Bridge Funding Startups: Interested Board Members, CEOs and How to Sanitize The Process

The venture capital community and its outside lawyers used to have real expertise in problematic bridge rounds, in which investors provide interim or "bridge"’ funding for a faltering startup in a choppy market. Now I wonder if any lawyer or investor without at least five years of experience can possibly have deep experience with these financings. It’s not that it’s so difficult to understand the mechanism of bridge rounds; it’s just that there have been very few distressed situations in tech-centric venture capital in quite some time. This is, however, a skill set we will all be dusting off soon enough, as markets turn and startups that have been overfunded or have staffed up too much (or both) perform poorly. And when we do have to dust off those skills, we will think it too soon!