Stripe acquires Clerky

199

zzakshay about 16 hours ago 41 commentsRead Article on clerky.com

HI version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.

https://twitter.com/darbyw/status/2092718828405096955

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90% Positive

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Discussion (41 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

ksec•about 1 hour ago

Clerky: We help startups and attorneys get legal paperwork done.

I wish all smaller startup that is being acquired by big fish would start their blog by stating what they do first. So that hopefully we get a little bit of context of what is being sold and what it might add in the future.

Every single time I had to click around and look at what they do and what are their competitors to help understand the company.

sickcodebruh•26 minutes ago

Clerky is great. I used it a few years ago and not only was the web product as advertised, they were quick to answer questions and give advice where they could for years after. I hope they keep doing well within Stripe.

phtrivier•about 4 hours ago

No idea about the products, or if it is "good news for founders, and bad for consumers" as is unfortunately sometimes the case.

But thanks for wording the press release as "company X acquired company Y", and not some weasely lingo line like "Y is joining the X family".

andunie•17 minutes ago

Stripe and Clerky are two companies that wouldn't exist of it wasn't for the existence of draconian government regulations.

Imagine how much capital and work hours society would be saving.

akrolsmir•about 12 hours ago

Oh awesome! I love Stripe Atlas overall for the fast/excellent UX, but Clerky supports PBCs and a higher degree of customization (eg useful for incorporating for https://manifest.is since we had previously agreed on an informal equity split with a bunch of people).

Hoping that now they'll have the best of both worlds!

HPMOR•about 13 hours ago

Clerky is great, Stripe is really buying all of the great product companies. I feel like with Clerky and Stripe Atlas they, Stripe now controls all of the early incorporation infrastructure now. This feels deeply problematic.

rattray•about 2 hours ago

I've used https://delawareinc.com/ to incorporate several companies over the years, and always had a good experience. Their website looks pretty old-school but it works well and their service is very prompt.

So I wouldn't Stripe controls all of the early incorporation infrastructure – just the flashy stuff (which I'm sure is great too).

(disclaimer: former Stripe employee)

schnebbau•about 2 hours ago

> Stripe now controls all of the early incorporation infrastructure now. This feels deeply problematic.

Lol, no.

Firstbase, Doola, Capbase. Not to mention all the old school cos that will help you incorporate in their state.

georgel•about 13 hours ago

> controls all of the early incorporation infrastructure

You don't need to rely on Stripe to do anything. There are other payment gateways, and you can file things yourself (or hire someone).

Do they make things very easy and accessible for a smaller fee than doing it yourself, yes.

techsystems•about 3 hours ago

What are some good alternatives to Stripe for people to pay for your stuff?

Unsure how much I trust my searches for this kind of stuff on the web lately

brianwawok•about 13 hours ago

In fact Atlas and their push to be a C-Corp is a bad play for us small timers

gnfargbl•about 2 hours ago

...unless you're based in a jurisdiction like the UK, where an LLC may not get the same tax treatment as a C-corp (Ltd companies being the norm here).

evtothedev•about 1 hour ago

I've used clerky to incorporate a company, and I *loved* it, and I've recommended them to many people.

That said, I wonder if this reflects how much people are using LLMs for generating legal boilerplate, rather than using lawyer-generated boilerplate (i.e. clerky). As in, this is another version of Stack Overflow losing traffic.

codemog•about 11 hours ago

What’s with all these acquisitions? Stripe realizing it’s going to slowly become PayPal 2.0 because infinite growth doesn’t exist?

hibikir•about 11 hours ago

Doing just payments is a really low margin industry, and the larger the contract you are after, the lower the margins. Therefore, it makes a lot of sense to try to sign up startups, as their growth is your growth. And to win in the startup market, you don't win by lowest costs, but by how much generic work you can save them. Cut their headaches, and they'll be happy giving you a wider cut.

Thus, a million little acquisitions to make the possible Stripe bundle for small companies stronger, as they become the moat. The opposite of, say, the Adyen play, when you want to lower your own costs, and make money on tiny margins to do processing for really large companies.

whazor•about 6 hours ago

My analysis is that Stripe wants to own the costs of running a startup. They would get a complete picture of both sides of the business: what money comes in and where it goes.

There are also a couple of advantages. They can take money directly from revenue before it leaves Stripes and without any processing costs. They can also invest into startups through credits and financing. And finally, their exposure to bankruptcy risk can drop as well.

benatkin•about 10 hours ago

AI is making it a low-moat industry too. It's a lot quicker to build some API docs, a behavior tracking JavaScript library, and some fraud detection, with LLMs.

testbjjl•about 10 hours ago

I think about their IPO and what seems and likely still is a promising offering seems a little less so with AI offerings. I also wonder if these businesses, suffering from the same AI uncertainties are a good value?

fny•about 8 hours ago

I think the aim is to become the agent for commerce.

amelius•about 2 hours ago

Like a regulator. Great!

If you don't like a government regulating a market then you haven't seen a company do it.

vxxzy•about 10 hours ago

we will soon be in the last month of q3

CodeCompost•about 6 hours ago

I'm getting Gordon Gecko vibes.

gkoberger•about 11 hours ago

Huge congrats to Clerky. They've been doing thins for a very long time, and have awesome support + a solid product (that just... does what it's supposed to do). Congrats Darby and team!

swampthing•about 8 hours ago

Thank you Gregory! I've always been a fan of ReadMe too :)

davidsojevic•about 14 hours ago

Congratulations to Darby, Chris, and the team!

Clerky is an absolutely amazing product and the team there are equally as amazing.

swampthing•about 13 hours ago

Thank you, and thank you for being a part of our journey!

nezaj•about 13 hours ago

+1 to Clerky being a great product. Was super useful for us when incorporating and after as well

swampthing•about 12 hours ago

Thank you!

written-beyond•about 10 hours ago

Chose Clerky over Atlas, never regretted a thing. I recommended it to everyone, pushing through atleast 3 more founders.

kshahkshah•about 2 hours ago

A competent administration would bring about an antitrust suit here I feel.

chupchap•about 10 hours ago

I think Stripe is looking at companies using their services and identifying companies to acquire. This reminds me of Facebook looking at data from pixel data to identify apps with heavy usage they could acquire.

tagalog•about 7 hours ago

Used Clerky ten years ago to make my company. Great experience!

alberth•about 12 hours ago

I thought Atlas was pretty comparable to Clerky.

What does Clerky do that Atlas doesn’t to justify the acquisition?

clerky2026•about 5 hours ago

I tried establishing my startup with Stripe Atlas in 2020 and it was a total trainwreck. Nothing worked right, nobody had a fucking clue what was going on, dead ends everywhere.

I gave up and went with Clerky, paid them $800 lifetime fee, and had things done the same day. A few years later I needed to change the name of my corporation and their support made it an absolute painless breeze.

So, I understand things change over 6 years, but Stripe Atlas was vaporware garbage when I attempted to use it.

written-beyond•about 10 hours ago

Have customers and marketing

kaonwarb•about 9 hours ago

R.e. customers: Atlas accounts for a quarter of Delaware incorporations (https://x.com/jeff_weinstein/status/2023891497792532950?s=20). But yes, Clerky does have additional capabilities, as others point in.

written-beyond•about 3 hours ago

My comment was poorly worded, what I meant was they have both lifetime and recurring customers. Their team is insanely good, specially their email support.

Seems like the easiest way to grow Atlas.

Computer0•about 15 hours ago

I really can't bring myself to put myself behind stripe. Maybe it's because of how the Paypal people turned out. Maybe it is just a dirty business to be in.