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

For each contract, we go through a multi-month process with 40+ attorneys to vet the standards against all of the permutations they've seen without making the agreements too complex.

On the software side, this is a big part of the value of structured data. We make it easier to keep track of the different variations you've agreed to in different contracts. It's a tricky balance to make sure our users are never constrained from closing new customers while still making sure the software sticks to and takes advantage of the standards.

Btw love the product. Would be nice to have optional blocks with explainers. Something like special terms. Also, LLMs would be nice so that you could ‘chat’ with the document to understand it better. Make it explainable. Or to help you define specific parts such as the subject of the NDA, which are typically too broad or undefined. LLMs could help users better define those parts by asking questions and writing the subject section.

By making contract review and negotiation faster, we speed up your sales cycle and grow revenue faster. Faster sales cycles mean that you get paid faster, which in turn means that you can recycle cash into new customer acquisition investments and grow faster. We wrote a blog post about the math of how sales cycle speed translates to revenue growth here: https://commonpaper.com/blog/impact-of-accelerating-sales-cy...

Some of our users work with attorneys, and some do not. For the folks who do work with attorneys, we still make those relationships more efficient because the scope of negotiation is more narrow. As a simple example, if the attorney helps the founder understand the implications of increasing or decreasing a liability cap, it's straightforward for them to apply that info on their own for many deals in the future. With traditional bespoke contracts, if they see a bunch of redlines to a paragraph about liability, it's much harder for them to reason about whether or not this is safe to sign.

We try to help users understand what sort of information tends to go in each variable, but we stop short of providing customized advice. So we can help people understand that a liability cap might be a fixed number (eg $1 million), a multiple of fees paid (eg 1X the last 12 months fees), or unlimited. But we can't advise them on whether or not their particular company should take the risk of a particular level of cap in order to close a particular customer. That's the sort of thing they should talk to an attorney about.

Great point on optional blocks/special terms. We have a project on the roadmap to make it easier to incorporate entries from the language library into your agreements https://commonpaper.com/language-library/

We're always looking for additional ways to help people understand the agreements and figure out how to configure them. I agree LLMs could provide help there, and it will be fun to figure out the right way to leverage them