Long ago a business colleague told me that he operates according to the KISS principle. Now, he was a nice guy, reasonable good looking, but I was not interested in that kind of relationship. He quickly explained that KISS stands for Keep It Simple Stupid. Ahh...that king of kiss sounded great to me.
We have enough complexity in forming start-ups, given the challenging nature of a new business, the last thing we want is to add layers of complex corporate mechanisms. KISS sounded like a great principle, and one that I have tried to live by...in the face of law firms doing their duty and looking to make a living.
This week we at Jerusalem Capital were involved in a refinancing of one company, M&A transaction of another, and "regular" course of business in a few others. And there is my new Hanaton project (more on that some other time), non-profit board meetings, etc. Throughout all of that I struggle to keep people working according to KISS.
With that in mind was pleased to come across a posting (pointed out by Brad Feld )from Techstars giving actual copies of financing documents for a typical seed stage deal. The full posting and the docs themselves can be found here. If that link doesn't work for you, try http://www.techstars.org/2009/02/07/techstars-model-seed-funding-documents/.
In these challenging times, we need to do everything we can to strip away noise and focus on what's important. Thanks to Techstars, at least the financing part can be kept to KISS.
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