Anthony Rose

Have you seen the UK government's new Founder Relief proposal? No CGT on your first £10M on an exit. Sweet! But read it in detail. Your company is unlikely to qualify, and you should assume that it will not apply to you. To recap: Once upon a time, there was Entrepreneurs Relief. If you had more than 5% equity in a company, then you paid only 10% capital gains tax when you sold your shares, up to a lifetime value of £10M. That was sweet! Then the government changed the rules, renamed it to BADR (though Worser would have been more appropriate) and cut the lifetime limit to £1M. In today's budget, they've reduced the BADR limit to just £500k - which as a tax benefit is minuscule. To compensate, they brought out a fabulous-sounding new Founders Relief - consultation paper link below. When you start reading it, it looks great. It applies to founders who've got more than 25% equity at any point in the company's life, which probably means if your company's got 3 founders or fewer, you probably qualify. But then it goes into such a convoluted maze of growth, revenue, and R&D requirements that few companies are ultimately going to qualify. And that's really the thing that makes it useless, because the whole point of such a relief is that, as a founder, when you're weighing up the pros and cons of building a business in the UK versus, for example, moving to the US, you see at the outset that, great, I'm going to pay only 10% CGT on my shares. But here, there is so much uncertainty that there's no way you can bank that as a benefit, and so ultimately it fails its key purpose, which is to drive decision-making for an early-stage founder to build and stay in the UK. So, fabulous work by Startup Coalition and Dom Hallas on getting this and the other package of founder benefits that they've managed to get into the budget at a time when that must have been an incredibly hard uphill climb with the government. I'd love it if this benefit was something that founders could bank on at the outset, but it's not. So I'm looking forward to using the consultation period to turn this into something deterministic rather than having the same chance as a lottery ticket. assets.publishing.service.go…

There are some fantastic free in-person @SeedLegals events in NYC this week, all themed around conquering your fears about presenting in front of others, getting confident on stage, creating a brilliant pitch, and raising investment. Look forward to seeing you there! Tue 27th 6PM @ Fabrik DUMBO Founder Pitch Clinic with Anthony Rose & Dave Wolovsky Interactive masterclass to help you conquer your nerves, get confident on stage and deliver an awesome pitch. luma.com/dehgirvb?tk=uNDrLr Wed 28th 6PM @ 26 Broadway, downtown Plug and Play & SeedLegals: Pitching Masterclass Do a 3-minute pitch to Plug & Play and SeedLegals, get immediate feedback, watch and cheer others. luma.com/w6eyybfk?tk=GsCR3l Thu 29th 10AM @ The Wilson, Chelsea SeedLegals Power Hours with Anthony X Wayo 1-on-1 office hours with Anthony Rose, CEO of SeedLegals. Bring your pitch deck, website, fundraising questions, ask me anything. luma.com/5g4kolnf Fri 30th 1PM @ Edge Studios, 45th St Your Investor Pitch: what to say & how to say it. A free, two-hour workshop for founders who want to build a stronger investor pitch and deliver it with confidence. luma.com/xkp2ppvs

Fundraising is broken. Founders have an idea, tell investors they're raising $500K to fund the next 18 months. Investors wire their entire amount up front without any idea of whether it'll take off. But founders don't need $500k. If they had $50k a month, that would be awesome. So founders struggle to raise because they're asking too much, and investors lose their investment by giving it all up front rather than based on validation and traction. Welcome to Steadily, the milestone-based fundraising platform. gosteadily.lovable.app And introducing the Steadily SAFE, the world's first milestone-based SAFE investment instrument. ☝ Before you get too excited, everything above is a concept we put together at a hackathon in New York today. Thanks to vibe coding, in the space of 5 hours, we came up with a concept, made a Lovable web page, and built an actual working app. Well, mostly working. If enough people like this, we'll go and build it! Thanks to Hunter Peress, Paula Bejarano, Femi Palmer & Shubh Khandhadia who collectively brainstormed and built this together with me at Deal Flow: NYC's First VC Hackathon here in New York, arranged by the amazing Somya Gupta.

The UK government's Online Safety Act is a national embarrassment. If you've been following the news, the UK government, under the guise of protecting children, is trying to force websites to require all UK users to provide passport or other ID in order to access content on those sites. The way this plays out is websites and platforms will pull out of the UK, and then everyone will use a VPN to continue to access them as if they are in a different country. It take seconds to install a VPN, bypasses the government's efforts to control your access to the internet. There's been talk of VPNs being banned, but that can't happen because banks and any number of companies rely on VPNs. More importantly, welcome to the next generation of distributed VPNs. Distributed VPN networks have no central control. And thanks to the code being open-sourced, anybody can create their own VPN network, there'll be thousands of websites you can download a VPN installer from. Next-generation distributed VPNs just killed the Online Safety Act. To explain how current and next-gen distributed VPNs work, I spoke to @harryhalpin, CEO at Switzerland-based @nym , a privacy-first VPN. I admire Harry's passion for protecting the core values of the internet against state control. @prestonjbyrne you can add distributed VPNs to your list of reasons it won't work.

You can now get an AI summary of your fundraising and legal documents on @SeedLegals. As part of the rapidly growing set of AI features on SeedLegals, it's now super easy to get a summary of the terms in your documents. You can even ask questions about the document and the deal terms. And if you're an admin on the company, if you want to change anything, just click on the Terms tab to set your preferred terms, and everything will update instantly.