It's Never Been Easier to Found a Company

Wow technology has come a long way

I remember founding my first company back in 2010. We were developing an app with live gas prices for every gas station in America, taken directly from credit card swipes at the pump (through a partner). We even made it so you could put in your destination and find the cheapest price along your route, up to 50 miles ahead.

Back then, I used an attorney to incorporate. Because I didn’t know any better, we became a Delaware LLC. But it took a month of back and forth, a lot of paperwork, and then I fell into the trap of the attorneys telling me I needed a hyper detailed operating agreement. I was young. I was naive. And what we have today didn’t exist.

When I founded Omnivore in 2013, I used a similar process, but much better attorneys. We were a Delaware C corp in about two weeks.

I founded my third startup two days ago…or today, depending upon whether you define it by submitting documents or actually getting incorporated.

But I did it all on my own. Online. In a few hours. And it took 2 days, most of which was spent getting my co-founders to sign the documents they needed to.

And 15 minutes after I Delaware accepted me, I had an EIN. I was sitting at a restaurant, took out my phone, and got a bank account in about 10 minutes.

I am amazed. Technology has perhaps not advanced anywhere else as fast as it has for starting a company.

Kind of says something weird about society doesn’t it?

I founded through Stripe Atlas. I’ve been a fan of Stripe as long as I can remember as they are one of the best designed APIs with fantastic developer-friendly documentation in the history of technology. Atlas is their product for incorporating a company so you can quickly use their platform to start accepting payments.

So, you submit basic information like name, address, SSN, etc., decide what kind of company you want to be (interestingly they still only offer Delaware for C corps…would have preferred Texas or Nevada), and add your initial share grants, which come with full paperwork including a vesting schedule and proper cliffs.

Your co-founders all sign the documents and everything gets sent to Delaware. But today was a state holiday there so I wasn’t expecting anything. Except there it was in my inbox. We filed yesterday, we are a full fledged corporation as of around 5pm tonight. With an EIN. And a bank account.

That’s insane.

Even better, Atlas partners with Carta for cap table management. I hit one button, and now Carta is managing my cap table with all the documents stored plus a data room already set up for my fundraising activities.

Sometimes I do enjoy how far technology has gotten us. If only more useful things had gotten so much easier and cheaper than making a corporation and all the necessary components maybe I’d be more impressed with society.