Spark Capital will now pay their own legal bills
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Spark Capital will now pay their own legal bills
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Re: Spark Capital will now pay their own legal bills
#2Impressive move by Spark, who have now put other VCs in the awkward position of explaining why they don't do the same.
Re: Spark Capital will now pay their own legal bills
#3This is going to be one of those wonderful games of iterated group prisoner's dilemma, in which one member of a formerly functioning cartel has just publicly announced an intention to always play Defect.
Re: Spark Capital will now pay their own legal bills
#4Doesn't paying the legal bills for the other party create some conflicts of interest or other weirdnesses for the lawyers?
And why do VCs expect people to pay the legal bills? Who buys the coffee when they go for drinks?
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Also, I'm using Chrome on Win Vista. Here's a screen shot. (http://imgur.com/5DP7C0e)
If that's how they wanted it to look, well, fair enough. But I don't think it is. I wonder how much time and effort is spent building style sheets that end up rendering as nasty as the results I got?
Re: Spark Capital will now pay their own legal bills
#5Impressive move by Spark, who have now put other VCs in the awkward position of explaining why they don't do the same.
The net effect is that they're being more honest about how much they're actually willing to invest, correct? They don't magically have more money and the lawyers have to be paid anyhow. At least it puts the onus on them to keep their negotiations to a minimum.
Re: Spark Capital will now pay their own legal bills
#6Heard at an event last night that for one company, the legal cost to include UPS as a strategic investor actually exceeded the amount they invested but the company chose to do so in order to access UPS data.
Re: Spark Capital will now pay their own legal bills
#7Impressive move by Spark, who have now put other VCs in the awkward position of explaining why they don't do the same.
Before the other VC's are in that awkward position this would have to reach some kind of critical mass or tipping point.
Not only that but different sellers, vendors, sides of business transactions, typically offer different terms, features, benefits.
The standard procedure when someone brings up something someone else is willing to do, is to bring up your strong points and why that particular feature shouldn't matter that much as a differentiator. And the truth is how much does this really matter vs. the benefits of the particular VC firm?
Re: Spark Capital will now pay their own legal bills
#8I wander if they are paying the $25k from management fees or from the fund.
The justification for why VCs don't pay their lawyer bill has always been that they don't want to take the money from their management fees, if Spark has figured out how to take it from their fund and their LPs are okay with that that is good.
If not then they are footing $25k from their pocket. But I guess if they only do 10 deals a year their max liability is $250k which isn't bad for a $450m fund.
Re: Spark Capital will now pay their own legal bills
#9Startups are slowly but surely getting more power/respect when fundraising. This is excellent, and hopefully the "heavy-handed VC oppressor" will go away for good some day...
Re: Spark Capital will now pay their own legal bills
#10This is going to be one of those wonderful games of iterated group prisoner's dilemma, in which one member of a formerly functioning cartel has just publicly announced an intention to always play Defect.
Would that imply that, strategically, other investors might wish to avoid co-investing with Spark to punish their defection?