First and foremost, I’d recommend making sure you have the best lawyer for your startup. I’ve shared tips on how to do that in this blog post. Then, I’d suggest using the following step-by-step guide to create one organized home for all of your legal documents. This guide will help you organize the documents required by MergeLane and many other early- and later-stage investors, lenders and acquirers.

A Step-by-Step Guide to Organize Your Documents

1. Create a shareable folder (At MergeLane, we prefer Dropbox) to house ALL of your documents.
2. Include your company name in the file name (i.e.: MergeLane Due Diligence). Otherwise, your investors end up like me – with 11 Dropbox folders called “Due Diligence”.
3. When you grant people access to this folder, send them an invitation to join the folder rather than the link. This is more secure and helps prevent document duplication.
4. Organize your folder with subfolders. Here is my suggested organization:
   • Corporate Records and Charter Documents
   • Securities Issuances and Agreements
   • Employee Matters
   • Material Agreements and Operating Information
   • Intellectual Property
   • Disputes and Potential Litigation
5. Create subfolders in each of these called “Draft Documents” and “Final Documents”. The “Final Documents” folder should only house the fully-executed versions of your documents once you secure them.
6. Create subfolders within each “Final Documents” folder for any documents with exhibits and/or amendments (i.e.: Initial Board Consent). Put all of the related documents in that subfolder.

General document tips:

• If one document refers to another document, or you see a reference to an amendment to a document, make sure to include those as well.
• Confirm the documents have been signed by ALL parties.
• Confirm the documents are signed by the CORRECT parties. For example, if you are working with a friend who owns a web design company and decides to give her company equity in exchange for the work she is doing, make sure all of the agreements are with your friend’s company, not with your friend.

eShares Inc.:

I highly recommend signing up for eShares inc to make your and your investors’ lives much, much easier.

A few specific folder suggestions:

“Employee Matters” – Create subfolders for each employee to house all copies of employee agreements.

“Securities Issuances and Agreements” –

1. Create a folder for each financing. Include the term sheet and final versions of the financing documents.
2. Create a subfolder to house all of the signed agreements from note holders or investors within those folders.
3. Create a folder for Stock Option Awards. Make sure you have signed versions of each stock agreement. Create subfolders for each person awarded stock options if needed.

Hear what Seth and Foundry are doing to ensure a safe and respected option in venture capital for woman leaders. This is a can’t miss conversation on iTunes and Soundcloud.

I was the victim of blatant, tabloid-style sexual harassment when I was first starting out in my career. I was even subject to some more subtle sexual harassment last week. It’s terrible for many reasons, but the most painful part of these experiences was the realization that these perpetrators saw me as inferior.

Since becoming the Chief Investment Officer for the female-focused MergeLane venture fund three years ago, I have had the opportunity to speak with hundreds of investors who invest in women because they think it is the smart rather than the “right” thing to do. I woke up this morning realizing that this recent sexual harassment conversation has made me feel the same way I’ve felt when investors invest in women because they think it is the “charitable” thing to do.

There have been well-intentioned suggestions that this is a human rights issue and wide-spread calls for more policies and procedures to protect women. I appreciate this deeply. I want to feel safe when I am working with men in our industry. I want to be as brave as the women who have come forward when I am sexually harassed.

Far more desperately, however, I want this change to occur because the venture capital industry truly values the contributions made by women. I want venture capitalists, LPs, and entrepreneurs to actually believe that gender diversity produces better returns. I want the effort to make venture capital a safe place for women to be driven by a genuine desire to invite more women to the table, rather than by a fear of litigation or public flogging.

For those of you who have kindly asked what you can do about this issue, here are a few suggestions:

• If you believe narrowing the gender gap will increase venture capital returns, share that view widely.
• Remember that an attempt to be a hero to a person or group of people may lead to a sense of paternalism or someone feeling like a victim. It is a subtle difference, but I think an offer to “support” is far more powerful than an offer to “protect” or “empower.”
• Consider equally effective alternatives to cumbersome policies and procedures. Especially in this industry, anything that slows progress is generally met with resentment and could potentially make things worse for women.
• Admit hypocrisy and hold others accountable for walking the walk, particularly when they’re talking the talk.

As an up-and-coming woman in venture capital, there are two specific things I wish people would do:

First, ask women to speak on non-gender related topics. I’m asked to speak about gender issues roughly ten times as frequently as I’m asked to speak about genderless business issues. I’d like to have more opportunities to be seen for my strengths as a venture capitalist.

