Emerging Enterprise Center Blog - Commentary and Analysis For Entrepreneurs and Startups

For the first time in several years, I was able to actually attend (as opposed to sign up for and then not be able to go) the annual meeting of lawyers and VC in-house counsel that was organized by Sarah Reed  (of Charles River) long ago to develop what are now the NVCA document forms. In my view, this is one of (perhaps the) most successful forms projects ever undertaken. We are about to publish EEC Perspectives for Q4 (the link is to Q3, but Q4 will be available in the next day or so) and year end. It will show very high... More

To follow up on comments on my post of a couple days ago and based solely upon our published numbers (which does not include all the transaction that we track),  77% of Series A investments tracked by us used the NVCA forms and 22% did not.   If I add unpublished data the adoption rate is slightly higher.  With respect to Series B and later stage investmens based solely upon our published numbers, 58% of transactions used the NVCA forms and 42% did not.  Again, if I add unpublished data the adoption rate becomes slightly higher. The increase from 58% of... More

I had lunch with Sarah Reed ,of Charles River Ventures, who was the moving force behind the NVCA forms project, and our discussion got onto the subject of adoption rates for the NVCA forms.  This harkens back to some old posts I have on the subject of forms.  This inspired me to go back and look at some research our firm had done (a portion of which is published in EEC Perspectives) and calculate the actual adoption rate in New England deals.  Based  on a somewhat random unscientific sample of more than 140 VC investments over the last two years,... More

Last week I noted that Fred Wilson had the last word on what is "standard" and quoted a paragraph from his blog. The gist of the quote was that you need to be able to articulate a reason for the "standard" provision you want. (By the way, often things get to be standard because they address some important and recurring issue.)... More

It being the middle of June the numbers for Q2 are about to come out, with the inevitable result that many new blog posts will be added to the blogosphere providing all kinds of analysis. Our firm contributes to this quarterly cacophony with our EEC Perspectives publication which analyzes what is going on in New England. When we started this publication, we gave some thought to what we could/should publish and from what base sources. So, we look at the quarterly data that we derive from mining VentureSource and various searches of Delaware filings. We analyze the data ourselves and... More

My post on the NVCA forms and levels of adoption did get one comment, which I did not get to releasing until yesterday because it got buried under an avalanche of work related email. The gist of the comment is that adoption levels for the NVCA forms are way lower on the west coast than the east coast – Yokum Taku (of Wilson Sonsinni) suggests in the 5% to 10% range. Our firm does not track west coast deals for the obvious reason that our home base is Boston. So, I don’t have a basis for disagreement with Yokum Taku.... More