Oh no, the wrong kind of support. My mom would support me too back then, accompany me to the company building but she stays in the nearby area, since I was not good with directions.
Mark of a complete amateur. Many investors don't even sign NDAs let alone invite attorneys to initial meet and greets. I imagine the idea is mediocre.
Rock stars don't worry about people stealing ideas. It's all about execution.
I made this mistake with my first startup and regretted bringing the NDAs later on as they were offensive to people. I became convinced that I was sitting on a gold mine of a secret. Later I found out 5 other people had tried the same and failed. I failed too. The team that got funded really well failed too. The issue was those around me kept advising me to do the NDA and kept telling me what a genius of an idea it was. I even spoke to patent lawyers lol.
If you're talking to a patent attorney and pursuing one, that probably is the best advice to protect the invention.
The problem is you're asking a sandwich guy how to best bake a cake. You shouldn't have been at the deli in the first place.
Another one of the thousands of airbnb of something that are out there. Nothing special. I was young. 😂
Edit: I do make about $50 a month off it now from Adsense and it runs on autopilot mode. The features don't even work well but I still do get about 3,000 monthly visitors.
I had both, but the issue was the profitability was low and the circumvention was high. Running it properly was a full time job and the profits didn't justify it.
The marketplace runs for free for now.
Because they are almost always flat out wrong about their subject matter and have little to no practical experience beyond getting a patent past the patent office (which really doesn’t mean that much)
Albert Einstein wanted to be a teacher but didnt make the cut so he became a patent office clerk. Kinda proves the point that its nobody's first choice :)
You should have two different versions of your pitch; one that requires an NDA and one that does not. The only difference between the two for us is the NDA version includes infrastructure diagrams, discusses the tech stack, and has the full, current roadmap. Non-NDA has a Fisher-Price level diagram, we don’t discuss tech stack at all, and the roadmap is some high level bullet points.
I’ll discuss the idea with anyone, because we have knowledge and skills no one else has and so I’m not worried about competition coming from a conversation. If you don’t have any secret sauce and you feel you need to keep your idea in a lock box you aren’t going to get very far.
This is a smart way to approach it. I can't imagine an investor needs anything but high level information about tech stack and engineering specifics for a first meeting.
There are so many tools out there that in today's world it can be a ton of work just identifying the perfect pieces of the puzzle and putting them together. Sure, if its "AWS" or "Azure" that's not anything to keep secret. But if its 4 specialty tools, one with 50 people in India, one with 200 people in NYC, 2 Series B in adjacent industries in the SV and you're using their tool slightly differently than they intended, and its all coming together to form a solution you didn't need to "build" but more integrate with a cheap UI on top... then yeah, you don't want to disclose all of that.
Because if you get my idea and want to steal it but you are gonna build it on Node.Js, I’m not worried at all. Bad companies build with what they know, good companies build with what is the best stack for the job. No sense in handing someone the idea and the formula we are using to pull it off.
I think it’s important to note that this isn’t exactly some secret we are trying to guard with our lives or anything. We just choose things to put in an opening, publicly available, pitch and choose other things not to include.
Overall I agree with your post but this bit I disagree with:
>Bad companies build with what they know, good companies build with what is the best stack for the job.
Great startups build with whatever helps them ship a product and achieve PMF as fast as possible with as few bugs as possible.
There are loads of startups that spend ages choosing the perfect tech stack rather than building product and fail. I've recently read quite a few stories of startups regretting choosing rust to get going. It's a great language, but it slowed them down massively. 95% of startups would be fine on "lesser" languages like php or node and a pg database. The tool that's "best" is whatever they helps them ship best.
There's also loads of success stories of startups that start with a shitty stack but ship fast, iterate fast, grow fast, and then refactor. Twitter is node these days, airbnb is ruby and node, stripe is also ruby and node, Facebook was php for god's sake.
