Exhibit AA new evening · 2027
Between theTerm Sheets
Built for the profession. Funded by it.
Canadian accounting and bookkeeping tech companies pitch to the accountants and bookkeepers who would use them. Community capital instead of venture capital — and no date yet, because the room gets built out of what comes in.
Term sheet · unexecuted
- Year
- 2027
- Date
- Not yet set
- Venue
- Not yet set
- Pitches
- Open now
Two lines are blank because nobody has filled them in yet. The third is the only one that matters today.
Accounting tech, pitched to accountants.
Canadian companies building for accountants and bookkeepers put a real business in front of the accountants and bookkeepers who would actually use it — and somebody in the room can read a term sheet properly before anyone signs one.
Pitch the business. Keep the company. The second half is the part nobody prices, which is why it gets a section of its own further down.
- Who pitches
- Canadian accounting and bookkeeping tech companies
- Who they pitch to
- Accountants and bookkeepers — the people who would use it
- Where
- Toronto. Venue to be confirmed.
- What it costs to apply
- Nothing. The form is the whole process.
What if the community funded what the community uses?
Software for this profession is funded, almost without exception, by people who will never use it. The cheque arrives with a growth target attached and no idea whether the thing works in a real practice on a real Monday.
Smaller cheques, from people whose institutional knowledge is worth more than the cheque. That insight, and that alignment, is the whole of what makes this worth doing.
Traditional venture capital
Capital from the community
- Where the money comes from
- Venture capitalA fund, raising from people who will never open the product.The communityAccountants and bookkeepers who would have it open by nine on Monday.
- What arrives with it
- Venture capitalA board seat, a growth target and a reporting pack.The communityTwenty years of running the practice you are trying to sell into.
- What it knows about your market
- Venture capitalWhat your deck told it.The communityIt is your market.
- What it is actually tracking
- Venture capitalThe fund's next raise, and the multiple it needs from you.The communityWhether the thing genuinely works, because they have to live with the answer.
The room gets built out of the pitches.
Fixing a date first and finding pitches afterwards is how you end up with a room full of people watching three companies that were available. So this runs the other way round.
It matters more here than it would at a general pitch night. Which accountants and bookkeepers are worth inviting depends entirely on what is being built — the whole point is that the people listening would use the thing, and that can only be worked out once there is something to listen to.
Sometime in 2027, in Toronto. Which evening, and where, depends on what turns up.
Pitches sent now are read first, and they are what the date gets built around.
- The room is built from the pitches, not the other way round.
- Which accountants and bookkeepers are worth inviting depends entirely on what is being pitched.
- A date gets set once both sides of the room are worth a date.
- Everything sent now is read, and read properly, before anything is fixed.
The money is the easy part to understand.
Here is the arithmetic underneath the section above. These are three lines founders sign without pricing them. Change them and watch what you walk away with — the cheque stays at a million whichever way you set it, so the only thing moving is the terms.
The terms
Raising $1,000,000
Pre-money valuation
What the company is worth before the money goes in.
Liquidation preference
What comes off the top when the company sells — and whether the investor shares what is left as well.
Option pool
Set aside for future hires. Created before the money goes in, so it comes out of your side alone.
Pro-rata rights would sit here on a real sheet. They cost you nothing in this round — they shape the next one, which is why they are not a switch above.
The day the money lands, you own
%
Sell it later for $6,000,000 and you walk away with $4,800,000. The investor takes $1,200,000.
Investor 20.0% · option pool 0.0% · post-money $5,000,000
Every outcome, side by side
$3,000,000
$2,000,000
$6,000,000
$4,800,000
$12,000,000
$9,600,000
You Option pool Investor
A worked example, not an offer. The figures are invented; the arithmetic is not.
Set it to a $4M valuation with a 1× participating preference, then to $8M with a 2× non-participating one. Between the preference and a six-million-dollar sale, the higher valuation is the worse deal for you — and that is the range most companies actually sell in. Below the preference, neither structure leaves you anything at all. Doubling the headline number sounds like winning. It is a trade, and this is the shape of it.
A smaller cheque from someone inside the profession is not automatically a kinder one, and nothing here pretends otherwise. What changes is that you can ask the person writing it what a clause actually means, and they have every reason to give you a straight answer — because they are the ones who have to live with whether the product works. That is the argument above, in numbers.
No black box.
It gets read
Every submission, by a person
Not scored, not filtered on a keyword. Read, which is slower and the only way it works.
A shortlist
The ones that fit the room being built
Fit is not quality, and here it is specific: whether the accountants and bookkeepers being invited are the ones who would use what you have built. A strong pitch can be wrong for the room that is forming, and that is said plainly.
A call
Twenty minutes, no deck
To find out what you actually need, which is often not what the form asked about.
The room
An invitation, once there is a date
You hear either way. A no that never arrives is the thing this is trying not to be.
Clauses struck from the draft.
Struck out- A venture fund, or anything that behaves like one
- A stage, a spotlight and a buzzer
- A pitch competition with a prize
- A fee to apply, or to attend if you are pitching
- A promise that anyone in the room will write you a cheque
Tell us what you’re building.
For Canadian companies building for accountants and bookkeepers. It is longer than a contact form because nobody can triage less than this. Fifteen fields, once, and then a person reads it.
Execution
No fee to apply and no fee to pitch. If it is not right for the room being built, you will be told that rather than left waiting.
The other room
Lake Effect is the dinner, not the pitch.
Smaller, no stage, nobody raising anything. A few times a year on Toronto Island.