Today we launched a new phenomenon in the Dutch Market: term sheets and legal documentation to download for free and use in investment transactions in early stage companies.
A short introduction of us: Principe Management from Amsterdam together with Lawyer firm Benvalor from Utrecht, decided that it was time the Dutch investment market should get some decent standard documentation for investment in early stage companies. To advocate our ideas and make the documentation available online, we started Capital waters.
It is our experience that investments in startup companies are not always managed efficiently from a legal point of view. Frequently, either to large amounts of money are spent on legal fees for relatively small investments, or no lawyer is consulted at all and parties end up with a contract full of defects. In both cases negotiations are generally very time-consuming. This is even stronger when the startup lacks legal support, creating a large knowledge disparity between startup and investor. This often leads to lengthy (and costly) negotiations and lots of misunderstanding. Our goal with Capital Waters is to reduce both time and costs of a startup investment.
We have chosen to set up this page in English initially, a Dutch version is under contemplation. The documents are already available in both Dutch and English.
Please feel free to use the term sheet and agreements and provide us with feedback to improve our service.