New Preferred Share Templates are now online

We have amended the Preferred Shares documentation. It is cool to see that the Capital Waters model documents are more and more used as a benchmark for balanced investment documents in many venture deals in the Netherlands and beyond. We are aware of our responsibility in that respect, so we have not made any changes lightly. We have gathered feedback from our users and looked carefully at market trends and asked our Expert Panel to once again review the documents and come up with any suggestions for improvement. Read more

Capital Waters 2020 Convertible is online

Given the uncertainty Covid-19 imposes on our daily lives, access to funding for startups and scaleups is likely to be even more challenging than it already is in less eventful times and accordingly being able to limit the time and costs spent on transaction is accordingly more important than ever. In our desire to support the Dutch ecosystem for emerging companies and investors, we are happy to announce the launch of the newest version of the Capital Waters Convertible. Read more

Capital Waters – Time for a Change

When we launched Capital Waters five years ago, we did not do anything extraordinary. We published a full set of Dutch law governed early stage transaction documents online. Freely downloadable. We did it because nobody else did it. It turned out to be a big success. Since then, the documents have been used by many investors, founders and advisors and we are happy that various incubators, accelerators, startup foundations, investors and investor associations have endorsed the initiative. Yet, we are radically going to change our format. Why? We will explain. Read more

Founder vesting arrangements

Vesting of shares is a popular concept with emerging companies. When instigated by an investor, the main goal is to ensure that founders (or managers) are incentivized to remain with the company for a certain amount of time. When agreed between founders it is a way to conditionally slice the pie, Read more

Version 4.0 of the Capital Waters Subscription and shareholders agreement (preferred shares) released

Today is a big day, since we have released our 4.0 version of the Subscription and shareholders agreement (preferred shares). It all started with this document when we launched Capital Waters in 2014. Our goal was to create a simple set of investment documents for early stage equity deals that people could use as a standard to save time and money. We are grateful that many people took advantage of this resource and Capital Waters became an online hotspot for early stage investments in the Netherlands. Read more