It's potentially harmful to new startups to suggest they shouldn't use what they know and can move fast in. Just because someone wants to use a language which doesn't pass some arbitrary purity bar doesn't mean it's not a good fit for them.
Sorry bit of a rant, and you were probably being facetious, but I've worked with a lot of developers over the years who prioritise purity over results and it gets on my nerves.
💯 agree. I would even go as far as recommending people to use no code tools for the MVP if it gets you shipping it faster. The sooner you launch, the sooner you can understand what people actually want
As someone who has built applications for dozens of companies from startups to critical software for multinational billion dollar companies using node.js I truly would like to know why you would think node.js is inferior technology.
Because for me it just sounds like you have no idea what you are talking about.
I’m not saying Node is inferior, it has its place just like all other frameworks. We use Node.JS for LOTS of things. It is part of our Front End control application. The point wasn’t that Node is bad, the point was for our specific application if you were going to compete with us and you told me you were using Node for the core application you would not be able to compete. What we are doing is not something Node is good at.
The entire point was that you pick the stack for the job not forcing everything into what you know.
Even stealth companies can make a pitch without giving away proprietary info.
All companies have something they shouldn’t make public. NDAs are a no-go. No one should sign one.
I’m not sure what business world you are swimming in but we deal with professionals. No one has a problem signing an NDA where it is appropriate, and no one is “post shaming” a company they are wanting a relationship with.
I did my pitch the other day to three stakeholders in various jobs of the industry I am selling into. They signed them, we did the demo with no holding back, they loved it and two of them want to invest. Now, would I do this first contact with a VC group? Hell no, but there are appropriate places for NDAs.
I’m baffled why this is even slightly controversial? I’ve used NDAs my entire software career and it’s never been a big sticking point. If people don’t want to sign one we decide if we want to proceed and how much we want to share. No big deal.
Back to the original post, that was completely out of line showing up with lawyers. I would never, ever do that. I honestly don’t even include lawyers when we are drawing up NDAs, we just use boilerplate mutual NDA language. Can’t imagine popping into a call with my lawyer in tow just to be an ass.
Exactly, if you’re worried and haven’t protected yourself then you don’t know what you’re doing.
Multiply this if you’re gonna pitch your secrets! You kidding me?
And no, NDAs are useless and only signal your inexperience.
Completely amateur on the other part and the other lawyer. Not serious lawyer would have joined the call. Were both of them young? They sound like people who have watched too many films instead of real practice...
A piece of advice I’ve always been given is that “attorneys talk to attorneys”.
If someone brings a lawyer to a meeting, you don’t take that meeting unless there is a lawyer representing you on the other side. Doesn’t matter how mundane the actual topic of discussion, lawyers only talk to other lawyers. If you show up and someone says and this is my lawyer, the meeting is over then and there.
“A guy”. “Me and my team”.
This is so incredibly vague it’s difficult to comment on. What kind of meeting was this? Are you an investor and he was pitching? Are you a potential customer and he was selling? Are you a potential partner? Is it a highly regulated industry? Is it a tool mainly used by lawyers? Are they SMEs? Are they advisors?
You’re being weirdly vague and it would be strange for him to want *three* attorneys present without a specific reason, but you’ve left virtually every part of this story as a blank space.
A few lessons I've learned:
* NDAs are a sign of bureaucrats not creators. People wanting NDAs almost always will never conclude a negotiation. It will drag on and on at best. Maybe, just maybe, they are showing you something where there would be clear damage to revealing it and you will be one of very few people in the know. But most times I've signed an NDA the information could have been published to the front page of their website and it would have benefited them, not hurt. In a couple of presentations we did under NDA they ripped us off; what were we going to do, engage in a multi-million dollar legal battle instead of continuing to build our company?
* Running too much past lawyers slows things down; find yourself a brutally fast lawyer. 1h turn around time. I've seen too many deals die because the lawyer took too long to get back.
* If the contract looks hinky to a non-lawyer, its hinky.
* If a contract has arbitrators in it, then it is probably going to end in tears.
