You just got your first customer! You just hired your first employee! You just got your first VC investor! These are huge milestones in the life of a startup and are extraordinarily exciting. That is, until that first draft of the contract arrives in your inbox and you suddenly realize you are 30 pages of legalese away from getting your deal done.
Contracts are the foundation for any business, and getting good at negotiating and understanding these instruments is critical for any startup founder. Asking the right questions at just the right moment can be the difference between signing a deal today (and saving those legal fees!) and losing a deal and ending up in a courtroom in the Eastern District of Texas.
Given how critical this skill is, we’re excited to bring two seasoned and complementary attorneys to TC Early Stage on July 21 and 22 who are experts at the legal issues facing startups to offer their advice and answer your questions about how to think about business law and how to balance getting the right advice with the financial constraints of early-stage startups.
James Alonso is founder and partner at Magnolia Law where he specializes in company formation, venture financing and the law around scaling startups. Meanwhile, Adam Zagaris is the founder and partner of Moonshot Legal, where he specializes in startup laws around areas like commercial transactions, intellectual property and human resources.
Together, the two will go into all the different facets of the modern legal environment for startups, and help founders understand their role in the legal process. If you can save even 15 minutes of your lawyer’s time in the future from their combined advice, you will already have paid for the entire entry fee for TC Early Stage in the first place. So come join us and become an interested party.
TC Early Stage (July 21 and 22) has so much to offer. The show will bring together 50+ experts across startup core competencies, such as fundraising, operations and marketing. Cyan Bannister is set to explain how to get an investor to say yes to your startup. Asher Abramson will be sharing how to create growth assets for paid channels, lawyers James Alonso and Adam Zagaris will share how to draw up your first contracts, and Priti Choksi is hosting a session on how to get a company acquired rather than selling.
The two-day show features more than 50 sessions, but don’t worry; attendees will get access to the videos on demand for all of them. What’s more, most of the speakers, who happen to be investors, are participating in TechCrunch’s CrunchMatch, our platform that connects founders to investors based on shared interests.
Here’s the fine print: Each of the 50+ breakout sessions is limited to around 100 attendees. We expect a lot more attendees, of course, so signups for each session are on a first-come, first-serve basis.
Buy your ticket today, and you can sign up for the breakouts we are announcing today, as well as those already published. Pass holders will also receive 24-hour advance notice before we announce the next batch. (And yes, you can “drop” a breakout session in favor of a new one, in the event there is a schedule conflict.)
Get your TC Early Stage pass today and jump into the inside track on the sessions we announced so far, as well as the ones to be published in the coming weeks.