Your Startup Needs Bucks? Open Seed Round Docs Can Help

by Sam Dean - Mar. 02, 2010Comments (1)

If you have a startup, or an idea for one, one of the best initial ways to ramp up your business is through seed round financing. As is true for all financing deals, though, drafting and completing the required documents for seed round funding is typically complicated, and involves navigating significant legalese. However, through documents being billed as "open source" (they're really just open for anyone to use) and found here at SeriesSeed.com the process can become much easier.

Ted Wang of Fenwick & West announced the availability of the open seed round financing documents today, in conjunction with dozens of entrepeneurs, attorneys, venture capitalists, and others. Andreessen Horowitz, which is focused on aggressively funding innovative startups, has reviewed the documents, and the firm will begin to use them in seed round financing deals.

"At the seed stage, the goal is to help an entrepreneur turn an idea into a product," said Ben Horowitz, General Partner of Andreessen Horowitz, in a statement. "The legal documents to do a seed round should be a lot less complicated and cheaper than those for a major round of funding. We think Ted's work is a great start towards that goal."

"A hundred pages of documents for a million-dollar investment doesn't make sense," added Wang. "We wanted to create a simpler and standard set of documents that would be acceptable to both entrepreneurs and investors. They are short, so they reduce costs; we put them on the Web so that they're transparent; and they preserve essential rights and protections without favoring any one party so that entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and angel investors will not need to change them."

The SeriesSeed.com documents include a Certificate of Incorporation, Stock Purchase Agreement, an Investor's Rights Agreement and a Term Sheet. Wang has also stressed that they are "live documents," open to changes as users see fit to suggest good ones. Startups Blippy and Civic Solar have already used the documents. If you're in need of financing for your idea or fledgling business, check this offering out.

Disclosure: True Ventures provided insight in the development of the seed round documents. OStatic's parent network, The GigaOM Network, is funded by True, and Om Malik, GigaOM's founder, is a venture partner there.