How do you issue the right number of shares/options to an employee or an advisor?

HM Revenue & Customs at Mevagissey Harbour
HM Revenue & Customs at Mevagissey Harbour (Photo credit: Cross Duck)

Most founders have desire to share their equity with people that helped them along the way, both as a thank you, but also as a motivation tool. However, how to share is always a big question mark for every Founder. The two most frequently asked question is, “How much equity should I assign an advisor?”, which is shortly followed by “How do I know when to issue shares to new employees and how much do I give them?”.

So, let’s take step back and look at why we are doing this in the first place.

Motivating employees and or advisors is a key part of having a productive workforce. One key element to unlock this productivity is by creating a culture of fairness. In his book titled ‘Drive’, Daniel H. Pink talks about how an employee’s productivity can be binary provided that the right results-oriented work environment is created AND they are treated fairly from a compensation point of view. Effectively, if you don’t create a feeling of fairness in terms of compensation, relative to the market, employees will simply not be ‘open’ to be fully motivated as they will feel slighted. It’s a simple concept on paper, harder to implement in practice.

Therefore, the word ‘fairness’ is what’s important here.. how do you define the fairness culture in your startup?

Let’s start with advisors:

Advisors need to commit some time to your company to ‘earn’ their equity. The first thing to do is to define what kind of role this advisor is going to take. Is he going to provide board-level feedback and help or just operational help (marketing, for example). Is she going to meet with you once a week or once a month?

Then, define a time period for this relationship before you review it for extension. As in, Joe, your marketing advisor, will work with you once a week for 9 months, at which point you can review your working relationship to see if he is needed any further or if it is working out.

It’s really quite simple, find someone that can help you, narrowly define expectations you have of each other and for how long, and then find an equity amount that is in line with the market and that makes them happy.

For the USA, the Founder Institute has come up with some guidelines on numbers, and you can read about those here:
http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/22/free-startup-docs-how-much-equity-should-advisors-get/

They also include an agreement you can sign with your advisor to narrowly define the engagement. For the UK, I’ll be linking to one soon… stay tuned.

Onto Employees (which is a bit trickier and I’ll include the topic of valuations as a bonus):

Back to the topic of Fairness… Fairness is defined by having the total compensation of your employee meet his or her expectations as defined by the market. As such, you need to think of your employee’s total compensation (cash + equity) as something that is within the boundaries of the market norm for his or her role. Deviate too much and not only is hiring hard(er), but you will have inherently unmotivated employees. Total compensations at startups usually have low or no salary, so that fairness is established by assigning equity.

So in order to quantify the value of the equity portion of the total compensation of an employee, one important thing to consider is that the total value of the option package issued, is a function of both the total number given, but also the strike price they have. The two go hand in hand.

But before we go any further, a quick definition check on Strike Price:

An option’s strike price is the fixed price assigned to an option for the purchasing of the underlying share (typically ordinary shares) in the company. In effect, you have to pay the [strike price x  the options] you’ve been granted, to exercise your right to buy the underlying shares. Once you’ve ‘exercised’, you own the shares.

Pricing strike prices is a bit of a pain. In the USA, you have to do 409A valuations. More on that from Fred Wilson here:
http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/11/employee-equity-the-option-strike-price.html

Pricing in the UK is both simpler and more difficult. More difficult because it isn’t as clear as the USA, but simpler, because there is more flexibility.

Here is the exact language from HMRC (http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/shareschemes/emi-new-guidance.htm#10):

If EMI options in an unquoted company are granted the company can, if it wishes, agree the market value of the shares with HMRC Shares and Assets Valuation (SAV). To agree a market value with them the company will need to propose a value for the shares and provide background information to support the proposal. It will need to complete form Val 231 for EMI options.
The form outlines the information needed to support the proposed valuation. When it is complete, it should be sent it to HMRC Shares and Assets Valuation (SAV).
If the form is not used or the company does not supply all the information requested, it may be asked to supply the missing information before a valuation can begin. This could delay the agreement of the valuation. When HMRC Shares and Assets Valuation (SAV) receive your completed form, they will tell you within ten working days if they need any further information.
Asking HMRC to agree a valuation is not the same as:

  •    notifying HMRC of the grant of EMI options
  •    or making the annual tax return required for EMIs

This language does give you some flexibility on how you want to value and define your company’s value at the time you are setting the strike price. Book an appointment with someone like
http://www.completeaccountingsolutions.co.uk/ to discuss how you might go about setting this, or with your lawyers. Getting this right is important because if you don’t get it right, it will have serious tax implications for your employees or any other option recipients.

