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

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

#91

Post by jakestein »

singleshot_ wrote: post #88
jakestein wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd also be interested to know which standard contracts you've seen in the construction industry. We're always trying to learn from other, related projects

ConsensusDocs would be one I’ve seen end up in a big ol’ fight. I gotta spend a little more time to answer the other question, though.

I had not heard of ConsensusDocs, thanks for sharing. I'm especially fascinated by cases like these where you have to pay for access to the standard contracts. Looking forward to learning more about them.

Sounds good re the other question, thanks in advance

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

#92

Post by mNovak »

Looks nice, congrats on launch! I hope to see this concept expand beyond SaaS.

My company deals a lot with government contracts, which is a slightly different beast in that they are actually semi-structured (via FAR and DFAR), but would be extremely useful to have tools to help us understand and track our contracts at a glance, and create compliant sub-contracts (for instance identify flow-down clauses).

Probably such tools exist, but gov contracting tools are typically extremely expensive, not targeting small business.

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

#93

Post by gamblor956 »

jakestein wrote: post #83
gamblor956 wrote: post #80

Ran it by our Legal Department. The inability to customize all aspects of the contracts to handle specific needs for each contract renders this DOA. What you see as unnecessary negotiation over "standard terms" they see as protecting the company's specific interests based on its needs and risk tolerances. By eliminating that, you've eliminated most of the potential market, since differences over "standard terms" usua…

Totally agree that this won't work for all companies or situations. You're right that our initial target market is technology companies, although many of our users are outside Silicon Valley. I also agree that getting large companies to agree to use the standards will be hard, but there examples of them adopting other standard contracts: Here's Bank of America entering into the ISDA Master Agreement for financial der…

Bank of America and Disney's ad department are using industry standard contracts for high-volume automated transactions where negotiation is not required or allowed, and review is not required by Legal prior to entry or execution.

Your product is intended for low-volume transactions that are intended for Legal to review before signing.

It's not even remotely the same thing, and if your advisors have suggested otherwise you need to replace your advisors.

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

#94

Post by jakestein »

mNovak wrote: post #92

Looks nice, congrats on launch! I hope to see this concept expand beyond SaaS. My company deals a lot with government contracts, which is a slightly different beast in that they are actually semi-structured (via FAR and DFAR), but would be extremely useful to have tools to help us understand and track our contracts at a glance, and create compliant sub-contracts (for instance identify flow-down clauses). Probably suc…

That's really interesting, I'm not familiar with FAR and DFAR but spent a few minutes reading about them and I'm looking forward to learning more.

We do plan to expand beyond SaaS later on. What kinds of products and services does your company sell to government?

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

#95

Post by jakestein »

gamblor956 wrote: post #93
jakestein wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agree that this won't work for all companies or situations. You're right that our initial target market is technology companies, although many of our users are outside Silicon Valley. I also agree that getting large companies to agree to use the standards will be hard, but there examples of them adopting other standard contracts: Here's Bank of America entering into the ISDA Master Agreement for financial der…

Bank of America and Disney's ad department are using industry standard contracts for high-volume automated transactions where negotiation is not required or allowed, and review is not required by Legal prior to entry or execution. Your product is intended for low-volume transactions that are intended for Legal to review before signing. It's not even remotely the same thing, and if your advisors have suggested otherwi…

I agree that many of the transactions on the IAB Standard Terms and ISDA Master Agreement are automated and don't involve negotiations. There are, however, also higher dollar value ad buys and derivative transactions that use those standard agreements and do involve negotiation.

I had a helpful conversation with an attorney who was previously at Facebook about this. They use the same basic addendum to the IAB Standard Terms for most of their ad sales, and they sometimes negotiate it with large customers.

We see a similar pattern among our users, where their lower dollar, high volume transactions don't involve negotiation, but their bigger deals do.

We don't yet have the same distribution as the IAB or ISDA, but our goal is that over time more and more companies will be able to focus just on the variables in the cover page of our standard agreements because their team has already reviewed our standard terms.

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

#96

Post by jakestein »

jagged-chisel wrote: post #25
melvinmelih wrote: post #20

> The breaking point came when one of our customers was acquired by Oracle. They wanted to keep using our product, but had to move from our original contract to the one that Oracle uses. In exchange for this, they were willing to increase the price they were paying from $6,000 to $24,000 per year. This is a cool idea, but the irony here is that Oracle probably still wouldn't use the Common Paper contract and insist o…

Today, no. But if the industry can standardize, it might get the behemoths to consider similar frameworks for the reduced expense and increased predictability. Maybe it won’t solve that particular problem today, but it stands a chance of improving things in the future … IFF someone is willing to start something now.

This is well said and a really important point that I often forget to highlight. If we're successful, the big companies will see a huge benefit.

I've interviewed a bunch of folks on enterprise procurement teams. They won't be early adopters, but they do want something like it to exist.

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

#97

Post by mchusma »

I do love the concept. I could see us using the standard terms. I am not sure about spending $5 per contracted customer per month forever. This seems like a lot. It feels like it should scale down or something, maybe $1/mo? or $5 per contract? Maybe the answer is cheap people can just use the open source docs without the tools...

I like the concept, I just don't see how I could pay for this at my (bootstrapping) company!

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

#98

Post by jakestein »

mchusma wrote: post #97

I do love the concept. I could see us using the standard terms. I am not sure about spending $5 per contracted customer per month forever. This seems like a lot. It feels like it should scale down or something, maybe $1/mo? or $5 per contract? Maybe the answer is cheap people can just use the open source docs without the tools... I like the concept, I just don't see how I could pay for this at my (bootstrapping) comp…

That's good feedback on our pricing, thanks for that. One thing I'll clarify is that this is just for customers with whom you sign contracts. If you have self serve customers that do click through agreements, we don't charge you for them.

A common pattern we see among our users is that they have a high volume of low priced customers on their self serve plans, and then a smaller number of high dollar customers on something like an enterprise plan. These enterprise customers are the ones where you need to sign contracts and have negotiations. That's more the case where our software is helping, and it's only these that we charge for.

And yes, you're always welcome to use the open source docs for free if the software doesn't make sense for you.

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

#100

Post by jakestein »

mschuster91 wrote: post #99

Wow, that does look awesome. However it seems that all the contracts use typical US boilerplate language - do you have any plans to make derivatives usable for the major European economies?

The short answer is yes, we do plan to add versions for other countries. I expect Canada to likely be the first country we add, followed by the UK.
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