A recent March 20, 2026 letter decision from the Delaware Court of Chancery in Gary T. Turner v. Lam Research Corporation is a stark illustration of how unforgiving Delaware courts can be when stockholders sit on their rights. For venture-backed companies and their stockholders, the case underscores a simple but critical point: stock ownership rights
For founders and executives at venture-backed startups, equity is often the centerpiece of compensation – and the primary driver of long-term wealth. But unlike cash compensation, that equity is typically illiquid for years. Outside of an IPO or a sale of the company, opportunities to turn shares into cash are limited, tightly controlled and often
In June 2025, New York Venture Hub published “The Forfeited Equity Trap: Why Your Non-Compete Might Be Worthless”. In that post, I blogged that the Delaware Court of Chancery’s decision in North American Fire Ultimate Holdings, LP v. Doorly served as a cautionary tale that an equity-based non-compete could become unenforceable if the equity
Early-stage startup financings have long reflected a tension between transactional efficiency and legal precision. Instruments such as convertible notes and SAFEs were developed to reduce cost and execution time at the seed stage, but they do so by deferring, and often obscuring, important questions of corporate law, investor rights and tax treatment. A new financing
Special purpose vehicles were always the sort of tool investors used only occasionally, in special circumstances. A hot deal. A founder who didn’t want 100 angels on the cap table. A one-off opportunity that didn’t quite fit inside a fund’s mandate. SPVs were the exception.
In 2025, they stopped being that. As Forbes put it