Instructor

Description

Overview

Entrepreneurial Business Law is an interactive class featuring speakers from the private equity, venture capital, and investment banking worlds as well as executives who have exited through a public offering or sale of their company. We will explore legal issues and considerations that are common to businesses as they are formed and throughout their business life cycle. The course will focus on several aspects relating to formation and seed and venture capital financing, mergers and acquisitions, initial public offerings and securities laws considerations, as well as employment and intellectual property matters and governance considerations. There will also be opportunities to negotiate various financing and other transactions.

Learning Outcomes

Upon completion of this course, students will:

• Identify and evaluate different business structures that start up companies can choose when starting a business.
• Understand the different types of founder agreements and the essential provisions of those agreements.
• Understand different types of equity and debt financing structures, including convertible notes, SAFE’s, Series A Venture Financings and Venture Debt financings.
• Understand the legal roles and responsibilities of shareholders, directors and executives.
• Have a basic understanding of intellectual property protection including copyrights, trademarks and patents.
• Understand the key elements of employment agreements, including compensation arrangements, stock option agreements and non solicitation and non competition agreements and their enforceability.
• Understand the process of selling a company and the key provisions in an M&A transaction.
• Understand the IPO process and the requirements relating to public companies.
• Read a basic contract and understand the elements that comprise a binding agreement. 
• Understand the art of negotiation and the concept of “Getting to Yes” as a key component of a successful business negotiation.

Course topics and objectives

• Students will explore topics facing entrepreneurs and decisions that entrepreneurs face when starting a new venture.
• The course will have guest speakers each week who are practitioners from the M&A and Venture ecosystem, including serial entrepreneurs, executives, Private Equity partners, Venture Capital Partners, Investment Bankers and others that will discuss the paths they have chosen, lessons learned and advice to those that will work in the M&A of Venture communities.
• Students will also learn through interactive exercises such as negotiating an actual founder agreement, a Venture Capital Term Sheet, an M&A letter of intent, an Employment Agreement and other material agreements that founders must negotiate as they grow their start up.
• Students will work collaboratively in groups to navigate issues and solve problems that face entrepreneurs.
• The course culminates in a final presentation where students will come up with an idea for a start up and then present each of the steps in the life cycle of that start up and the choices that the student and their group made from formation to financing to intellectual property protection to exit.