Quick Review of Common Term Sheet Items

Terms sheets are relatively short legal documents that outline the proposed high-level details of an investment or acquisition. Over my career, I’ve been involved in a half-dozen term sheets on both sides of the table. While term sheets can be complicated, they’ve been more standardized over the years with open source legal docs like the Series AA Equity Financing Documents from Y Combinator and the AngelList Docs.

Here are a few thoughts on common terms:

• Pre-Money Valuation – This is the value of the company before the investment (so, if $1 million is invested at a pre-money valuation of $2 million, the post-money valuation is $3 million)
• Liquidation Preference – Investors with a 1x non-participating preferred liquidation preference get their money back or their percentage ownership in the event of a sale vs a 1x participating preferred liquidation where investors get their money back plus their percent ownership of the amount left over (double dip). 1x non-participating preferred is most common for seed stage investments while participating preferred is often used when there’s a discrepancy between the desired valuations of the entrepreneur and investor.
• Dividends – Similar to interest payments for the preferred shares, these are used to improve returns. Seed and early stage investments don’t typically include a dividend component.
• Anti-Dilution – If the company raises money in the future at a lower valuation, the previous investors get more shares to account for the new, lower per share price. Weighted average anti-dilution is the most common.
• Option Pool – With each round of funding, investors often require new equity allocations to the employee stock option pool, usually in the 10 – 15% range. Most importantly, the option pool shuffle comes into play and it’s important to model out the difference of the option pool being formed pre or post investment.

Now, there are a number of additional items like pro-rata rights, information rights, preemptive rights, registration rights, and more, but they are fairly standard. Term sheets are best reviewed by experienced startup attorneys and not general practitioners.

What else? What are some other thoughts on the common term sheet items?