So back to strike pricing and its effect on the value you give to your employees:

If you have a very high strike price, you affect the employee’s total return on an exit. In a simplified equation (that isn’t designed to give you the present value of your options (Black–Scholes), but rather just the mechanics of cashing out), the value of the options will be:

(Share Price at Exit * Options you have) – (Strike Price you have * Options you have) = value to employee in cash at exit

You can see where to match employee 100, who comes in when the company is worth a lot more, with employee 10, who came in early, you’d have to issue employee 100 many more shares to ‘equal’ the same given to Employee 10. Try explaining all that to your hundredth employee and also to your first few, who might feel slighted that someone has more ‘shares’ than they do for the same job function.

Also, here is an interesting point to consider: different exercise prices for fully vested employees will cause them to behave differently. An employee who has 100 shares to buy, but only at $1 each will act differently (buy the shares and be a passive shareholder) vs an employee that has 100 shares at $100 (more likely to make a calculated decision as to whether to exercise (or not) the options upon a departure). Remember, if you set an exercise period after someone leaves the company, the question is, do you want them to keep the shares as a bet (low price) or only keep them if they really believe in the company (high price)? Again, no right answer as you balance between equity you give out.

So how much equity to give them?

After the above exercise, you see the challenge between articulating fairness mathematically, but also in terms of how employees chat between themselves and can sometimes get the wrong impressions based on not having all the facts.

Transparency is very useful in the early stages of a business, but as you grow, you may choose to just share the basic information of your company’s equity buckets, or strata. It’s really up to you and how you want to stratify the different kinds of employee equity issuances, for example: director level, supervisory level, and admin level.

The trick here, is really in how to ‘define’ who is what. I’d say that the important strata are:

  •    Those that set strategic direction overall (typically the founders or CEO)
  •    Those that set functional strategic direction (typically someone like a CFO, or CMO)
  •    Those that set budgets to hit strategic goals (Directors, VPs)
  •    Those that manage people according to budgets (Supervisors, Line Managers)
  •    Those that execute (Developers, Sales people, etc)

Then, you define what’s a fair total comp bucket value for each of these, and then use the math equations to give you the relative values of equity for each strata.

As with most things of this nature, however, there are more than one way to slice the onion.

Fred Wilson’s post below on what to issue each strata is useful as a guide for both an equation to calculate absolute numbers, but also to help understand the different tiers of employees.
http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/11/employee-equity-how-much.html

And here is Guy Kawasaki’s suggested split (via @brandid):
http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/03/nine_questions_.html

Lastly, here is another version of how to divide things ‘fairly’ between everyone (via @gosimpletax): http://www.brightjourney.com/q/forming-new-software-startup-allocate-ownership-fairly

Once you’ve chosen your preferred method, one mistake to avoid is to promise early employees ‘percentages’. Meaning, don’t say, I’ll give you 2%, but rather say, I’m giving you 2,000 shares which represent 2% of our current cap table. The reason is that if you leave it verbally at 2%, you may inadvertently make them believe that at the next round the will continue to have 2%. Don’t assume all employees understand the mechanics of financing rounds and/or dilution.

Another mistake to avoid is not including a vesting period. Without a vesting period, your employees have full access to what you’ve promised them, whether they’ve spent time to ‘earn it’, it is dangerous for the company to not have one. Read here an explanation of why that’s important:  http://www.seedcamp.com/2012/11/seedhack-founders-collaboration-agreement-version-2-0.html

In the end, this is more of an art, and you will get it wrong at least once, and don’t be afraid to experiment, but as long as you have a process, I believe you will have less issues going forward, particularly when the company grows larger, than if you leave things entirely open-ended.

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Managing the Legal Process in an Early Stage Startup

 

Law School

One of the most time consuming things founders have to do other than raise money is deal with all the legal paperwork pre and post termsheet that fundraising typically generates. Not only can the legal process be time consuming, but also it can be emotionally difficult depending on how many items are being discussed before finalizing.

While there is no standard process (largely due to the variability in deal types and jurisdictional issues) that can be outlined for how to deal with your unique legal situation, I’d like to propose a few tips that might help you navigate your process along the way. As such, read this post not so much as a how-to, but more-so as a list of things to consider while going through your investment documents.

