Post Category → Founders

Promising Equity v. Issuing Equity

Background Reading:

An underlying theme of a number of SHL posts has been the common misunderstanding among young, first-time founders around what startup/vc lawyers in fact do. As I wrote in Legal Technical Debt, a mindset has emerged from certain startup circles suggesting that virtually anything legal that startups do at early-stage, from forming their company to raising seed financing, can be automated with software.

That confused mindset leads founders to (i) assume that all lawyers are just luddites over-charging startups for effectively filling in forms, and (ii) results in founders accruing an enormous amount of compounding ‘legal technical debt’ from badly drafted documents, mis-matched contracts, missed legal steps, etc. For companies that fail fast, the debt never comes due. And yes, there is a clear correlation, from my experience, between founders who arrogantly think lawyers are worthless and those that never build anything of significance.  Dumb people believe and do dumb things.

For those founders that do end up building a real business, however, the 10x cleanup cost of legal technical debt (relative to what it would’ve cost to do it correctly from the start) is often brutally painful. There are a lot of very interesting new tools out there being built to streamline and optimize how tech/vc lawyers work, and you should certainly look for lawyers who are using them. But if you think for a second that you’re going to build a real tech company without needing serious lawyers who can safely manage significant legal complexity, you are, without question, deluding yourself.  

A significant source of “automation confusion” arises from founders not understanding the difference between promising equity and actually issuing equity. I’ve noticed this from how many of our own (very early stage) clients will randomly e-mail us a set of contracts executed over a period of several months with a short message like: “we went ahead and *issued* some equity on our own.  just FYI.”  This blog post will save me from having to write the same e-mail 30 times in the future.

Promising Equity 

I can promise someone equity in 5 seconds, and 1 sentence.

“I promise to issue you 10,000 shares.”

See, it’s not hard. Promising equity is exactly as easy, and as automatable, as it sounds.  Anyone who automates a contract for promising equity, which usually means filling in numbers into a static template, doesn’t deserve the slightest bit of praise for innovation. It’s been do-able for decades.

Sure, people still make mistakes in promising equity all the time. They calculate the number of shares incorrectly, or they get the vesting schedule wrong (or don’t offer one at all), or they simply grabbed the wrong form to begin with.  But the point is that, perhaps with a little guidance from educational materials and a boilerplate form, promising someone equity is do-able as a DIY project.

Reality Check

The problem, of course, is that promising equity is 2% of the much more complicated process needed to actually issue equity. To correctly accomplish the issuance of equity from your company and into the hands of the intended recipient, a web of highly contextual legal analysis needs to occur. Just a short (non-exhaustive) example:

  • What kind of entity are you? That influences the type of equity you can issue.
  • Stock? Option?
    • If Stock, at what price?
    • If Option, at what price? To an employee, or a contractor?
  • Vesting schedule? 83(b)? Acceleration?
  • Was the price set correctly to avoid tax consequences?
  • Enough authorized shares?
  • Correct class of equity?
  • Is it being issued under an equity plan?
  • Was the plan adopted correctly?
  • Are there enough shares in the plan?
  • Is the recipient eligible to receive the equity under securities laws and tax rules?
  • Any state-specific rules/filings to comply with?
  • Any contractual approvals needed?
  • Any cap table adjustments needed, like anti-dilution?
  • Approved by Board?
  • Anyone else that needs to be notified about the Board action?
  • Any spouses we need to worry about for community property purposes?

I could go on, but you get the idea.

Want to try automating that? Good luck to you. Medical care will be fully automated before complex legal work is. Why? Because there’s far less variability in biology than there is between the legal structures of companies. You simply cannot automate (not in a commercially viable way, at least) in an environment where every use case has a totally different starting point, context, and history, in an infinite number of combinations. Even less so where high-stakes errors are cemented in ways (via contract execution and enforceability) that do not allow for quick and easy bug fixes. That is precisely the world in which serious VC lawyers operate.

Believe me, I empathize deeply with the disdain for lawyers held by many entrepreneurs, and share some of it myself. As someone who manages recruiting for our firm, I constantly find myself fighting a sense that the legal field is a magnet for people who think that perfecting their punctuation matters more than learning to actually advise clients on the what, why, and how of startup law.

But there are lawyers in the market who know how to get things done efficiently and correctly. I hire those lawyers. You can either (i) pay them now, (ii) pay them 10x later, or (iii) assume your company will fail before the debt comes due.

Startup Advisors: Best Practices

Background Reading:

Advisors. The best startups have great ones. They save you lots of headaches, time, and money. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve come across any successful client that didn’t have a strong set of advisors. Here’s some advice on how to not screw it up:

Advisory ‘Boards’ Rarely Exist.

A set of advisors is sometimes referred to as an advisory ‘board,’ but 99% of the time that’s just a term to make it sound cool. The advisory ‘board’ never meets as a group, and often doesn’t even know each other. They’re just a loose set of advisors that a company works with 1:1, or occasionally in smaller groups. Nothing like a Board of Directors, which actually does have to coordinate schedules.

