Standardized Seed Documents

As business startup costs significantly decrease, legal services represent a larger percentage of the financial requirements of starting and running a business, placing high-priced legal services in the cost-cutting crosshairs.

Earlier this year, Silicon Valley lawyer Ted Wang and venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz released an early free version of Series Seed documents that help young businesses intelligently and cheaply structure the legal documentation around raising seed capital.

We see this as indicative of a small business trend: industry standard agreements with default deal terms that make sense for most business transactions. Simply, the less time companies spend on negotiating and nitpicking over legal language, the more these companies can do in less time.

They’re not exactly “boilerplate”. Like actual boilerplates (slabs of rock), boilerplates contracts tend to be unique and require careful inspection before use. However, with documents featuring standard terms written in uniform language, “boilerplates” can truly act like the commodity they are, reducing legal expenses throughout the document drafting and review process..

Naturally, we like this trend and are excited to see more from Series Seed.