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Speaker 6: All right, Jake, thank you so much for joining.

Speaker: My pleasure. Really happy to be here, grant.

Speaker 6: All right. So, let's just jump in, give us a little backstory about you, about common paper and then we'll, and we'll take it from there.

Speaker: Yeah, absolutely. So, my background before Common Paper, I was the co-founder of two B2B software companies. First one was called RJ Metrics and it was business intelligence dashboards, data analytics, targeted primarily at e-commerce companies. We ran that business for about eight years. My co-founder was a guy named Bob Moore.

And we ultimately sold it to Magento which then later went on to get acquired by Adobe. And if folks aren't familiar with Magento, it's sort of like a open source on-prem, more enterprise-y version [00:01:00] of Shopify. And they were our biggest partner and ultimately acquired us to like, sort of bring our reporting capabilities in-house.

At rj we had created this like small second product, which instead of focusing on visualizing the data, it was more about. Bringing it together from a bunch of different sources into one data warehouse. And as part of the deal to Magento, we structured things so that we could spin that out into its own company.

And that was the second one. It's called Stitch. And that was data integration. So competitor to folks like Tran which still dependent. And they were like our, our big competitor at the time. We ran Stitch for a couple years and then that company was acquired by Talend which is again, sort of a older school enterprise-y version of data integration.

Talend was a public company at the time. They've since been taken private. But I spent two years at Talend, first running the Stitch Business unit and then running growth for Talend as a whole. Once we got Functionalized and then left, took some time off and then started common paper.

[00:02:00] And the, the genesis of common paper was really like. Me getting pissed off about contracts across all the experiences at RJ Stitch and Talend where it just seemed like, you know, customers when they had decided that they had a problem and they wanted to give us money for our product to solve that problem.

And then we got in a fight about the contract, and it was just, it was slow, it was expensive, it was needlessly adversarial. And then eventually, once we like signed the contract, we had to do all the stuff that we promised to do, and it was like spread across hundreds of Dropbox folders and PDFs. And so common paper was sort of like the genesis of it was solving that problem that I felt like I was banging my head against the wall on and recruited.

I, I, I, I had been pitching one of the early RJ engineers, this guy named Ben Garvey to work with him again for years. And then finally when my pitch was come start, comment paper with me, he was like, yes. So working on this for a couple years and yeah, that resisted today.

Speaker 6: And, and [00:03:00] so, you know, I, I, I definitely understand the problem that Common Paper is solving. Tell me more about the product and like how you solve it.

Speaker: Yeah. So there's a couple components to it. So the first piece, what, what we actually built first is standardization of the contract itself. So, folks might be familiar with like the safe, which YC created this early stage standard contract for fundraising. And if you fundraised not on the safe and fundraised on the safe, one thing that you know is that a lot of complexity and annoying things are solved by using a contract that the other side has also seen a million times before.

You know, there's a handful of variables that you're optimizing around, and then a lot of it is just the standard safe that we've used. And so we've created an analog of that. But for B2B software sales, so it includes a sales contract, an NDA, an S-L-A-A-D-P-A. A bunch of other like compliance related things around the sale pilot agreement, design partner agreement, LOI.

And one [00:04:00] of the first things we did at the company was we CR recruited this committee of about 45 attorneys that we modeled after an open source project. So they are effectively like contributors or to the project. And one of our first hires was effectively the maintainer of the project. This woman named Tiffany who's a super experienced, legit attorney who has like both been at big law firms as well as like, you know, rocket ship tech companies.

And she is running this committee process gathering feedback, facilitating these like debates and instead of pull requests, there's like redline word docs getting sent around. But it's the same sort of thing that you could imagine, you know, is happening in an open source project just around like what should be in this contract, what's market, what should be standard, and what's a variable?

And then she goes through this process of synthesizing all the feedback and then creating, okay, this is the common paper, NDA version 1.0. This is the, the cloud service agreement 2.0 or whatever. And they're all versions. So like, you know, people know what changed and [00:05:00] we, we show, okay, because the market changed.

Now AI is a thing. There's a standard AI clause or whatever. We release those under Creative Commons license. So again, like an open source project, they're totally free. I think they've now been downloaded many tens. We might be up to hundreds of thousands of times that people just download these templates and they can use 'em however they want.

So that's this standards piece. And one of the things that we collaborated on is this software license agreement for on-prem deployments. Where originally we were only working with cloud software companies. And then something that, you know, better than me is a lot of times when you go after the enterprise, they care about, you know, behind the firewall deployment or within their VPC.

And so this is a contract that's like made from the ground up for that and with in mind that, you know, someone might use the cloud service agreement as well as the, the software license agreement depending on, on their customer base. So those are the standards. We also, the first product we built around those standards.

It's contract management. So basically [00:06:00] helping a company customize the template to their particular company as well as their particular customer. So you might have templates that are like, these are our defaults. This is the description of our product, this is our default, you know, support hours or whatever we're promising to, and here's our pricing model.

And then, you know, there's like the initial problem of the founder who, you know, needs to close their first deal. And then hopefully the founder's closing a bunch of deals. They may be hiring sales folks and they want to give some flexibility to those sales folks, but not infinite flexibility. So the contract management software enables the right amount of customization depending on what the policies are, and then like generates those contracts, captures signatures for those contracts, and then crucially like uses the data in those contracts for all the other stuff the business needs to do.

And all of it is addressable via API. So like. As an example, one of the things that makes possible is that you know, we have an integration with like Stripe, where the [00:07:00] instant your customer signs a sales contract, we can take all the terms of that contract and generate the customer record, the subscription, the invoice in Stripe so that your customer immediately gets redirected to a custom payment portal with whatever terms they negotiated in that contract.

Or, you know, you might have your account management team might need to know like, what are all the contracts that have 30 day opt-out periods on renewal? What are the ones that don't have auto renewal? So all that structured data within the standards and people have access to that data. So that, that's all contract management.

And then the newest thing that, that we have released this in private beta now is Jerry, this AI agent for redlines. And that is basically, you know, you can forward emails to it, you can upload Word docs and you can actually also set it up to just like. Listen to your Gmail and basically watch for any redlined word docs that come in and automatically compares those things to your company policies and you know, positions.[00:08:00] 

And then before you even know the redline is there, it'll respond to that email just to you and say, Hey, this is safe to sign this. Actually, all these red lines are within your policy. They just made Mitre changes or, you know, this one needs to get escalated to the CEO because they're asking for this crazy thing that's, you know, you don't allow, or this one needs to get you know, moved to the, the head of Cs.

And so it both checks things and then figures out who within the company needs to sign off when it requires manual review. So that is solving that, that red line problem. So yeah, those are the different pieces of, of what we do.

Speaker 6: very cool. Okay. Yeah, I was wondering because I, I kind of knew the original story around, you know, the comm paper, the, the, creative Commons and then some of the contract management stuff. But I, so I hadn't heard of the the AI tooling in your bill, but that makes a lot of sense.

Speaker: Yeah. And that, that one's the newest. And you know, there's like, there, there are pieces of what Jerry does that was baked into the, the contract management tool for a while, but it increasingly made sense for us to like separate that out into [00:09:00] its own product, partially because that there's not perfect overlap in the customers who need it.