Don’t Stay Local.

As the first linked post above explains in depth, 20 minutes on the phone with someone who has the right expertise is 1000x more valuable than days spent with someone who is more accessible, but can’t provide real insight that isn’t available already via blog posts or books. This means that if you’re relying solely on the very limited pool of people available via your local business ecosystem, you’re doing it wrong.

LinkedIn, Twitter, Angellist, E-mail, Phone. Work ’em. Connect with the key people in your local ecosystem who can make things happen, but don’t fish only in your little pond.

Don’t Confuse Mentors with Advisors.

Mentors can be really valuable to new founders. They can provide emotional support, friendship, coaching, and all kinds of other things. But are those the kinds of things that deserve an equity grant?

It’s ultimately the team’s call. But just realize that those are not the kinds of things that real advisors are meant for. Advisors provide real strategic insight, connections, recruiting, investor introductions, things that go beyond moral support for the founders and actually move the ball forward for the company in an obvious way. That’s the kind of value-add that typically merits equity.

Get Independent Viewpoints

For high-stakes, complex questions for which the answer isn’t clear, advice needs to be triangulated. You don’t treat any particular person’s perspective as gospel; instead you speak with multiple people and combine all of their viewpoints to make your judgment call.

That sort of triangulation is not possible when all of your advisors have the same background, are part of the same circles, etc. Especially when the questions involve big decisions for which various stakeholders have incentives to favor one option over another, you want advisors who are detached from those incentives, so their advice is objective. This, btw, is also the case with lawyers.

Favor Intellectual Honesty over Politeness

The whole point of getting outside advice is to help you see things you can’t see on your own. If your strategy for choosing advisors is to work only with the people who are agreeable to your own opinions, you’re wasting your time. People who are blunt with their advice, but deliver real insight when they give it, can be game changers for a company. 

Use an Advisor Agreement.

It’s not magical; templates abound. The Founder Institute’s FAST Agreement is perfectly acceptable, and even simplifies equity calculations. The most important thing is that an Advisor Agreement removes any ambiguity as to (i) compensation owed for advisory services, (ii) who owns the contributions, IP, etc. that result from the advisory (the company), and (iii) confidentiality of any info shared. Yes, any vc lawyer has seen founders get in trouble with these issues for not taking the time to document it properly.

Equity; %, Vesting Schedule, Cliff, Acceleration.

If an advisor expects cash from an early-stage startup, that’s usually a red flag, short of a really unusual circumstance.

The FAST Agreement has pretty solid guidelines for what’s appropriate in terms of equity %, depending on the Company stage. Pre-equity round, 0.25%-0.5% is a typical advisor. 1% is someone extremely strategic whose name you absolutely want behind your company. After an equity round, the %s naturally shift down a bit because the company is more valuable.

1 or 2-year vesting schedule and a 3-month cliff, and full single-trigger acceleration on a change of control.  Advisors get full acceleration because acquirers never expect them to stick around after a sale, unlike founders or executives.

Use that cliff.

We regularly see founders engage an advisor expecting tons of value to be provided, and then crickets once the equity is granted. But the founders don’t do anything about it. 3-months should be more than enough time to know whether a new advisor will really deliver the goods, and if not cut the cord and get that equity back for re-use.

 The hard part, of course, is finding the right advisors and selling them on your vision, so they’ll give you the time. If no one on your team knows how to hustle and sell, either start learning yesterday, find someone who can, or (honestly) just give up now. Selling, in a dozen different ways (including to advisors), is 75% of what a competent founder CEO does.

When You’re Not CEO Material

TL;DR: Before you even talk to VCs, know your own strengths and weaknesses as a leader, and work on them. Know your VCs by asking honest questions early on, and verifying answers in the market. And be proactive and honest about what you really want to be doing at your company, and what matters most to you. When CEO succession drama starts to damage a company, it’s almost always because the founder and the VCs failed to (i) align themselves on their approach to Company management and recruiting early on, and (ii) create an environment of trust and transparency where founders can give up some control without fearing that the fruits of their hard work are being given up as well.

Background Reading:

No matter how much certain investors market themselves as “founder friendly,” no competent VC can guarantee a Founder CEO that they will stay CEO. VCs have a job to do: to turn other people’s money into more money. To the extent they are convinced that keeping a founder as CEO will maximize their chances of doing that (long-term), they will do so. Otherwise, they will tell a founder CEO, sooner or later, that a new CEO is needed.

“Founder Friendly” VCs are the ones who’ve concluded that being friendly to founders helps them make more money.  They are not your BFFs, and you shouldn’t need them to be.

The below are some thoughts, from someone who’s seen it play out many times, on how founders should approach the “Are you CEO material?” issue; both before the hard conversation has arrived, and after.

First: Answer Your Founder’s Dilemma: Rich or King?

