Why We Decided to Make Our Term Sheet Public

The VC world has a reputation for being opaque, and not without reason. During the fundraising process, Founders often feel like they’re navigating in the dark. This includes trying to guess what terms might be offered and then decoding somewhat cryptic term sheets that could have huge implications for their companies. We think this is backward.

The goal of a term sheet is to create alignment between founders and investors. When the terms are hidden until the end of the diligence process, that alignment becomes harder to achieve. At Dogwood Ventures, we’re taking a step toward fixing that. By making our term sheet public, we're not only fostering transparency but also significantly speeding up the decision-making process, ensuring both investors and founders can move forward quickly and confidently. We're committed to learning from this first version, and we may adjust our term sheet over time to better align with the needs of our founders. If we do, we'll explain why.

But there’s a deeper reason, too. If you look at the companies that change the world, they tend to be led by founders who value transparency, honesty and speed. Those founders attract the best people because they trust them and create a sense of urgency. By being transparent ourselves and hopefully decreasing the time spent fundraising, we are following the behavior we believe outlier founders value.

Making our term sheet public is a small act, but it’s part of a larger philosophy at Dogwood: the best way to win is to be open and honest, to trust founders, and to make the process as fast as possible. In the long run, we believe this approach will lead to better outcomes for everyone.

You can find our standard term sheet here: Dogwood Ventures Standard Term Sheet.

In the next blog post, we'll walk through our terms, the reasoning behind them and provide resources to help founders dive deeper into the world of term sheets.