Mentoring: Equity Law with Brian Patterson, Partner at Gunderson Dettmer

fnMentoring functions accelerate your startup and expand your high-tech network through mentoring sessions with founders and featured guest experts. Functions are free to members but require your “RSVP”. If you are not a member you can apply here.  Next week’s featured topic & guest will be:

Topic Description: Traditional debt vs. equity and compensating with equity.

Name: Brian Patterson

Brian Patterson of Gunderson Dettmer

Background: Brian Patterson is a business, corporate and securities attorney in the Silicon Valley and San Francisco offices of Gunderson Dettmer. He approaches his legal practice with business acumen, assisting businesses and investors in structuring and executing on transactions and making business decisions within an appropriate and practical legal framework for their goals and specific circumstances.

Brian is passionate about entrepreneurship and technology. Because of this his practice is focused on the representation of start-ups throughout their lifecycles and in the representation of venture capital and private equity investment funds. Brian is broadly experienced with business formation and governance matters, deal structuring, equity and debt financing transactions, public offerings, a variety of M&A, strategic and commercial transactions and fundamental intellectual property, employment and stock and option matters. For early stage companies his work includes assisting entrepreneurs with key strategic decisions and coaching related to business formation and initial capital raising, and prospective investor strategy and introductions. For growth and later stage companies, Brian has significant experience in providing counsel on the range of issues that these companies face, such as growth financing and exit strategy, international expansion and cross-border transactions, governance and fiduciary responsibilities, risk and litigation management, stockholder, employee and customer management. His company representation spans a wide variety of industries, including software, consumer web, mobile, gaming, entertainment, life sciences, semiconductors and clean technology industries.

Brian also represents a number of VC funds of different sizes and focuses in their investments, business and portfolio management. Also, he is one of the few attorneys that combine a dynamic emerging company practice with representation of venture funds in fund and special purpose investment vehicle formation and fund operations.

Company: Gunderson Dettmer is the only business law firm of its kind—singularly focused on the global venture capital and emerging technology marketplace. With 160 attorneys in seven offices—Silicon Valley, Boston, Los Angeles, New York, San Diego, San Francisco and Beijing, China—we represent more than 2,000 high-growth companies from a broad range of industries in every stage of development. We provide our clients with counsel on general corporate and securities law, mergers and acquisitions, financings, intellectual property and commercial agreements, strategic alliances, executive compensation, and tax matters.

The Firm is a recognized international leader in the representation of venture capital and private equity investment funds. With extensive experience in North America, China, the EU and Latin America, our attorneys provide general counsel, fund formation and investor representation services to hundreds of the world’s leading venture capital and private equity firms. We routinely earn the Dow Jones Private Equity Analyst’s ranking as the most active law firm in the world in venture capital financing activity.

We combine our deep market knowledge and strong industry relationships with a unique practice experience to provide practical, business-oriented counsel designed for the needs of the emerging-growth company marketplace.

fnMentoring is on Tuesday, March 18th beginning at 10:30 am PDT. RSVP here to participate in this event.