Startup Litigation
Plus: Reflections on the Academic Year at UC Law SF and Stanford GSB
Yesterday, we published the latest edition of the Startup Litigation Digest, a project that I lead at UC Law San Francisco. This edition covers high-profile cases involving startup fraud, founder disputes, board oversight failures, and regulatory enforcement actions. Featured cases include CaaStle’s $500M accounting scandal, GameOn’s alleged $60M fraud, the indictment of AllHere’s founder for defrauding investors in a collapsed AI-edtech startup, a $2.1M investor scam involving La Mancha’s founder, and Cookies’ $18M arbitration victory in a cannabis joint venture dispute. We also provide significant updates on previously covered litigation.
The Startup Litigation Digest began in 2023 in collaboration with my colleague Abe Cable. With support from a dedicated team of research assistants, we have now documented 28 cases, regularly adding approximately five new cases each quarter.
If you read this newsletter, you’ll be familiar with GameOn and CaaStle, but in this edition you can read about an extended number of cases.
Stanford GSB Course on Corporate Governance
This spring, I had the privilege of teaching a corporate governance course to two sections of 100 MBA students at Stanford. It was a fantastic experience, thanks to an outstanding group of students and teaching assistants. We were also fortunate to host an exceptional lineup of guest speakers, including Sue Siegel (former CIO of GE and CEO of GE Ventures; board member at Illumina, Align Technology, the Kaiser Family Foundation, and Chair of MIT’s The Engine), Teresa Briggs (former head of Deloitte in Silicon Valley; board member at ServiceNow, Snowflake, DocuSign, and Warby Parker), Nora Denzel (former interim CEO of Redbox/Outerwall; board member at AMD, Gen, SUSE, and NACD), Robert Zivnuska and Rachael Harrison (PJT Partners), Emily Melton (Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Threshold Ventures), Ignacio Giraldo (Partner at TPG Rise), and Jack Lazar (board member at Astera Labs, Box, GlobalFoundries, Resideo Technologies, thredUP, and Tonal Systems).
In my last newsletter, I mentioned the podcast version of my conversation with journalist and author Karen Hao, which I had the pleasure of moderating. Her new book, Empire of AI, offers a gripping inside look at OpenAI and the global race for artificial intelligence supremacy. Check out the event summary from Stanford’s GSB Corporations and Society Initiative (CASI), along with the video recording from the GSB, now with over 13,000 views.
UC Center for Business Law San Francisco Annual Report 2024-2025
The UC Center for Business Law San Francisco continued to grow in 2024–2025, expanding its core programs and partnerships. Highlights included the second and third editions of the VC-Backed Board Academy, the selection of the fifth cohort of CBL Scholars, three editions of the Startup Litigation Digest, and multiple roundtables, speaker series, and academic collaborations focused on corporate law, AI governance, and entrepreneurship. Thank you to our students, faculty, alumni, partners, and supporters for making this work possible.
Read the full 2024–2025 CBL Annual Report here.
Onward and upward.
Sincerely,
Evan Epstein