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In Hollywood, a lot of stuff is agreed upon without a contract. How does that work?
If your instinct is to say "it's a disaster," this will fail.
> Everything about contracts was frustrating, both at those startups and the larger companies that acquired us. In Hollywood, a lot of stuff is agreed upon without a contract. How does that work? If your instinct is to say "it's a disaster," this will fail.
That's the set of contingencies that contracts are supposed to address.
I am building a business right now, and I need a standard contract for customers. So this is exciting! I am delighted! I just wish I were in the target audience. My business is not a startup, and I'm going to need specific terms because I'm a one-man shop. (How do you handle taking a vacation as a one-man shop? Work will effectively cease.) Maybe I'll look at the contributor list and find an attorney in my state, whi…
They can potentially help with configuring the standards for your business and/or drafting something custom if none of those are a fit
> Everything about contracts was frustrating, both at those startups and the larger companies that acquired us. In Hollywood, a lot of stuff is agreed upon without a contract. How does that work? If your instinct is to say "it's a disaster," this will fail.
By the time YC published the SAFE, it had a lot of soft power and influence in early stage investing, because it could coordinate with every YC startup in the batch and give them cover if an investor had an issue with the SAFE. They essentially had a "union" (on the startup founder side) with critical mass, which when they all demanded the use of the SAFE instead of bespoke docs (which many investors to this day still try to mess with the standard SAFE), it just became easier for the whole industry to adopt the standard.
I'm curious how you guys are thinking about achieving that effect in the realm of each type of contract? Because on a 1-1 basis, it seems like the bigger party will always just demand their lawyers' preferred contract, and they can have a lot more leverage than a smaller startup.
The other challenge I can see is that ultimately, there's a perverse incentive when it comes to the lawyers. In my experience, large corporate firms like Orrick and WSGR are pretty aligned, because they want the long-term relationships with tech startups. But this product objectively reduces the need for lawyers (which I'm all for, btw!). For larger companies, where they pretty much pass it to their retained law firm at the contract stage of the process, what incentive is there for the lawyers to go with the standard contract (low billable hours), versus a bespoke contract (where they'll make a lot more money)?
Or I guess, how are you guys getting around the lawyers and selling the companies themselves, over the probable objections of their law firms?
I love this, and it seems you've already gotten some good traction, good luck!
Do you plan on offering migration services from Ironclad? That would amount to importing our workflows and repository.
> Everything about contracts was frustrating, both at those startups and the larger companies that acquired us. In Hollywood, a lot of stuff is agreed upon without a contract. How does that work? If your instinct is to say "it's a disaster," this will fail.
One guess is that it might be a relatively small community where the same people and companies do business with each other over and over. In a community like that, some of the jobs that contracts do in other industries might be done through norms and relationships.
I enjoyed "Why Trust Matters" by Ben Ho (https://www.amazon.com/Why-Trust-Matters-Economists-Guide/dp...) and it talked about a sweet spot where contracts shouldn't try to over or under-specify the deal in order to optimize for trust. I'm sure that some industries, like Hollywood, have less laid down in contracts than others.
If you're open to it, I'd love to hear more about how you've seen this work in Hollywood.
Congrats on launching. This is a very new area for me. How does tech solve this problem?
Your intuition is right, and in our view tech only solves part of the problem. We believe that the actual content of the contracts needs to get standardized, in addition to deploying tech against the contract problem When lots of organizations use standard contracts, everyone becomes more efficient regardless of what tech they use (or even if they're just working with contracts manually). Standardization also enables…
Do you offer integration with docusign or Adobe? I failed to understanding the signing process. I am not the target demographic but I toyed with the idea of such products as this field is a total mess.