memonicOfficial Blog

At last month’s StartupCamp in Basel, Toni and I had the pleasure of revisiting our presentation called “24 Hints for Start Ups” with 24 new hints. These have inspired a new blog series, which we hope you will find useful.

Of the new tips we shared, one in particular – “Start with a good founding contract” – caused quite a stir, and raised several questions. That’s why I’d like to expand a bit on our previous posting on the matter.

A startup is considered to be cool. Quite the opposite of what “corporate”, lawyers and contracts are considered to be. Yet our experience suggest you’d better get a bit of the latter to be more of the first. Why?

Any startup is built on a strong belief in one’s idea – which comes with the assumption of greatness and economic success. We believe in Memonic, and we know you believe in your idea with all your heart. But on the way to glory, you will need to overcome a few hurdles. And in order to overcome some of them before they even occur, it is good to have a contract among the founding team clearly stating a few (contractual) ground rules for likely scenarios. For example:

• How do you decide if two of four founders want to sell the company and the other two founders want to hold out for a better deal?
• Who will provide how many shares / accepts what dilution in case of a capital increase?
• Are there any special rights endowed on founders? Any special duties to which each founder is subject?
• What happens if one of the founders – for perfectly valid reasons – decides to quit and move to Australia? What happens to her shares, at what price may she sell (and to whom).
• What do you do if one of the founders forgets that elder statesmanship is reserved for the time after the IPO and not before (i.e. you need to get rid of him because he doesn’t get rid of the cocktail glasses)?
• How do you handle the situation if one of your founders is drawn into a nasty divorce battle and half her shares (in most marriages there is no prenuptial agreement, actually to have one is another good idea) fall to her estranged husband who in turn wants a seat on the board of your company?
  (PS: if you have not yet seen “Intolerable Cruelty“, starring George Clooney and Catherine Zeta Jones, go and watch it now!)
  



• Let’s suppose somebody quits; is that person still entitled to some of the rewards in case of a change of ownership in the years after he quits?
• How do you determine the value of the shares at any one time?
• Additionally, we highly recommend encoding/defining the following, too: Right of first refusal rights, pre-emptive rights, and tag along rights

Each point for itself is plenty of potential trouble. For once money wisely spent, even if it is on lawyers. Consider this your best investment in reduced future sorrows.

Oh, what fun we had!

On Saturday, the Memonic team turned up to participate in one of the Swiss Internet Community’s coolest events: StartUp Camp. This year, it was hosted in the Basel University of Applied Sciences. The location was excellent – as was the food (special kudos go out to the desserts. Yum!).

The highlight of the event, for us, was the networking – which was superb. We bumped into our old neighbors, Liip – who told us that they miss us (aww. We miss you guys, too!), and into good friends from other startups. We met engineers – and circled the rumor that we are still looking to hire for our excellent StartUp (Pssst: Memonic is a web based note-taking software. Join us!).  In fact, there was a whole job board attracting lots of attention. Check out the funniest post we spotted:

Amidst fantastic speaking sessions, we were honored to be included – with Dorian and Toni’s “24 MORE Hints for Start Ups” talk. It was a smash hit!

For now, of particular interest to the vast crowd was the segment on devising a founding contract when launching your start up. Due to popular demand, we will be launching an exciting new European START UP BLOG SERIES in this space – with an extended blog on founding contracts kicking off the fun. We hope you will follow!

Until the next time, huge congratulations go out to Dania Gerhart of Amazee for a stellar job organizing this. We hope you will invite us next year!

Today Dorian gave a speech on virtual organizations at the famous Lift11 conference in Geneva. Lift brings together an eclectic crowd under one common topic: “What can the future do for you?” See the handout with the tool hints here.

Wir konnten schon von wissen von andern Unternehmern profitieren und so geben wir immer auch gerne eigene Erfahrungen weiter. So heute am Venture Apéro im Gründungszentrum Frauenfeld. Hier unsere 24 Tipps für ein super schlankes Startup (pdf, 6MB) oder direkt bei Memonic, um einfach in die eigene Kollektion zu kopieren.

Do you plan to launch your own startup? Dorian did a session at the Future of Web Apps conference this year, sharing lots of hints on how we’ve built our own startup called memonic.com.

The nice people over at Carsonified recorded Dorians talk. And now you can watch it right here, right now.

Enjoy :-)

24 Hints on how to run a Super Lean Startup – memonic.com from Toni Birrer on Vimeo.

What are you waiting for? Go build your own startup now! ;-)