Fundraising Fundamentals — Lesson 4: The Term Sheet Is a Control Document

This is The Build Log, the weekly fundraising series from The AI-Native Founder. New here? Start with Lesson 1.

The email came in at 4pm and you have read it eleven times since. Two pages, a number near the top that is bigger than you expected, and a paragraph at the end saying they would like to move quickly. You have already told your co-founder. You have already done the arithmetic on what the number means for your ownership, and it came out fine, and that is the part that should worry you, because you checked the one number on the page that is designed to be checked.

Here is what this lesson gives you: the four clauses that decide who controls your company regardless of what the valuation says, a way to tell a standard term sheet from a creative one in about twenty minutes, and a diff agent that does the reading so you arrive at the negotiation already knowing which two things to push on. None of it takes longer than an evening.