swampthing

Sorry to hear you had a poor experience. Just for clarity, we don't get anything out of the Delaware franchise tax. We'd certainly rather it not exist. But the franchise tax and the late penalties, and the fact that there is a minimum tax even if your corporation didn't do anything, are just part of Delaware law.

Thank you Gregory! I've always been a fan of ReadMe too :)

Thank you!

Thank you, and thank you for being a part of our journey!

Thanks!

To save everyone some trouble, "some Delaware elections" refers to elections in a town that amended its charter to explicitly allow legal entities to vote.

Hi there, I'm the CEO of Clerky! I think our support team has already replied to your email about this, but please feel free to let them know if you need anything else :)

By "dismiss the religion factors", do you mean that the author attributed the religious taboos to non-religious origins?

I don't think that's accurate — the article doesn't dismiss religions at all, it examines theories for why religions have the taboo in the first place.

That's not at all the conclusion of the article you linked to. In fact, that theory is discounted by it.

> Price points out, however, that none of these theories fully accounts for the taboo. Pig-rearing, after all, had existed for thousands of years in the region, even in times of drought, and many types of meat can harbor the larvae that cause trichinosis.

> For Price, the key piece of evidence is the sole reason given for the taboo in the biblical text—the fact that the pig “has hooves and does not chew its cud.” In other words, it’s unlike ruminants. He argues that this harks back to an era when the Israelites were simple pastoralists. As their descendants settled down in towns and cities, raising pigs became a more viable option. “This detracted from the fantasy of living like their ancestors,” says Price, prompting Judean priests to ban eating pork.

> Rosenblum argues that the pig taboo only gained special status with the invasion of the Levant by the forces of the Macedonian ruler Alexander the Great in 332 B.C. These European conquerors enjoyed their pork, and pig consumption in the Levant soared. So did tensions between Judeans and their Hellenistic rulers, including the Ptolemaic kings of Egypt and the leaders of the Seleucid Empire based in today’s Iraq.

Uh, go back and read your post. You certainly made the first one :)

I think there’s a pretty big gap between “salary is the most effective way to attract and retain people” and “the only possible reason you’re not getting as many quality applicants as you might hope for is salary”. As a very basic example, your standards for quality may simply be unrealistic.

I'm not talking about you, I'm talking about people in general.

You're assuming that the only reason to pay for Pave is to get a negotiation advantage. My point is that there are other reasons, for example, to make sure that you're not below market.

I guess my point is that without some sort of sense of the market, whether through Pave or something else, the motivation to pay as little as possible may lead some employers to have lower salary ranges than they would otherwise.

Because information has to be used for good or bad and never both?

I have to disagree. If you're not getting quality applicants, how do you know if that's because of your salary range, the default applicant pool, or something idiosyncratic to your company?

If you're a new startup founder, you don't always have a good sense of what the default applicant pool should look like. You might have a sense of what quality looks like but how would you know without recruiting experience what the mix of quality to non-quality applicants is supposed to be? There are many reasons why you might not be getting the number of quality applicants you want, and compensation is just one of them. Salary benchmarking data helps eliminate that as a possible cause.

I have to say I am pretty surprised to see the negative sentiments toward Pave and salary benchmarking data in general here. Why is the assumption that salaries would always be lower given this data? It seems just as likely to inform companies that what they had in mind is below market or that they are under-compensating someone in light of market changes.

Hey, I’m one of the founders of Clerky :) The most common approach is to put the state where you’re located. That said, the more certain you are that you’ll be moving, and the sooner that move will occur, the greater chance that you might want to put down either the state you’ll be moving to or else Delaware. For example, if you’re 100% sure you’re moving from State A soon, but have no idea where you’ll be long-term, Delaware could make sense. Delaware is sort of a default fallback that some startup attorneys use if no other state would be an obvious choice.

Does the LLC own any of the IP? If it was set up correctly, it would, and you'd need to work with an attorney to convert the LLC to a C corporation. There's no online service I'm aware of that can do that safely.

When you're issuing yourself shares, you can have the attorney make the start date of the vesting backdated to account for the work you've already put in. E.g. you can backdate the vesting start date to a year and half ago.

Clerky CEO here :) I just wanted to pop in to let you know that we touched on this topic a bit in our handbook on startup incorporation:

https://handbooks.clerky.com/startup-incorporation/what-abou...

https://handbooks.clerky.com/startup-incorporation/what-abou...

Stock purchase agreement :)

Thanks for the mention!

