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Don’t be an Asshole.

TL;DR: You probably can’t afford to be one.

Background Reading:

A regular theme of SHL involves different ways for founders and executives to protect themselves from bad actors – often via advice that I’m able to give by being in a position of not representing any institutional investors, deliberately. If you want more on that, see: How to avoid “captive” company counsel. 

The purpose of this post is to flip the topic, and discuss why there are very real, non-warm-and-fuzzy, reasons why entrepreneurs/execs should be very careful not to behave like bad actors themselves.

If you apply Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to the business world, you arrive at one very real truth: the most talented, value-additive people in any industry are virtually never in it just for the money. They have enough, and trust their ability to earn more. Their talent allows them to care about other things: like challenging work, trust, friendship, impact, fun, respect, etc. By no means does this suggest they don’t care about money at all – in some cases money is a way for them to ensure they are being valued and respected for what they deliver. But it does mean that anyone who approaches these people with a kind of opportunistic cost-benefit analysis is likely to get ice cold water poured on them, very fast.

Startup ecosystems are full of these kinds of people. If all they cared about was money, they’d never touch early-stage.  If they’re working with startups (and your very early-stage risky startup), there are non-financial motivations higher on the hierarchy of needs at play, and you need to be mindful of that as you interact with them.

When you’re building your brand new or very early-stage company, unless you have a LinkedIn profile that screams “winner,” people all around you are going to be risking their time and money in working with you. There are 1,000 reasons why they might say no, and move on to someone else with a different risk profile. The absolute last thing you want to do is give them a reason to walk away, because they smell an asshole. And trust me, they will walk away. 

“Startup people” react much more viscerally to assholes than “corporate people” do, because the startup world often selects for people who won’t do or tolerate anything for a big payout. The large hierarchies of corporate environments enable, naturally, more hierarchical behavior among peers. In contrast, the “flatter” nature of startup ecosystems generates, and enforces, more “democratic” (respect everyone) norms.

As startup lawyers, we’re often in a position to see firsthand who the assholes in the entrepreneurial community are. They treat lawyers and many other service providers as line items to be deferred, discounted, and written-off to the very last dime, as much as possible; and will play games to manipulate people into giving them more for less. Thinking extremely myopically, these assholes think they’re doing what’s best for their company by grabbing as much as possible on the table – but played out over time, they’re actually whittling down the number of people who will work with them to those who simply don’t have other options. And when someone doesn’t have options, it’s often for a reason. Interestingly, assholes have a way of ending up stuck with other assholes. 

All of this applies just as well to top investors, particularly angel investors (with more freedom than VCs) who know they deliver a lot more than money. God help you if you give them even the slightest reason to think you’re an asshole. Information travels fast.

The definition of a mercenary is someone whose every decision is cost-benefit calculated for money. The fact is that if you build a reputation in a startup ecosystem for being a mercenary – always maximize the valuation, minimize the equity grant, discount the bill – you’re dramatically reducing your chances of making money, simply because of the personalities and values you tend to find in the startup world.

Be careful out there. Don’t be an asshole. On top of it being simply wrong, you probably can’t afford it.

Startup Employee Offer Letters

TL;DR: A few simple principles can help founders avoid big legal landmines in making offers to their employees.

Background Reading:

Hiring an employee is one of the first areas in which I see poorly advised founders really start messing things up from a legal perspective; exposing themselves to liability and errors that can have very long-lasting effects.

Here are a few simple principles to keep in mind as you hire people and paper their employment.

An Employee Offer Letter is NOT the same thing as an “Employment Agreement.”

In the United States, the default for employer-employee relationships is “at will” employment, which means broadly speaking an employer can fire the employee for any reason, even without warning, apart from a narrow set of discriminatory reasons that violate labor laws. This is very different from other countries, which typically have more robust statutory defaults for employees.

When most people speak of an “employment agreement” they are referring to a negotiated document, usually reserved for high-level executives, that provides more robust protections to the employee/executive; including protections around how that executive can be fired, and the consequences of firing her/him. True employment agreements are quite rare in the very early days of startups.

When a startup hires a typical employee, they provide an Offer Letter that states high-level details like their position, compensation, etc., but also makes it clear that the relationship is at will; in other words, they don’t have the protections a high-level executive’s “employment agreement” would often provide. Offer Letters are not Employment Agreements. Know the difference, and that you should start with the assumption that an offer letter is what you need.

Everyone who works for you is not an Employee. Know the difference between a contractor and employee.

I often see founders casually, without really thinking about it, call everyone who does work for them an “employee.” It seems harmless, but in labor law the word “employee” can have very material implications for what you owe them, how you treat their compensation, how easily you can modify their terms or terminate them, etc. Don’t use that word indiscriminately.

Don’t forget IP / Confidentiality, which is not covered in the offer letter (usually).

