The Convertible Debt Debate – An ex-Lawyer’s Twist on the Argument
Posted by Allan in Finance - Business, VC, Venture Capitalist, business, expense, technology, venture capital, tags: bad, cash, company, creditors, debate, debt, directors, early-stage, employment, fail, focus, forever, graham, insolvent, judge, Justice, law, lawsuit, lawyer, liabilities, limb, manages, money, note, paul, pay, personal, resqbug, seed, Seth, success, sueToday, my partner Seth wrote a great piece on the merits of early-stage startups raising convertible debt rounds versus traditional preferred stock equity structures. The piece was inspired by Paul Graham’s recent tweet that said: “Convertible notes have won. Every investment so far in this YC batch (and there have been a lot) has been done on a convertible note.”
Seth’s piece is a must read in this debate that is only gaining more participants, including a nice follow up from Mark Suster about his thoughts. I can’t do justice to either Mark’s or Seth’s pieces trying to summarize them, so I strongly encourage you to read them.
I’m going to go out on a limb and break out my old law bar card and bring up one issue that I don’t think is getting enough focus in the debate: the use of debt fundamentally changes the fiduciary duties of managers and board member of the company.
If a company raises cash via equity, it has a positive balance sheet. It is solvent (assets are greater than obligations) and the board and executives have fiduciary duties to the shareholders in the efforts to maximize company value. The shareholders are all the usual suspects – the employees and venture capitalists. Life is good and normal.
However, if a company is insolvent, the board and company now owe fiduciary duties to the creditors of the company. By definition, if you raise a convertible debt round, your company is insolvent. You have cash, but your debt obligations are greater than your assets. Your creditors include your landlord, anyone you owe money to and folks that you might owe money to you, like former disgruntled employees and founders who have lawyers.
How does this change the paradigm? To be fair, I have had no personal war stories here, but it’s not hard to construct some weird and scary situations.
Let’s look at the hypothetical:
Assume the company is not a success and fails. In the case of raising equity, the officers and directors only own a duty to the creditors (landlord, etc.) at such time that cash isn’t large enough to pay their liabilities. If the company manages it correctly, even on the downside scenario creditors are paid off cleanly. But sometimes it doesn’t happen this way and there are lawsuits. When the lawyers get involved, they’ll look to try to establish the time in which the company went insolvent and then try to show that the actions of the board were “bad” during that time. If the time range is short, it’s hard to make a case against the company.
However, if you raise debt, the insolvency time is forever! Not just when cash got below the ability to pay liabilities like the equity situation, because the company has never been solvent.
What does this mean? It means that if your company ends up failing and you can’t pay your creditors, landlords, etc. that their ability for a plaintiff lawyer to judge your actions has increased dramatically. And don’t forget, if you have any outstanding employment litigation, etc., all of these folks count as creditors as well.
The best part of all of this is that many states impose personal liability on directors for screwing up things while a company was insolvent. Read this to be: “some states will allow creditors to sue directors personally for not getting all of their money they are owed.”
Now I don’t want to get too crazy here. We are talking about early-stage / seed companies and hopefully the situation is clean enough that my doomsday predictions won’t happen, but my bet is that few folks participating in convertible debt rounds are actually thinking about these issues. And no, I don’t know of any actual cases out there, now. But I’ve been around this business long enough to know that there is constant “innovation” in the plaintiff’s bar as well.
With thanks to jasonmendelson.com To see the original article please click here.
Remember, that the only dumb question is the one never asked. If you have any questions or comments, I look forward to them, please email or call me.
Cheers.
Allan
RESQBug.com Technical Services and PRAD Enterprise
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This article is for information purposes only. It is recommended that individuals consult with an IT professional before acting on any information contained in this article. The opinions stated are those of Allan Waddington and not a reflection of any company he currently works with or has in the past.
“If you think it’s expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur.” -Red Adair
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