0) Always be mindful that the most important thing you have at your disposal is your word. If you make promises, keep them. Create trust between everyone you deal with. Say what you mean and mean what you say, and ask questions if you’re not sure. This will help build you a good reputation that will greatly help you along your way.

1) If you aren’t incorporated yet, or if you’ve just started working on an idea with friends, have a pre-founder and advisor arrangements (relating to splits and vesting) agreed before lawyers start drafting stuff later. Lawyers often need to change docs several times to accommodate founders changing their minds or negotiations taking a different turn before the legal docs. We’ve put up a document on our Seedhack site called the Founder’s Collaboration Agreement, which you can use if you don’t have something like this. I assume that for most of you this is not a relevant point, but perhaps for some of the newer teams that haven’t incorporated yet.

2) Always check what your legal responsibilities with existing shareholders are before taking any decisions with or without them. When you have existing shareholders, involve them (including the distribution of information about the new round) as per whatever rights they may have agreed with you as part of their investment documentation. If this means you need to inform them, then inform them, if this means you need to ask them something, then ask them, but don’t leave it to the last minute. Generally speaking, they’ll try and be helpful, but depending on how busy they are, they can take a while, so don’t leave it for the last minute.

3) Don’t be annoying:

a) Lawyers cost money for both sides of the table. Do as much research as possible on your own and try and aggregate your questions as much as possible so that you use your lawyers and their lawyer’s time efficiently.
b) Make sure you have a position on items that are being discussed so that you don’t go back and forth on stuff on the phone or after decisions have been made. Nothing is more annoying than backtracking in legal processes.
c) Don’t let your lawyer get annoying or overly aggressive with your investor. The investor can always walk away if you and your lawyer are coming across as overly difficult and asking for stuff that might actually be destructive for the company in their view. Be assertive for sure, but don’t be divisive. Seek to understand the issues and always think creatively on how to solve them rather than letting the lawyers get into a stalemate or in an argument with your potential investor. Always feel free to say “let’s park this point for now and return to it after we’ve had to consider it”.
d) Don’t let paranoia of what others could do to screw you get the better of you. It is OK to be slightly paranoid (I know I am), but don’t let it be so bad that you make the legal process feel painful as you come up with bogus reasons by which to reject perfectly common clauses in an investors proposed documentation.

4) Legal documents have two parts, the commercial stuff (like valuations, percentages, etc) and legal stuff (like which jurisdiction, which filing/reporting procedures, etc). Get all or as much of the commercial points agreed between you and the investor before involving the lawyers (this is effectively what the termsheet is, but sometimes some stuff slips into the subsequent docs to keep the termsheet ‘light’) so that the lawyers are just left with representing these on your documents. If you need to have a discussion on a commercial point, do it with the investor alone and offline (even if you had to ask your lawyer or another shareholder for advice) you shouldn’t spend time on the phone with lawyers negotiating commercial points. Lawyers will help you through the technical points.

5) Always ‘red line’ any changes you make to documents. Keep track of all changes. Use track changing on Word. Google Docs may have this, but lawyers don’t use Google Docs generally.

6) Generally speaking.. and this is just a general rule… conversations are Founder <> Investors and Lawyer <> Lawyer.. meaning, you rarely speak to the counsel of the Investor directly or the Investor with your counsel directly without you guys being on the phone with them.

7) Keep CALM AT ALL TIMES. If you lose it, you will lose it.

8) Always seek solutions. There are multiple ways to skin a cat. Any issue can usually be solved via some creativity. The lawyers aren’t there to come up with stuff for you, you have to sometimes be the one (along with the investor) that can come up with solutions and then the lawyer’s articulate it legally. Although.. Don’t get too creative too, cause that can burn you.

9) Most of you are using lawyers that have been recommended and are experienced, but maybe you are struggling with your current counsel and are looking to switch. It is important that you get good counsel (read my post on this here). Don’t be cheap on this one. You’ll regret it later.

10) Do propose using standard documentation that other lawyers have frequently seen, in the USA consider using the Series Seed docs, or here in Europe, the Seedsummit docs which are based on the US Series Seed docs, or the BVCA ones, etc. there are probably a few more out there, just familiarize yourself with a few to ask them if the ones they send you are based on ‘standards’ as that will reduce everyone’s workload.