The conventional structure of startup employee documentation is (i) a simple offer letter, and (ii) a more robust agreement covering confidentiality, intellectual property ownership, and (unless you’re in California or a few other states) a non-compete. This second document is usually called something like a Proprietary Information and Inventions Agreement (PIIA), Confidentiality and Inventions Agreement, or some variant of that. Missing this document can be a huge problem, and in some states fixing it is not as simple as having an employee sign it later. Don’t forget it.

Unlike most legal issues, local state law tends to govern in employment relationships. Docs vary by state.

Most tech startups are incorporated/organized in Delaware, and if they have a national footprint, a lot of their agreements will be governed by Delaware law. With respect to employees, however, that is rarely the case, unless the employee is actually located in Delaware. In employment documents, the location of your employee will often determine the documentation they have to sign, and that means the documentation can vary significantly by state. Work with your lawyers to ensure you don’t use the wrong forms.

Your offer letter might promise equity. But you still need to issue it, which is more complicated.

If you’re promising options or some other form of equity, the offer letter will usually cover that. But you need to understand that the letter is only promising the equity. To actually grant/issue the equity, more steps need to be taken, including a Board Consent and other processes.

Early-stage founders often get in hot water by signing lots of offer letters thinking that’s all they need to do for employee equity purposes, and then waiting a long time (as the value of their stock continues to go up) to be told by lawyers that the equity was never issued. Then they end up (for tax reasons) having to issue the equity at a much higher price than they would’ve if they had done it sooner, and the employees are understandably angry. Promise, then quickly grant. The offer letter is just the first step.

Small Business v. Startup

TL;DR: Small business law is nowhere near the same thing as Startup Law. Many of the expensive legal errors that we see founders make often result from not understanding their distinction.

Background reading:

As I’ve written many times before, what separates startup lawyers from the vast majority of other kinds of services that an early-stage founder will need to engage is the extremely high cost, and in some cases permanence, of errors. Making a mistake in coding, accounting, or other areas is often a matter of issuing a version update, changing a report, or perhaps paying a small fee. Making a mistake in a contract (which can’t be unilaterally fixed), or taking a misstep that exposes you to legal liability, can create irreversible exposure that in some cases blows up companies, or in others proves 10x-20x+ more expensive than simply having done it properly the first time.

This is why smart entrepreneurs building serious companies take far more seriously what lawyers they engage – their background, credentials, experience, network and reputation – than they do for other professionals.

One way to avoid huge costs in engaging lawyers is to understand what distinguishes startup lawyers from other lawyers, and to really understand the difference between a small business and a startup; because it’s “small business lawyers” whom I usually encounter making the most egregious mistakes that harm startup founders.

A “startup lawyer” is a corporate/securities lawyer with a heavy specialization in early-stage companies. I have seen litigators, real estate lawyers, patent lawyers, etc. who for some reason represent themselves also as “startup lawyers,” and any founder who understands how legal services work should be completely terrified of using them. See: How fake startup lawyers hurt founders.

A “startup” is a business that, while starting out small, expects to (i) grow much more quickly relative to a typical new business, (ii) expects to have more cross-jurisdictional legal issues (less local) either via hiring across state/country lines or customer relationships across state/country lines, (iii) usually intends to use equity in some manner for recruiting purposes, instead of keeping it closely held by 1-2 founders/partners, and (iv) often, but not always, expects some form of capital injection from angel or seed investors in the near future.

Contrast a “startup,” with a small business, like a coffee shop, or a boutique clothing store. In the small business case, early customers and employees/contractors are expected to be geographically contained, it would be highly unusual to use equity ownership for recruiting purposes, and beyond money from a partner or two, it would be very unusual to raise outside capital for years until the business has proven successful and an expansion plan has been put in place.

Startups, as defined above, hit far more complex corporate, securities, tax, financial, intellectual property, labor/employment, etc. legal issues far more quickly than small businesses, and that is why startup lawyers and small business lawyers are very different people, with very different credentials. If you contrast a highly regarded startup lawyer with a small business lawyer, you’ll find the former will almost invariably have graduated from much higher ranked schools, trained at much larger firms early on in their career, and generally be connected and have access to specialists in a much wider variety of legal fields; because startup law is way more complicated, and prone to expensive errors, than small business law.

And this is why so many of the expensive errors we encounter when startups arrive at our doorstep come from founders engaging small business lawyers lacking the background and resources to properly do the work; on top of services like LegalZoom and Rocket Lawyer, which are not structured for startups.

A small business and a startup are not the same thing; not even close. From a legal perspective, they are totally different worlds. In fact, I rarely/ever encounter specialized startup lawyers who even represent themselves as small business lawyers; but I too often see the reverse, where small business lawyers will throw in “startup law” on their website to see if they can train on a founder’s dime.

Do your diligence, or you’ll regret it.