We are sharing our Standard Investment documents

Hi all!

It’s Ire again, Partner at IFF.

As most of you know by now, I’ve spent the bulk of my career writing checks into early-stage companies out of the Bay Area. When I came back to Italy, nobody had warned me about the sheer knowledge gap among founders when it comes to raising VC funding: what the international standard terms are, and how the investment process plays out in practice.

This isn’t a founder problem. Italy has recently seen a real influx of international capital, and we need to play in the best league we can: know the standard terms, stop reinventing the wheel, and make Italy a place where anyone, from anywhere, can invest with all green flags.

After nearly two years at IFF, I realized how much of what I considered obvious about standard terms wasn’t obvious at all. I think it’s essential that every founder (and VC!) starts from the same baseline, and things I took for granted simply weren’t shared knowledge yet. That needs to change.

The truth is that when it’s your first time building a VC-backed startup, nobody prepares you for everything you’re supposed to know. What is a term sheet? What does it mean once I sign one? What is a liquidation preference? Why is there a vesting schedule for me and my co-founder?

Anyone with enough agency and who’s serious about building a company can look these up and understand them quickly. What’s harder to know, especially if it’s your first time building a VC-backed company, is this: what is the standard? Am I being offered terms that will put my company in a difficult position in a few years? How do I differentiate between a good set of terms and an off one?

Over the years, we’ve closed many deals alongside our friends at BonelliErede, a leading European law firm with a fantastic VC practice. They’ve experienced the same problem from the legal side, having to work with founders on things that in the US are simply taken for granted.

So we joined forces and did what should have been done years ago: we wrote a set of standard investment documents, available to every founder who wants to understand:

• What the main legal documents in an investment round are

• What the main clauses mean and how the negotiation usually unfolds

• What some of IFF’s standard terms look like

Today, we’re excited to announce that soon you’ll be able to access all of these resources, for free, from our website.

Throughout the summer, we’ll release:

• The Term Sheet (next week!)

• The ESOP

• The Long-Docs overviews (investment agreement & by-laws)

We’re thrilled to put these out into the world, and we hope that in doing so we’ll help build a more transparent, informed, and fast-moving ecosystem.

A big thank you goes to BonelliErede for doing this with us. Without them, this work wouldn’t have been possible.

Enjoy the standard docs! And remember: with great power comes great responsibility ;)

Ciao!

— Ire