Startups, Emerging Companies & Venture Capital

Our entrepreneurial services include:

• Entity formation, structuring, and governance
• Benefit company registration for clients seeking to pursue triple bottom line goals
• Equity structuring
• Negotiating with investors, including seed, angel, venture capital, and private equity investors
• Intellectual property protection, including licensing, distribution and sales agreements, and trademark and trade secret protection
• Tax and executive compensation
• Employee and consultant contracts, including non-compete and confidentiality agreements
• Government relations and regulatory compliance
• Mergers and acquisitions, or other liquidity events, for clients reaching this stage in the business lifecycle.

Additionally, Tonkon Torp offers both our venture capital and emerging company clients a range of other issue-focused advice through our full-service practice. We can provide seasoned counsel for all client matters.

Every emerging enterprise needs to raise capital in a timely and effective manner. Our attorneys have the experience and industry contacts to help make that happen. We regularly represent investors, such as angel investors and venture capital firms, so we fully understand their needs and can help match entrepreneurs to investors when the opportunity arises.

Capital Connections

We also work closely with groups like TiE Oregon, the Oregon Entrepreneurs Network, the Oregon Venture Funds, the Elevate Capital Funds, the Elevate Inclusive Fund, the Willamette Angels Fund, the Cascade Seed Fund, and the Portland Seed Fund. We leverage these relationships to help connect emerging companies with potential funding sources, board members, management-level employees, and other resources – without compromising our paramount role as advocates for our clients.

Flexible Fee Schedules

Drawing upon our firm’s long history of providing strategic counsel and transaction services to businesses at all stages of development, we partner with our clients to help them efficiently and effectively implement their business plans, deploy their capital, and take timely advantage of opportunities—and we can structure our fees to match their stage of growth.

We work to staff client projects as efficiently and economically as possible and we implement billing arrangements that make sense for our clients at each stage of their development. We have deferred some of our fees until closing on the first round of financing or have found other creative approaches that allow our startup clients the fee flexibility they need, particularly during early-stage development.

Our goal is to be considered a valuable member of our clients’ management teams. We will always give our best legal advice—with an eye toward containing costs and proportionality—and we’re available for a simple phone call whenever legal questions arise.

Creative Advice Aimed at Meeting Goals

We know how difficult the journey can be for entrepreneurs, which is why we focus on finding solutions to obstacles no matter their level of difficulty. Clients can count on us to provide our most creative, robust advice at every step in their journey toward reaching their entrepreneurial goals.