Better Contracts

Motivation

Contracts in the startup world are too limiting.

For founders, they make it hard to collaborate freely on multiple projects.

For employees, they imply all creations belong to some entity, even those unrelated to it.

In general they make people time-prisoners, forbidding them from taking new commitments, or adapt their commitment level to changes in their life.

Solution

I would like to present the following "radical" notions:

Like code, contracts should be short, concise and easy to read, even if you are not a lawyer.
Adapt the contracts to what fits you, instead of adapting your conduct to some imaginary often obsolete standard.

For this problem we would like a system that:

Allows individuals to collaborate with others on different projects.
Allows collaborators to dynamically determine how much of their week they dedicate to a project. Something personal came up? Lost interest? No problem, You can work less on that project.
Does not glorify or give "founders" any special status or rights. Someone's importance to the project is not always a function of when you joined, or the title they hold.
Compensates collaborators on things that already happened, not speculation about what they will do in the future.

This repo attempts to imagine what such a system might look like.

FAQ

Is this like "Slicing Pie"?

Yes, these contracts are inspired by Slicing Pie. To those unfamiliar, slicing pie is a method that tries to acheive these goals. It works like this:

You agree with your collaborators on how much your hours are worth
You treat hours put in the project as you would a monetary investment.
Your share in the company is simply your contributions divided by everyone's.

Is counting hours a good way to measure contribution?

The goal of hours reporting is to remove the risk of bringing on a cofounder and giving him half of your project based on good intentions alone.

However to many hour reporting sounds weird. Are hours really what we want to compensate for?

After all people can work for hours and not create any value. Also what prevents false reporting?

The question however is about the lesser of multiple evils, or in other words - what is the alternative.

Some efforts do not create immediate value. Trust is fundamental anyway.

What if someone just reports many hours, but not creating value?

If someone is putting in the time and not creating value, they should be terminated.

Terminated? Isn't this a hippie cooperative?

This method still needs a clear supervisor for each collaborator. It is enough that the supervisor has the authority to terminate so it derives all other autorities. Each person should have exactly one supervisor. This means the company is run by one decision maker until the top. At the top you could make other kinds of agreements, e.g. a voting system between multiple top level managers, an outsider to tie-break 2 level managers etc'. So there is a clear way to compensate and a clear way to terminate.

What are alternatives for counting hours?

Well you could count days as well 😜

But seriously here are some alternatives:

Tickets worth a certain amount of $
Work on open source
Share ownership over IP.

What about roles?

If termination rights and compensation is agreed upon It is made redundant to decide on roles, at least within this framework.

uriva / better-contracts Goto Github PK