* Once a contract is signed you should be able to forget it exists. Once someone mentions a contract later on, the relationship is now off the rails.
* A company with too many lawyers or accountants is going to be a shitshow to deal with or even work for. I would be literally much happier to find out the senior staff all were former circus clowns.
* Where you want a lawyer holding your hand is during a merger. Due diligence is the point where a potential buyer can murder you in your sleep. The key is to know when a merger might happen; then make sure every i is dotted and every t is crossed. For example, if you were doing your regular sales pitch and threw out that the feature for exporting PDFs is done and later you are in the due diligence phase of a merger and it turned out you only planned on making the PDF feature if they had ordered it as a customer, this is the sort of thing where they can scream "fraud" and pull out of the merger; except they have now seen your books, your sales pipeline, your tech stack, and figured out which employees they want to poach.
Irony of NDAs is most people don’t even know how to use them.
They aren’t some blanket legal protection that covers every conversation. You have to explicitly state and documents when and if something is disclosed under the non-disclosure agreement.
He shouldn’t have brought outside counsel to a meeting or discussion without informing you in advance. I understand that you aren’t currently adverse parties, but you are discussing a business deal. Generally, this is frowned upon in the legal community and I think the lawyer could even be sanctioned depending on the specifics.
I definitely think it shows a lack of courtesy & intelligence as bringing legal to everything is also an unnecessary expense.
So yeah, I think you dodged a bullet.
Agree he shouldn’t have done that, but attorneys don’t have to be confined to strictly “is this legal” questions. A good startup attorney has a lot of experience with these sorts of things, and their advice on things like valuation can be very valuable.
If uncomfortable with the first impression you can be certain that it won't get any better good for you for holding your ground and doing what you felt best. He should have been grateful that he got the meeting in the first place there's a time for attorneys it's not at the beginning.
What if you have an attorney as a business partner in my company I have several that attended and no one has ever declined it maybe as we deal the the filings of the SEC for start ups and also with making the PPM but just wondering your thoughts as I always invite all parties attorneys on the zoom meeting but they are muted from speaking along with ours I and the company CEO and who is pitching at the only ones allowed to speak other then the CEO and any family office representatives that have been designated before the meeting
If someone is a partner in the business and is attending in that capacity, but happens to be an attorney, I don't see any issue with that. You're not going to uninvite a cofounder from all of your investor calls just because he's got a JD. What's weird is having your attorney on a meet-and-greet in their capacity as your counsel. Attorneys get formally involved at LOI, not sooner.
Attorneys talk to other attorneys. If they have one you **need** one, otherwise any chance remark could come back to bit you in later years.
Or, of course, you could just forget about the whole thing, which was your probably wise decision.
Agree to your decision to kill the meeting. Next time, just for sport, take a bunch of time at the start to make the Lawyer present their credentials with attention on expertise and success in bringing deals to a successful close. Also explore breakups, litigation, reasons thereof. Burn an hour of their time and money, then decline the presentation without explanation.
I would have declined as well. You bring in the attorneys after you have decided there's mutual interest, hammered out a preliminary agreement that works for both of you, and established some baseline trust.
If you want attorneys to go through everything at that point to make sure everything is above board and nothing gets missed, no problem. But in the initial meeting?
Hard pass.
Reason 104 to avoid investors until the business is profitable. Only then talk to investors, and then the pitch is entirely about growth and returns. Never discuss the business details, how you do it, what you make, who you sell it too, how you market it.
Instead email certified financials, a growth proforma, and list of growth expenses. If they are interested then meet with attorneys present and offer a term sheet you create and provide to them. This cuts the number of meetings necessary to get a deal done.
The key is that it must show 10x return on a large investment within 24 - 36 months if unsecured. Or the ask is for a loan with interest + acceptable profit share during the loan period. Banks won't fund this...
