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Because today's startup generally requires significantly less seed capital to function, the legal contracts once required for large-scale deals are no longer appropriate. Rather than forcing startups to draft lengthy legal documents, one attorney is offering an invaluable resource to entrepreneurs. Best known as the Fenwick and West attorney responsible for Twitter , Ted Wang recently released a series of templates to help startup companies navigate the difficult task of investment financing. Sponsor The Series Seed documents are a set of guideline documents that allow startups raising less than $1.5 million dollars to lighten the burden of the legal process. Documents include a certificate of incorporation, a preferred stock purchase agreement, an investors' rights agreement and a seed term sheet. Says Wang, "From an investor's perspective, while moving away from the traditional full-blown financing documents entails giving up a number of rights and protections, when taken across numerous transactions, the benefits of spending less time and money on the documents outweigh the cost of sacrificing these additional rights and protections. Moreover, I don't believe there's anything included (or excluded) in these documents that will be wildly controversial." Should there be any controversy, Wang plans on open sourcing the documents for discussion in the near future. While entrepreneurs may use the documents at their own risk, some of the endorsers of the resource include Charles River Ventures , Ron Conway with SV Angel, First Round Capital and Polaris Ventures . To download all four documents entrepreneurs can visit seriesseed.com . For additional resources on how to actually get to this portion of the investment process, early-stage companies should consult Venture Hacks' series entitled Term Sheet Hacks . Discuss
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Series Seed Documents: Legal Templates for Early Investments
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A visit to the typical homepage for a venture capital firm most likely provides a well designed landing page that spells out the firm's mission with links to its portfolio companies and VC bios. Secondary to this general information is a page dedicated to press releases from the firm, or in many cases, a company blog with relevant posts. First Round Capital , however, recently redesigned its homepage to place a much heavier emphasis on real-time information from news sources and its VCs, and portfolio companies. Sponsor The feed works in a similar fashion to Facebook's news feed in that information is presented in a reverse chronological order. It includes news from its portfolio companies, third party news articles, as well as blogs, tweets and even Foursquare checkins from its team of VCs and entrepreneurs - all of which can be subscribed to using RSS . Also included in the feed and on its own dedicated section of the site are job postings from First Round's portfolio. "One of the most helpful things a VC can do for a portfolio company is to help them find key hires," writes First Round Managing Director Josh Kopelman. "And the jobs section of our site contains well over 125 current job openings within our portfolio." The job postings complement First Round's Key Hire Wire , a weekly newsletter released a few weeks ago containing job openings with its companies. First Round also helps its portfolio out by placing these openings on a Twitter account dedicated to blasting these openings out to the Twittersphere. The revamped site also contains a new portfolio section with some interesting ways to navigate through the firms numerous companies. A standard list of current and former companies is supplemented by options for viewing a tag cloud of industries and other keywords, a map of company locations, or a feed of company tweets. First Round, which recently snagged the top position (by a wide margin) on Larry Cheng's list of the top VC firm websites based on average monthly traffic, is leading the way for VC firms with its innovative approach to its homepage. What better way to show potential companies that you not only invest in innovation but that you participate in it yourselves? And venture firms aren't the only group that can learn from First Round's redesign. A news feed of aggregated content from various networks can be a unique approach to the homepage of any company. In startup culture, most entrepreneurs and employees have their own blogs, Twitter accounts, Foursquare accounts, as well as of a number of other social network accounts. Rather than linking out to individual employees and making visitors click out to a slew of different sites, why not provide a handy news feed of relevant information from your employees? The new site is an excellent one-stop location for startups and entrepreneurs to find pertinent blogs and news, especially for those looking to Foursquare-stalk their favorite VC at the local coffee shop. First Round has created a definitive resource for anyone looking for information relative to the firm, its employees or its companies - a model any company could easily replicate. Let's just knock-on-wood that Facebook doesn't go waving its shiny new patent in anyone's face too soon. Discuss
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Facebook-Like News Feed Headlines First Round Capital's Redesigned Homepage
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