Making Canada SAFE

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.