Articles Posted in Start-Ups & Financing

I spend a lot of time talking to founders of Silicon Valley start-ups about the stock they will receive in exchange for their contributions to their new company, and then preparing restricted stock purchase agreements for the founders. In the last couple of blogs, I have discussed the issues surrounding how founders’ stock could vest.

The concept of vesting is usually intertwined with the concept of repurchase rights. Simply put, for founders’ stock, vesting is where the repurchase rights held by the company disappear or change. In a typical scenario, when a triggering event occurs, a company can repurchase unvested stock for its original purchase price. A company may not, however, repurchase any vested stock or may only repurchase vested stock at the stock’s then fair market value.

What kind of triggering events might allow a company to purchase unvested stock? One common trigger is anything that results in the shareholder not working for the company. Most often, this means a termination of employment.

Working with start-ups in San Jose, I have often had to counsel founders on the intricacies of business law as it relates to issuing stock. A large part of initial discussions with the founding group involves the funding needs of the new corporation, how shares will be divided, and the best way to provide equity incentives to founders, advisors, and new employees.

As I discussed in my last blog, one of the key issues involved in issuing stock to founders is how to incentivize them to stay with the new corporation. One mechanism discussed is reverse vesting, where the corporation can repurchase a founder’s shares of company stock at their original purchase price when certain events specified in a contract occur.

A typical reverse vesting structure is to allow the corporation to purchase a declining number of a founder’s shares at their original purchase price as time goes on. Typically the number of shares the corporation can repurchase will reduce on a straight-line basis over the course of three or four years.

Practicing business law in Silicon Valley over the past year, I have seen start-up activity pick up. We are in that part of the cycle where the survivors of the not so great recession have decided that they are better off on their own and have decided to make their dreams come true by forming their own companies.

Because many of these companies hope to become a welcome opportunity for outside investors, their choice of entity is the corporation. From the legal end, the process of incorporation is fairly straightforward and can be accomplished relatively quickly. Founders have a number of decisions to make, such as how much they want to each contribute to the new venture, and who will have which role.

Where a group of founders is involved, one of the most difficult issues, relatively speaking, is the issuance of stock. The first issue involves what percentage of the corporation each of the founders should receive. There are few, if any, rules of thumb as to whom should get what, and the decision is typically made by the founders assessing each of their respective strengths and weaknesses, and their contribution to the new venture, and deciding on a split. If the new corporation never expects to issue any new stock, and each founder will be actively involved in the business with profits being split at the end of each year, there may be little more to do with the stock other than to create a suitable buy-sell relationship.

I have always known that Silicon Valley is home to many innovative companies and has a lot of entrepreneurial talent, but I was still amazed to read that start-ups in Palo Alto, Mountain View, Redwood City, Sunnyvale and San Jose received a combined $980+ million in funding in Q2’13. [Source: Silicon Valley Business Journal, July 16, 2013]. As a business lawyer in San Jose, I have seen a number of attempts to make fundraising for start-up companies easier. Recently, a new technique has come into favor.

The new buzz word for start-ups looking for funding is crowdfunding (sometimes known as crowdsourcing). In this type of deal, a group or entrepreneur will receive contributions from a large number of people for a project. The process started with artists raising money for their projects. Their success led for-profit companies to look at crowdfunding to raise money. Websites like kickstarter.com and indiegogo.com are just a few that provide crowdfunding opportunities.

To encourage crowdfunding, Congress passed the JOBS Act a year ago last September. In response, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) released new regulations intended to encourage crowdfunding. One of the new regulations relaxes the public solicitation limitations that had been imposed for certain types of private financing deals.