Sie Ventures’ Post

During the Sie Foundations program, Fran Spooner and Eesheta Shah, partners at Marriott Harrison, joined us for an Office Hour with our founders! 💡 The session covered the legal maze of issues frequently encountered by early-stage companies. Here are the critical insights they shared with our Cohort: 🏗Fundraising structure: try to avoid overcomplicating your pre-seed round with too many different types of investors investing at different times and on different terms, but if you do need to do that to get the money in, make sure you keep detailed records of all terms and a close eye on the financials for your next round(s). 💰 Fundraising fees: legal costs can rise each round, usually driven by increased complexity, risk, and due diligence requirements. Always factor it into deal costs. 🔒 IP Protection: identify your core IP assets (this might be your brand, a proprietary piece of software, the design of a product, a new product entirely or a database of information) and how they are or can be protected (whether through trade mark rights, copyright, patents, design rights or trade secrets) and ensure ownership of IP rights is clear from day one. 🤝 Contracts: key areas to focus on are payment and payment terms, IP ownership and licensing, liability and term and termination. Use NDAs when sharing core ideas. 📋 GDPR/Data protection: start putting in place processes, procedures and policies for compliance early; investors check compliance during due diligence. Thank you to Fran and Eesheta for your golden advice and Marriott Harrison for supporting great female co-founded companies!