Launch HN: Common Paper (YC W23) – SAFEs for Commercial Contracts
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.<p>What you see as unnecessary negotiation over &quot;standard terms&quot; they see as protecting the company&#x27;s specific interests based on its needs and risk tolerances. By eliminating that, you&#x27;ve eliminated most of the potential market, since differences over &quot;standard terms&quot; usually reflect significant differences in each parties&#x27; specific legal needs and risk tolerances. It seems that you&#x27;re targeting SV tech companies that all use the same group of VCs, which explains why they have a lot of standard terms they can all agree on. But once you expand outside of this narrow niche (and especially if your contracts involve foreign counterparties), this list of common standard terms selected by a third party that both counterparties can agree on without review or negotiation goes to zero. Even just a cursory review of the Professional Services Agreement raised several huge red flags that no competent Legal Department should agree to...<p>Also, any company that needs standardized contracting so they can automate processes based on that is large enough that they can simply demand their counterparties use their standard contracts...you&#x27;re not getting Oracle and Apple or large companies to use these contracts (and especially not non-tech companies), and that means any customers who are dealing with such counterparties will need a separate process for handling those contracts, which makes contract management <i>more</i> complex, not less.