Introducing the Complete Clerky

My cofounder Chris and I were driven to start Clerky after working as startup attorneys in Silicon Valley. At our law firm, we saw our clients doing paperwork without our involvement, in order to avoid legal fees. Inevitably, they would either use an online service not designed for startups, or do the paperwork themselves and miss some obscure detail. In either case, they would ultimately have to pay us even more to clean things up. With our engineering backgrounds, Chris and I knew that we could build software to help startups save money while still getting the legal paperwork done correctly.

We started with company formation, because that's where the most startups needed help. All the existing online services were geared toward regular small businesses (whether internet-based or physical) - but the correct legal paperwork for regular small businesses is very different from the correct legal paperwork for startups, and vice versa. To this day, we are the only major online service to provide startups with the complete set of formation paperwork they need to pass investor due diligence.

We didn't start Clerky just to do company formations though. Startup founders do all sorts of legal paperwork on their own. Our aim has always been to build software that minimizes the total cost of legal paperwork over a startup's entire lifetime.

This is why we're proud to announce that Clerky now has products covering all the standard corporate legal paperwork that startups need prior to a Series A financing. In addition to our flagship Formation product line, we now have product lines for Fundraising, Hiring, Commercial, and Maintenance.

Our Fundraising product line is designed to help startups do seed financings using standard safes or convertible notes. All you have to do is pick whether you want a valuation cap, discount, or both, and then enter the investment terms. The software helps you do things correctly - for example, by having you do a board consent before closing any investors.

Hiring is our product line for hiring employees, consultants, and advisors. It includes onboarding paperwork like offer letters and consulting agreements, as well as equity compensation paperwork so that you can issue stock or stock options out of a stock plan you've adopted on Clerky. We even handle basic paperwork for when people leave the company.

Of course, startups also need to protect themselves when they partner with other companies. That's where our Commercial product line comes in, with software for standard NDAs.

Finally, our Maintenance product line helps you make changes to your corporate structure. No matter how thoughtfully you set things up at formation, things change. From changing the company name, to authorizing more shares, to changing the board of directors, we've got you covered.

With the release of these new product lines, startups can now use Clerky to do the full range of standard corporate legal paperwork they need prior to a Series A financing. There is no better way for startups to do their paperwork. And we're not finished! We are hard at work building new features to make it even easier for startups to do paperwork safely. Stay tuned for more!