Getting ready for your seed round? Don’t let your lawyers use these forms…

There is no question, over the past 10+ years, the trend in the industry has pushed companies and investors away from a more robust “Series A” round as a form of initial equity financing to a leaner “Series Seed” round. We almost take for granted now that a company can access much smaller (yet meaningful) amounts of capital, much earlier than they would have been able to, from established institutional investors willing to commit time and energy to a company and its vision. Over the course of that same period, the tech community became comfortable leaning a lighter set of customary legal rules, rights and obligations for companies and investors to live by as they navigate together toward the Series A round. This reality was spearheaded by Fenwick & West through their initiative to open source a set of financing documents called “Series Seed Documents”. The first version of the documents were made available in 2010. They had some kinks but overall they were industry changing. In 3 fairly simple documents (a charter, stock purchase agreement and investors rights agreement), they were able to establish a market standard for how to paper Series Seed rounds. For companies this was a huge deal as they had, up until that time, been forced to rely on variations of the full suite of NVCA Series A documents (a charter, stock purchase agreement, investors rights agreement, voting agreement and ROFR/CoSale Agreement) with lengthy rights and legal concepts which very rarely (if ever) came into play given the company's stage.

In 2013, however, the Series Seed forms took a bad turn. Fenwick decided to combine the stock purchase agreement with the investors rights agreement in one agreement called the Stock Investment Agreement. So you might ask, why would it be a bad thing to limit the paper work further from 3 to 2 documents? Well, I’ll tell you why. After closing your initial Series Seed round, not all companies experience the trajectory that allows them to follow-on with an immediate Series A round 1-2 years later. Instead, a large majority of my clients (and other seed stage companies) end up opting to put together a follow-on “Series Seed-2” round, typically to take advantage of raising additional capital, at a slight uptick in valuation to the Series Seed round, while leveraging the same defined rights/obligations set forth in the Series Seed round. And it is at this moment, after hanging up the phone with their client, that the lawyer runs into technical drafting issues. Whereas, with the version 1 Fenwick documents, amending those forms to layer in the Series Seed-2 security sold in the follow-on round was seamless and required only a small handful of changes to the already approved documents, with the version 2 Fenwick documents, specifically, because of the combination of the stock purchase agreement with the investors rights agreement, lawyers were left with only clunky (and I mean CLUNKY) ways to layer in a Series Seed-2 security appropriately.

So what is the solution? Hopefully Fenwick will address this issue and revert back to help standardize an industry around their original forms composed of 3 documents. Otherwise, you should pressure your lawyers to rely on alternative forms which have the flexibility to account for that follow-on Series Seed-2 round (even if you don't end up utilizing it). Anything otherwise would be short sighted.