The Innovation Attorney Podcast

16:16

Does Delaware Still Carry Legal Risk After Senate...

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/09/25

The Delaware Supreme Court upheld Senate Bill 21’s Section 144 safe harbor on February 27, 2026 in Rutledge v. Clearway Energy Group LLC, but the reincorporation risk survives.The ruling shields a director, an officer, or a controlling stockholder from money damages and most equitable claims once a conflicted transaction clears an informed, disinterested committee or a fully informed majority of the minority vote. It says nothing about the separate claim still pending in the Delaware Court of

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15:16

Hachette v Google Puts Training Data Documentation on...

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/09/25

Hachette Book Group v. Google LLC, filed July 10, 2026 in the Southern District of New York, alleges Google stripped author names and titles from books before training Gemini. That single allegation is reshaping what training data documentation a startup needs to keep. The complaint does not ask whether training a model on a book is lawful. It asks whether erasing the record of where the book came from is its own separate violation, regardless of the answer to the first question.Hachette Book Group,

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16:38

Why Deep Tech Founders Have More Leverage In 2026...

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/09/25

Deep tech founders raising capital in 2026 hold more negotiating power over their term sheets than at any point since the sector became a distinct venture category, and the reason has almost nothing to do with the technology itself. It has to do with how few investors can actually underwrite reactor physics or laser optics, and how many of those investors are now chasing the same handful of companies at once.Most founders think of their capital stack as one number: the size of the round. Focused

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15:54

How To Negotiate A GPU Cluster Reservation Contract

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/09/25

A cloud provider that finances a GPU cluster against a six year depreciation schedule, while selling that same cluster under a four year customer contract, has already decided who absorbs the difference, and it is not the provider. That mismatch, not the headline dollar figure on the term sheet, is the mechanic an AI startup’s own negotiating team should study before signing a multi year GPU cluster reservation in 2026. CoreWeave’s own reported book, 96 percent of 2024 revenue from take or pay

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14:37

How Startups Should Structure AI Computing Services...

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/09/25

Positron AI closed an 875 million dollar Series C on September 10, 2026, at a 5 billion dollar valuation, and the round says nothing about how the company should paper its next customer deal. The commercial mechanic most founders building dedicated AI computing infrastructure miss is not the financing. It is the choice between selling a customer the hardware itself and selling the customer a metered slice of what that hardware produces, a choice that determines who owns the obsolescence risk, who

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18:46

Are Founder Non-Compete Agreements Still Enforceable

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/09/24

The Federal Trade Commission erased its own noncompete rule from 16 CFR Part 910 on February 12, 2026, leaving founder noncompetes to state law and the Delaware Court of Chancery.A noncompete written into an ordinary employment agreement now lives or dies by the statute of the state where the employee works. A noncompete tied to the sale of a founder’s shares or a company’s goodwill survives in nearly every state, including California, under sale of business exceptions such as Business and

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15:05

What Does The Anthropic $1.5 Billion Settlement Mean

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/09/24

Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle Bartz v. Anthropic PBC, No. 24-cv-05417 (N.D. Cal.), a class action brought by author Andrea Bartz and other writers over the books Anthropic downloaded to train Claude. The federal court granted final approval on July 20, 2026, closing the largest copyright class action settlement in United States history. The fund pays roughly $3,000 for each of 482,460 works on the court certified list. It resolves a single, narrow claim: that Anthropic built a

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16:16

Do Tender Offers Affect the QSBS Tax Exclusion

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/09/24

A tender offer that lets employees sell part of their vested stock can strip the federal tax exclusion off shares that were never part of the sale at all. Internal Revenue Code Section 1202(c)(3) tests every stock redemption a company makes against the shares it issued in the surrounding two years, and a founder who authorizes a well intentioned liquidity event without running that test first can leave people who never sold a single share holding a tax bill they did not create.Tender offer volume

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15:39

Should My Startup Incorporate In Delaware or Texas

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/09/24

Dropbox moved from Delaware to Nevada on March 5, 2025, but that move, and Meta Platforms’ reported interest in Texas, do not change where a venture funded startup should incorporate. The litigation risk pushing large public companies toward Nevada and Texas comes from entire fairness review of transactions involving a controlling stockholder, the standard the Court of Chancery applied against Elon Musk in Tornetta v. Musk. A seed or Series A company has no controlling stockholder problem to solve

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14:27

Should Startups Get AI Vendor Indemnification Clauses

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/09/24

A startup buying an AI vendor’s product should insist on a negotiated indemnification clause for claims tied to that vendor’s AI generated output, because the commercial insurance market stopped absorbing that risk in 2026. The Insurance Services Office filed three generative AI exclusion endorsements, CG 40 47, CG 40 48, and CG 35 08, effective January 2026, and major carriers applied them to commercial general liability renewals through the year. A contract clause is the only mechanism a founder

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14:30

Does Tech E&O Insurance Cover AI Chatbot Mistakes

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/09/24

A startup can still buy technology errors and omissions insurance that pays a claim over its AI product’s bad output in 2026, but only from the specific carriers, CFC and Beazley among them, that added affirmative artificial intelligence endorsements this year rather than relying on a legacy policy that never mentions the word model.The mechanic most founders miss is that the exclusion making headlines this year does not live inside the policy that actually pays their claim. The Insurance Services

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19:03

What Happens If My AI Startup Trains Models On...