OP — for startups (as opposed to a regular new small business) in the US, what would be in a "founders agreement" is typically handled across stock purchase agreements, IP and confidentiality agreements (either CIIA or PIIA agreements), company bylaws, and Delaware law. It is pretty rare for US startups to have one single "founders agreement". I think the reason why you read about them is that they may be more common for regular small businesses, and some people consider any new small business to be a startup. For our purposes, to paraphrase pg, a startup is a company that is optimizing for growth (as opposed to distributions to owners).

And to answer your original question, yes, we (Clerky) are what most YC companies use to handle everything described above (the others typically have cross-border setups that require more tailored paperwork from a law firm).

It's important to also get the certified mail receipt physically postmarked by the USPS (it is possible to send certified mail without that). Also, it's a common best practice to include an additional copy of the election along with a self-addressed stamped envelope, and ask the IRS to date-stamp the copy and send it back to you.

Correct! We've always included spousal signatures on 83(b) elections. I would say the vast majority (if not all) forms I've seen from good law firms have explicit places for the spouse to sign.

Clerky | Senior Software Engineer | REMOTE | Full Time | Ruby on Rails

Clerky is the most popular way for high-growth technology startups to form, and we're also used by tons of top-tier startups for hiring and fundraising. We're launching powerful enterprise-grade software to helping attorneys and companies collaborate. We've invested a lot in architecture, maintainability, and testing, giving us a significant advantage as we build out functionality that founders and attorneys can currently only dream of.

We could be a good fit for you if you're interested in working at a startup (1) without the chaos of a move-fast-and-break-things environment, (2) that's small but extremely productive, and (3) that's profitable but has tremendous growth potential.

To learn more and apply, please visit https://cler.ky/3uKADqh. Thank you!

Congratulations on the launch Umur! Looks really great :)

Clerky | Senior Software Engineer | REMOTE | Full Time | Ruby on Rails

Clerky is the most popular way for high-growth technology startups to form, and we're also used by tons of top-tier startups for hiring and fundraising. We're launching powerful enterprise-grade software to helping attorneys and companies collaborate. We've invested a lot in architecture, maintainability, and testing, giving us a significant advantage as we build out functionality that founders and attorneys can currently only dream of.

We could be a good fit for you if you're interested in working at a startup (1) without the chaos of a move-fast-and-break-things environment, (2) that's small but extremely productive, and (3) that's profitable but has tremendous growth potential.

To learn more and apply, please visit https://cler.ky/3uKADqh. Thank you!

We (Clerky) only support Delaware because that's where practically all startups (as opposed to regular small businesses) form. In case it's helpful, we've put together a pretty extensive explanation of why Delaware has come to be the standard for startups: https://handbooks.clerky.com/startup-incorporation/where

If you're not forming a startup and are considering Wyoming or Nevada, then I think whether you use an online service (like a registered agent) or an attorney could depend on whether you're just looking to have an entity for the sake of having one or if it's possible the paperwork will be important (e.g. if you have business partners). Unfortunately, there are no major online services similar to Clerky (in terms of legal quality) for Wyoming or Nevada, that I'm aware of, so if you fell in the latter category, I would recommend talking to an attorney. But if not, an online service could be fine.

I'm a co-founder of Clerky — I think it really depends on your needs. If you're starting a true startup (as in you are going to optimize for growth, might raise money, etc.), then you'll be better off either using Clerky or working with a good startup attorney, or both. The reason for this is because there is a lot more you'll need to do beyond just incorporation, and we have products for that. Incorporation just causes the corporation to exist, nothing more. No one even owns any shares right after incorporation. The odds of someone getting all the paperwork right on their own if they're not a startup attorney are basically 0%.

Even for incorporation itself, if you do it on your own or work with a registered agent, it's likely that you'll end up needing to at least amend your certificate of incorporation later. Most of the self-help / registered agent resources out there are for regular small businesses, not startups, so the guidance is not really what startups need. Some people like referring to every new business as a startup, I think because it sounds sexier to be working on a startup than a regular small business.

However, if you're starting a regular small business — i.e. not a startup — then I would say using Clerky is not a good idea. We're really purpose-built for startups and don't attempt or purport to serve regular small businesses. Whether you should use a registered agent alone is another question. At a minimum, if you have business partners you're starting the business with, I would say you probably should talk to a business attorney rather than trying to go on your own. On the other hand, if you just need an entity just for the sake of having an entity, and don't really care about whether the paperwork is done correctly or not, then just working with a registered agent directly could suffice.