Seed Documents

While some people hate the phrase “failing fast”, I find it instructive when it’s used to signify that one isn’t going to pursue a particular path in the context of a larger set of activities. A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about The Proliferation of Standardized Seed Financing Documents . It generated several hundred email responses and a handful of phone calls. A week or so later, my partner Jason Mendelson wrote a post titled Why There Will Never be a Standard Set of Seed Documents. I’ve concluded that Jason is right so rather than torture myself, I’m failing fast with regard to trying to help create a set of standardized seed documents. ...

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 . ...