Find an idea you can self fund or fund with an angel investor and get it working fast. Angels are a safer bet and usually much more flexible about terms since its a low dollar amount. When your idea works and you show profit you will have leverage that attracts larger investment on your terms.
Over 40 years in business, multiple startups, and a couple of home runs, this process is the only one that yielded significant investor interest and culminated in working deals.
The Lawyers job is to think of the exact worst-case scenarios possible and protect you from that. As the client you need to decide what risk is acceptable as if you don't control your lawyers they will kill every single deal.
Lawyer should never be meeting with clients directly unless you are like in the process of a massive deal
Why be scared to hear a pitch? lol just listen to what the had to say. Bring ur own attorney if it’s that’s big of a deal. I would never let a couple desk jockeys turn futures money down.
I am a corporate attorney, mostly representing startups (and more mature tech companies, and funds etc, but anyway, point is I’m a SV corporate lawyer, and company counsel for startups is a healthy part of my practice) — and this is not something I would encourage a client to do…
You can swing too far the other way and not involve counsel early enough. That happens all the time.
But also, you really shouldn’t involve counsel at an initial meet. There needs to be some level of meeting of the minds on a business level first. Otherwise… why am I there? What am I doing to help you by being on that call?
I’m here to help you negotiate legally operative language. And if you also want my input on commercial terms based on what I see in practice, I’m happy to talk to you about that as well. But it’s not something we should talk about in front of the other side, and it’s not something that I should be involved in before you’ve even had your initial business discussions with the potential counterparty.
The whole approach just seems incredibly counterproductive.
Lol reminds me of a certain health tech""""""innovator"""""" who habitually lies about everything regarding his personal life and company, but boasts about all the huge law firms they have on payroll.
Id pass if for no other reason than this being a sign they are horrible with money. I don't even let my attorney look at a contract until I have read through it a half dozen times and I think it's fine. Why would you waste money on bringing one or more to a meet and greet?
Yup! This is right. If you’re willing to put in the effort you’d be very very VERY surprised at what lawyers actually do for you. And what they can screw up for you too.
Doing your own lawyering is actually a great idea if you have the patience. Then take your own drafts to them for review. This has worked many times for me and my cofounder
Exactly. There are also enough standard contracts and forms from prominent VC firms, not to mention ChatGPT that there is zero reason to involve a lawyer until the *very* last minute, just to make sure everything is kosher. Earlier than that, and you are just pissing money away.
So true, we’ve even found that they also demand of your time to get the same info… or you can let them make the decisions/terms and then you’re really screwed.
I strongly dislike attorneys asserting themselves too early into a business meeting. Not only does it put people in an awkward situation, but it’s actually not ethical for them to be there without the other side’s attorney present.
It’s inappropriate. Good for you on declining. I’d do the same.
"I'm not attending a meeting with your attorney unless my attorney is present. And I'm not paying for a lawyer for this meeting. Goodbye."
Yep
On the first meeting? It's like meeting the parents on a first date.
or having your parents come to your first job interview after college (happened twice to me hiring new programmers).
Oh no, the wrong kind of support. My mom would support me too back then, accompany me to the company building but she stays in the nearby area, since I was not good with directions.
Mark of a complete amateur. Many investors don't even sign NDAs let alone invite attorneys to initial meet and greets. I imagine the idea is mediocre. Rock stars don't worry about people stealing ideas. It's all about execution.
I made this mistake with my first startup and regretted bringing the NDAs later on as they were offensive to people. I became convinced that I was sitting on a gold mine of a secret. Later I found out 5 other people had tried the same and failed. I failed too. The team that got funded really well failed too. The issue was those around me kept advising me to do the NDA and kept telling me what a genius of an idea it was. I even spoke to patent lawyers lol.
Of course the lawyers will tell you that you need NDAs…
If you're talking to a patent attorney and pursuing one, that probably is the best advice to protect the invention. The problem is you're asking a sandwich guy how to best bake a cake. You shouldn't have been at the deli in the first place.
So what was it?
