Brad Feld

Back to Blog

The Proliferation of Standardized Seed Financing Documents

Mar 01, 2010
Category Term Sheet

As of today’s announcement that Ted Wang at Fenwick & West has collaborated with a group of bay area early stage VC’s and angel investors to create the Series Seed Documents we now have – at my count – four different standardized seed financing documents floating around the industry.

  • TechStars Model Seed Funding Documents (by Cooley)
  • Y Combinator Series AA Equity Financing Documents (by WSGR)
  • Founders Institute Plain Preferred Term Sheet (by WSGR)
  • Series Seed Financing Documents (by Fenwick & West)

Many smart and capable people have either worked on these various docs on signed on as supporters.  However, until there is one standardized set of documents that everyone – especially the various law firms agree on – I don’t expect there to really be a standardized set of seed financing documents.  I wrote about this in my post The Challenge of The Ideal First Round Term Sheet.

Rather than whine about it, after reading the PEHub article Marc Andreessen on “Series Seed Documents,” and Why VCs Should Start Using Them I’ve decided to try to get a handful of lawyers in a room and try to come out with one set of documents.  This might be a futile effort, which will prove the point that it’s impossible to create one standard set of documents.  But – I’m an optimist, so I’m going to plan for a good outcome.

I’ll proactively reaching out to the appropriate folks at Cooley, WSGR, and Fenwick & West to organize a one day session, with laptops, somewhere in the bay area.  I’ll include a handful of early stage investors (both VCs and angels) in this effort.  My goal will be to finish the day with a truly standardized set of seed documents that all of the firms agree to use.  Then we’ll open source these and evangelize them across the startup world, at least in the US.

If you are an attorney at a major national or regional law firm that works with startup companies, please email me if you are interested in participating.  If you are a VC or angel investor that supports this effort – same drill (email me).  Let’s end this madness (which I’ve been dealing with for 16 years and an angel and VC investor) once and for all – the entrepreneurs who we work with deserve better from us.