Like the contract management tool assumes that a lot of the stuff you're doing is around standards where Jerry can work with any red line contract. It's more like looking at like, okay, what, what are you sending to your customer and what are they sending back to you? And so it's more about looking at like what have they changed and then how do those changes line up with what you want?

Where the standards are more about like. Standardization and structure. So they, they work really well together, but it made sense to have Jerry as a separate app because some of it's bigger companies, some of it's people that are just working in different ways. But yeah. And that's, that's the newest thing that we've done.

It's also a lot of stuff that, like wasn't possible a year or two ago.

Speaker 6: That's super cool. And I mean, you know, one of the things you, you kind of mentioned briefly, but I think it's just so important is, is really understanding, like giving anyone an idea of what is market, right? Like that's just like, it's a [00:10:00] one of these concepts. You're like, I get this red line back from some company that I'm trying to sell something to.

And as a founder, or even like a sales, if you haven't done like hundreds of these deals. Even then you're like, you don't know if this request they're making or if the way they're wording it is like some, you know, lawyer trick to like, you know, and like shift all the liability over to you or do something that you like, you know, something that you wouldn't normally do.

And understanding what is market. I think it ends up being one of the most, it's basically what you're paying lawyers for. It's like you're, you're paying them to like interpret and explain to you so you can like decide if that's the right thing for you, but then also guide you around. This is an out of market ask.

Like, we don't need to accept this. We can, you know. Yeah.

Speaker: think it's, it is a really good point. And then like, I, it's one of my most common questions for our attorneys, like when I'm fundraising or doing whatever kind of deal that is just like, is this normal? Is this market just 'cause like [00:11:00] for a lot of this stuff, I may have a gut reaction, but that might just be the way these deals happen.

So that's like, and yeah, like we now have like literally, you know, more than $10 million of deals every month flowing through our system. And so we have this really unusual view into what is market. We actually like have released benchmark reports that are just sort of like, okay. At this point in time, how common is unlimited liability?

Like, what is the most common thing, or, you know, like are most, there's like a million things that most people, unless you are negotiating these deals all the time, you may not even heard of it before. And so you just don't know, like, is that a reasonable request? And, and then like that you don't necessarily want to do it just because it's common, because maybe for your company it's the wrong thing, but that's at least like a really helpful data point for informing how you should respond to this and like how the other side is gonna respond if you push back on that.

Because that may sort of like, make [00:12:00] you look like you have no idea what you're doing or potentially, ideally you can sort of, you know, uplevel your position in, in their eyes too.

Speaker 6: Yeah, I, it, it is the contract negotiation is, is like definitely one of my least favorite parts of, of like the whole thing. You know, maybe up there with like, you know, employee misbehavior, right? Like, those are like, it's like those are two unfun problems to, to deal with. And I think your point is like, because like, it is confrontational.

You don't really, you like, you're like, I'm trying to be on the same side as my customers. I'm not trying to, you know, so I always said like, the golden rule for us was like, we should never put a contract in front of someone else that like, we wouldn't sign right. I think that's like, I, I just fundamentally believe that it's like if we would, if we would laugh at this, the other side, then like, why would we try to put those terms in front of someone else?

And, and then yeah. And then try to understand what's [00:13:00] market and I, and then, I mean, the other lesson I've learned is like dual tracking, the, like purchase process and the legal alongside of like a POV is like a really good exercise because it gives you a chance to like, you know, hey, we're gonna, we're gonna like do the tech eval and the integration and do all that stuff simultaneously while we negotiate the terms.

And I think there's this like, interesting balance there because it's kinda like you can get the tech folks to put a little more pressure here and you can like say, hey, well, like we may, maybe we can't give you that term if you're gonna not pay as much as you want it. Right. So it's like the whole, the whole balance.

Speaker: I think a lot of people who are not as experienced as you have like the opposite intuition about that, which is that like I know the contracts contracting process stinks and I know that's gonna be a sticking point. So like maybe if I. Don't bring it up. They won't [00:14:00] bring it up. And like, maybe that works if you're like selling to like an SMB or like, you know, just like an individual person.

But when you are selling to the enterprise yeah, like that, I, I think you're, you're exactly right. Where if you, there's a bunch of things that take a long time and you can execute them serially or you can execute them in parallel. And I think it's sort of just like good sales practice to ask your champion or whoever your contact is, is be like, tell me about the last time you bought something like this and what was the process?

Who are all the people that had to sign off? What are the checks? And then just get all those things and then like you're managing it like a project. 'cause that's what it is. And part of it is getting them excited, but part of it is just like pushing it through those things. And as much as you can run those in parallel.

The whole thing will be shorter. The downside is that you may waste more resources if one of those things is a blocker because you're investing in all that. But that's a good trade off is to try to make it as fast as possible, even if you end up getting stuck somewhere, because then [00:15:00] you could just spend those resources somewhere else.

Speaker 7: Yeah.

Speaker: the other thing that you said that I think, again, I, I completely agree with but it's actually like there are super experienced people who disagree with you is like on the, like, don't put the con anything in front of the customer that, you know, you wouldn't sign or vice versa. Like, like sort of like that golden rule.

And I think there's a school of thought which i, I don't share, which is that like there is, there is a pie and it's much more zero sum. And it's just like, I'm gonna start with everything super favorable to me because I assume they're gonna ask, they're gonna try to move everything in their direction. So I want to move it, start as close to me and then that helps me out.

And I think a big part of what that misses. Is like, 

Speaker 3: even 

Speaker: if it is successful in making like the terms more favorable to you, and I'm not totally sure that it is, it like is adding so much friction in all the deals and it undervalues the, the delay of that friction and it's like shocking what a [00:16:00] big lever like sales cycle velocity is.

Actually one of like the first blog posts we've made a common paper was I made this big Google sheet of like, here's a fake company. Just change the input of like it's a four month sales cycle versus a three month sales cycle versus a two month sale cycle and no additional capital raise, no additional marketing budget, same win rate.

And it's just like the sales growth of that company. 'cause you can recycle the cash so much. So in any case it's

Speaker 6: Oh, that's interesting.

Speaker: yeah, because you, once you, and especially if you get annual prepayments, it, it's, it's less extreme if you're, you're paying monthly, but it's sort of like a an e-commerce company or a retail company that can turn their inventory really fast.

You can. When that customer pays back, you can then spend that on customer acquisition for the next one. And just turning that that capital, that whatever much you have, you can get a lot, many more turns out of it.

Speaker 6: Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, I like that a lot. I hadn't thought about that as a reason. I, I mean, the way that I've always approached it is like, I'm like, Hey, look, I think this is the right way to [00:17:00] do business. And I try to do business like in the spirit of the deal. And I think it, like, it allows me to, to like go to someone and be like, I gave you the contract that I think I would've signed.

I think you should sign it. Like. I'm not moving. Like, it's kinda like I, it allows me to be like, I'm not gonna move on that I already gave you, like, so, so, so, you know, because I think when someone tells me, you know, oh, like, it's like the price, like they anchor it really far away. I am like, I'm like, okay, well you're gonna negotiate because that's an insane price.

Like, so, you know, now I have to do is try to find the low, like the lowest price. Whereas if they give me a fair price to begin with, I'm like, okay, that's a fair price. Right? Like, you know, I'll probably, that's probably not, I'm probably not trying to negotiate that much. So.

