Common Paper Wants to Be the SAFE for Commercial Contracts
Common Paper, a Y Combinator Winter 2023 company, is on a mission to do for sales contracts what Y Combinator’s SAFE did for early-stage fundraising: replace bespoke, lawyer-heavy documents with a shared standard that everyone in the ecosystem can recognize and trust. The company builds standardized, open-source agreements for commercial transactions, and is betting that an open standard becomes more valuable the more companies adopt it.
Founded in 2020 and based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Common Paper builds open-source standard contracts, including non-disclosure agreements, data processing addenda, and full sales agreements, alongside software for managing those contracts at scale. Because the agreements are structured by design, the data inside them is queryable from inception, which makes it possible to plug contract terms directly into other business systems such as CRMs, billing platforms, and revenue operations tools.
The company was co-founded by Jake Stein, its CEO, and Benjamin Garvey, its CTO. Stein previously co-founded RJMetrics, which was acquired by Magento and then Adobe, and Stitch, which was acquired by Talend. He started his career in venture capital and has a long track record of building data infrastructure businesses. Garvey was the technical lead at RJMetrics and later worked at Magento, Adobe, and Betterment. The pair’s backgrounds in data tooling shape Common Paper’s approach: contracts are not treated as static legal artifacts but as structured records that should flow through a company’s data systems the way customer accounts and product SKUs already do.
Common Paper’s release of its SaaS Agreement Toolkit drew attention from the legal technology community as a serious push toward standardization in commercial contracting. Coverage in Artificial Lawyer and Technical.ly highlighted the company’s growing presence in Y Combinator’s winter cohort and the ambition behind the project. For startups that today spend weeks negotiating each new enterprise deal, the value proposition is concrete: faster cycles, lower legal costs, and less friction at the moment a customer is ready to buy.
The company’s eight-person team operates across focus areas spanning SaaS, open source, sales, legal, and legal tech, a combination that reflects how Common Paper sits at the intersection of multiple long-standing industries that have resisted standardization. The bet is that an open standard, much like the SAFE, becomes more valuable the more companies adopt it.