Comment by jakestein | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jakestein | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Totally agree that this won't work for all companies or situations. You're right that our initial target market is technology companies, although many of our users are outside Silicon Valley.

I also agree that getting large companies to agree to use the standards will be hard, but there examples of them adopting other standard contracts:

Here's Bank of America entering into the ISDA Master Agreement for financial derivatives https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1065696/000119312511...

and Disney using the IAB Standard Terms for online ads https://disneyconnect.com/dpep/disney-ad-guidelines/

We've already seen our users closing deals with Fortune 500 companies using the standard contracts, but we have a lot more work to do on that front.

Bank of America and Disney's ad department are using industry standard contracts for high-volume automated transactions where negotiation is not required or allowed, and review is not required by Legal prior to entry or execution.

Your product is intended for low-volume transactions that are intended for Legal to review before signing.

It's not even remotely the same thing, and if your advisors have suggested otherwise you need to replace your advisors.

I agree that many of the transactions on the IAB Standard Terms and ISDA Master Agreement are automated and don't involve negotiations. There are, however, also higher dollar value ad buys and derivative transactions that use those standard agreements and do involve negotiation.

I had a helpful conversation with an attorney who was previously at Facebook about this. They use the same basic addendum to the IAB Standard Terms for most of their ad sales, and they sometimes negotiate it with large customers.

We see a similar pattern among our users, where their lower dollar, high volume transactions don't involve negotiation, but their bigger deals do.

We don't yet have the same distribution as the IAB or ISDA, but our goal is that over time more and more companies will be able to focus just on the variables in the cover page of our standard agreements because their team has already reviewed our standard terms.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com