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

Hey HN, we’re Ben and Jake, founders of Common Paper ( https://commonpaper.com ). We provide standard, open-source contracts and a platform for getting them signed quickly. See https://youtu.be/f7maIapJpU4 for an overview, and https://youtu.be/A1PWjWiheFk for a demo of sending and signing a contract. I (Jake) was a co-founder of two B2B SaaS companies, RJMetrics (where Ben and I met), and Stitch. Everything about contracts was frustrating, both at those startups and the larger companies that acquired us. Way too often, the contracting process with a customer got adversarial—arguing over whose template to use, emailing Word docs back and forth, huge legal fees, and unpredictable delays that made it hard to know if a deal would ever close. Then, when we finally got the customer to sign, we had to keep track of all of the promises embedded in the contract. This is difficult when you have hundreds of customers and contract PDFs full of unstructured t