Series Seed Funding Documents Go Open Source @ GitHub

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., March 6, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, law firm Fenwick & West announced a new version of the Series Seed documents is being released on GitHub. Since the initial release of the Series Seed documents in 2010, they have been used by numerous startup companies including investments from many of the Silicon Valley's most prominent venture capital (VC) firms. Version 3.0 of the Series Seed documents is being released on the leading open source forum, GitHub, to encourage continued collaboration.

"The most valuable assets for early stage companies are time and money," said Ted Wang, a Fenwick lawyer and the current curator of the Series Seed documents. "Series Seed endeavors to save both for young companies by simplifying early stage funding documents, getting signoff from VC firms who have agreed to use them, and making those documents available online for free."

"One of our core beliefs at GitHub is to open source (almost) everything: the community benefits from having more resources available and the projects benefit from having the input of the greater community," said Tom Preston-Werner, co-founder and CEO of GitHub. "That's what makes the Series Seed project fun to see. Fenwick is bringing open source concepts to early stage funding documents and using GitHub to encourage community participation and collaboration."

The new release provides a modern, technology-based approach to easily use traditional financing terms in seed funding documents by providing a standard set of rights, privileges and preferences with "fill in the blank" variables. This helps entrepreneurs avoid spending time and money negotiating over standard transaction terms and more clearly highlights the key variables in these seed transactions.

The Series Seed 3.0 documents are accompanied by a blog post "for law nerds and real nerds" describing the changes to the current versions and how to use them on GitHub.

Version 3.0 uses GitHub as the primary platform for managing discussions and updates to the Series Seed documents. GitHub is currently used by engineers to post software projects and highlight their work making it an excellent platform for community comments and facilitating multiple branches of the documents.

Visit the GitHub Seed Series documents at https://github.com/seriesseed

For luddites, a Word copy is available at http://seriesseed.com

About Series Seed
The Series Seed documents are a standardized set of documents that can be quickly and easily deployed for a seed investment:  to help get a company financed properly, legally, quickly, and intelligently.

About Fenwick & West
Established in 1972, Fenwick & West is one of the nation's premier law firms with extensive expertise in venture capital, public offerings and other corporate finance, joint ventures, M&A and strategic relationships, intellectual property, litigation and dispute resolution, taxation, antitrust and employment and labor law.

Contact:
Melita Jampol
Fenwick & West LLP
650.335.7392
[email protected]

SOURCE Fenwick & West LLP