Articles Posted in Start-Ups & Financing

I spend a lot of time talking to founders of Silicon Valley start-ups about the stock they will receive in exchange for their contributions to their new company, and then preparing restricted stock purchase agreements for the founders. In the last couple of blogs, I have discussed the issues surrounding how founders’ stock could vest.

The concept of vesting is usually intertwined with the concept of repurchase rights. Simply put, for founders’ stock, vesting is where the repurchase rights held by the company disappear or change. In a typical scenario, when a triggering event occurs, a company can repurchase unvested stock for its original purchase price. A company may not, however, repurchase any vested stock or may only repurchase vested stock at the stock’s then fair market value.

What kind of triggering events might allow a company to purchase unvested stock? One common trigger is anything that results in the shareholder not working for the company. Most often, this means a termination of employment.

Working with start-ups in San Jose, I have often had to counsel founders on the intricacies of business law as it relates to issuing stock. A large part of initial discussions with the founding group involves the funding needs of the new corporation, how shares will be divided, and the best way to provide equity incentives to founders, advisors, and new employees.

As I discussed in my last blog, one of the key issues involved in issuing stock to founders is how to incentivize them to stay with the new corporation. One mechanism discussed is reverse vesting, where the corporation can repurchase a founder’s shares of company stock at their original purchase price when certain events specified in a contract occur.

A typical reverse vesting structure is to allow the corporation to purchase a declining number of a founder’s shares at their original purchase price as time goes on. Typically the number of shares the corporation can repurchase will reduce on a straight-line basis over the course of three or four years.

Practicing business law in Silicon Valley over the past year, I have seen start-up activity pick up. We are in that part of the cycle where the survivors of the not so great recession have decided that they are better off on their own and have decided to make their dreams come true by forming their own companies.

Because many of these companies hope to become a welcome opportunity for outside investors, their choice of entity is the corporation. From the legal end, the process of incorporation is fairly straightforward and can be accomplished relatively quickly. Founders have a number of decisions to make, such as how much they want to each contribute to the new venture, and who will have which role.

Where a group of founders is involved, one of the most difficult issues, relatively speaking, is the issuance of stock. The first issue involves what percentage of the corporation each of the founders should receive. There are few, if any, rules of thumb as to whom should get what, and the decision is typically made by the founders assessing each of their respective strengths and weaknesses, and their contribution to the new venture, and deciding on a split. If the new corporation never expects to issue any new stock, and each founder will be actively involved in the business with profits being split at the end of each year, there may be little more to do with the stock other than to create a suitable buy-sell relationship.

I have always known that Silicon Valley is home to many innovative companies and has a lot of entrepreneurial talent, but I was still amazed to read that start-ups in Palo Alto, Mountain View, Redwood City, Sunnyvale and San Jose received a combined $980+ million in funding in Q2’13. [Source: Silicon Valley Business Journal, July 16, 2013]. As a business lawyer in San Jose, I have seen a number of attempts to make fundraising for start-up companies easier. Recently, a new technique has come into favor.

The new buzz word for start-ups looking for funding is crowdfunding (sometimes known as crowdsourcing). In this type of deal, a group or entrepreneur will receive contributions from a large number of people for a project. The process started with artists raising money for their projects. Their success led for-profit companies to look at crowdfunding to raise money. Websites like kickstarter.com and indiegogo.com are just a few that provide crowdfunding opportunities.

To encourage crowdfunding, Congress passed the JOBS Act a year ago last September. In response, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) released new regulations intended to encourage crowdfunding. One of the new regulations relaxes the public solicitation limitations that had been imposed for certain types of private financing deals.

I recently taught a program to California lawyers for the Santa Clara County Bar Association concerning B corporations, a subject I covered in a previous blog. As a Silicon Valley business attorney, with an increasing number of clients forming new companies, I want to discuss some attributes of these corporations that should be considered by anyone starting a new business.

The first consideration is whether becoming a B corporation will assist in a company’s funding and operations. B corporations arise from a national movement to allow companies to consider factors other than just profits and shareholder value in making their decisions. Certain types of investors and employees are drawn to companies that share similar values. Because of the attractiveness of value-driven organizations to these constituencies, start-up companies should strongly consider whether becoming a B corporation can provide them with a unique story when soliciting investment, and an edge when recruiting employees.

The second consideration is whether the goods or services “fit” with the concept of a B corporation. Fortunately, a B corporation does not necessarily need to exist solely to pursue its social goal. Almost any business can be a B corporation if it adopts the kind of public purpose that is required under one of California’s two B corporation statutes. For a “benefit corporation“, the purpose needs to one which creates a material positive impact on society and the environment, taken as a whole. For the “flexible purpose corporation”, the purpose needs to be one which could be pursued by a California nonprofit benefit corporation, or one which promotes or mitigates the effect of the corporation’s activities on the corporation’s stakeholder, the community or society, or the environment. The open ended nature of these purposes allows a wide variety of businesses to organize as a B corporation.

Because California created two different types of B corporations, you will need to consider which type of B corporation your new company should form. One way to approach this decision is to ask yourself how much the corporation should be forced to consider its public purpose. In the “benefit corporation”, the board of directors MUST consider the impacts of any action on the company in the short term and long term, and its shareholders, employees, customer, community, and environment, and its ability to accomplish its public purpose. This will force the board to deliberate very carefully, and will require your counsel to prepare corporate documentation carefully to record the board’s deliberations. By contrast, the “flexible purpose corporation” merely allows the board to consider its public purpose when making decisions, but does not require that furthering the purpose be a component of its decision.

In making your decision to conduct your business using a B corporation, you can avoid some common misconceptions. One common myth is that a B corporation needs to be certified. There is nothing in any of California’s B corporation laws that require any type of third party certification. There is, in the “benefit corporation”, a need to compare the efforts toward meeting public purpose to a third party standard, but this falls short of requiring actual certification. Another common question that often arises is whether B corporations are taxed differently. At this time, they are not. Of course, a B corporation does not need to be a nonprofit corporation for tax purposes.

In a future blog, I will cover one of the most critical considerations you face when adopting a B corporation – the disclosure of your company’s activities.

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As a Silicon Valley business attorney, I often help small businesses and start-up companies in San Jose and Santa Clara with their financing transactions. Whether my client is a newly formed software corporation getting capitalization from its founders or an existing company trying to raise money by making a preferred stock offering, as my client’s business lawyer, I need to counsel them in their fundraising efforts to ensure that the company complies with securities laws.

However, a bill recently introduced in the California State Senate will make it harder for small businesses and start-up companies to raise money in California. The bill, SB 978, could eliminate a securities exemption commonly used in fundraising transactions and expose a company to fines, and its controlling persons to individual liability, if a certain filing is not completed in time.

A little background is helpful to understand why this bill is such a disaster. Fundraising to start or grow a company requires compliance with both state and federal securities laws. If an offering violates the securities law, anyone who purchased the securities in that offering can rescind their purchase and get their money back. The aggrieved investor can look to the company for return of funds, or can look to any of its controlling persons individually. If you are considered to be a controlling person of a company that misses a securities filing deadline for an offering, your house may be on the line.