Second, if you extend an offer to support emerging talent in the venture capital ecosystem, stop to think whether there may be an equally qualified woman who could also benefit from that offer. As an example, some of the best venture capital networking opportunities involve skiing or golfing. I am an expert skier and my business partner is an expert golfer, but I am not sure if we are as top-of-mind as our male counterparts for these opportunities.

And for whatever it is worth, writing this post has made me completely reenergized and refocused on achieving the best returns possible for the MergeLane venture fund. Thank you to all of you who believe making venture capital a safe place for women will increase venture capital performance. I look forward to proving you right.

The issue is that there are people who want to hang out, ask questions, and get input. There are wonderful friends of mine who want their friends and associates to do this with me. I WANT to say “yes” to most of these requests, because I like supporting my friends, I like welcoming new people to Boulder, I like plugging people in to opportunities, and I like being a community-oriented soul.

I’ve tried lots of approaches: using an online booking system, scheduling call time for airport drives, doing 15-minute “lightning calls” to allow me to say yes more. A couple months ago, however, my business partner Elizabeth shared some jarring feedback. She wanted to get on my calendar, and, she said she was particularly bummed because on the one time that could work well for her, I had a fairly “random” meeting set. By the way, there’s nothing normative in the word “random.” I think I stole the phrase “random meeting” from Brad Feld for meetings set with people I don’t know. Probably because of his openness to these, they are popular and available in Boulder, and it’s part of what (a) made this community open to me when I moved here and (b) makes this community special.

In addition to Elizabeth’s wake-up-call observation — which represents the tension between my areas of business focus and these meetings — these meetings poorly organized take a toll on my personal time (golf, long walks, etc) and on the time I might use to create. The latter requires space; creativity in my experience recoils in the face of a back-to-back calendar.

When I’ve thought about this issue lately, what’s surfaced is a specific vision. It has the following features:

• I set one block of time and commit to be available
• I go to a place I like, hang around, and people who want to connect come to me
• I do not set any specific appointments other than the block of time
• People can come (or not), they are guaranteed at least a 15-minute conversation on their topic of interest, and during other time, they can talk to anyone else who shows up
• Hannah is there also engaging in conversation. She knows as much or more than I about MergeLane, issues related to women in startups, the Boulder community, etc. She knows way more than I do about a lot of topics that people care about.
• The block of time is late afternoon, early evening
• The venue is located in downtown Boulder. It is a bar that carries cider that I like
• The venue has a REALLY GREAT BOOTH that we reserve for this purpose

And so, for now, I’m going to give this current best idea a try. To find out the next date for the new BOOTH event, visit my events page or MergeLane’s events page.

I’ll see you in the booth!

Young adults who had a mentor are over 130% more likely to hold leadership positions, states Mentoring.org, and MergeLane CEO, Sue Heilbronner is putting that statistic to the test. As a former civil rights attorney and successful entrepreneur, Sue has led companies in the interactive travel, digital publishing, e-commerce, and online education sectors, and she was the creative catalyst behind Avid4 Adventure’s exciting new leadership camp for high school girls.

Jennifer Fontaine:  Why do you believe mentorship is an invaluable way to shape our future leaders?

Sue Heilbronner: I think mentors of any kind are invaluable to people who are interested in being mentored and eager to learn. There is a tremendous value to a mentee seeing leaders of all different types, including men and women, and getting a chance to be mentored by someone who is a champion of changing the ratio of women’s leadership in companies, government, and nonprofits is meaningful. Of course, the more women who escalate to positions of leadership in our culture, the more examples and mentors young women and girls will have to help shine a light on the path ahead.

JF: Throughout your long career as a leader in business and as a mentor to many, what have you identified as the key components to developing leadership skills in youth?

SH: I believe strongly that high levels of leadership can be developed over time and with study and trial and error. In our culture, we often confuse “leadership” with “extrovert,” and I love that as a culture we are expanding our views on what leadership looks like. One fundamental issue for girls and women is retaining their sense of self through the pressures that they face, many of which start as early as middle school. These are pressures that often translate into minimizing girls’ talents and drive to “fit in.” I have seen infinite examples of interrupting these patterns in girls of any age, and I think Avid4 Adventure’s Girls Leadership Camp will dive into those beliefs, motivations, and limitations and increase the participants’ awareness in an important way.

