The Convertible Noteholder Standoff

For founders, raising that first equity round is a true milestone. It is not only an opportunity to bring in meaningful dollars from professional investors to fuel a start-up’s growth but, if you have had outstanding notes running interest since the early days coming out of inception, it also serves as a chance to clean up your company’s cap table by converting outstanding convertible instruments in connection with the round. With angel investors’ broad adoption and comfort of investing into early stage companies through convertible instruments, companies are delaying the need to sell preferred stock in an equity round, in some cases, for the first couple years of a company’s development. The fallout from this reality, however, is that when you do head toward closing that first equity financing, a founder will have the task of coordinating with the (sometimes, many) noteholders in connection with the conversion of those noteholders’ outstanding notes.

With a syndicated noteholder base, the risks of holdout (or unreachable) noteholders is elevated and without collection of all signatures from that constituency in connection with the equity round, the new money investors in the financing will inevitably be spooked. To combat the potential negative effects and risks of a “standoff” down the road at the time of the equity financing, initially when preparing and issuing your convertible notes, your counsel should be advising you on the appropriate language to include in the instrument to ensure there is zero room for interpretation in the event the noteholder does not provide its signature at the time of a triggering financing and resulting automatic conversion. Without an air tight documented mechanism, you will otherwise risk taking the “automatic” out of automatic conversion and open up potential delay in the closing of you ever-so-important equity financing.