A Standard and Clean Series A Term Sheet
Now switch the preferred shares to common shares and eliminate all liquidation preferences and you'd have something closer to a fair term sheet template.No young start-up should ever agree to preferred shares or any liquidity preferences. This is the next great battle for founders to win over venture investors. To push that risk back onto the investors where it should be instead of allowing the investors to unduly offload even more of their risk onto the founders and early employees.Liquidity preferences should have never become common with start-ups, they should be quite rare. There is no more important territory for founders to be focused on taking back from venture capitalists than that. Liquidity preferences are a routine source of screwing over the founders and early employees. YC could do something tremendous for founders by fighting on their behalf to put that shifted risk back where it should be: with the investor; the founders and employees already shoulder enough risk as it is.