Speaker: I, yeah, I, I agree. I, and I, for the record, I don't think I'm very good at negotiating, and I definitely don't like it. I, I took a negotiation class in college and like, I feel like I learned a lot in it. And one [00:18:00] of the things we, we learned about is like, you know, there's, there's some people that are like, you know, really extreme positions and like getting walked back and all that.

And I remember reading about I'm gonna mispronounce his name. His first name was Wayne. His last name was like Jinga or something like that. He created both like Blockbuster and Waste Management. They were both like rollups of all these, like small little mom and pop in one case garbage businesses, in other case video stores.

And he was like, very much like you're describing, like he did a million deals. Each of them, he just like did a bunch of research and basically said, okay, this is what I think a fair price is. Yes or no?

Speaker 7: Leave it.

Speaker: Yeah. And it was like actually a fair price. And like, I think because he wanted to do it with velocity, I can imagine if you're like doing a bunch of really bespoke things and it's like you're gonna do one deal ever, you wanna hyper optimize it and not think about like, but I also, similar to you, like I just, this is the way that I like to operate.

It just like transparent and open and not a lot, like, I'd rather focus on making the product better, [00:19:00] providing great service time with my team rather than, yeah. So I'm gonna say

Speaker 6: Yeah. It's, it's a sort of like a, a, it is a, it's a different po like world like worldview, right? Like the, the, the view of the fixed pie versus like, we'll just make the pie a lot bigger. Right. And, you know, that's the answer.

Speaker: totally. And, and this whole thing about, like, this is what I would sign, this, you know, is very much the, the ethos that are embodied in the standards. Because one of the things that the people who use them get to say is that like, they didn't make this thing. It's not like there's some, like, it was all super favorable to them.

Like lots of companies use this and in a lot of cases people use this both for procurement and, you know, for selling their stuff. And, you know, the, the magic really happens is like when two people who are on the standards meet where it's like the same thing where it's like, you know, you fundraising on the safe with an investor who's done the safe a million times.

It's like, we're using a safe, it's this gap, [00:20:00] or it's this much yes or no. You know, do the, there's still a lot of stuff to talk about, but it's like, do you wanna do this deal? Not what's in the third red line of this thing? Whatever. Yeah.

Speaker 6: Yeah, I was, I was wondering how you've kind of, you know, there's kind of that supply and demand side, like how have you approached the procurement side?

Speaker: So, most of our like customers of the software. Our vendors, we have lots of people using the docs for procurement, but that that is like, like we think about like distinct audiences kind of for the, the docs, the contract management and, and for Jerry. And they, there's a lot of overlap there. But we, part of how we thought about this, and this was an evolution in like from when we started the company, at first we thought about our target market as like, okay, anyone B2B software transactions, buying and selling any size.

And we had a, you know, several months [00:21:00] of just sort of like running as fast as we could, but feeling like we weren't making progress. And as is a lot of cases, we realized, okay, we need to refine our target market. And so, you know, on day one, if Jake Stein says, this is a standard contract, you should use it at the response of everybody in the world is, who's Jake?

And why should we care? Like, I don't. Like this is a standard 'cause you say so. And so the way we sort of resegmented the market was in the very early days we said, okay, who is, who's gonna be the earliest adopter of this? Because this is like, there is a network effect here. The more people who use the standard, the more valuable the standard is.

So how do you overcome the Cold Start problem? And the way we thought about it is like, okay, companies at their earliest stage, there's no switching cost. They're like, they need, they need a standard. And it's typically like they get a verbal yes from their first customer. That customer says, okay, send me over your NDA or send me over your sales contract or send me an LOI and that founder's like, [00:22:00] oh, okay, I need to go get one of those things.

And you know, it might be a technical person who's never been involved in the sales process, maybe not the legal process. And so we wanted to be, okay, can we be top of mind for that person or the recommendation their investor makes to them or their accelerator or whatever. And so that was how. We thought about, you know, getting the initial critical mass and have since expanded out from that.

Speaker 6: Interesting. Yeah, it's a it's a, it's a very interesting approach. It is. I'm guessing it is hard, like changing your, the paper that you use, like to do a deal is like a, is like a pretty big. No, like, everyone's like the paperwork. The salespeople don't want new paper, like they, no one, no, like, yeah. So that's a hard, it's a hard, there is a high switching cost there.

Speaker: There, there's a, you're correct, there's a high switching cost. I think there's also a, like a psychological thing that is in some cases disproportionate with the real cost. Because it's like. You know, [00:23:00] there's, it is just like, like who we, we know legal stuff is annoying and so, you're asking me to change the legal thing.

It's, it's sort of like taking, making front, loading that problem to a degree. So, yeah, it's much easier to either get a brand new company or a company that is adding something like

Speaker 7: Mm-hmm.

Speaker: they only do cloud before and now they're adding on prem, or now they're going to become HIPAA compliant. So they need to sign BAAs, like, you know, whatever the thing is.

That's often the wedge in or is, you know, it's like switch with the NDA first. That's an easy one. And then see how great that is to use. And you're like, oh, you know what? I kind of wish our sales contracts were more like this. Excuse me.

Speaker 6: No, that makes sense. That's interesting. And then, I mean, I guess like the, the, is the, the hope or the intention of the business there is like if you get, if some of these become the next big, you know, vendor, then you can scale with them and that's a pretty, you know, yeah, that's a good

Speaker: [00:24:00] Exactly. So yeah, there, there are companies that you know, we, they used us for their, literally their first sale and they now have, you know, a 30, 40 person sales team. And, you know, they used us for, you know, either a hundred percent or very close to all the deals they've done, they've done. And then since, as we've gotten more traction with those people, as you can imagine, you know, some people that already are going are like, oh, I was a customer of this other company.

And that was a really nice experience. I would like that I. Process for my customers, or it just seemed like you eliminated a lot of the, the nonsense from this. And so that has helped us get some people to switch over. And it's also sometimes we get people who are already on the standards and then only a year or two in, come in for the software.

So it's really like, again, modeled after an open source project where like you're using MongoDB later, you need a Mongo enterprise. Or you could start with the on-prem version and switch to Atlas. You know, it can go in in a bunch of directions.

Speaker 6: Yeah, [00:25:00] and I'm guessing like, and maybe you might maybe have this data, but I would assume that the like. The results that you want to show for your customers are both like lower legal expenses and more and faster, you know, faster contracting. Does that feel right? Does it feel like, like the two

Speaker: I would say I would put faster number one. Yeah. And, and so lower legal is certainly one one of the other things that like people

Speaker 6: I mean, those two kind of go hand in hand, right? Like the time and money with lawyers is like, you know, that's a that's a real,

Speaker: The thing that I'll so sometimes happen, this is especially true for people that have like in-house counsel, where like those attorneys have strategic projects that they wanna work on, and then every month they have to drop that to support the sales team for the monthly close. And so this might not change their legal bill at all, but maybe their attorneys are working on much higher value [00:26:00] stuff that is more interesting to them.

So it can go in that direction, but, but you're sort of, especially if you have outside counsel, it's, it's more of a one-on-one relationship. But actually some of the more sophisticated people we talk to, especially the ones that have scale, they have switched to like subscription billing with their attorney.

Where it's like you were gonna support us and then that, you know, aligns incentives. In some cases it's still a minority in cases, but I think it's really smart. And then that attorney is sort of like partners with them on, I wanna make this as easy as possible, I want you emailing me. Never. And so they're helping them deploy tools or set up playbooks or things like that.

