by Mike Baker | Jul 30, 2025
We see a lot of cap tables, and we’ll be blunt: most early-stage startups get at least a few things wrong. Some mistakes are harmless—like rounding ownership to a tenth of a percent. Others can wreck a financing, trigger tax disasters, or undermine employee trust....
by Mike Baker | Jul 17, 2025
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act (“OBBBA”) opened up new opportunities for QSBS planning (as our last blog covered). From a business entity standpoint, a large portion of the OBBBA was extending and tweaking some of the most popular changes from the 2017 Tax Cuts and...
by Mike Baker | Jul 8, 2025
November 2014: I was laying in bed reading abovethelaw.com when to my delight I ran across the newly announced Cravath bonus scale (Cravath is a New York law firm that is often the first to announce its associate year-end bonus numbers). Cooley had never been a market...
by Mike Baker | Jul 8, 2025
If you’re an entrepreneur you’ve no doubt heard from a buddy about qualified small business stock (“QSBS”). QSBS is stock in a C corporation that if held for more than five years can result in a 0% federal tax rate on a significant amount of gain. See here for more...
by Mike Baker | Jul 5, 2025
One of the biggest tax breaks in the Internal Revenue Code is qualified small business stock (QSBS). For founders, early employees, and investors, it can mean walking away from a big exit with little or no federal tax. Here’s the short version: If you invest in a...
