Live data from Hacker News

Launch HN: Common Paper (YC W23) – SAFEs for Commercial Contracts

news.ycombinator.com

51–60 of 169 posts

Re: Launch HN: Common Paper (YC W23) – SAFEs for Commercial Contracts

#51

Your main pitch is on open source standardized contracts and that definitely resonates, but as a current Ironclad user where they’re our single-most expensive SaaS subscription, your contract lifecycle management system built for startups is what resonates for me. Do you plan on offering migration services from Ironclad? That would amount to importing our workflows and repository.

I would love to have you as a customer, but I'd have to do more research on what it would take to import the workflows and repository. If you're open to talking about this, my email is jake [at] commonpaper.com

Re: Launch HN: Common Paper (YC W23) – SAFEs for Commercial Contracts

#52

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…

If you send us a note at support@commonpaper.com, we'd be happy to make an intro to one of the attorneys on the committee. They can potentially help with configuring the standards for your business and/or drafting something custom if none of those are a fit

Thank you for the offer. I just went through the list, and unfortunately, I found none in my state. :(

I still might use the contracts, though. Thank you.

Re: Launch HN: Common Paper (YC W23) – SAFEs for Commercial Contracts

#54
I’ve seen so many deals get hung up on the smallest legal issues. One time a company spent 6 months just negotiating the NDA before could even get to a POC that the champion kept pushing and wanting to do!

I think what’s cool about CommonPaper is not just having the negotiations scoped to smaller areas but also the affect on the sales cycle. If can trim months off a deal process, that can help save a startup in terms of resources spent and dollars coming in earlier.

Re: Launch HN: Common Paper (YC W23) – SAFEs for Commercial Contracts

#56

Congrats on launch! 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 invest…

I appreciate that, and you're right that overcoming the cold start problem is the key to establishing a standard. We've tried to learn what we can from how YC published the SAFE, as well as other standard contracts like the NVCA model docs, IAB standard terms, ISDA master agreement, etc.

For us, it's about providing day 1 value to the users of the contracts that does not depend on the agreements already being widely adopted. One example of that is our Stripe integration, which enables our customers to automatically bill their customers once they sign a contract. This uses the information already in their contracts, and it saves a lot of manual work and helps them get paid faster, and is separate from the negotiation benefits.

The other thing I'll point out is that our users have been seeing more success in using the standard contract from when we released our original NDA. Instead of losing an arm wrestling match because they have less leverage, they can say something like, "We adopted this standard agreement created by a committee of attorneys." That doesn't work every time, but we've seen some companies cut the percentage of their deals on customer paper in half.

We've seen a big range of reactions from attorneys. While we have some big supporters (and committee members) at law firms, we've gotten more traction with in-house counsel. I think it's at least partially because of the reasons you outlined. I do hope to get all the law firms on board as a channel eventually, but for now, we're focusing our energy on the companies themselves.

Re: Launch HN: Common Paper (YC W23) – SAFEs for Commercial Contracts

#58

> 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.

I don't have experience with contracts (or the lack thereof) in Hollywood, and that's interesting to hear. 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…

I signed up, it's valuable to me at AppMana. Trust resonates with me.

> If you're open to it, I'd love to hear more about how you've seen this work in Hollywood.

There's so much to say. But maybe the most important thing to you is that entertainment lawyers are customarily paid 5% of the transaction's value to their client. So you get quality and often creative legal advice, with aligned incentives, whether you're Leonardo DiCaprio or some nobody.

Every startup is a nobody.

Re: Launch HN: Common Paper (YC W23) – SAFEs for Commercial Contracts

#59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're correct that we make money by charging for our software. It's free until you use it to close deals with more than 5 customers, and free forever if you're just using it for NDAs. Full details on pricing here: https://commonpaper.com/pricing/ Our target customers are B2B SaaS companies, and our goal is to have them start using us when they are small on the free version and grow with them. I agree that the bigger…

Free NDAs forever is great! I run a B2B SaaS/licensing business, and this pricing strikes me as really high. But perhaps others see the value differently. I can see how it would be useful to constrain negotiations to the various bits that your contracts allow. But given how much contracts vary, and how larger orgs want to use their paper, it seems like this is an uphill climb. And if my biggest, most important contra…

That's totally fair, and it might be partially a function of price point. If, say we can help our customers close a bunch of deals at $20k each, that's very different than a company who has an average price point of $1k each. You're always welcome to use the agreements for free separate from our software.

One thing I'll note is that we do support importing contracts on customer paper / or deals executed outside our system. We only have a subset of our features for those, but all of your contracts can be together in the same system.

On the options making sense together, the standard agreements are created by 40+ attorneys specializing in tech law and commercial contracts. They design our contracts to reflect what is industry standard with a focus on creating a fair and balanced starting point. That being said, each company chooses how they want to configure their own cover page. We provide tooltips and help articles on what the terms and variables mean, and companies can work with their attorney to set it up initially or include them in the workflow. We can intro our users to attorneys who are familiar to with the standards and do good work.

Re: Launch HN: Common Paper (YC W23) – SAFEs for Commercial Contracts

#60

Congrats on launch! 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 invest…

I appreciate that, and you're right that overcoming the cold start problem is the key to establishing a standard. We've tried to learn what we can from how YC published the SAFE, as well as other standard contracts like the NVCA model docs, IAB standard terms, ISDA master agreement, etc. For us, it's about providing day 1 value to the users of the contracts that does not depend on the agreements already being widely…

Yea definitely makes sense to me that you're concentrating on the company's experience! It's also such a massive market (just like, all companies), that there's an insane amount of room to grow, even without tackling the david vs goliath problem.

Excited to see this take off!

Post reply on HN