Cloud Service Agreement Benchmarks - with Jake Stein, Founder and CEO Common Paper

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Wright, Founder and CEO of BenchMarket, and your host of the Metrics It Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of the top B2B SaaS and Cloud thought leaders, CEOs, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics informed and benchmark validated decisions.
Now on to today's show.

**Jake Stein** (0:26)
Thank you.

**Ray Rike** (0:36)
Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics It Measure Up podcast. Today, I am so pleased because we're joined by Jake Stein, the founder and CEO of Common Paper. We'll be covering three main topics with Jake today. First, the vision behind standardizing cloud service agreements.
Second, a deep dive into the cloud service agreement benchmark report that Common Paper just recently published. And third, have Jake share some of the challenges and advantages of being a multiple time founder. Jake, can you take a moment to give a brief overview of your journey to becoming a guest here on the Metrics It Measure Up podcast?

**Jake Stein** (1:16)
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks, Ray. Super excited to be here. So like you said, I've started a couple of startups before. Originally, I was co-founder of RJ Metrics, which is a data analytics and business intelligence software company.
That was acquired by Magento, the e-commerce shopping cart platform, which is now part of Adobe. After that, I was co-founder of Stitch, which is a data integration software company that was acquired by Talend, which was a publicly traded enterprise data company that's actually now part of Click. And after that, took some time off and realized that the problem that I had been banging my head against for all that time was all around contracts and decided to start Common Paper.

**Ray Rike** (1:55)
Well, two great exits. So congratulations to that.
So I wanted to start with, it's a very different trying to standardize loud service agreements, which I believe is the kind of a high level mission of Common Paper. But can you kind of, what was the catalyst for founding Common Paper and do share the mission of the company with the audience?

**Jake Stein** (2:15)
Sure, sure. Yeah. And it really came out of my experience at the prior two startups and at the acquirers, where it seemed just like everything having to do with contracts with our customers was unpleasant and too hard. The beginning of a relationship between a vendor and customer theoretically ought to be a really happy time where like the customer believes in the vendor's vision. They want to give the vendor money to solve their problem. And then at that point, we sort of get in a fight with each other and we argue about whose template to use. And then we exchange red lines over emails. And then eventually you sign the contract and you have to actually do all the stuff that you promised to do.
And that's not that hard to do if you have five customers, but if you're fortunate and you have 500 customers or a thousand customers and so on. It's really challenging to keep track of all the different promises embedded in all the different PDFs inside your Dropbox folders.
And that was a challenge that we had. And the other side of this was that, I live in Philadelphia. I bought my house using the Pennsylvania Agreement for residential sale, which is a standard contract which has like a dozen variables. And it was very easy to negotiate. We raised money using safes. We raised money using the NVCA model financing docs. There are examples of standard contracts that make things much better.
And basically we're trying to create an experience like the safe for raising money, but for sales.

**Ray Rike** (3:37)
Well, I love it. So your vision is to have a standard service agreement for B2B tech companies, cloud companies. Can I ask, who do you have to get on board first? Is it the large buying entities like the enterprises? Is it the vendors? Is it the lawyers?
Who are the stakeholders you have to convince?

**Jake Stein** (3:58)
Yeah, this is really hard. And something, as you can imagine, we thought a lot about, because there's a lot of different stakeholders. And once there is a standard, there's tremendous network effects that keep it going.
But that also means it's very challenging to like get one off the ground, as you know, for sure.
The way that we've decided to go to market, and one thing just to clarify, so cloud service agreements are probably like the headline contract that we're doing this for, also for NDAs and SLAs and DPAs and partnership agreements. So it's sort of the whole bundle of commercial contracts between software companies and their customers. But among all those stakeholders, we decided that the right first step was early stage B2B software companies, because those are companies that are making their first sales or expanding from self-serve into sales led deals or whatever their motion is, and they need to adopt a new contract. So over time, the goal is to get everybody on board, but the key first actors are those early stage vendors.