You need to send a SAFE. Which one, and what happens next?
A 30-minute call with Grady Andersen, startup advisor and founder of Cairnul, an AI agent that runs your round's paperwork for you. Saving you a ton of money and stress on a Securities Lawyer.
Sending the wrong SAFE is easy. Undoing it is not.
Nobody built this path for you. The templates on page one of Google don't say which one fits your round, the tools are built for companies three stages ahead of you, and the correct answer bills by the hour. So most first rounds run on a guess. Here's what a guess can cost:
None of it is hard once someone shows you the order. That's what the call is for.
Leave the call knowing exactly what to send.
Free, 30 minutes, on your schedule.
We'll ask three quick questions when you book: whether you've incorporated, whether you've started raising, and which state your investors live in.
Three steps to a round done right
What the agent does, and what you do
The agent doesn't eliminate the need for securities counsel. It greatly reduces it, because the routine paperwork stops needing a lawyer. And when something is a real legal judgment call, it says so instead of guessing.
Every investment, run as a checklist
This is what Cairnul tracks for one investor's check: seven steps from opening the round to an updated cap table, and the agent tells you whose move it is at every one.
Already started?
Already sent a few SAFEs? Upload them. Cairnul places each one in the round it belongs to and builds your ledger from what you've already signed. You don't start over, and you don't re-paper anything.
What a SAFE actually is
It's an agreement that says: you take the money now, and later, when you raise a priced round or sell the company, that money turns into shares.
Y Combinator publishes three versions for US companies. Which one you send changes how much of your company that check costs you, and most first-time Founders send whichever came up first in search.
The version matters. The valuation cap matters. What happens 15 days after the first one gets signed matters, and almost nobody mentions that part.
What's real, and what we're not
Grady Andersen
I'm Grady Andersen, a startup advisor and the founder of Cairnul. I've spent the last six years working with idea-stage founders, and two of them advising on exactly this: SAFEs, advisor agreements, and the paperwork nobody warns you about. I'm building Cairnul because I got tired of watching first rounds get run in a Google Doc.
I'm also raising my own round on this product, so I'm running the same paperwork you are.
On the call I'll walk you through how this normally works and what the sequence looks like. I'm not a lawyer, so anything specific to your situation is a question for counsel, and I'll tell you when you've hit one.