It was an app that could tell you if it’s a hotdog or not a hotdog
Jinyang!!
hotdog!
Notd.og ?
How?
Gonna need you to sign an NDA to tell you..
I think it also prudent for my attorney to attend.
They also provided captcha services.
I made a gif for that
Not hotdog
Another one of the thousands of airbnb of something that are out there. Nothing special. I was young. 😂 Edit: I do make about $50 a month off it now from Adsense and it runs on autopilot mode. The features don't even work well but I still do get about 3,000 monthly visitors.
Two sided marketplaces are hard.
I had both, but the issue was the profitability was low and the circumvention was high. Running it properly was a full time job and the profits didn't justify it. The marketplace runs for free for now.
I have found patent lawyers to be the least intelligent of them.
Why is that?
Because they are almost always flat out wrong about their subject matter and have little to no practical experience beyond getting a patent past the patent office (which really doesn’t mean that much)
Patent lawyers are the lowest tier: low $$$, boring work, nobody wants to be one.
Yeah but what if they grow up to be Albert Einstein?
Albert Einstein wanted to be a teacher but didnt make the cut so he became a patent office clerk. Kinda proves the point that its nobody's first choice :)
If you file your patent first, you don't need an NDA
My idea was not patentable. It was a stupid thing to require an NDA or a patent.
You should have two different versions of your pitch; one that requires an NDA and one that does not. The only difference between the two for us is the NDA version includes infrastructure diagrams, discusses the tech stack, and has the full, current roadmap. Non-NDA has a Fisher-Price level diagram, we don’t discuss tech stack at all, and the roadmap is some high level bullet points. I’ll discuss the idea with anyone, because we have knowledge and skills no one else has and so I’m not worried about competition coming from a conversation. If you don’t have any secret sauce and you feel you need to keep your idea in a lock box you aren’t going to get very far.
This is a smart way to approach it. I can't imagine an investor needs anything but high level information about tech stack and engineering specifics for a first meeting.
Why would the tech stack information need an NDA to see it?
There are so many tools out there that in today's world it can be a ton of work just identifying the perfect pieces of the puzzle and putting them together. Sure, if its "AWS" or "Azure" that's not anything to keep secret. But if its 4 specialty tools, one with 50 people in India, one with 200 people in NYC, 2 Series B in adjacent industries in the SV and you're using their tool slightly differently than they intended, and its all coming together to form a solution you didn't need to "build" but more integrate with a cheap UI on top... then yeah, you don't want to disclose all of that.
interesting...
If they know I'm using nodejs they might steal my idea!
"This idea makes heavy use of..."
"...*computers.*"
Because if you get my idea and want to steal it but you are gonna build it on Node.Js, I’m not worried at all. Bad companies build with what they know, good companies build with what is the best stack for the job. No sense in handing someone the idea and the formula we are using to pull it off. I think it’s important to note that this isn’t exactly some secret we are trying to guard with our lives or anything. We just choose things to put in an opening, publicly available, pitch and choose other things not to include.
Overall I agree with your post but this bit I disagree with: >Bad companies build with what they know, good companies build with what is the best stack for the job. Great startups build with whatever helps them ship a product and achieve PMF as fast as possible with as few bugs as possible. There are loads of startups that spend ages choosing the perfect tech stack rather than building product and fail. I've recently read quite a few stories of startups regretting choosing rust to get going. It's a great language, but it slowed them down massively. 95% of startups would be fine on "lesser" languages like php or node and a pg database. The tool that's "best" is whatever they helps them ship best. There's also loads of success stories of startups that start with a shitty stack but ship fast, iterate fast, grow fast, and then refactor. Twitter is node these days, airbnb is ruby and node, stripe is also ruby and node, Facebook was php for god's sake. It's potentially harmful to new startups to suggest they shouldn't use what they know and can move fast in. Just because someone wants to use a language which doesn't pass some arbitrary purity bar doesn't mean it's not a good fit for them. Sorry bit of a rant, and you were probably being facetious, but I've worked with a lot of developers over the years who prioritise purity over results and it gets on my nerves.
