Startups Are Complicated. Your Estate Plan Doesn’t Have to Be. Founder Friendly Estate Planning

If you're building a company, you already have enough on your plate. Product development, team growth, investor relations — the last thing you need is your estate plan complicating things further.

One common issue: how to handle private company stock in your trust.

Most law firms will recommend re-titling your shares into the name of your trust. In theory, that’s fine. In practice? It means asking your startup’s executive team to coordinate with legal to re-issue your stock — something that’s often low priority, potentially expensive, and may raise questions that no one wants to deal with right now.

We get it. And we agree: for most clients, the benefit of re-titling private stock is limited.

So what happens if you don’t re-title your shares? Will they go through probate if you pass away?

Not necessarily. If your stock still isn’t liquid and your family believes it has value, they can file an 850 petition — a streamlined court process — to confirm the stock is part of your trust. It usually costs around $4,000 and avoids full probate.

To make things easier, we include an assignment of interest in your estate plan. This allows you to assign any stock or interest that can be assigned to your trust. Some companies do require consent from the executive team for such assignments. But in our experience, most companies are willing to honor the assignment after death, particularly when they understand it doesn’t affect ownership — it simply clarifies who receives the shares.

So rather than delay your estate plan over a technicality, we recommend this practical path: sign the assignment, move forward, and revisit the title if the shares become public or liquid.

Your estate plan should support your work — not get in the way of it.

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