And then especially with Jerry, in a lot of cases we'll be working with, we have a couple things like that now where we're working with the outside council and the company where the outside council is heckling to set up Jerry. So that all of the like repetitive low level stuff that used to go to the outside council, they're saying, here's how we always answer this question.

You don't need my brain for that. And we don't need do our brain for that. And then, you know, only the more sophisticated stuff gets escalated to them.

Speaker 6: [00:27:00] Yeah, and I, I mean, if I, I think like, you know, a claim that you can make over time, if you can just be like, you know, hey, we, we helped X company, you know, speed up their sales cycle from, you know, 90 days to 60, whatever it is. And, you know, being able to show that broadly, I think is a powerful claim for people.

And then to then, to your point, if that velocity, you know, can, can give you more turns, like there's a lot of, there's value there, so.

Speaker: Totally. And, and I also think it's like e even, so I think the, the quantitative thing is really powerful and like the economic argument that's easy to justify. I think there's also a, like, for lack of a better word, a vibe space thing where like a sales rep, it's the last day of the quarter and even if like, you know, it takes five hours for the attorney to, to turn around a dock, which is really fast.

Like they're freaking out during that time. And so if we can for at least a subset of their contracts, change [00:28:00] that turnaround time to five minutes and like the founder is not texting the attorney saying, what are you doing? I need to do that. Like, that's just like. A much better experience. It's hard to quantify.

And you know, maybe the ROI case is not clear, but I think that's better. And then it's also, you can sort of, I think some of that, you know, customer relationship stuff you were talking about before, you can just like, make it, see, make you easier to do business with.

Speaker 6: Yeah. I mean, particularly like we look, To automate more of the like back office rote tasks that we kind of all, you know, have to manage and put up with. I mean, like, this is also not the like, highest value time for your seller, for your CEO, for anybody else, it's like managing the contract. It's like part of the job, but it's not like, you know, it's not really generating new biz, right?

Like getting new leads, working new deals, solving new customer problems. It's like, it is [00:29:00] the you know, epitome of some of that blocking and tackling that you have to do in order to like sell software. So,

Speaker: Yes, this is no one gets into sales because they're excited about the contract piece. I mean, if they were excited about that, they'd become a attorney or a paralegal this is just something that they have to do. And, you know, different companies have the salespeople involved in that different amounts.

But but yeah, this is it's very easy to get people on the revenue team, you know, sales, sales ops or what have you, like talking about the challenges here. It's, it's not that, that, that's not the hard part of this where people, people feel like there's a problem.

Speaker 6: Yeah. And, and so I mean, like, let's, let's hit a couple terms. Like what? Like gimme some, what is market, right? Like, you know, and liability auto renewal, like hit, hit some of the high points, you know, on some of these contracts around like where, what's market

Speaker: Yeah, for sure. So I, I mean by far the most common thing for liability is a one x cap. And that one x is based on and this is a little nuance here, the [00:30:00] fees paid or payable in a given year. And so that, you know, sometimes it, it used to be mostly like fees paid, but then they realized, okay, there's a loophole if the customer just doesn't pay their bill.

So it's like what is, you know, owed there. Often like there, there's, that changes if you're either selling to a big enterprise or you have like, you're touching some like particularly sensitive data. And then what there will be is like potentially progressively higher caps. For certain categories of things.

So it's like, okay, if you, there's a data breach or you do what's called like gross negligence or misconduct, like if you really f up then there'll be a higher cap. And if you're selling to the enterprise, it might be a higher multiple or they might just say it's 5 million or something like that.

The people, well one of the biggest questions we, we get is like, Hey, my customer asked for unlimited liability. How common is that? It's in less than 1% of the deals on our platform. Those [00:31:00] deals are disproportionately with big enterprises, and that's sort of like, for a lot of companies, that's just a red line.

They won't do it. Because like you can't buy insurance that covers unlimited liability. And then some people they decide it's worth it because this is a big deal and, you know, if we wanna sell this company, they need it. So it's, it's a general call.

Speaker 6: And then even, even when you're giving unlimited, you're normally just trying to scope it to like, you know, as few things as possible in that, in that scenario, right.

Speaker: Correct. You're exactly right. So you, you try, the goal is, you know, number one, keep the caps low and then keep them as narrow as possible. So you're exactly right. So maybe, you know, one thing that people will sometimes say is, okay, we'll do higher cap for gross negligence or misconduct. Or maybe we'll do unlimited for just that.

And then the other thing, and this is again, too far in the weeds, we could just edit it out later. There's like indemnity, which basically means like how much you're, it's almost like you're insuring the other side [00:32:00] for problems in like that a third party comes in and makes, so like the classic example of what, like a vendor might in the contract, say the customer indemnifies the vendor.

For like, if the customer uploads, like pirated content or something to the product. And so it's like, clearly it's the customer's fault if they're doing that. And then what might happen is like, just make it up, like you're uploading Metallica music to this, you know, file storage thing, and then Metallica sues you and then,

Speaker 6: Why would they sue me? They like, they love

Speaker: they love it.

They wouldn't sue you you wouldn't steal whatever.

Speaker 6: Yeah. You wouldn't steal, you wouldn't steal a car. Why would you steal a song? 

Speaker 7: Yeah, 

Speaker 6: exactly.

Speaker: Uh uh, so that's like the, the customer would indemnify the vendor for that. And then, you know, something the vendor might indemnify the customer for, like, if the customer gets sued for using the product and because like someone else's IP is in the product and they like [00:33:00] incorporated open source, have a license or someone else's thing.

And so there are like, this is a gray area, like do. The caps supply to indemnity. And sometimes people try to make that explicit. There's debate about like, maybe it's better to not be explicit about that. So this is like a more nuanced thing, but again, the idea, this is a case where it's really about trying to scope it, like scope it to stuff that's really my fault that I have control over.

So I'm not protecting you against something that's your own fault.

Speaker 6: Yeah. So that, and, and within the, I call it the lull, right? The limitation of liability and the lulls, just for the lulls I think what, what, at least this is my tactic around it, is I just try to make sure that the buyer understands, like they. I'm not like, there is, there is risk in liability in doing whatever they're doing.

Like you've got sensitive data, you're putting it somewhere like, [00:34:00] yes, you're giving it to me. You are not gonna outsource the risk or the liability of that data to me and like, now I gotta pay, if something happens to it right now, again, I have some responsibility for it, but acknowledging that there is just inherently some risk.

Like, you know, hey, you're, there's bugs, there's other things that happen. So it is, and, and, and at any point there is. Responsibility and risk. And like, just because you use a vendor doesn't mean that you don't have that risk in your business anymore. Of course you do. So like, I, I can't unlimited your liability because you are, you have, you know, crypto keys, like, you know, don't give me the keys.

Like, that's, it's like, you know, do you do your thing? Anyway, that's, that's kinda like my like a, a little bit of how I talk around that. I dunno how other people talk about it, but,

Speaker: Yeah. And I think that is like, that makes a lot of sense. And in my mind this is one of the [00:35:00] things that a great lawyer can really help with. 'cause I think sometimes people say like, oh, you know, comp paper, you're just trying to like, you know, box the lawyers outta the equation. And I think there's like a lot of things that are incredibly useful that a great lawyer can help with.

