Stripe acquires Clerky

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!

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.

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

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!

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

Congratulations to Darby, Chris, and the team!

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

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.

I thought Atlas was pretty comparable to Clerky.

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

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.

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

> 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.

Congratulations to Darby, Chris, and the team!

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

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

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!

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

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.

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

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.

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?

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

we will soon be in the last month of q3

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

I thought Atlas was pretty comparable to Clerky.

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

Have customers and marketing

> 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.

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

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.

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

Have customers and marketing

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

we will soon be in the last month of q3

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

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.

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

We're happy to announce that Clerky has agreed to join Stripe!

We started Clerky more than a decade ago because we believed startups and their attorneys should be able to get routine startup paperwork done quickly, easily, and without causing problems for legal due diligence. As startup attorneys in Silicon Valley, we saw how our clients would try to get paperwork done faster and cheaper, but ended up paying us more in the end to fix everything. We started Clerky to provide the experience our clients were looking for, but with our legal expertise built into the products.

Today, Clerky is the most popular online legal service for top startups and their attorneys. Clerky startups account for 23% of all Silicon Valley seed / pre-seed financings and have raised over $140 billion in aggregate venture capital. Hundreds of attorneys and paralegals are working with their clients on Clerky. Startup formation on Clerky grew 6.5x faster in the past year than our historical average. Along the way, we've gotten to know many platforms in the startup ecosystem, including Stripe. The more we got to know the team at Stripe, the more we found similarities, not only between our culture and beliefs, but also in our shared mission to help the startup ecosystem.

As a part of Stripe, Clerky will continue to build on this momentum with the same team and the same focus we've always had: helping high-growth startups and their attorneys get routine legal paperwork done safely. And we'll continue providing the same high level of service to startups and attorneys that we do today.

We know that startups trust us with their most important legal paperwork and rely on us in their most important moments. Stripe has spent over 15 years building infrastructure that startups depend on and is one of the most startup-aligned companies in the world. With this strong fit, we're very excited for Stripe to be our long-term home.

Thank you to all the startup founders and attorneys that have been a part of our journey to date. We all want life to be easier for startups, and your support has always been critical in enabling our work toward that. We'll now have more resources to leverage in building new products and features for you, and we can't wait.