Playbook · Startups, Founders & Venture Advisory
The Startup Legal Playbook
A complete legal and regulatory guide across the five stages of a startup - ideation and structuring, incorporation, early-stage funding, growth, and exit - with the 2025–2026 reforms folded in.
21 slides
What this covers
The playbook walks the five stages of a startup life cycle and the legal event that sits inside each transition: ideation and structuring, incorporation and foundation, early-stage funding, growth and scale-up, and maturity and exit.
Why it exists
Founders tend to treat compliance as a funding-round checklist; regulators, acquirers and courts treat it as continuous. The stage at which a gap is created is rarely the stage at which it is discovered - most surface at diligence, years later.
Inside
- Founders' agreement terms, entity choice and DPIIT recognition under the 2026 framework
- Formation filings, and the hard deadlines of the first 30 to 180 days
- Term sheet, SHA, valuation and FC-GPR reporting on a funding round
- ESOPs: legal basis, vesting, two-stage taxation, and the instruments compared
- Governance and the four labour codes in force from November 2025
- Exit routes - M&A, IPO, buyback, secondary sale and wind-up
- What changed in Indian startup law across 2025 and 2026
- Risk areas founders commonly overlook
The full deck is available to download below. It is marked for internal discussion and circulated on request.
Downloads