price. Today, that concept is somewhat archaic, but it still plays an important role and…
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How Many Shares of Authorized Stock Should a Startup Company have at Incorporation?
An often overlooked aspect of filing a certificate of incorporation is determining how many shares of authorized stock should the new corporation authorize at incorporation. This decision doesn’t really matter to most businesses (I don’t have a clue how many shares I authorized when I incorporated my law firm), but startup companies aren’t like most…
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How I Launched My Startup (Law Firm) 2016 Update
I’m often contacted by lawyers for advice about going solo or how to start a law firm. In the legal world, going solo is the equivalent of quitting your day job and launching your startup full-time. So I’m dedicating this blog post to provide some background about how I launched my startup law firm. I…
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When To Fire a Startup Company’s Founder-CEO
When should a founder be replaced as CEO of a venture-backed company? The topic is obviously a touchy one for a startup founder that brought early success to a company. But while a founder might have been successful leading the startup to a funding event, can the founder also lead the startup to a liquidity…
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The Entrepreneur Also Rises
I had some free time this weekend and watched “Empire of the Sun” starring Christian Bale and John Malkovich. The movie came out in 1987, but I saw it for the first time Saturday. The premise of Empire of the Sun is that an aristocratic British child is separated from his family (living in China)…