It has been 9 months since PG announced the YC SAFE (Simple Agreement for Future Equity). The Winter 14 batch included Canadians: Taplytics, Send With Us, Piinpoint, Minuum, Gbatteries and others. (There have been an increasing number of Canadian companies since Chris Golda and Michael Montano headed down in 2008. Maybe there should be a new drinking game: how many Canadian YC companies can you name?). This usually means a trickle down effect of culture, term sheets and deal structure. But I haven’t seen a SAFE used in the wild.
Until now.
Thanks to Aaron and Cobi at Taplytics, Dan Debow, Jesse Rodgers at Creative Destruction Lab and Tom Houston at Dentons for providing a working draft for Canadian companies of Cap, No Discount SAFE.
I have also seen angel deals using Laberge Weinstein and Cognition LLP that are using the SAFE as the starting points Canadian companies (h/t @ddebow). It seems like we might have a functional alternative to convertible debt.
NACO is working on some standard docs for Canada — I will point them at this.
Feel free to share. Anything that simplifies the legal aspects is +100 in my books.
Great resources, thanks David.
Sounds great. always wondered how people take on convertible debt. What if it doesn’t convert? Then the entrepreneur owes the investor millions of dollars? Pretty risky, unless they already have many millions and it’s just a game to play. But for normal startups it seemed like a huge risk.
Thanks for sharing these @David. We’ve used some of LW’s docs and have been very pleased with them. Investors too.
There is a really great discussion happening in the StartupNorth Facebook group https://www.facebook.com/groups/startupnorth/permalink/10152723526657840/