Vauban has been keeping a strong emphasis on its product and execution, and for the moment, our marketing and PR has been limited. When someone writes about us, we generally become aware of it pretty quickly. Someone reached out to us recently, saying that they’d heard about us on the blog of Harvey Multani. Reading through this blog, we noticed that it was all centred upon a concept called the employee led-SPV, which we had never heard of before. We had to get on a call to learn more. If you are an employee at an early stage startup you believe in, you might enjoy learning more about the concept.
An employee-led SPV is created by an employee for the purpose of investing in his or her employer. It is a way for employees of startups to enjoy their employers’ success in a more direct way than stock options permit. How? Employees do this by investing their close network money and collecting a carried interest (i.e., a performance fee).
Let’s say you are working for a startup you enjoy and think it will become huge in the future.
There are several options to accommodate this.
We recommend sticking to one employee’s close network of HNW and family offices. There are several reasons for that.
Again, for simplicity and regulatory reasons, we recommend using a syndicate structure where voting rights and day-to-day management are shared with investors, like the Self-Managed LLP (for international startups) or the EIS Nominee Structure (for British startups). Traditional Partnership SPVs are more expensive and target regulated investment managers.
While this concept was born in Silicon Valley where equity has always been more sought after than in Europe by startup employees, Vauban is proud to facilitate the Employee-led SPV in the UK, in Europe and internationally generally.
Vauban has transformed the process of setting up and closing a SPV from a highly archaic, slow and expensive journey into blazing-fast digital one.
Feel free to reach out if you think we could help you build an Employee-led SPV.