If staying in control of your company is much more important to you than achieving an excellent financial return, you should significantly reconsider whether venture capital is right for you at all.  Remember: VCs have a job to do, which is to make lots of money. You bring them on to align yourself with them so that when they make lots of money, you make lots of money.

It’s fine and common if you have a certain ‘mission’ that runs alongside the goal of building successful, profitable business; most great founders do.  But if you’re working with VCs, (i) that mission better be the kind of mission that unlocks lots of benjamins, and (ii) you better be OK at some point handing over the crown and becoming a part of, but not the leader of, management. Because, statistically, most founder CEOs eventually get replaced; voluntarily or involuntarily.

Second: Find Out if a VC is a Coach or Underminer

While all VCs are in it to make money, their philosophies regarding how much “coaching” to give founder CEOs vary wildly. Some VCs know that a founder CEO most likely will need to be replaced once the company has become a true enterprise, but they see value in keeping a founder in the CEO seat for some time and coaching them on their gaps, and also helping them fill some those gaps with other senior hires.  Other VCs virtually never let a first-time founder CEO remain in their position post-Series A. They are fine having them as CTO or COO, but they will almost always make their large check contingent on bringing in one of their preferred professionals.

There is no way to know whether you are working with a Coach or an Underminer other than to (i) directly ask (early) the VC what their perspective is on senior management post-closing, and (ii) examine the existing portfolio of the VC to see what has in fact happened every time they’ve closed a round. Trustworthy advisors who are active in the market are helpful here, as is LinkedIn.

If you’re working with an Underminer, and there are no other options, it is what it is. Work within that reality (see Step 4).

Third: Realize that you are being “sized up” from the moment you first speak to investors.

No one should pretend that “good CEOs” fit neatly into some contrived stereotype. Their personalities, appearance, backgrounds, etc. can vary significantly. However, the core jobs of a CEO, particularly at early stage, are quite uniform: (i) recruit employees, (ii) recruit investors and strategic partners, & (iii) manage and lead everyone to execute effectively on the strategy. From the moment you first interact with investors, they are asking themselves whether a founder CEO can do those things.

Fact: everything about your interactions with lead investors, from the tone and confidence of your communications, to body language and eye contact, and how you respond to push-back and calculated aggression, will influence their perception of whether you are “CEO material.” Complain all you want about prejudices, bias, judging books from covers, etc., but that is just reality. Leadership is not handed charitably. It’s asserted by behavior and results. The concept of “executive presence” is something worth familiarizing yourself with.

No, this does not mean you need to pretend to be some gun-slinging, type A alpha executive. Many great CEOs are calm and collected. But the fact of the matter is that being a CEO of any company requires the ability to have hard conversations and take some heat. If you can’t hold your own in a direct conversation with a VC, they will infer that you can’t do so in the many other key conversations that a CEO needs to have to lead a company.

I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve heard something like “That founder? He’s got a bit of an ego,” to which I usually respond, “What do you think it takes?” Ego? Thick skin? Stubborn? Chip on their shoulder? A little prickly? You better f***ing believe it.  Industries usually don’t get blasted open by people overflowing with tenderness and sensitivity.

Fourth: Focus long-term on transparency and influence. Not control.

I’ve found over time that many founder CEOs do not actually enjoy being CEO, especially as the company starts growing significantly (~post Series B). They insist on staying in the CEO seat, not because they truly think it best suits their skillset, but because of a fear that stepping down from the top automatically means totally losing influence and visibility into where the company is headed. A culture of transparency and clear communication at the board level can resolve this disconnect and avoid dysfunction.

The key issue here is not whether the Company needs a new CEO, but how to handle succession. The perfect way to create mistrust between founders and their board/management is for VCs to parachute in C-level hires with minimal founder involvement in the recruitment and selection process. It looks something like “We are getting a new CEO, and it’s X (often who was a CEO at a prior portfolio company).” In this scenario, the recruitment of new executives feels far less like the leveraging of much-needed, independent new talent for the benefit of everyone, and more like the investors taking control over management by hiring their loyalists under the pretense of ‘upgrading’ the team. 

When a founder CEO is able to propose her own candidates for the CEO position (and other C-level positions), and play a lead role in interviewing, vetting, and training the prospects, succession goes substantially smoother for everyone. In that scenario, much like a truly independent director, the founders will view the new CEO and other C-level hires as balanced people whose long-term vision and values are closely aligned with the original team. Trust is preserved, and that trust, along with a continued seat at the Board table and contractual protections around their equity and compensation, frees founders to move to positions in the company that are better suited for their skills (CTO, Chief of Product, Chief of Strategy, COO, etc. etc.), and which they usually enjoy more.

Again, different VCs have different philosophies on how to approach CEO/Executive succession, including timing. The only way to find out is to get a dialogue going early on, before term sheets are delivered, and verify the answers by talking, privately, to portfolio companies. As always, having your inner circle of advisors to, confidentially and off-the-record, help you gather that information is key.