One of which is like understanding the interaction between what your product does, the like stage of your product, your company, and like sort of what your risk posture should be. And then like the specific concerns of this customer, because like if you're selling to Coinbase versus if you're selling the common paper versus if you're selling to replicated, like we have very different risks and we also represent.

Different dollar values to a vendor. And if the vendor is a word processor versus a payment processor versus like security software, like they can, if they screw up, it messes us up in different ways. And so like, yeah, you always want your liability to be lower and you want to indemnify for narrow stuff, but like understanding [00:36:00] how these things interact and sort of how to thread the needle in a really complicated thing where either this deal is gonna make or break your company or you're willing to walk away from it.

You don't wanna accept stuff. And like thinking all the other piece is just what is this term gonna, is it gonna come back and bite us? Like when we're in diligence and getting acquired, what is, what are they gonna think if we have unlimited liability? Is that really scary to them or do they maybe not care if we have you know, a thing that they have the right to break the contract depending if we try to assign all the contracts to the acquirer.

What does that mean? So all those things are like sort of dependent on what kind of company you are. What do you want your outcome to be? And tho those are the things that it really could, you know, I might choose something very different than you.

Speaker 6: Yeah. Yeah. I just, it is, it is sort of interesting. I think there's like these, some of these mental things you have to like, understand about contracts and about the business in order [00:37:00] to be like, kind of get into the mindset. And it's funny because I. I, I have a, a trick that I do sometimes and I just say, oh, I love contracts.

Right? So like, this is my favorite part, right? I love doing the contracts and I try to just trick myself to say, oh, this is a fun puzzle. And I try to, and when I get into the mindset of like, I kind of load up the context around like, what is, what's market? What are we done in the past? How is this supposed to work?

Then it actually isn't so bad. The hardest part is when you enter into a conversation and there's like three lawyers on the other side. You've got your lawyer, your salesperson. There's like a, you know, and you're like, I don't really know what I'm supposed to do here. That's, that's the worst. When you have some of the context and you're a little bit prepared and you sort of can like, reason about these things pretty well.

It's, it's not that bad. It's, it's manageable.

Speaker: Yes, I agree. And, and I have found a lot of, you know, things to be interested in, in, in this field. And like, I, I'm still like, [00:38:00] I'm not a lawyer, I'm not the world's expert on contract terms. Like, I know a lot about the, the, the terms that are running through our system. And Tiffany, this attorney on our team, has taught me a tremendous amount and is a great communicator.

And like, you know, for a lot of this stuff, one, one of her things that, that she's, you know, explained to me many times is that, like for most contract things, it's very rare where it's like, no, the, the answer is no, we can't do that. Or the answer is, yes, we should do that. It's just sort of like, what are the trade-offs?

Like, it's not like illegal to take unlimited liability. You're not like, there's no one who's gonna say to you later, you shouldn't have done that. You know, it may turn out to be the wrong call, but it's just like what, you know, is the risk that you're gonna go outta business, that you might be willing to take pretty much any risk in the contract.

'cause this is the, the, because it doesn't matter if your company takes on unlimited liability.

Speaker 6: I've been there at, at some points, you know, in the replicated history where I was like, oh yeah, let's I was like, you know what, we need this cu, we need this customer, we need this at this point. Like, let's, let's just, yeah, this is, [00:39:00] we'll, we'll fix it in post, right? Like, you know, next year we'll be like, okay, if we're, if we're alive, we can't accept this, this term anymore.

So,

Speaker: Right. And so that, that is like, yeah. Sorry. Again,

Speaker 6: I was gonna put a sticky note on it and come back to it in a year. Yeah.

Speaker: and I, I've also seen the other side of it where I've like been talking to a lawyer who joined the company that had been running for like, you know, five years and she's like, yeah, I went through some of the contracts. And like, there's stuff in there saying like, can't wait to visit you in Bulgaria, smiley face emoji.

And she's like, are we promising to go onsite to this, you know, customer that's paying us $500 a year? Like, is that, and I was like, no, no, no. I was just saying, I, I look forward to visiting. It was like, no, that, that, like, that is an obligation of us in this contract. Like, you can't just do that. And so, you know, and like, you know, who cares?

Maybe the $500 contract doesn't matter, but like, there's yeah. So, so your risk profile may change. Oh, the other thing I was gonna say before about like, loading up the context and understanding what's going on, and it can [00:40:00] be kind of rewarding. I, I think one of the other fs most frustrating situations is when you're selling to a big company, you have your champion who like totally gets what your product does, has the problem, like understands the solution, but they have so much specialization and division that like your contract gets sent to someone in procurement or some attorney that has zero context on what you

Speaker 7: Oh yeah.

Speaker: Then they're just like, well, we always ask for this. And it's like, well, well, like, you know, you're asked, like, I remember at Stitch this cloud data integration software, like someone was adamant we had to agree to their hard hat policy.

Speaker 7: Yeah.

Speaker: it's like, I, I don't, like we don't go on site. If we were going on site, we wouldn't be going to your construction site.

I

Speaker 7: but if I did, I'd have a hard hat on. Yeah.

Speaker: yeah. It's like, but like, you know, there, and I, I, because of what I do, I hear so many horror stories about like, people who are just like saying to their champion, I am going to be breaking this contract on day one. [00:41:00] And the champion is just like, I really need you to sign this contract.

Like, they won't let me buy this unless you agree to this. It's like, I, I don't have backup CDs. It's all delivered. You know, it's like whatever.

Speaker 6: Sometimes you just gotta buy the teams from hard hats and, and FedEx mouth everybody, and be like, we're wearing these for the next month. Everybody 

Speaker 7: you.

Speaker: It, it'll be worth it. And so yeah, it's, it's just like deciding how important is this deal? How much do you wanna fight over it? And could you, can you get around it? 

Speaker 2: Yeah,

Speaker 6: Yeah. The, like, the the other part of this sort of like, like nodding along, knowing that like, that's just not how it works, but you're like, all right, like, I'm gonna sign it because this is the only way we're getting this deal done. And it's like, maybe like, there's no backup CDs, but like S3, you know, we're like, it's already s and like there's backups.

So it's like, you know, who do I, how Maybe they have a cd, you know, back who knows.

Speaker: yeah. [00:42:00] Maybe I could, if, if the, if things really hit the fan Alberta cd, I still have my own cd. You know, I, it was last used to make a sublime mix tape,

Speaker 7: Yeah. Exactly.

Speaker: Yeah, I, and I think that is a reasonable point of view. It's really 'cause you know, sometimes,

Speaker 6: sometimes you squint and you're just like, yeah, I can kind of see how that, that's, that's basically the same thing.

Speaker: And, and this is another case where like, not only is most of this stuff, like not a rule with a capital R because like, there's no one saying you can or can't do this, but like, this is a question I'm, I always ask Tiff Tiffany, it's like, okay, tell me how this matters. And the situation in which it goes really poorly for someone using the contract.

And a lot of times it's like, you know, there are many steps to get there. It is, okay, customer and vendor get pissed off at each other. They try to hash it out that way, then they sue each other and then this is getting interpreted. And as you said, it's like they're saying, okay, maybe you didn't have the CD but you had the backup.

And that does or doesn't satisfy [00:43:00] the thing and. You don't know. And then also like, is this getting adjudicated in Delaware where they do this other thing all the time? Or is this getting adjudicated in France where you just don't, you have no idea how they treat this and so that sort of thing.