JF: The outdoors plays a major role in this MergeLane/Avid4 Adventure partnership. What was its pivotal importance in creating the leadership camp’s curriculum?

SH: I’m a huge believer in movement and the outdoors as components of learning. Our Leadership Camps with adults always include hikes as options to integrate learning and explore big questions. Partnering with Avid4 Adventure for Girls Leadership Camp takes this belief to the next level. Getting outside is so much more than just “taking a break,” the staff will build-in leadership training in this adventure context, challenging the participants to try something new, take a risk, and see what leadership looks like in a way that often is overlooked in corporate settings.

This unique 5-day Boulder-based program aims to aid young women in honing their leadership skills and provoking thoughtful exploration of their future dreams and goals. “At MergeLane, we want to back extraordinarily talented leaders with tenacity and a deep passion for their business,” declares Heilbronner, and that’s precisely what her galvanizing partnership with Avid4 Adventure’s Girl Leadership Camp aspires to achieve.

This blog was originally published on Avid4Adventure. 

I recently finished reading The Love Warrior, by Glennon Doyle Melton.

In the book, Glennon talks about sexiness. She starts by talking about the conventional sexy that most of us can agree on (with some standard deviations). She goes on to celebrate the other kind of sexy, her own sexy, the one born from the inside.

Since reading her account, I’ve been exploring my own sexy. I feel it wearing my PJs, and when wearing my fingerless gloves. I feel it in yoga clothes. I feel it when I curl up on the edge of the couch or lie down on my living room rug. I feel it when I run after a frisbee or ride on a snowboard. I usually feel sexy when I dance, but not usually at weddings. I feel sexy with my guitar and often wearing my glasses. I feel sexy when I’m organizing bookcases or eating beautiful food.

Certain things I think should make me feel sexy usually don’t. Dresses don’t, fancy underwear doesn’t, neither do nice shoes. Jewelry rarely does either. Sex only does sometimes, though honest conversations reliably light me up. Having a door held for me makes me feel sexy, or my bags carried, but having my meal paid for can still make me feel weird.

When I was 13, which for me was pre-sexy, I knew how to express myself. I frequently wore a silver polyester workman’s shirt with a man’s name stitched over the pocket in red—Charlie or Mac or Lester. I also wore a yellow-and-white waitress uniform I bought at Goodwill. Sometimes I wore scrubs covered in butterflies, Doc Martins with orange flames, and red-and-white striped toe socks. At that age, I wore my opinions on my polyester sleeves; I was self-expressed, creative, inventive, and free.

As I became a woman though, I got confused. I think part of the reason for this is that women are sexy, and when that started to show up in me, I didn’t know what to do with it. I didn’t feel safe to explore it, because the margin for error in middle school seemed incredibly small.

I still remember comments a few innocent boys made which painfully shaped my view of myself and what I thought was allowed. I didn’t feel safe to express my sexiness because I didn’t want to be “one of those girls who tries too hard.” And no one seemed to be talking about any of it in a healthy way. My girlfriends and I didn’t. My mom and I didn’t. The whole concept of sex and sexiness and being a woman seemed to be reduced to a couple of biological inconveniences like periods and bra-shopping.

Also, women seemed to get a bad rap. This was the era of TV shows like “Married with Children,” “Roseanne,” and “9-5.” I learned that women were nags: emotional and difficult, unpredictable and superficial. Women were bossy, but never bosses. In movies, women were frequently cheated on by their husbands with other women. To my adolescent eyes, women were a distant second-class; why the hell would I want to be one of those?

If my mom tried to talk to me about all this, I certainly wasn’t available to hear it. I was a daddy’s girl, and one of the boys. I’m sure I was never open about how confused I was, because I never understood it myself. Being this second-class citizen was too true to even ask about. This was the same time my eating disorder began, and I see now, this is no coincidence. As my body started to take the shape of a woman, I did everything I could to stop it. And this went on, for nearly 20 years.

Earlier this year, I spent two months surrounded by women. We sang together, danced together, ate together. We cried and screamed and stomped together. We held each other and listened deeply to each other. We shared our pain, our longings, our joy, and our creative expression. We honored the moon and her cycles and our cycles too. We danced around the fire. We’ve planted seeds of intention and watched them flourish. We expressed our femininity in all its forms, and one thing I’ve come to realize is that it is impossible to separate a woman from her sexiness. Because when she is allowed to be, with all her light and all her power, all her feeling and all her knowing, she cannot not be sexy.

