markoblad

@joshuaheard -- thanks for the comment. I think it's fair to say it's an overstatement. The tools we have live are merely around Delaware incorporation, and yes this is a minuscule piece of the big picture.

I think there's a few reasons why this is a very interesting and key piece, though. To my mind, here are a few reasons:

- modeling and automating corporate transactions starts with the easier stuff, and expands into more complicated transactions; - the way VCs (or more broadly, the technology industry) set up companies (e.g., with vesting; transferring nascent technology and intellectual property) probably should be adopted more universally (not to say that many small businesses should be corporations); - the technology industry sets trends.

Other in-roads we are working on that are also key to my mind are: - integrating transactions and documents with cap tables; - scripting complex documents with the full set of options the documents routinely cover; - building in the models that frequently built in spreadsheets and circulated with documents.

valcu.co (I'm the founder) is automating corporate transactions, with startups currently using the Delaware incorporation and setup tools. We are working on some heavier stuff (e.g., equity financing transactions integrated with a cap table). It's not surprising to me how difficult it is to innovate here as there are so many moving pieces. Scripting up the NVCA forms runs about 250 variables per document and requires conditionals and loops, which most merge tools can't handle. Control provisions, amendment provisions, board rights, protective provisions and many other provisions have to be modeled separately. Share numbers and capitalization reps have to either be entered individually (meaning you have to build a separate model), or the tools have to build in a cap table. It's been build, build, build-we're over 100k lines of code.

@rcarrigan87 Thanks! I spent 6 years doing this at Gunderson for lots of successful startups. Passing Word documents around is a terrible process--it's manual editing, manual file system updates, manual redlines, manual emails and project management, repeated every time something changes. Though legal advice can't be automated (and we certainly don't provide legal advice), these other things can :)

Though we don't have them yet, I'd love to automate many of the pieces of LLC conversions.

Thanks dang--we're very excited about the launch, simplifying the tools and of course would love all of my friends to see it on HN. Nothing funny.

Thanks @mliso -- we're really aiming to simplify the process and automate as many of the menial but time-consuming things as possible! We'll be launching the cap table next :)

This looks like a worthwhile project--I'm excited to see it develop.