DealPrep creates business law negotiation curriculum that supports business professionals, lawyers, students and entrepreneurs alike by providing the skills needed to understand, negotiate and close deals.
This edition of our DealPrep Spotlight focuses on our Founders’ Agreement workshop, where participants assume the positions of two founders of a health tech startup. In this workshop, participants negotiate a variety of business law concepts, with focus on intellectual property rights, time commitment, starting capital, management duties and ownership percentages.
In this simulation, participants pay particular attention to various negotiation aspects, some of these include:
- Starting Capital: When they started their business, the founders put in different starting investments, one of them 3x more than the other. The founders initially decided to split their ownership 60/40, but with other terms in mind and further development of the business, the founders are now beginning to reconsider how much of the company they individually should own. Participants will need to take various terms into consideration when negotiating the company’s ownership structure.
- Experience and Time Commitment: Because the founders have different experience levels in their field, as well as different professional specialties, they’ll need to decide how much time commitment each founder will invest in the company. Participants will need to negotiate each founders’ time commitment based on their experience level, type of professional experience, and what’s considered most valuable to the company’s growth.
- Intellectual Property: One of the founders developed the company’s IP, one of the founders is funding all of the associated fees with trademarking and patenting. Participants will need to leverage other negotiation terms to come to an agreement on who the IP is assigned to.
Participants leave the workshop with a heightened understanding of founders’ agreements and how they can be negotiated in practice.
Contact us to learn more about this workshop and our library of over 85 different topics!