Field guide 01
Running a SAFE round
Signature to stock: what to decide, what to send, and what to keep.
A SAFE round is three jobs that look like one: agreeing the terms, getting the money in, and tracking a promise of stock that stays open for years. This guide walks the sequence in order, names the evidence each step produces, and shows what the round file has to hold when a lawyer asks for it at your Series A.
- What a SAFE is, and what it is not
- The four terms you will be asked about
- What a complete round file holds
- The sequence
- Wire instructions, and the fraud that targets them
- Three facts about money, never collapsed into one
Field guide 02
Funding a revocable trust
The asset-by-asset checklist, and what counts as proof.
Signing a trust moves nothing. Funding is the separate, unglamorous work of retitling each asset to the trustee, and it is where most revocable trusts quietly fail. This guide goes asset class by asset class: what moves, who has to do it, and what the institution’s own record has to show before you can call it done.
- A signed trust moves nothing
- What funding actually means
- Asset by asset
- The proof standard
- Five ways funding quietly fails
- The annual re-check
Field guide 03
A personal loan from a trust
Papering a note to a family member so it survives review.
A loan between a trust and a beneficiary is the transaction most likely to be recharacterized later as a gift, a distribution, or a breach of duty. What prevents that is ordinary documentation, done at the time. This guide covers whether the trust may lend at all, what the note has to say, why the interest rate is not a free choice, and how the note ends.
- First question: may the trust lend at all?
- Term note or demand note
- What the note has to say
- Interest, and why the rate is not a free choice
- Disbursing the money
- The life of the note