Speaker 6: Yeah, that's it. It, it is one of these kind of unsexy but important parts of, of what we do and figuring out how to do it quickly. Do it well. You know, you don't want to get a ton of red lines from customers. It's like, it's always painful, you know? You don't want, yeah. So it, it's, I can see, I can see the value.

One, one thing I wanna chat about really quick, 'cause I'm, I'm gonna make a guess, which is based on my experience, which is like, we're pretty levered to like the success of the enterprise software ecosystem. And so like that, like 20, 22 timeframe was pretty painful for us because our customers were hurting, right?

And so, you know, when [00:44:00] like people are, you know, making tough decisions and layoffs and budget cutting and all these different things, did you see like. You know, seat counts go down or you, you like. How was that painful for both, for, for you because your, it was painful for your customers or were you still like, kind of early enough where you were still growing through it?

Or how did you, how did, how did you fare?

Speaker: It was a lot less painful for us than I think it was for you. And I think for, for two reasons. One is because we were just so early in our life that, you know, it was just, there wasn't a lot to lose that way. And then the other thing is that, because like I was talking about before, we. Started really wide and then became really narrow on the early stage companies.

And so a big proportion of our early customers were startups, selling to other startups. And then, you know, that that has its own, you know, ups and downs for sure. And like we see seasonality on like multiple dimensions. Like obviously like [00:45:00] end of quarter, end of month things get more active. But then also just like in kinds of deals, you know, certain things happen more in, in certain times of year.

But we were more, we were small and our customers were smaller in 2022, so I think we just did not see it as much.

Speaker 6: Yeah. Yeah, it was it was tough. And then, I mean, then, and honestly, even in the, in the, like, I would say seven years prior to that, we like never really had a customer like, go outta business. And then like in the last three years, it's like more customers went outta business than I like expected. I was like, oh, this is a, it's like, there's a definitely a, a cliff, like a, and so, you know.

Speaker: yes. That, that we have certainly seen a bunch of where, you know, we, not a hundred percent of the time, but try to be proactive if someone is like churning or something like that, or downgrading to the free plan, you know, asking 'em for feedback, finding out what's going on. [00:46:00] And it seems like there was a really big uptick in, Hey, I love the product.

We're winding down the company, you know, can't wait to use you in the next thing or something like that. Or like, I'm going to get a job. I'll see if they need a contract thing. So yeah, that, that went from not a big deal to like the number one source of churn for our

Speaker 6: Yeah. Oh, interesting. Yeah. And I mean, and even the Acquihire, right? Where they're getting, they're getting rolled in and it's like, well, they're gonna go onto this big company's paper, they're gonna end the product. And so it's like, you know, that like those two kind of combined end up being Yeah. Pretty painful.

And it's, those are hard ones because it's really just like a market dynamic. And it's, and it's not like, you know, and, and to, to the point of, like, I, I have seen many of them come back as customers and become, you know, at more, it's more successful companies. So there is value there. But it's hard at the moment.

Right.

Speaker: Yes. A hundred percent. And I in my last company we had a board member who's [00:47:00] like an independent, his name is Chuck Dietrich, who's super successful, entrepreneur, offered a couple companies and he, like, he gave me some feedback that I didn't really understand until like several years later where it was something along the lines of like, really like understanding what your strategic bet is and then organizing the company behind that.

I think I like understood all the words he was saying, but didn't really internalize it for a while. Whereas like, I just for example, I remember the early days of rj, we had a sales meeting with someone at Comcast and this, I, I knew nothing at this point and I was just like, they told me they had to use their contract.

And I said, okay. And I was like, could you tell me what is in it or show it to me? And the guy just like showed me on his desk this pile of papers, like, this is a vendor and I'm gonna, you know, send this back. And I was just like, we're not that kind of company. Like I know that there's a million things behind that, that we need to do.

And so like [00:48:00] we could dedicate everything to become that kind of company and we would change our sales model, we would change our marketing strategy, change our product. And, you know, maybe we'd be successful, maybe we wouldn't. But like I knew enough at that point just to know, like, I have no idea, like there'd be dragons.

And I feel like now for us, when we made that, that bet a couple years ago to say, okay, we're gonna start with startups. We needed to orient ourselves so that we could accept, you know, these early stage startups going outta business and, you know, not have a super high customer acquisition cost. To be able to be retained by the ones that do grow and have that balance it out.

Like what does that mean for our cost of acquisition? What does that mean for our cost of support? And just like organizing the company around that bet that we could do that. Because you could say, I wanna do this or I wanna do that, but that has implications on how you do lots of other stuff.

Speaker 6: Yeah, that's interesting. It, that, it kind of, it's, I I like that as like a, a framework or, or a you [00:49:00] know, find your, did you call it your organizing bet? Is that the,

Speaker: Yeah, it is the strategic bet and then how do you organize behind it? So like, what is the thing that, like, it's right or wrong, but like that is the thing, like that we can acquire a whole ton of early stage companies and then grow with them and not, you know, burn ourselves out on that. Or, I think it's, it's a, you know, lots of companies have been super successful saying, we're gonna focus on selling to the enterprise and we're not gonna, you know, worry about the YC startup with two people who's trying to do that.

You know, or whatever the, the, the thing is that your company, like the fundamental thing you need to be successful for you to be successful.

Speaker 6: Yeah. Yeah. It's it's an, it's interesting what any other kind of frameworks or patterns or just like, you know, core beliefs around startups in this process of, you know, building, selling, creating value. What, what, what are some of those foundational things for you?

Speaker: Yeah, so one of our like [00:50:00] core values as a company, and like, I think it, it, we try to view a lot of parts of our company with it is just the idea of like, creating more value than you capture. And I think, you know, it's like we've modeled that, those docs after open source and like, we have actually gotten feedback from a lot of people that like, Hey, I don't want to use the software.

I'm, I get a ton of value out of the docs. I would pay you for that. But like, you know, I, I I'm not gonna pay you for the software. Like, I'm, I really want to use this other thing. So is it okay if I like download a Word doc from you and then go upload it into company X, Y, Z and like. That was a very explicit company design thing that we made.

And part of it is we give this really valuable thing away for free. And we invest a lot into it. And that is actually like our most important source of lead generation. And it also just like has all these what's the right way to put it? Like, ancillary benefits that are hard to quantify or hard to know about in advance.

[00:51:00] Like I think it just sort of like lays positive groundwork. Like before we have a BD conversation with somebody and they check us out on our website and they're like, oh, wow, this seems really great. I, I, like, I've wished someone would do this. So I think that like just buys you a lot in, in general.

So that just idea of creating more capture and like we think about how we do support or like how we price and, you know, we have a really generous free tier. That's just, you know, part of a lot of the decisions we make. I think, and then maybe just the other thing that has been incredibly helpful for me is early in my career when I and my first job was actually at this VC firm and I was like a junior analyst, you know, cold calling companies and trying to invest in them.

And then me and another person from there that Bob from my, my co-founder for the first company, we left to start RJ Metrics. And like, I didn't know how to sell. Like I knew that some people were good at sales. And I reached out to the CEOs of one of the portfolio companies who, [00:52:00] like, he had run multiple portfolio companies, this guy Thomas Charlton.

