I am amazed every day by the resilience of people.

Life is difficult almost always, but 2020 is bananas.

I can’t complain because in some most important ways, my life got better. My kids are healthy and working from home. Ellen is building a career in real estate and is crazy busy because lunatics are buying homes this summer in Phoenix as if global cooling is about to be announced. I wake up at 5 AM each day just like I woke up before COVID-19. It just happens to be in my own bed and the same timezone an extra 10-15 days a month. I make my calls every day and work with my partners at Social Leverage and do my walks and runs and rides. I talk to my neighbors and the sun is shining. But I digress…

Despite 2020 being ridiculously difficult for most, companies are being started at a breakneck pace. I totally expect my mom to send me a pitch deck in the next week and she is still on a flip phone. Nobody knows Toronto obituaries better than Sandy!

For too long now, many founders want to do ‘SAFE note’ financings for their early rounds. I won’t go into all the gory details, but at Social Leverage we stopped doing SAFE notes a long time ago and when we talk to founders we mention early on that we only do ‘priced rounds’.

Fred Wilson points out on his blog today that…

There is this narrative that equity rounds are expensive and take a long time and that SAFE notes are quick and inexpensive. That is not right. We can do priced rounds as quickly and inexpensively as SAFE notes. And we do that regularly.

If you want to get your company going, take Fred’s advice which is the same we tell founders when they talk to us…’lets do a priced round’.

If you are a founder or an angel investor bookmark Fred’s post on financing document forms.