A workbook for junior lawyers · English law
Venture Deals
A plain-English workbook on how startup investment actually papers — the instruments that take money before anyone agrees a price, the priced round that finally sets one, and the terms founders and funds argue over hardest. Built around one company's complete funding history, with a full training investment agreement you can read clause by clause. Every chapter shows its sums on the page — cap tables, prices per share, percentages — so keep a pencil handy: here the arithmetic is the lesson, and none of it is taken on trust.
Chapter 1 is free to read now. The edition unlocks the other fourteen chapters, the full training investment agreement and the 40-question final exam.
How this workbook works
Watch the table move
Every chapter opens and closes on the same cap table. You see who owns what before a step and after it, so dilution stops being a word and becomes a number you can point at.
See it in a real agreement
Concepts are anchored to specific clauses of one investment agreement — an original training document with a constitution, six historic instruments and the 2025 deed of exchange.
Test yourself
Every chapter ends with a 10-question test (pass mark 8). Finish with a 40-question final exam. Your progress is saved to your Solon profile, alongside your other editions.
The case study: funding Solaris
November 2020. Two founders incorporate Solaris Digital Assets Europe Limited, an Irish crypto-asset company, with €3,000 and a two-page agreement. Five years later it is owned by a single shareholder and sells for €42 million. This workbook follows every step of that journey — the angels who paid before there was a price, the note that hoped never to be repaid, the priced round that finally set one, the bad year that made anti-dilution bite, and the deed that swept a venture cap table into one line.
The full investment agreement is on this site, and chapters link straight into its clauses — the waterfall, the anti-dilution formula, the drag-along that could not be used. This is the prequel to the deal our M&A edition documents and our diligence edition investigates.
The modules
Reference shelf
The Solaris Investment Agreement
The complete training document: the cap table record, 23 clauses, the constitution, the six historic instruments and the 2025 deed of exchange.
Glossary
Every venture term used in this workbook, in plain English — with links to the clause where it actually lives.
Final Exam
Forty questions across all fifteen chapters. Pass mark 32. Open book, like real practice.
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M&A Foundations
What happened to Solaris next: the €42m sale, with its own complete training share purchase agreement.
Legal Due Diligence
The buyer's investigation into everything this workbook watched being built — including the two loose ends nobody tidied.
Shareholders' Agreements & JVs
Reserved matters, deadlock and exits outside the venture context.