A board of directors is the elected body that governs a corporation, overseeing executives, approving major decisions, and bearing fiduciary duties to shareholders. Board-approved decisions include financings, acquisitions, executive hires, option grants, annual budgets, and dividend declarations. Venture-backed startup boards typically combine founders (1 to 2 seats), institutional investors (1 to 3 seats depending on funding rounds), and independent directors (0 to 2 seats added over time). It is the governance layer above executive management and below shareholders, and the body whose composition often matters more to founder control than the cap table alone suggests.
The typical venture-backed startup board evolution:...
The legal architecture that holds a startup together. This cluster covers entity types and formation (LLC, C-corp, Delaware), governance (board, officers, fiduciary duty), IP protection (trademark, patent, copyright, work-for-hire), employment law (NDAs, non-competes, employment agreements), commercial contracts (MSA, indemnification, arbitration), and privacy/compliance (SOC 2, GDPR, DPAs). 46 entries.
Founders skip this stuff until they can't. The cost of getting it right early is low; the cost of getting it wrong is brutal at diligence or in court.
A privacy policy is the customer-facing legal document disclosing how a company collects, uses, shares, stores, and protects user data. It is legally required in most jurisdictions (US state laws like CCPA require it; GDPR in Europe requires comprehensive disclosure; many other jurisdictions have similar requirements) and operationally critical for user trust. It is one of the legal documents most-often outdated or generic at startups despite being prominently linked from every website and product. It is the document that tells users what you do with their data.
The standard sections:
Types of data collected:
Sales efficiency is the unit-economics metric measuring how productively sales and marketing spend produces revenue. It's typically calculated as new ARR per dollar of S&M spend (gross sales efficiency) or net new ARR per dollar of S&M including churn (net sales efficiency). Used alongside Magic Number, CAC Payback, and LTV:CAC to evaluate the efficiency of growth investment, sales efficiency varies by stage and sales motion: sales-led typically lower efficiency at lower scale; product-led typically higher. It is the operational metric most-directly tied to whether growth investment is producing returns.
The calculation:
Gross Sales Efficiency:
A micro-VC is a small venture capital fund, typically $50M to $200M in fund size, that focuses on leading pre-seed and seed rounds. Distinct from traditional VC funds at $300M to $5B+ and from individual angel investors, micro-VCs write check sizes of $100K to $2M and are often founded and run by 1-3 partners who were previously operators, angels, or junior partners at larger VC firms. They occupy the institutional layer between super-angels and traditional VCs. The category emerged in the early 2010s as the cost of starting a company dropped and a market opened for institutional capital at amounts traditional VCs couldn't economically deploy.
The structural characteristics: fund size of $50M-$200M typical (anything smaller is ofte...
An S Corporation is a US federal tax election that allows a domestic corporation or LLC to pass profits and losses through to shareholders. Named after Subchapter S of the Internal Revenue Code, the election is not a separate entity type but a tax classification that avoids the double taxation C-corporations face. S-corp status is subject to restrictions on shareholder type, count (100 maximum), and stock structure (one class only) that make it largely incompatible with venture-backed startups. It is a popular structure for small businesses with US-citizen owners and incompatible with the cap-table realities of most institutional fundraising.
The restrictions that disqualify most venture-track startups: maximum 100 shareholder...
The VP of Sales is the senior executive responsible for building the sales organization and scaling from founder-led selling to a repeatable rep-led motion. Sometimes called Head of Sales, Chief Revenue Officer, or Chief Commercial Officer at scale. The VP-S hires and manages sales reps and sales managers, owns revenue targets and forecasting, partners with marketing on demand generation, and partners with product on what customers want. The hire is one of the most-common executive hiring mistakes founders make because companies often hire VP Sales before the underlying sales motion is repeatable, leading to expensive failures. It is one of the highest-leverage hires when timed correctly and one of the most-expensive mistakes when ...
Accounts Receivable (A/R) is the balance-sheet asset that tracks money customers owe for products or services already delivered but not yet paid for. It's recorded as a current asset because the company has a legal claim to be paid, and tracked with aging buckets (0-30 days, 31-60, 61-90, 90+) that reveal how quickly customers are actually paying. A/R represents revenue that's been recognized but not yet collected; healthy A/R turns into cash on time; aged A/R becomes collection risk.
The basic mechanics:
Customer signs a $50K contract with Net-30 payment terms. Service is delivered (or in SaaS, the recognized portion is delivered). On the day of invoice:
A vendor contract is the binding legal agreement between a startup as buyer and a third-party supplier (vendor, contractor, or service provider). The contract covers the services or products provided, fees and payment terms, data handling and security, IP ownership (especially for work product), indemnification, limitation of liability, and termination. It is the contract category that quietly accumulates the fastest as a startup scales, and it is the one founders pay the least attention to until something goes wrong.
The categories that matter: infrastructure and cloud (AWS, GCP, Azure, Cloudflare, Vercel; typically click-through ToS with separate Enterprise Agreements at $250K+ annual spend); payments and money movement (S...
A business license is a government-issued permission to operate a specific type of business in a specific jurisdiction. Licenses are often required at multiple levels (federal, state, county, city) and vary widely by industry, ranging from broad general business licenses required by most cities to specialized professional licenses for regulated activities like healthcare, food service, transportation, and financial services. Penalties for operating without required licenses include fines, business closure, and personal liability. It is the area of startup compliance most consistently neglected by founders who assume "I formed an LLC, I'm good," and one of the most common surprises during fundraising or M&A diligence.
The ma...