Contracts Every Startup Needs
The documents that matter change as you go from two founders to a funded company. Most startup legal problems trace back to something that was never written down at the stage it should have been.
A startup typically needs a founders agreement with vesting first, then employment contracts with IP assignment and NDAs as the team grows. At fundraising, add a SAFE or convertible note, then a shareholders agreement and investment agreement at a priced round.
Your contract stack
Roughly in the order you’ll need them. Each links to what our lawyers check in that document.
Before you write a line of code together — vesting is the point
Your first hire, including part-time and advisory roles
Investor decks, partner conversations, technical diligence
First external money, before you can defensibly price a round
The moment there is more than one owner of record
Priced rounds — where liquidation preference actually bites
First revenue and first tooling spend
Ahead of the first enterprise or EU customer, once user data volume makes it a diligence item
Where startups & founders businesses actually get caught
No vesting, and a co-founder leaves in month eight
Without vesting, a departing founder keeps their full stake permanently while everyone else keeps building the value it represents. This is the single most common — and most expensive — early startup mistake.
IP that does not belong to the company
Code written before incorporation, by a friend, or by a contractor without an assignment clause may not be the company’s. Investors check this in diligence, and fixing it later requires the goodwill of someone who has already left.
Stacked SAFEs nobody modelled
Several instruments at different valuation caps, all converting at the same priced round, can produce dramatically more dilution than any single one suggests. The time to model that is before signing, not at the round.
Liquidation preference that eats the outcome
A participating preference or a multiple above 1x can mean a headline exit price that sounds like success returns very little to common shareholders. The economics should be modelled at realistic exit values, not optimistic ones.
A missing DPA discovered during diligence, not before
A startup handling user data with no data processing agreement in place is a routine finding in investor and enterprise-customer diligence — not because the gap is hard to fix, but because it is easy to not notice until someone is specifically looking for it.
Clauses that matter most here
Plain-English explanations of the terms that carry the most weight in this industry.
Frequently asked questions
A founders agreement, ideally before meaningful work begins. It settles equity split, vesting, roles, IP assignment, and what happens if someone leaves — all of which are far easier to agree before there is anything valuable to argue over.
Not sure which contract you need first?
Upload whatever you have for a free Contract Health Check, and a lawyer will tell you what’s missing as well as what’s wrong.