10 Incredibly Awesome Documents to Help You Start a Company

Jul 10, 2008 76 Comments by Jason Nazar

Non Disclosure Agreement (NDA) – these are over-hyped in my opinion and few angel or venture investors will sign them, but always helpful to have one handy to bust out at parties.

LLC Operating Agreement – I put my first LLC together myself using this agreement. My advice is to hire an attorney, but if you don’t listen to advice so well, knock yourself out.

Sample Convertible Note – A convertible note is a way to raise debt for your company that will convert into equity. When you are first raising money, if you can use a convertible note instead of having to give up shares/equity, you’ll usually be in a better position later on and own more of your company.

Board of Advisor Agreement – A good board of advisor can be worth their weight in gold, a bad one can be worth their weight in radioactive fluid.

Financial Projections Template – This document is “da bomb”. My good friend and previous business partner Mike Sheridan put this together in our prior consulting company Venature. This is a fantastic financial model template to build your basic Income Statement, Balance Sheet, and Cash Flow statement. Needless to say he paid a LOT more attention in accounting classes in our MBA program.

Financial Model Projections for an Internet Company – Big shout out to Brian Garrett of Crosscut Ventures (site coming soon). This is a fantastic model/template for internet companies to use to project their growth.

Application for Employer Identification Number (EIN) – Basic government form you need to fill out to get set up with an Employer Identification Number (EIN) so that you too can hire folks and pretend to be a badass at cocktail parties (don’t forget to pull out the NDA).

Start Up Pitch Presentation – there are no graphical elements here, but this doc lays out how to describe your business in a presentation format. Business Plans are dead, use a PPT Deck, see graphic examples below.

10 Questions to Consider When Start a New Business – I wrote this doc so I’m biased (hell, I’m writing this whole blog post) – but I do think this is a simple set of questions you can use to analyze any business you are thinking of starting. And once you decide to start, here are some mistakes to avoid.

Business Plan Presentation Template – This doc has a sample layout you can use to pitch investors/partners (plus its got a cool effect of color changing bars on the side – that only took me 4 hours to figure out one law school class)

Business Plan Presentation Template – Get more Legal Forms

Business Plan Deck – I stripped down the docstoc deck and left all the graphical assets in the presentation so that you can download it and use it however you like. We paid a good amount of money to get this done, so I hope you can take our graphical starting point, and raise LOTs of money for your own company with this. Upload Documents to Docstoc and we’ll call it even.

Business Plan Deck – Get more Business Plans

Oh yah, I should probably have some legal disclaimers around the use of these documents…. use your best judgment and hire a qualified professional to review or customize where needed. Or don’t.

Business

Jason Nazar

About the author

Jason is the Co-Founder and CEO of Docstoc.com, the premier online community to find and share professional documents. Before starting Docstoc, he was a partner in a venture consulting firm in Los Angeles where he worked with dozens of startups. He holds have a BA from UCSB and his JD/MBA from Pepperdine University, where he was the Student Body President of both Universities.