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Starting a new business is exciting. Founders often have a mental image of how they imagine their new company will be: the new Google. But before they can create a new verb, they first need to make sure that they have the best corporate setup, have raised adequate funding, have commercial contracts to protect their interests, and that their intellectual property, including patents and trademarks, are protected. When you have early stage legal needs, you want to find a law firm that specializes in working with startups and know how to guide them toward an exit. To choose the right one, business owners need to evaluate their needs as well as the abilities and experience of the startup law firm. We have identified seven key questions that startup business owners need to ask before hiring a startup firm. These should help business owners choose the law firm that is best suited for their needs.

For many entrepreneurs, their first experience with corporate law occurs when they decide to organize their fledgling business into one of the several forms of business entities permitted by law in most states. For the first-time business owner, the options presented by legal counsel can be confusing, in part because the differences among some types of business entities are subtle or highly technical. The appropriate form of entity can depend on numerous factors, including the nature of the business, its intended ownership and management structures, the need to raise equity capital, the desired tax treatment of income and losses and the importance of limiting the personal liability of the business’s owners. The good news is that for nearly all startup businesses (particularly the tech, tech-enabled or life science businesses that I most commonly represent) the choice of entity can be narrowed down to two options – the corporation or the limited liability company.

When your startup is very small, it’s fairly easy to gauge its health. From your vantage point as the company’s leader—and perhaps its only employee—you can readily track the arrival and departure of customers, the growth or decline of revenues, and changes in profitability as costs rise or fall. But as your company grows and its complexity increases, measuring the success of the business becomes more difficult. It is important to develop a well-thought-out set of metrics, or measurement tools, and apply them consistently.

As the Growth Manager at Gust, one of my responsibilities is to evaluate accelerator programs on the Gust Accelerator Platform to determine if they are a good fit for our community of founders. The guidelines we use for this, which were built by the Gust team, leveraging the collective decades of experience we have working with startups, can also be used to help founders determine which accelerator is best for them.