
Show HN: Delaware Public Benefit Corporations on Clerky (YC S11) - swampthing
http://blog.clerky.com/public-benefit-corporations-on-clerky/
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grellas
Clerky continues to impress with its ability to offer cost-effective ways for
founders to accomplish sophisticated corporate steps while preserving the high
standards to ensure that it is all done right.

As one who has worked with founders for three decades now, I can say that it
is far from easy to anticipate the range of things that can go wrong in such
endeavors and even more daunting to try to build fail-safe procedures by which
to scale such services so as to make them easily accessible to founders.

It might almost be taken as a measure of Clerky's remarkable progress that one
can be confident, based on its brand name alone, that this is safe and
friendly turf for every founder who wants to go the B Corp route. A very
exciting development for founders!

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swampthing
Hi everyone, I'm one of the cofounders of Clerky. We are super excited to be
partnering with B Lab to launch this!

For those that may be unfamiliar with PBCs, the high level overview is that
they make it easier for founders to build mission-driven companies. With a
normal Delaware corporation, you're supposed to maximize stockholder value -
but with a Delaware PBC, you're supposed to balance that with the public
benefit(s) you chose, and with the interests of anyone materially affected by
your company's actions.

B Lab is the non-profit organization that spearheaded public benefit
legislation in the US, including in Delaware. They're also the folks that
certify B Corporations (some famous ones include Kickstarter, Patagonia,
Method (the soap company), and Plum Organics).

This launch is exciting for us because up until now, Delaware PBC startups had
no way to get all their formation paperwork done online (there are some
incorporation services, but that doesn't give you everything you need as a
startup).

If anyone has any questions on the legal details, or in general, feel free to
ask :)

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anandkulkarni
We were among the first companies to use this product at Crowdbotics, and our
company couldn't be happier. This is a phenomenal step forward for folks
looking to bake social awareness into their company's corporate DNA from day
one. I'll mention also that the process was almost totally frictionless and
Clerky's support was (as usual) phenomenal.

Go Chris & Darby!

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SandersAK
This is awesome! I remember when B Corps came out and I was stoked to look
into it but it just seemed really complicated so we bailed.

One question - have you talked to any VCs about b corps and what apprehensions
(if any) they might have?

~~~
swampthing
Thanks! B Lab actually wrote a blog post recently about that topic:
[https://bthechange.com/how-investors-really-feel-about-b-
cor...](https://bthechange.com/how-investors-really-feel-about-b-
corps-7dcf7988a6e3)

> Let’s look at some B Corp investment activity from the past few months:
> Altschool, an education company that has already raised $130M from the
> venture community, announced a $40M raise just this month. In April,
> Lemonade, a peer-to-peer personal insurance startup, received a strategic
> investment from Allianz, after having closed a $34 million Series B round in
> December. In March, Data.world, an Austin-based tech startup, announced that
> it had secured a $19M Series B round from Chicago Ventures, Fyrfly Venture
> Partners, Hunt Technology Ventures LP, LiveOak Venture Partners, Shasta
> Ventures, and Sherpa Asset Management AG. Other venture investors in B Corps
> include Benchmark Capital, Founders Fund, Andreessen Horowitz, GV, Prelude
> Ventures, Tao Capital Partners, Khosla Ventures, S2G, Collaborative Fund,
> Blueberry Ventures, Thrive Capital, General Catalyst and Sequoia.

This maps to what we've been seeing at Clerky too - there could be some
investors who have questions about PBCs or B Corps (we haven't come across
them personally), but there are definitely investments being made by top-tier
investors.

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kalvin
Wow, this is great. Props to the Clerky team. If this had existed in 2015 we
would have used it, instead we paid a few thousand extra.

For anyone starting a mission-driven company, there's not really any practical
downside to incorporating as a PBC, though it's still relatively new and
untested. It's much less effort than becoming a B Corp, which you can choose
to do afterward.

I see some confusion on terms--

PBC: legal corporate structure in 25+ states and growing, but still uncommon

B Corp: a more widely known certification from B Lab

You can be a PBC without being a B Corp but all B Corps need to become PBCs by
a certain year iirc

(We incorporated Nava PBC as the first, and I think only, government
contractor that's also a PBC.)

