Releasing "standard financing documents" like this is a win in two ways -- it saves you from the legal costs of creating documents from scratch each time, AND provides an "objective" "standard" set of documents, so people are less likely to waste a lot of time and energy negotiating. Or, if they do negotiate, at least there is a fair starting point.
If foreign countries wanted to try to recreate Silicon Valley (as the Startup Chile people are doing), they should create equivalent financing docs under their own national laws and publish them. A well-understood legal environment with lawyers/etc. familiar with the process is one of the big advantages of Silicon Valley and the US.
A small note, what's the license terms of those documents? "Open-sourcing them" doesn't mean anything and all author rights are still reserved for those documents.
It would be more appropriate to add the terms of the licensing for the documents. For example, the CC-PD (to put them in public domain), GNU FDL or CC-BY-SA or CC-BY.
A brief summary of important terms (IANAL, this is just a quick read):
- This has 1x preference and no participation.
- Pro-rata rights are available to some shareholders.
- Ditto information rights.
- The preferred has a veto over selling the company that can be exercised with a simple majority.
- Lots of stuff not included: board seat, drag along, antidilution, redemption rights, employee option pool (!), restriction on sales, or a no-shop.
Overall mostly VERY favorable to the entrepreneurs, mostly by virtue of what's been left out. The one notable exception is the prefered's veto over an exit, which is a big ouch.
