NVCA Forms Project
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 continued adoption rates. For those of you who are not familiar with these forms, they are an annotated set of series A deal documents. They are a great resource for any entreprenuer trying to understand what is in the docs and what is "market".
Based on comments at the meeting, there will be some modest revisions to the documents. Perhaps the most noteworthy is that we will be going back to the future: The next round of forms will (when done) include an additional form of charter with a pay-to-play provision. If my memory serves me well, we included pay-to-play when we did the original version of the charter seven or eight years ago (can it really be that long ago?).
Another noteworthy discussion revolved around whether or not registration rights should be deleted from the forms. They won’t be – at least not this time. Let’s hope that by the time this group meets again next year, there will have been a few (more than a few) IPOs and everyone will start feeling like reg rights are important after all, even if rarely used.
One final note, Ted Wang from Fenwick, discussed model seed series financing documents (based on the NVCA docs) that he prepared and will be making publicly available. This is another great project and great service to the entrepreneurial community.
Comments (1)
Read through and enter the discussion by using the form at the endMatt Storms - February 19, 2010 9:49 AM
Agreed Dave, the NVCA model documents are excellent starting points and it would be good to have an "industry standard" set of seed-stage documents as well.
I'm on an ABA committee that actually added a considerable number of annotations to the NVCA term sheet a couple of years ago. Here's a brief article/post on it (http://wistechnology.com/articles/4386/) as well as a link to the underlying redlined comments to the NVCA term sheet (http://alphatechcounsel.com/ABA-Comments-to-NVCA-Term-Sheet.html).