And he like his reputation was like amazing operator would just like parachute into these companies that were doing poorly and like whip 'em into shape and just like really. Successful guy. And he was based in Philly, so it was like perfect that me and Bob like went and I was just like, I'm gonna be selling.

How does one get good at that? Like, I want, I want them, I want people who have the money. I want them to give me the money. How does that happen? And he is like, oh yeah, this is a skill you learn. We have training programs for this. There are companies that do training, like we pay this company. In that case it was like Sandler sales training.

And like, here are the materials. Like if you were a new salesperson at whatever company he was running at the time, this is what you would get. And like it included this audio recording of a lecturer, a series of lectures about how to do sales. And I like listened to it like four times. It was like a revelation to me.

And I think it is [00:53:00] useful both, number one, for doing sales, but I think it's like an incredible framework for just communicating with people and like even like in relationships outside of work. Just like some of it is like really obvious stuff around like listening more than you talk or asking questions.

But like, one of the things that I really love the most, it's like, as a salesperson, you, when you think about sales, you might like, the first thing that comes into your mind is like the used car salesman and like the sleazy guy trying to trick you into something. And one of the ideas in this program was that like a much better seller is your doctor.

And you walk into the doctor's office and if the doctor would say, oh, hey, it looks like you need a cast. Let me get one on you. You'd be like, what are you talking about? Like, you don't know what's wrong with me. How do you know? But they ask you a bunch of questions and they say, what brings you in here?

Like, why are you here? What's the problem? What have you done to try to solve this before? How long has it been going on? Have you ever experienced anything like this? Do you have any theories about it? And then after all [00:54:00] that. They take all that information and combine with the fact that they're wearing the white coat and they do this all the time and they've been to medical school, they say, you know what?

I think you've broken arm. And I, you know, I need to do that. And just, so why do you feel so much more confident in the things that they're saying? And can you make your interaction with a potential customer or a potential recruit or partner or whatever feel like the confidence that you have in your doctor where you listen, you ask questions, you make it feel, because you do do this all the time.

You're like, oh yeah, I, these are the indications of a broken arm. I see people with broken arms all the time. I give 'em cast, they feel better. You whatever, need help deploying your software. I, I know all this. I've asked you all these questions and so that, all that framework of just sales as applied to just communicating with people where you maybe have the same goals, maybe you don't, you're trying to understand what they need.

That is just a a big uplevel in like my communication and effectiveness and just getting stuff done in general.

Speaker 6: Interesting. [00:55:00] Okay. The, so, so specifically like the Sandler sales training, is that the one that you're like,

Speaker: That was the one that like I listened to first and had the most impact on me. I have like subsequently listened to a handful of others and I thought they were good. And I think there's a lot of overlap in a lot of these things. None of the other ones like bowled me over in the same way, but it's also like, you know, I, I think it was, I was going from zero to something.

But yeah, I, I had a really positive impact from that. 

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 6: Do you have your sales folks and go to market folks, like read it

Speaker: So we had a big sales team at both Stitch and RJ Metrics and yeah, they all went through the Sandler system. Common Paper has more of a product led go to market, and so we actually don't have full-time salespeople on the team now. I'm doing most of the sales and our product folks do a little bit. So there's not as formalized of a training program, but a hundred percent that will be, 

Speaker 7: yeah.

Speaker: And I would default to Sandler. I think, you know, if we hired a sales leader and they were like, oh, [00:56:00] you know, challenger selling is the thing I love, I would say, great, let's try that. You know, I don't I don't have a reason to believe that that one is not as good as some other one or vice versa. But I think just the idea that sales is a learnable skill was sort of like a mind blowing thing to me.

Yeah. So that, that was like sort of wild.

Speaker 6: Any other, like, how about like on the product side, any philosophies or things that you follow or thing, how, how do you think about that?

Speaker: Yeah. I I think like w when I read the Lean Startup however many years ago, that was like a extremely eye-opening to me, and I think there's still a lot of that that influences how we build products. I think over time I have what's the right way to put it? Like.

Speaker 10: I.

Speaker: I was really into the empirical quantitative evidence earlier in my career, and like, so much so that like I sort of, downplayed, you know, the importance of brand, the importance of anything that can't be [00:57:00] quantified or like, if we don't have statistical significance, I'm not really interested in hearing about it.

And as I have gotten more experienced, it turns out there's just a lot of things that it's impossible to get statistical significance on. And like I learned about, like, observe how I make decisions or, you know, just learn about psychology and it's like, wow, you know, like there's a lot of things that are like pretty tough to measure that seemed to have big outcomes on it.

And so I could just pretend they don't exist or I could use other criteria for making the decision. So I think I've become much less hard line about like, I think I was like. Got data, religion earlier in my career, and I think I've become much more modern. I was like a zealot

Speaker 7: Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker: And I think I was like running a data company.

So like it was like, you know, talking to my books to some extent. But now I, like I, a lot more of my conversation with the team is like, about like, wow, would that be an amazing moment for someone if they [00:58:00] did this in a product and this thing happened like much less so than would that raise our conversion rate from, you know, four to 5%.

Like, I still wanna know that stuff and I'm still interested in it and I'm still like where it's possible, but a lot more of the time is spent about like, man, I would feel freaking awesome if the product did that. What do, how would that feel for you? And I think that's probably the best way to get to a conversion bump or retention bump or whatever you want.

Speaker 6: Yeah. It's funny 'cause I, I've kind of, I probably went a little bit, like, I probably started on the opposite extreme and then came towards to now I'm more in the middle. Like I, I was much more like the, you know, like. It's the art. You gotta feel it. Like I'll know it when I see it. Kinda like this whole a lot of intangibles and just, and not really having the, like, the data to back much of it up.

Just being like, I just kind of like, this is what I believe works and this is like, I want great stuff. And like I, I think about taste. [00:59:00] I still think that's important, but I've also like, like we didn't really like instrument much of our product. It replicated until like. 2022. But like, we kind of went through this downturn and I was like, we don't really know, like who's really using the product that much.

We don't know like how many they do. Like, so we, we, we brought this data team on. We got so much visibility into like all the actions and you know, who's like, and, and that became so valuable, right? Because we needed to get the data, but we just didn't have it. So like, and, and then you look at it, you're like, oh, it would've been pretty obvious that like a third of these customers are gonna churn over the next two years.

Right? And we need to like, figure out what, you know, what to do there. But yeah, I, I sort of came from the, the vibes and move towards the data now, but I think we're probably in the same place now. So it's funny.

Speaker: I think you're right. And, and the other thing that is colors. I think my perspective is that I, in a lot of cases there's people that I've been working with, you know, it's like my third company working with them. And I think [01:00:00] we have, like, for a seed stage company, we have like tremendous visibility and instrumentation.

Like, we're like, and so I sort of, some of this stuff I sort of take for granted now and like until but, and like when, when we're like, we're building this new product and I was like, oh my gosh, we don't know what the most likely reason when someone uploads a file. That doesn't have a successful outcome.

Like everybody's like, this is ridiculous. We need to fix this right away. So I think some of it is also like become in the water that I swim in, and so now I'm focused on the other stuff. But yeah, I bet we are both sort of moderated and we're in the same ballpark now.

Speaker 6: Yeah. It's and you know, you, I think you gotta, you gotta figure it out. It's both sides, right? It's, it's, it, it is,

Speaker: Yeah, I I think so. And it's also like different situations just call for different sort of levers.