So this is what it means to be a woman? Is this the class they forgot to teach in middle school? Just typing this makes me want to scream. When I was 20 and in college, I refused to join Women in Computer Science because why would I draw any more attention to my own inferiority? Just typing that makes me want to cry.

The way we are handling womanhood in most of this world is like a massive spiritual, emotional, and in some cases, physical, castration. Actually, it’s genocide, and I’m not choosing that word lightly. I mean it. Because that is how it has lived in me. I have tried to repress, bury, and destroy the feminine aspects of myself: the fluidity, the turbulence, the pleasure, the anguish, the dynamism, the emotionality, the nonsensical intuition, the beauty, and of course, the sexiness—all the while cultivating more masculine qualities so I could try and succeed based on what I thought I saw around me.

I’m sharing my part of this to emphasize that I don’t see anyone to blame; I think we are all colluding to some degree. I used to think a “feminist” was a woman who was held back by inequality and wanted to catch up. But today, on this day, when I am coming out, both as a woman and as a feminist, I realize it means something else.

A feminist is someone who adores the feminine, who sees her as beautiful and honest, powerful and strong, who witnesses her magic and her music, her creativity and care. A feminist worships her knowingness and not-knowingness, her strength of conviction, and her leadership in its own inclusive, exploratory way. A feminist honors the feminine desire for presence and integrity, vitality, and peace. And yes, a feminist celebrates her deeply powerful, essential sexiness. The energy that literally creates us all.

For me, sharing all of this a beginning. I don’t really know yet who I am as a feminist, or as a woman. I don’t know what it is like to claim it proudly and passionately. But I do know I feel deeply grateful and excited to get to find out.

do a mid-program in-person week, and so this week our cohort companies from around the US and Canada returned to Boulder to connect with mentors, investors, our team and each other. This is the homestretch for this year’s program. MergeLane 2017 Demo Day is May 4th (Join us!).

I held a casual dinner at my home for the team members who were in town, and at 8pm, I gave the co-founders of TinyHood a ride to their last mentor meeting of the day. Becky Miller and Susan Blinn — who are creating a system where parents can get expert real-time, personalized answers to their parenting questions — jumped in the car and rattled off the details of their day. As I listened, I realized how intense the accelerator experience can be and how amazing the community of advisors, mentors, and speakers really is.

There are never too many occasions to be reminded of this.So I asked them to drop me a note with their agenda for that day, and here it is:

4:30am: Becky woke up (still adjusting to the time change!)

7:00am: First newly created “expert advice package” on Tinyhood purchased

7:30am: Team meeting 

10:00am: Pitch Practice with Seth Levine of Foundry Group

11:30am: Mentor meeting with Derek Kraus, most recently of Solidfire

12:00pm: Mentor Lunch with Kirk Holland of Access Venture Partners

2:00pm: Mentor meeting in Denver with Craftsy co-founder Josh Scott

4:00pm: MergeLane session featuring Jenny Lawton, COO of Techstars

5:30pm: Mentor meeting at Gaia office in Louisville with CMO Jaymi Bauer

6:30pm: MergeLane dinner at Sue’s house in Boulder

8:30pm: Mentor drinks with Yoav Lurie, founder and CEO of Simple Energy 

10:30pm: Back to our hotel 

11:00pm: Becky is responding to emails from the day and writing our investor update while Susan is fixing bugs…. 

Not half bad. #changetheratio

I sometimes find that incredibly tenacious founders want to move as quickly as possible to get an investor’s check in their hand. This typically causes frustration on both sides of the table. Before we consider companies for investment, we like to invite them to step back and look at the things that are really going to make or break a company’s ability to raise capital and, more importantly, build a successful company.

Idea: Is your business solving a big enough problem? Does your market actually view this as a problem? Is your market willing to pay to solve this problem? Is the vision of how your company will solve this problem the best way to solve the problem? Can you make your vision bigger?

Market: How big is your market? How much of this market cares enough about this problem to become a user or paying customer? This is a great resource for calculating your total addressable market (TAM).

Team: Are you the right team to execute on your vision? I’d suggest answering these questions specifically:

1)    Do you have a “Hacker, Hipster and Suit”? For more, see this post and this podcast for MergeLane mentor Morris Wheeler’s take on this topic.

