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I'd argue you could/should be doing this kind of stuff from day 1. IP assignments, clean books, documented agreements etc are part of your business, not a seco
by amirmc 12y ago
I'd argue you could/should be doing this kind of stuff from day 1. IP assignments, clean books, documented agreements etc are part of your business, not a secondary concern. Having this stuff under control throughout the life of your business can become a selling point to an acquirer, in that you've created an internal culture that cares about (and scales) its business processes as much as its product and customers (I'm speculating here, but it seems reasonable to me).
Of course, this is the least sexy part of building a company and is actually quite easy to ignore as long as you're hiring highly competent people.
- mattzito 12y agoFor sure, there's a basic amount of stuff that you should always be doing: - Employee agreements - Updated financials (potentially get them audited once a year) - Insurance paperwork - etc. There's no reason you should ever not have those things. But there's other stuff that can creep in - for example, we were using a variety of perl modules in our software. We had made sure from a policy perspective that all of the modules were in CPAN and licensed apporpriately. But during DD they wanted us to identify every module, and provide them with a copy of the license for every single module. They wanted to see a written DR plan, and a list of business operational risks, both personnel and office-wise. Just two examples of the sorts of things that can come up in DD that probably aren't worth doing day 1.
- ojilles 12y agoHaving been on the other side, one can always ask for the DR plan, half expecting the seller side not to have it. Then you know where they stand (which is the objective of DD anyways). So not having the answers is in my opinion okay, depending on the topic.