On July 12, 2023, our Managing Partner Erdem Mümtaz Hacıpaşaoğlu joined a session at İTÜ Magnet — Istanbul Technical University’s well-known entrepreneurship and innovation hub — where the conversation focused on the legal structures founders need to put in place as they move from idea to incorporated company.
The central thesis of the session was clear: most early-stage legal problems are problems of timing — a clean founder agreement, a complete IP assignment and a thoughtful share structure cost almost nothing on day one, and become extraordinarily expensive to retrofit at the diligence stage of a Series A.
From idea to entity
Mümtaz walked through the most common founder-stage decisions: where to incorporate, how to allocate equity among founders, how to handle vesting and reverse-vesting, how to assign IP correctly from independent contributors, and how to structure early friends-and-family or angel investments without creating downstream problems.
The lawyer as a strategic partner
Closing the session, Mümtaz returned to a recurring theme: the founder-stage lawyer is not a cost center — they are a structural co-author of the company’s first years, and the difference between a transactional lawyer and a strategic one becomes visible in the cleanliness of the cap table when the first institutional round closes.