2)    Is the current CEO the right CEO for today and in the future? Why? The 6 Most Important Roles of a Startup CEO, The CEO Job Description, and this article are worth reading.

3)    Have your assumptions about your team members changed? Do you need to rethink your roles as team members?

4)    What are the critical holes in your team? How will you fill them? Can you leverage mentors, etc. to fill those holes for the next 18 months?

Passion: As you think about these questions, don’t lose sight of the fact that the most successful founders typically build startups to solve problems about which they are deeply and personally passionate.

After you answer these questions, think about whether raising capital from angel investors is actually the right strategy. To answer this question and more, I’d suggest:

1. Reading this post about the types of companies angel and venture investors typically fund
2. Listening to the following in order of priority:
   1. MergeLane CEO Sue Heilbronner’s podcast with a bootstrapped business (worth subscribing to her Real Leaders podcast)
   2. The Jed Katz portion of this podcast that outlines a Series A checklist
   3. Episode 712 of Jason Calacanis’ This Week in Startups (worth subscribing to his podcast)

This class has it all: B2B, B2C, B2E. This cohort also features the kind of diversity that is a hallmark of our program: diversity of gender (of course), age, race, and country of origin. We can’t wait for you to meet these terrific companies:

1. EVmatch (Santa Barbara, CA): A distributed network (a la Airbnb) for charging systems for electric vehicles. Individuals can make outside charging stations available and rentable during their off hours.
2. BizXPro (Toronto, ON): A marketplace to find and hire IT resources on a contract basis. Upwork for IT resources to save companies from having to have an in-house FTE team for this limited and highly specific need.
3. MentalHappy (Las Vegas moving to Denver/Boulder, CO): An e-commerce “box” company that sells “cheer boxes” to send to those in your world who are grieving or in pain.
4. Helper Helper (St. Louis, MO): A SaaS platform for high schools and colleges to track student athlete volunteer hours.
5. Tousled (Seattle, WA): A service platform to allow consumers and businesses to book beauty and massage professionals for on-location services.
6. Hired on Demand (Denver, CO): A marketplace for construction companies and commercial developers to staff commercial construction projects with available, vetted subcontractors on demand.
7. Tinyhood (Boston, MA): An on-call expert Q&A service for parents to get quick answers to urgent questions about kid-related questions 24/7.
8. RecoveryWarriors (Denver, CO): A digital content platform, community (300k users strong), and eventually app to boost the emotional intelligence and resilience of people struggling with depression, anxiety and eating disorders.
9. SpaceiShare (Toronto, ON):  A marketplace for peer-to-peer distribution of parking and storage spaces.

MergeLane is focused on advancing the potential and growth of female-led companies. We do this through our accelerator (see our 2015 cohort and 2016 cohort), our investment fund (see our fund portfolio), and educational programs like Women’s Leadership Camp and Summer Leadership Camp for Girls. If you’d like to learn more, visit www.mergelane.com.

MergeLane is in the business of accelerating high-potential female leaders. We do this through our 12-week business accelerator and investment fund for startups with at least one female in leadership and our Women Leadership Camps. We’re excited to announce that our reach will now extend to high-potential high school girls.

High school is a critical time for girls to develop leadership skills, self-awareness, and confidence. For our newest program, Bold Summer: Leadership Camp for High School Girls, MergeLane is partnering with Avid 4 Adventure, a leader in outdoor adventure summer camps.

At Leadership Camp, girls will ask challenging, introspective questions to develop a personal brand of leadership, hone communication skills, and plan life goals.  They will also stretch their limits through outdoor adventure sports designed to refine their teamwork skills and grow their confidence.  Each day will be a blend of indoor activities based at entrepreneurial incubator, Galvanize, and outdoor activities at beautiful crags, trails, and the Boulder reservoir.  

Surrounded by an encouraging community of girls, expert executive coaches, and certified outdoor educators, participants will come away from this program energized, confident, and ready to take on the world.

Camp will be in Boulder, CO August 7th-11th 9am- 5pm. We welcome all girls entering 9th-12th grades to participate. We are only running one program this summer, and we are pretty certain it will sell out. If your daughters, nieces, or friends want to be a part of it, register now.

If you’ve already passed the 12th grade, and don’t want to miss out on the opportunity to dramatically grow as a leader, join us for our next Women’s Leadership Camp March 24th-26th in Boulder or our co-gender half day “Taste of Conscious Leadership” event on January 27th. You’ll always find these and other events at MergeLane Events.