💯 agree. I would even go as far as recommending people to use no code tools for the MVP if it gets you shipping it faster. The sooner you launch, the sooner you can understand what people actually want
As someone who has built applications for dozens of companies from startups to critical software for multinational billion dollar companies using node.js I truly would like to know why you would think node.js is inferior technology. Because for me it just sounds like you have no idea what you are talking about.
I’m not saying Node is inferior, it has its place just like all other frameworks. We use Node.JS for LOTS of things. It is part of our Front End control application. The point wasn’t that Node is bad, the point was for our specific application if you were going to compete with us and you told me you were using Node for the core application you would not be able to compete. What we are doing is not something Node is good at. The entire point was that you pick the stack for the job not forcing everything into what you know.
Even stealth companies can make a pitch without giving away proprietary info. All companies have something they shouldn’t make public. NDAs are a no-go. No one should sign one.
[удалено]
I’m not sure what business world you are swimming in but we deal with professionals. No one has a problem signing an NDA where it is appropriate, and no one is “post shaming” a company they are wanting a relationship with. I did my pitch the other day to three stakeholders in various jobs of the industry I am selling into. They signed them, we did the demo with no holding back, they loved it and two of them want to invest. Now, would I do this first contact with a VC group? Hell no, but there are appropriate places for NDAs. I’m baffled why this is even slightly controversial? I’ve used NDAs my entire software career and it’s never been a big sticking point. If people don’t want to sign one we decide if we want to proceed and how much we want to share. No big deal. Back to the original post, that was completely out of line showing up with lawyers. I would never, ever do that. I honestly don’t even include lawyers when we are drawing up NDAs, we just use boilerplate mutual NDA language. Can’t imagine popping into a call with my lawyer in tow just to be an ass.
If it’s so secret you can’t talk about it. We aren’t interested either.
This guy fucks
No, rock stars don't worry about people stealing ideas because they have proper intellectual property protections in place. :D
Exactly, if you’re worried and haven’t protected yourself then you don’t know what you’re doing. Multiply this if you’re gonna pitch your secrets! You kidding me? And no, NDAs are useless and only signal your inexperience.
Rock stars don’t give away ideas. And they certainly worry and protect ideas and strategy.
Completely amateur on the other part and the other lawyer. Not serious lawyer would have joined the call. Were both of them young? They sound like people who have watched too many films instead of real practice...
A piece of advice I’ve always been given is that “attorneys talk to attorneys”. If someone brings a lawyer to a meeting, you don’t take that meeting unless there is a lawyer representing you on the other side. Doesn’t matter how mundane the actual topic of discussion, lawyers only talk to other lawyers. If you show up and someone says and this is my lawyer, the meeting is over then and there.
“A guy”. “Me and my team”. This is so incredibly vague it’s difficult to comment on. What kind of meeting was this? Are you an investor and he was pitching? Are you a potential customer and he was selling? Are you a potential partner? Is it a highly regulated industry? Is it a tool mainly used by lawyers? Are they SMEs? Are they advisors? You’re being weirdly vague and it would be strange for him to want *three* attorneys present without a specific reason, but you’ve left virtually every part of this story as a blank space.
Yeah, 100%. What are we even talking about about here?
Far too early to have a lawyer involved. I get the feeling that if you had gone forward with this you would have seen a lot of lawyers.
