Venture Capital Editing and Proofreading Services

Venture capital is negotiated between parties with wildly asymmetric experience. An investor has seen four hundred term sheets; a founder is looking at their first, at midnight, with a runway of eleven weeks and an offer that expires on Friday. The documents are not deliberately obscure, but they are written in a shorthand that assumes fluency the founder does not have, and the clauses that matter most are the ones that look least alarming. Almost every founder who feels badly treated at exit signed something they had read and not understood.

We edit what venture funds, founders and their advisers produce — term sheets and plain-English term sheet explanations, shareholders agreements and articles summaries, investment memoranda and investment committee papers, fund marketing materials and limited partner reporting, portfolio company updates and board packs, founder-facing guidance on financing terms, safe and convertible note documentation, cap table and dilution explanations, follow-on and bridge round communications, down round and recapitalisation communications, exit and secondary sale documentation, and fundraising decks and data room material. Our editors work on both sides of the table and are used to material under embargo and non-disclosure.

Liquidation preference is the term that most often produces the founder's worst day, and it is the one most easily glossed over. A "1× non-participating preference" is a phrase founders nod at in a meeting and cannot model afterwards. We write these explanations so the mechanism is shown as arithmetic rather than described: at a £40m exit, this is what the investor receives and this is what the ordinary shares receive; at £12m, this is what happens; here is the exit value below which the founders receive nothing. Where the term is participating, or carries a multiple, or stacks across rounds in seniority, we show the outcome at three exit values rather than one, because the effect is invisible at the optimistic number everyone is imagining and decisive at the realistic one. Funds sometimes worry this makes negotiation harder. It makes the negotiation shorter and the relationship afterwards considerably better, which is the asset a fund is actually accumulating.

Everything you send is treated in strict confidence, including term sheets, cap tables and unannounced rounds. We are editors rather than lawyers or investment advisers, and nothing here is legal or investment advice — founders should take independent legal advice on any financing document. What we can do is make the writing clear enough that both sides know what they have agreed.