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/09/23

Seven class action complaints filed against Mercor.io Corporation since April 2026, including Ananthula v. Mercor.io Corporation, No. 3:26-cv-03362 in the Northern District of California, allege that the ten billion dollar AI recruiting startup exposed facial biometric data, interview recordings, and Social Security numbers for more than 40,000 contractors after a March 24, 2026 supply chain breach. The complaints reach further than a standard data breach filing. They accuse Mercor of using

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12:43

Does The Fed Rate Hike Raise Venture Debt Interest

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/09/23

The Federal Reserve’s September 16, 2026 vote to raise the federal funds target range a quarter point to 3.75 to 4.00 percent already increased the interest bill on most outstanding venture debt in the United States, and it did so without a single lender picking up the phone.A founder who signed a venture debt term sheet eighteen months ago is used to thinking about interest rate risk the way a homeowner thinks about a thirty year mortgage: locked in at closing, revisited only if the company

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12:51

AI Startup Seed Valuation Premium vs Non AI Startups

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/09/23

Seed stage investors in 2026 price artificial intelligence startups at a median premium of roughly 42 percent over non-AI peers, a gap of $17.9 million against $12.6 million in pre-money valuation, and that gap widens to 5.4 times by Series A. A founder without an artificial intelligence focused product who prices a seed round against the blended market headline, rather than against the sector specific comparable set, sets a Series A hurdle the company’s own growth rate cannot clear.In thirty years

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15:35

Would an AI Labs Agreement To Slow Model Releases...

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/09/23

A federal court dissolved the American Airlines and JetBlue capacity alliance in 2023, a precedent that would likely doom a formal pacing pact among Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft. Sherman Act Section 1, 15 U.S.C. Section 1, condemns concerted restraints among competitors, and a pact that slows the release of frontier models restrains output the same way the airlines’ capacity coordination restrained flights. The four companies already meet inside the Frontier Model Forum, the safety

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18:08

How Should a Fintech Startup Prepare For CFTC AI...

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/09/23

On October 28, 2026, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission will question the founders and engineers building agentic AI trading systems at the first session of its new Frontier Forum series. The Commission’s Innovation Task Force announced the roundtable on September 21, 2026, and named artificial intelligence and agentic finance as its opening topic. No proposed rule accompanies the announcement, and that absence is not the same as an absence of stakes. The Commission already told every

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14:25

Should an AI Startup Take Venture Debt For a Data Center

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/09/23

Venture debt paid for a real slice of the AI infrastructure buildout this year, and the two biggest 2026 GPU backed facilities both required a signed customer contract before a bank would lend a dollar against the hardware. An AI infrastructure startup should treat venture debt as the instrument that stretches an already funded equity round further, not as the instrument that gets the company to its first contracted customer in the first place.Here is the mechanic most founders shopping a term sheet

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15:18

SEC Regulation Crypto Assets Exemptions

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/09/23

A founder with a token launch scheduled for the fourth quarter of 2026 is reading the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Regulation Crypto Assets and hearing the wrong headline. The rule, published in the Federal Register on August 21, 2026, with comments due October 20, 2026, does let that founder sell up to 5 million dollars of tokens without filing a registration statement. It does not let the tokens stop being securities. Those are two different questions, and the gap between them is where a

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18:29

Krux Digitial

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/09/23

Salesforce Acquisition of Krux Digital: A Venture Capital AnalysisThe Innovation Attorney | mjk@theinnovationattorney.com | March 2026Executive SummaryIn October 2016, Salesforce announced the acquisition of Krux Digital, a San Francisco-based cloud data management platform, for approximately 700 million dollars in a combined cash-and-stock transaction. The deal closed in January 2017 and stands as one of the most strategically consequential exits in the ad technology and marketing technology sector

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15:12

Why Is Flock Safety Losing Municipal Contracts

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/09/22

Flock Safety, valued at $7.5 billion, faces widening municipal contract cancellations after the Los Angeles Police Department’s Office of Inspector General found a 32.3 percent false positive rate in July 2026. The company’s own conduct now drives much of that attrition: audits in Illinois and litigation in California allege that Flock let outside agencies query local camera databases without the permissions state law requires. Hardware disputes in Massachusetts and Texas show gaps in how the

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