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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

#161

Post by jakestein »

mguerville wrote: post #160

I work at a large publicly traded tech company and spend 3-5 hours a week in various meetings solely focused on getting updates on the contracting process with fewer than 20 enterprise accounts... I may not be able to use this near term but thank you for creating it and I will share with my stakeholders for inspiration at the very least. I do share carlosdp's concern on law firms' (and even internal legal teams)'s wi…

I appreciate sharing it with your team. On the topic of getting updates from contracts, I've had a similar (frustrating) experience. One thing we offer to make that easier is a Slack integration to proactively alert the relevant stakeholders when an important event has happened with a contract. We also have an API and webhook for getting it into other systems.

For internal legal teams, the biggest motivator is often re-allocating their time to more strategic and/or more interesting work. They have a long list of other projects that they'd rather focus on if they can reduce their time spent on yet another NDA or routine sales contract.

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

#162

Post by tasn »

jakestein wrote: post #161
mguerville wrote: post #160

I work at a large publicly traded tech company and spend 3-5 hours a week in various meetings solely focused on getting updates on the contracting process with fewer than 20 enterprise accounts... I may not be able to use this near term but thank you for creating it and I will share with my stakeholders for inspiration at the very least. I do share carlosdp's concern on law firms' (and even internal legal teams)'s wi…

I appreciate sharing it with your team. On the topic of getting updates from contracts, I've had a similar (frustrating) experience. One thing we offer to make that easier is a Slack integration to proactively alert the relevant stakeholders when an important event has happened with a contract. We also have an API and webhook for getting it into other systems. For internal legal teams, the biggest motivator is often…

Congrats on the launch! I'm often annoyed with how slow and expensive getting lawyers involved is, and everything is clouded with legalese which makes it impossible to understand. There's no reason to have this, we can have standard stuff and agree on high level terms.

Additionally, let us[1] know if you need help with your webhooks, we do webhook sending as a service and help quite a few companies do a great job there. Though glad to see you already have them, that's such a quality of life improvement to be able to hook to actions.

1: https://www.svix.com

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

#163

Post by singleshot_ »

jakestein wrote: post #91
singleshot_ wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Generally speaking your approach seems good. You have the advantage of having “option” that are fairly easy to describe and rely more on the description of the business activity considered, not the law.

Take for example a LLC operating agreement. It might have a whole section about securities law and making sure all the members of the LLC are qualified investors, not on OFAC, Americans, fewer than 100 in number, not in need of liquidity, understand the risks, what have you. A closely held family farm would need none of this.

So in a commercial document templating service, “make sure none of the investors make our company ineligible to be an s-corp” would definitely be an option.

The design choice is whether you can get away with a user experience that asks the user “hey are you cool with not paying attention to a bunch of stuff investors might be interested in, but isn’t necessary to allow you to pass the farm to your kids?” Sure it’s a lot simpler not to have to know any of the law, and yes it’s impossible to really make the decision of which contract to use in an educated way without knowing a wide range of stuff.

I guess what I’m acknowledging is that my design suggestion of “be like west law” is mostly junk; you explicitly don’t want to do that because it would not spark any kind of customer joy (and plus, Westlaw is a thing already).

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

#164

Post by gavinhoward »

robertlagrant wrote: post #158
gavinhoward wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My business model is support for my software. Can you tell me how to make my business run without me using that model? Most startups don't do support for this reason; I'm pretty sure it's impossible to do support without an available person. But it's not unprecedented. Think Daniel Stenberg of libcurl.

I think most businesses solve this problem by charging enough to employ another person. If there's not enough value in the market for that then fair enough, but that would be the normal solution.

That is true, but it is a personal limitation of mine that I work best on codebases I don't share.

I have been thinking about how to handle this problem, and I'm not sure of the solution.

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

#165

Post by jakestein »

singleshot_ wrote: post #163
jakestein wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Generally speaking your approach seems good. You have the advantage of having “option” that are fairly easy to describe and rely more on the description of the business activity considered, not the law. Take for example a LLC operating agreement. It might have a whole section about securities law and making sure all the members of the LLC are qualified investors, not on OFAC, Americans, fewer than 100 in number, not…

That's helpful context, thanks. And your last sentence made me smile. Definitely helpful to hear how you think about this

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

#166

Post by robertlagrant »

gavinhoward wrote: post #164
robertlagrant wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think most businesses solve this problem by charging enough to employ another person. If there's not enough value in the market for that then fair enough, but that would be the normal solution.

That is true, but it is a personal limitation of mine that I work best on codebases I don't share. I have been thinking about how to handle this problem, and I'm not sure of the solution.

Would it require someone who works on the codebase? Or could you employ someone to be nice to customers and have just enough technical knowledge to do triage?

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

#168

Post by sebastiennight »

This is brilliant, and I'm going to implement the CommonPaper contracts for Cloud Service Agreement, DPA, and SLA.

I think an Acceptable Content Policy/Fair Use policy and a Privacy Policy are what's missing if I was going to replace all of our self-serve agreements with your Toolkit.

Also, your "governing law/courts/jurisdiction/" sections (in the step-by-step forms) only target the U.S. ; I don't think there's a solid reason to restrict the choice of country.

For instance IMHO if I'm incorporating in Singapore, and I'm choosing to adopt the Common Paper agreement, customizing the Cover page to my country is my problem but I shouldn't be prevented from doing so.

I also see that you'd only gotten 1 comment on your earlier "Show HN", and now 165+ on your "Launch HN" post, so congrats!

I wish you great success with this business. I think the value you provide is awesome.

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

#169

Post by gavinhoward »

robertlagrant wrote: post #166
gavinhoward wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is true, but it is a personal limitation of mine that I work best on codebases I don't share. I have been thinking about how to handle this problem, and I'm not sure of the solution.

Would it require someone who works on the codebase? Or could you employ someone to be nice to customers and have just enough technical knowledge to do triage?

I have no idea.
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