As outside counsel to thousands of VC-backed startups, we are often asked the same questions about what startups need to do after raising their first round of VC financing.
Here is a quick and dirty list of those next steps. The action items below are described in further detail in the “You’ve Got VC Money” series posts linked below.
Please reach out to your Perkins Coie team member if you have any questions.
- Create sustainable employee policies.
- Develop an employee handbook.
- Obtain employment liability insurance.
- Get employee classification right.
- Use the right employment agreements.
- Avoid noncompetition agreements.
- Comply with tax withholding requirements.
- Comply with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Corporate governance
- Ensure your board understands their duties to the company and takes an active role.
- Keep your board informed.
- Hold regular board meetings (at least 4-6 per year) and make them maximally effective.
- Keep good board minutes.
- Understand what requires board and stockholder approval.
- Keep your investors informed—they will love you for it.
- Understand the company’s patents, trademarks, copyrights, and trade secrets and develop a plan to protect them.
- Protect your domain names and websites.
- Update your privacy policies and terms of service.
- Update your PIIAs.
- Get licenses in writing.
Establish cap table best practices.
Establish equity compensation best practices.
- Adopt an equity incentive plan.
- Benchmark your equity grants.
- Establish a standard protocol for granting equity awards—get us involved early on!
- Use our template charts when providing equity grant information.
- Establish a standard protocol for employee/contractor termination.
- Establish a standard protocol for option exercises.
- Don’t allow electronic option exercises.
Get more sophisticated accounting help.
Review where you qualify to do business.
Adopt a plan to stay organized amidst an influx of paperwork.
How to Prepare for an Equity Financing
We have covered in past FTTWs how to value your startup and how much capital to raise. Once your startup decides to pursue equity financing, you should start to prepare for the investor due diligence process. On the business side, you will need to prepare a business plan and should take steps such as obtaining management references, interviews and background reviews, customer/user references, technical/product reviews, financial statements and business model reviews.
What Every Startup Needs to Know
On Wednesday, June 26th, Perkins Coie’s Palo Alto office hosted the startupPerColator event, “What Every Startup Needs to Know.” Lowell Ness, a Perkins Coie partner in the Emerging Companies & Venture Capital (ECVC) practice, moderated a panel which included Herb Stephens of NueHealth, Thomas Huot of VantagePoint Capital, Jennifer Jones of Jennifer Jones and Partners, Yuri Rabinovich of Start-up Monthly, and Olga Rodstein of Shutterfly.
Surviving the Series A Crunch: Financing Alternatives
The “Series A Crunch,” which is the significant decline in the number of startup companies per quarter that are completing their first equity financing, appears to be deepening.