One thing I learned after meeting with a bunch of top firms in the Silicon Valley (Fenwick&West, Orrick, Cooley, Silicon Legal Strategy) is that "innovative" and "creative" legal strategies can be much more expensive and can even hurt you in the critical initial growth period. If your goal is to raise money from investors, your best (and cheapest) bet is to follow established conventions and standard terms. When you get to be much bigger (e.g. Facebook, Dropbox), that's when more creative strategies may be needed (e.g. Facebook's strategy to prevent employees from selling stock prior to IPO).
In regards to IP, it's always a cost vs benefit tradeoff. It was quite refreshing to hear pretty much every partner we spoke to say "just focus on building something awesome and focus on the hard legal stuff later," instead of pushing us down the (more beneficial to them in the short term) path of securing patents, etc.