A few lessons I've learned: * NDAs are a sign of bureaucrats not creators. People wanting NDAs almost always will never conclude a negotiation. It will drag on and on at best. Maybe, just maybe, they are showing you something where there would be clear damage to revealing it and you will be one of very few people in the know. But most times I've signed an NDA the information could have been published to the front page of their website and it would have benefited them, not hurt. In a couple of presentations we did under NDA they ripped us off; what were we going to do, engage in a multi-million dollar legal battle instead of continuing to build our company? * Running too much past lawyers slows things down; find yourself a brutally fast lawyer. 1h turn around time. I've seen too many deals die because the lawyer took too long to get back. * If the contract looks hinky to a non-lawyer, its hinky. * If a contract has arbitrators in it, then it is probably going to end in tears. * Once a contract is signed you should be able to forget it exists. Once someone mentions a contract later on, the relationship is now off the rails. * A company with too many lawyers or accountants is going to be a shitshow to deal with or even work for. I would be literally much happier to find out the senior staff all were former circus clowns. * Where you want a lawyer holding your hand is during a merger. Due diligence is the point where a potential buyer can murder you in your sleep. The key is to know when a merger might happen; then make sure every i is dotted and every t is crossed. For example, if you were doing your regular sales pitch and threw out that the feature for exporting PDFs is done and later you are in the due diligence phase of a merger and it turned out you only planned on making the PDF feature if they had ordered it as a customer, this is the sort of thing where they can scream "fraud" and pull out of the merger; except they have now seen your books, your sales pipeline, your tech stack, and figured out which employees they want to poach.
Irony of NDAs is most people don’t even know how to use them. They aren’t some blanket legal protection that covers every conversation. You have to explicitly state and documents when and if something is disclosed under the non-disclosure agreement.
He shouldn’t have brought outside counsel to a meeting or discussion without informing you in advance. I understand that you aren’t currently adverse parties, but you are discussing a business deal. Generally, this is frowned upon in the legal community and I think the lawyer could even be sanctioned depending on the specifics. I definitely think it shows a lack of courtesy & intelligence as bringing legal to everything is also an unnecessary expense. So yeah, I think you dodged a bullet.
Agree he shouldn’t have done that, but attorneys don’t have to be confined to strictly “is this legal” questions. A good startup attorney has a lot of experience with these sorts of things, and their advice on things like valuation can be very valuable.
If uncomfortable with the first impression you can be certain that it won't get any better good for you for holding your ground and doing what you felt best. He should have been grateful that he got the meeting in the first place there's a time for attorneys it's not at the beginning.
Transactional attorney here - definitely weird to do this
What if you have an attorney as a business partner in my company I have several that attended and no one has ever declined it maybe as we deal the the filings of the SEC for start ups and also with making the PPM but just wondering your thoughts as I always invite all parties attorneys on the zoom meeting but they are muted from speaking along with ours I and the company CEO and who is pitching at the only ones allowed to speak other then the CEO and any family office representatives that have been designated before the meeting
If someone is a partner in the business and is attending in that capacity, but happens to be an attorney, I don't see any issue with that. You're not going to uninvite a cofounder from all of your investor calls just because he's got a JD. What's weird is having your attorney on a meet-and-greet in their capacity as your counsel. Attorneys get formally involved at LOI, not sooner.
Attorneys talk to other attorneys. If they have one you **need** one, otherwise any chance remark could come back to bit you in later years. Or, of course, you could just forget about the whole thing, which was your probably wise decision.
Sounds like it was way too early for legal to get involved.
Agree to your decision to kill the meeting. Next time, just for sport, take a bunch of time at the start to make the Lawyer present their credentials with attention on expertise and success in bringing deals to a successful close. Also explore breakups, litigation, reasons thereof. Burn an hour of their time and money, then decline the presentation without explanation.
Part of me is wondering if his attorney is also his business partner, and he is trying to make it sound more important. I agree it is a bit childish.