11) Managing the closing process. This is a difficult one and in the UK, with deed execution requirements can be difficult, but when there are multiple angels involved lawyers often spend a lot of time getting signatures and it increases the costs that founders don’t want to pay (I just heard of a deal that had 9 angels and the lawyer spent 20 hours managing that process for the entrepreneur, thus ended up overall 3x over budget).  Sometimes, you as founder, can handle this but best case is if one of the leading angels takes charge of this process, we have seen this and it has been really good but you can’t count on having that organized person being on board, so be prepared to be ‘that guy’.

12) Do your due diligence homework. Get your IP agreements, employment agreements, etc organized to help the process go by faster and smoother for your new investor as they will likely have to review these documents.

Hope that helps, and feel free to add your suggestions in the comment section below!

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The Importance of Good Legal Counsel

French Senator Charles Humbert and his lawyer ...
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Going into any new legal agreement is scary. On the one hand, you’ve seen enough movies to know that legal documents can have all sorts of loopholes and/or subtleties that feed your paranoia about walking into a trap at some point in the future, but on the other hand, you know you need to get them done in order to move on with any deal.

Legal docs are just part of business life.

The thing is, though, that it doesn’t have to be something that is so scary that you need to be extremely paranoid about. This is particularly the case when you’ve been able to bring on a good legal firm on board. Good legal counsel can basically help you understand all the tools in the legal toolbox. What the tools are for, how they are used, when they are appropriate, and what they are protecting against, etc.

Now, when I mean good legal counsel, I don’t mean your cousin’s best friend who is a lawyer and can do it on the cheap or a favor. That is probably the single worst thing you can do in terms of starting off on the right foot with your investors, you’ll waste their time and yours. If you can’t find good legal counsel where you live or nearby, then go outside of your area or move your business (and the good thing is you may not have to do it physically either). One sure sign of a startup ecosystem being mature is the availability of top tier legal firms in the area. If you need to move the legal state of your company to get access to these… do so, you won’t regret it. If you don’t know where to start, cold-call a startup you admire and ask around.

A good anecdote always helps in illustrating the point…

A few years ago, I was working with company that had reached out to a local lawyer, but not one that specialized in venture law. After having provided the company with standard industry docs, a long, almost two week period followed where I didn’t hear back from either the company or their counsel. Then, once I did receive the documentation, it was red-lined so much that it took another week just to come up with the response. As you can imagine, every single conversation we had was tough and grueling, and the entrepreneurs, grew increasingly paranoid that we were trying to get the better of them, but it was mostly due to the lawyers providing poor advice on items that we standard across the industry. This carried on for a few weeks with volleys going back and forth and various stalemates being reached at different points. In the end, we did reach an agreement, but it was after much work and much education. The situation was salvaged in the end, but it didn’t have to start off like it had. And, as you can imagine, the legal fees were over budget.

In summary, good Legal Counsel does the following:

1) Validates your company. The best Firms will be selective of whom they work with. Their time is valuable as is their reputation. Working with a top tier firm definitively says something about your company.
2) Saves you money. Yes, it sounds counter intuitive, but whilst you may pay higher in terms of fees, you’ll spend less on legal fees in the long run with the reduced issues that you’ll have during a negotiation as well as with any future issues that are the result of poor legal advice.
3) Saves you time. As mentioned in #2 above, the time an experienced lawyer takes going through documents they’ve seen time and time again is a huge savings over a lawyer who is getting acquainted with the docs on your time and money. Additionally, that time could be better spent on helping you think of what realistic scenarios you are trying to protect yourself against rather than making mountains out of molehill standard terms.
4) Helps you consider the future. As your company will go through many permutations throughout its life, a good and experienced lawyer will not only be able to help you with your current situation, but also in preparing you for situations to come, be they setting up your company in a specific way, to how you should try and negotiate with potential investors.
5) Good counsel knows the industry players. By the very nature of being a top tier legal firm, they will have worked and will know the top tier investors first hand. The firm will know what the investors tend to offer in their deals, what to expect as being standard in their terms, and what might be out of the norm.

After considering the above, however, you do have to manage your counsel. In the end, you are responsible for every item on your documents, and only you care as much about your document as well.. you do. So as much as great legal counsel can help you on not making mistakes, don’t slack off during the process. Stay engaged, you’ll learn a lot.

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