Andrew D. Toebben

Andy specializes in business law for high-tech startups, venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, and angel investors, with a primary focus on the formation, financing, successful execution, and sale of start-ups in San Francisco, Silicon Valley, and the greater emerging growth company marketplace.

Andy’s representation of companies spans the entire corporate life cycle, from formation to exit, including pre-incorporation business advice, prospective investor introductions, general corporate counseling to achieve business objectives, debt and equity financings, commercial contracts, employment matters, mergers & acquisitions, and other day-to-day business matters relevant to rapidly growing companies. His clients operate and invest in AI, enterprise SaaS & IT, climate tech, fintech, semiconductors, digital health & wellness, consumer internet, autonomous vehicles and robotics, mobile, cybersecurity, space tech, hardware, big data, biotech, life sciences, gaming, social, and new media industries.

Andy also represents some of the nation’s leading venture capital and angel investors in their SAFE, convertible bridge loan, early-stage seed and preferred stock equity investments, as well as their M&A exits and other liquidity events. He has structured hundreds of emerging technology businesses and led company and investor-side transactions valued at billions of dollars.

Andy began his legal career in the Silicon Valley office of Gunderson Dettmer LLP. In the fall of 2008, he took a leave of absence to serve on Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. As Deputy Director of Voter Protection, Andy led the President’s legal efforts to protect the vote in the Commonwealth of Virginia, and he continues to work closely with members of the Obama administration’s leadership team.

Andy received his law degree from the University of Virginia School of Law and his Bachelor of Science degrees in Economics and Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he graduated with highest honors and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. During his junior year in college, while studying economics in England, Andy played shooting guard on Cambridge University’s varsity basketball team. Prior to law school, Andy served as an Urban Fellow for Mayor Rudolph Giuliani in New York City and as a Leland Fellow for the Congressional Hunger Center in Washington DC.

Andy grew up in Lawrence, Kansas. During college and in the years soon after he lived in a Maasai village on the Kenyan / Tanzanian border, backpacked and motorcycled throughout South America, and couch-surfed with families in Peru, Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina. He’s still exploring. But today you’re more likely to find him biking his home streets in San Francisco. Or on foot in the Old City of Barcelona, where he and his vibrant Catalan wife visit family, revel in Mediterranean culture, and do their best to keep up with their two buoyant sons. Andy remains an avid college basketball fan, and a Jayhawk for life.