Title: Hello HN!  I&#x27;m one of the founders of Clerky :)  For the uninitiated, we&#x27;re one of the most popular ways for startups to incorporate (and get all sorts of other legal paperwork done).<p>We&#x27;ve written a handbook about startup incorporation and I wanted to share it with all of you :)<p>There is, of course, a lot of content about startup incorporation out there already.  Why did we decide to add to the pile?  Honestly, I often wince when I read what&#x27;s out there, because so much of it is misguided or just plain wrong.  A lot of it is people with no legal expertise regurgitating the same (often misguided &#x2F; wrong) information they&#x27;ve read&#x2F;heard elsewhere.  Basically, the setup for the Gell-Mann amnesia effect, except the culprits are content marketers instead of the media.<p>We also felt there was a need to have something comprehensive.  While there&#x27;s a lot of bad information out there, there is also a lot of great, accurate information.  It&#x27;s just usually spread across various blogs from startup attorneys, which makes it difficult to get a comprehensive view.  With this handbook, our goal was to provide a central resource covering everything you need to know about startup incorporation.<p>A few content-related notes:<p>• We mention this in the handbook, but this is all written with US-based startups in mind.  We fully recognize a lot of founders are elsewhere, but there&#x27;s just too much to cover if we were to expand the scope to beyond the US.  Sorry about that!<p>• The word &quot;startup&quot; means different things to different people.  We use the word in pretty much the way PG uses it here: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.paulgraham.com&#x2F;growth.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.paulgraham.com&#x2F;growth.html</a><p>• As the name implies, this handbook is narrowly focused on startup incorporation.  A lot of people don&#x27;t know this, but there&#x27;s a lot more to forming a startup than just incorporation, like setting up a board, issuing stock to founders, etc.  We previously published a handbook called Legal Concepts for Founders, which touches on those topics: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;handbooks.clerky.com&#x2F;legal-concepts" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;handbooks.clerky.com&#x2F;legal-concepts</a><p>On more of a UI-related note, some personal pain points that we tried to address with our handbook design:<p>• It&#x27;s easy to jump down to a footnote and jump back up to where you came from (just click on the footnote number).<p>• Every subheading is link-able, as are any callouts that you might want to link to.<p>• We&#x27;ve been very generous with linking to glossary terms so that readers can quickly learn what they need to know in order to understand what they&#x27;re reading.  The challenge was that regular link styling would leave the copy way too busy.  To solve for this, we made each link look super close to regular text so that the linking isn&#x27;t distracting.  That way readers that are puzzled by a term, who might be looking at it more closely anyways, will be able to click through and learn more, and other readers won&#x27;t be distracted by the link styling.<p>I&#x27;d love to hear any thoughts or questions about either the content or the UI!  I&#x27;ll be here all day to respond.  Also happy to answer random questions related to startup law.<p>Thanks :)
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