Speaker 6: And then let's, let's, you know, always gotta wrap up a little more ai. So obviously you built this AI product, which is called Jerry.

Speaker 2: Correct?

Speaker 6: how [01:01:00] Well, like, you know, like, we'll talk about architecture there, but like, you know, how else are you, like, do you, I mean, are you, I mean I, I, I've told the story on this podcast, but like, I basically became a prolific engineer on our team for like two or three months because I was like, these tools are so interesting and like, I just think the whole landscape is changing for how we build and develop and like, we just built like a massive new product and like six or seven weeks because of ai.

And so like, just like all this stuff is changing how we work and what we do, but I'm curious how, you know, it's impacting you, your business, how you're thinking about it, where, you know.

Speaker: Yeah, it's, it's been an evolution. 'cause I think like a lot of people who started their company before, like chat, CPT and like the, a current AI moment, we started by just sort of like sprinkling some AI stuff on the existing product. And so that was things like, hey, you're gonna send an email to your customer when you send them the initial [01:02:00] contract.

Why don't we generate that email for you and like, give you a button to make that friendlier or more formal and, you know, that's useful Or similarly, like you have a list of, you know. 70 contracts in the system, might it nice to be like have summaries of all of 'em that you can get, you know, stuff like that, which is, is useful, but it doesn't like fundamentally change how the product works.

It just takes the product that exists and makes it better or, you know, add features. I think as we got deeper into it and as the capabilities advanced, it became more apparent to us that like putting more into the, the current product is like, is sort of like, there are different assumptions in that, that you can make with something.

And so like the, the value of structured data changes. If you can after the fact extract, meaning out of unstructured data. And similarly like, the interaction model can be very [01:03:00] different if you are not assuming you know, certain things. So we thought it was useful to sort of like step back and say, okay, let's, let's pause on adding more for the moment to that product.

That's still lots of customers, lots of revenue, like that's where we you know, that that product's not going away or anything. It's still something we're investing in, but like what would it mean if we sort of like went back to the drawing board with all these capabilities and rethought the assumptions, like what would we start over and build right now?

And like that originally was some functionality in the main product and then we realized like, okay, this is. There, there are some different assumptions, different data models. So like, let's make this a separate app and those apps can live together. A another thing that's just like a big implication for me personally is that I have a 2-year-old daughter who like, has a lot of delightful curiosity and I want to encourage that and like reward it and participate in it.

So like she'll just ask me like, you know, what is that thing? And half the time I [01:04:00] don't know what it is and I just open up chat GPT and go on video mode and look at it. And it's like, she wants to know, what's the bump on a blackberry called? Turns out it's a drt. And you know, or like, we've got these windows here that have like wood in the middle of it.

She's like, what's that part called? I'm like, I don't know. I look it up. It's, it's a a million. So like there's all these things that she's asking and like, so I now, like she and I interact together with Jet GPT like 15 times a day. And I, I think that's like great for just like, I'll say I didn't know that like Jeff Gtt could do all this stuff until she asked me questions and I didn't know how to answer them.

So it's like, you know, impacting my personal life as well. Oh, oh, sorry. And then one last bit on the work front, there had been some things in our product that like we wanted to add we had to deprioritize because it just takes so long to build them. And then like, we hadn't added more of them for a couple months.

And then my co-founder was like, you know, we haven't tried this with Cursor yet. Like, we started using Cursor after we decided to stop doing this. Let me just take a day and [01:05:00] see. Or actually it's a different member of our team to just like see, like, can she, can't she do it in a day now instead of four weeks?

And we're gonna see, and you know, I'll, I'll let you know in a week if, how successful she is.

Speaker 6: Yeah. I'm gonna, I'm gonna expect success to be honest. Like we've just, we've seen it accelerate so many things and, and, you know, I. I'm not like a, I, I taught myself how a program 15 years ago and I taught myself PhD, HP in sql. So like I am not a super talented engineer, and I got in and I was building features and doing everything by the, like, you know, within weeks and if you have some skill and look, I had great folks to review PRS and things, but if you have some skill you can just go so fast and get so much done and make, you know, make changes and, and improve stuff.

So I think we're gonna have a lot better software in the next like, few years because of it. So.

Speaker: So I, and I think that's such an interesting question because I, I, I think there's a great chance to write about that. I, I'm very confident we'll have more software. But like one of the like when my [01:06:00] co-founder did the 20 minute version of Ken, like we use Cursor all the time now, but he like basically like wrote a paragraph prompt for Cursor to design this feature and the output of that was it did the feature, it made a million tiny things wrong.

And he's like, okay, this actually, this version of it would not have saved me time because I need to go change all those things. So it's like, okay, let's do the day long version of it where we like create a really like specific plan. And so one of the things I'll be really curious to see is it like certainly lowers the bar to creating new stuff.

And I think some of that may be that just like stuff that just sort of so-so gets out, which is great. More software in the world is a good thing. Or at least I, I, I like that. And I think it also is potentially will be used to like make better stuff, but I don't know that it's necessarily true. Does that make sense?

Speaker 6: Yeah, I mean, it, it, it, to your point, all software that's done this way will not be better. But I think like put in the hands of people, like Yeah. Also like one shotting [01:07:00] a prompt to like, get exactly what you want. Just like not, it's like try to tell an engineer with one in one paragraph what you want and you're not gonna, you're gonna get like rich.

Right. So it's, it requires, you know, a little more conversation. But like, I just, you know, I mean, I, I think I integrated, you know, saml, like a skim is like a protocol I integrated, like skim into replicated core product in like six hours, right?

Speaker 3: Oh wow. That's

Speaker 6: been like a much bigger pro. And there's some, so there's some, some things I think you're gonna be much.

More like able to do, or like, there's really defined standards and you know, like easy way to test it and all this kinda stuff. But like, I don't know, I just, I'm I'm super bullish. I, you know, and I, and I, it seems like, what, tell me, how do people find Jerry's? You said it's private beta, but is it, does

Speaker: yeah, if, if they go to get jerry.ai so they, they can go there, they can sign up, they can try it out. And yeah, so you could sign up for free and just, just give it a shot.

Speaker 7: How do you spell Jerry?

Speaker: G-E-R-R-I, [01:08:00] it's as we all know, the general Counsel on succession was named Jerry. And so she was part of the inspiration.

Speaker 3: This is

Speaker 6: Okay.

Speaker: no nonsense lawyer.

Speaker 6: I could not watch succession. I just hated everyone too much,

Speaker: oh yeah. They, they were terrible people, but made me feel better about myself.

Speaker 6: Oh, nice. Yeah, I just, I, when, when there's, when there's literally no character that I can reform. Like, this is not, I, I'm like, it, I I just find myself being like these, I dunno who, well, we'll watch it at some point, but I, I couldn't get into it. But that's, you know, that's me.

Speaker: Yeah. But yeah, get Jerry is the name ge, RRI get geri.ai. And that'll take you to a page on our site where you can sign up and and give it a shot.

Speaker 6: And if you go to common paper.com, I'm sure you can

Speaker: Oh yeah, for sure. There. If you go to com, paper.com, there's a link to try it out there. So, yeah 

Speaker 6: amazing. Jake, thank you so much for doing this. It was a pleasure.

Speaker: likewise, I appreciate it and always fun to catch up.

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