We asked the VC, their lawyer and our lawyer to join us for a working session where we could walk through our legal docs page-by-page until they were completed.
I was surprised how reluctant everybody was. I realized that their lawyer much preferred not giving up his working hours. He would prefer to turn the docs at 1am between other stuff he was working on. And by "1am" I mean three days from now. And without agreeing all of our points.
My VC wasn't that keen either.
But they acquiesced. We spent several hours in a room. We took several breaks for each side to discuss issues privately that were in contention. We made phone calls to others. The VC mostly to come back and say some version of, "In all of the 50 deals we've seen in our portfolio we've never seen this term approved."
[side note: please don't fall for that line. either the point makes sense or it doesn't. I have seen VCs hide behind this "we've never done it before" line many times]
Anyway. It was a long day but at the end of the meeting we had a final agreement. The lawyers drafted it within 48 hours and we signed it in 72 hours. 1 week later the market crash of 2000 began and the dot com market began to collapse and financings with it.
It's not always easy to get the various parties of your deal to agree to be in a room all together at one time. But if you can make it happen I promise it's a much faster way to get a deal done.
And it obviously doesn't just apply to a VC financing.
Mark Suster joined GRP Partners in 2007 as a general partner after selling his company to Salesforce.com. He focuses on early-stage technology companies. His blog
