E-signatures for startups

Which documents does a startup sign in its first two years?

The first year is mostly people paperwork: founders' agreements, the first employees' offer letters, and contractor agreements that assign intellectual property to the company. Investors will check those assignments in due diligence, and a missing one can hold up a round.

Then come the corporate documents. Board decisions are often taken by written consent instead of a meeting, shareholders sign resolutions, and early commercial deals bring NDAs, letters of intent and the first customer contracts.

• Founders' or shareholders' agreement
• Offer letters and employment contracts
• Contractor agreements with IP assignment
• Board resolutions and written consents
• NDAs and letters of intent with partners

What makes startup signing fiddly

Board consents need every director, and directors are often investors on different continents. In Delaware, section 141(f) of the General Corporation Law allows directors to act by written consent given by electronic transmission, but the consent still has to come back from each of them. One slow director holds up the whole resolution.

Founders also get caught by retrospective paperwork. The IP assignment for the contractor who built the prototype a year ago turns up as a gap in due diligence, and has to be signed in a hurry by someone who has moved on.

How a startup gets a board consent signed with Sign PDF

The same steps work for an NDA or an offer letter.

• Upload the consent from Word or Google Docs exported as PDF.
• Sign PDF places a signature and date box beside each director's name and works out who is who from the wording.
• Send to everyone at once, or type 'chair signs last' to set the order.
• Switch on reminders so the slow director gets nudged without you writing the email.
• File the sealed PDF in your data room. The certificate and the verify page at signpdf.ai/verify let a lawyer check it has not been altered.

What a startup pays

Very early, a two-founder company signing a couple of NDAs a month can sit on Light at $5 a month. Once hiring starts, Full at $10 a month for unlimited documents is the obvious plan, and templates mean your standard NDA and offer letter are always ready.

Both plans are monthly. There are no seats to buy as the team grows because there are no seats; the trade-off is covered below.

What startups will outgrow

We have no API, so you cannot trigger a signature from your own product. There are no team seats or roles, no SSO and no CRM integration, which a sales team sending order forms will notice quickly.

Equity is a separate area. Option grants, SAFEs and share issues are usually best signed inside the platform that holds your cap table so the records match. We are also not SOC 2 or ISO 27001 certified, which some enterprise customers ask about in security questionnaires.