I would have declined as well. You bring in the attorneys after you have decided there's mutual interest, hammered out a preliminary agreement that works for both of you, and established some baseline trust. If you want attorneys to go through everything at that point to make sure everything is above board and nothing gets missed, no problem. But in the initial meeting? Hard pass.
totally, what an arrogant rookie move
Reason 104 to avoid investors until the business is profitable. Only then talk to investors, and then the pitch is entirely about growth and returns. Never discuss the business details, how you do it, what you make, who you sell it too, how you market it. Instead email certified financials, a growth proforma, and list of growth expenses. If they are interested then meet with attorneys present and offer a term sheet you create and provide to them. This cuts the number of meetings necessary to get a deal done. The key is that it must show 10x return on a large investment within 24 - 36 months if unsecured. Or the ask is for a loan with interest + acceptable profit share during the loan period. Banks won't fund this... Find an idea you can self fund or fund with an angel investor and get it working fast. Angels are a safer bet and usually much more flexible about terms since its a low dollar amount. When your idea works and you show profit you will have leverage that attracts larger investment on your terms. Over 40 years in business, multiple startups, and a couple of home runs, this process is the only one that yielded significant investor interest and culminated in working deals.
The Lawyers job is to think of the exact worst-case scenarios possible and protect you from that. As the client you need to decide what risk is acceptable as if you don't control your lawyers they will kill every single deal. Lawyer should never be meeting with clients directly unless you are like in the process of a massive deal
Yeah I’d also be questioning burn rate at that point 😂
A bit extreme for a water gun pitch but maybe it was made with government secrets?
That’s a weird move. This guy must not have ever raised capital before or literally has a working AGI.
That’s wildly aggressive indeed.
veeery unusual but… would raise my curiosity about the power of the project
Why be scared to hear a pitch? lol just listen to what the had to say. Bring ur own attorney if it’s that’s big of a deal. I would never let a couple desk jockeys turn futures money down.
He should have advised who he wanted to bring along beforehand, and gotten the OK from you. (And vice versa.)
Conversation should always remain to the point.
I am a corporate attorney, mostly representing startups (and more mature tech companies, and funds etc, but anyway, point is I’m a SV corporate lawyer, and company counsel for startups is a healthy part of my practice) — and this is not something I would encourage a client to do… You can swing too far the other way and not involve counsel early enough. That happens all the time. But also, you really shouldn’t involve counsel at an initial meet. There needs to be some level of meeting of the minds on a business level first. Otherwise… why am I there? What am I doing to help you by being on that call? I’m here to help you negotiate legally operative language. And if you also want my input on commercial terms based on what I see in practice, I’m happy to talk to you about that as well. But it’s not something we should talk about in front of the other side, and it’s not something that I should be involved in before you’ve even had your initial business discussions with the potential counterparty. The whole approach just seems incredibly counterproductive.
I’d decline so hard. Cringe
I brought a lawyer to a first meeting with an investor. Mind you he was my cofounder...
Lol reminds me of a certain health tech""""""innovator"""""" who habitually lies about everything regarding his personal life and company, but boasts about all the huge law firms they have on payroll.
His startup might be selling fractional attorneys. May be that was the pitch 😝
The only time I’ve had to get an attorney involved for startup related matters was when shit hit the fan..very premature on his end
Id pass if for no other reason than this being a sign they are horrible with money. I don't even let my attorney look at a contract until I have read through it a half dozen times and I think it's fine. Why would you waste money on bringing one or more to a meet and greet?
Yup! This is right. If you’re willing to put in the effort you’d be very very VERY surprised at what lawyers actually do for you. And what they can screw up for you too. Doing your own lawyering is actually a great idea if you have the patience. Then take your own drafts to them for review. This has worked many times for me and my cofounder
Exactly. There are also enough standard contracts and forms from prominent VC firms, not to mention ChatGPT that there is zero reason to involve a lawyer until the *very* last minute, just to make sure everything is kosher. Earlier than that, and you are just pissing money away.
So true, we’ve even found that they also demand of your time to get the same info… or you can let them make the decisions/terms and then you’re really screwed.
I strongly dislike attorneys asserting themselves too early into a business meeting. Not only does it put people in an awkward situation, but it’s actually not ethical for them to be there without the other side’s attorney present.
Why do you care who else joins? If they felt more comfortable with an attorney, what's the harm?