This informative program will focus on ten key aspects of starting your own company: (1) leaving your current job; (2) raising capital; (3) choosing an entity type; (4) hiring employees and contractors; (5) dealing with vendors; (6) contracting with customers; (7) protecting intellectual property; (8) acquiring debt; (9) locating partners; and (10) planning exit strategies.  The speakers have extensive experience working with start-ups and guiding them from formation to funding.

SPEAKERS:  Sblend A. Sblendorio and Derek Y. Chien

Attorney Sblend A. Sblendorio is a shareholder in the firm. His practice focuses exclusively on real estate, finance and commercial. He has negotiated hundreds of business acquisitions and dispositions, real property transactions and work-outs for businesses, developers, commercial landlords, and commercial lenders, and has negotiated the sale, lease and financing of hundreds of millions of dollars of business assets and real property. He assists his clients nationwide with real estate, land use, commercial negotiations, bankruptcy and insolvency. He has negotiated land use entitlements in the Bay Area for a couple of decades with an emphasis in public assistance financing, development agreements and specific plans. Sblend was named a “Northern California Super Lawyer” in 2012 as chosen by his peers and through the independent research of Law & Politics and San Francisco Magazine.

Attorney Derek Y. Chien is in the firm’s Corporate and Intellectual Property practice groups. As a transactions attorney whose clients range from start-ups to large companies, Derek’s practice focuses on commercial and technology transactions, corporate governance, private mergers and acquisitions, financings and recapitalizations, as well as providing business advice and counseling to for-profit and non-profit organizations.