Cali is tough- the regulator is really standing in the way of a functioning market and is driving insurers away... Allstate stopped writing new policies in Nov 2022 and said they would pull out of the state entirely unless they could increase rates drastically... so they were allowed this increase.
The 2017 and 2018 wildfire seasons wiped out nearly two times the combined underwriting profits for California homeowners’ insurers for the prior 26 years… it’s acceptable to have large losses in this business but you need to have years of gains to offset them. CA is the only state that doesn’t allow for consideration of reinsurance costs in ratemaking.
CA requires insurers to underwrite using historical data from the past 20 years (which doesn’t include housing growth in high-risk regions or increased fuel load following years of drought and poor fire suppression strategies) to determine catastrophe losses vs predictively modeled data incorporating climate change. It is the only state that disallows forward-looking models when pricing wildfire risk.
Until California does something to ensure that the prices of insurance reflect the risk (letting them use modern catastrophe models, letting them price in reinsurance, approving rate filings in a timely manner), insurers will continue non-renewing folks and pulling out of the state altogether. It filed the rate increase in April 2023 and was just approved. In the meantime, Allstate has not added a single new homeowner in the state.
Semi-relatedly, I had my parents sign up for https://www.charlie.com/
There are a bunch of great anti-fraud features including one that lets me be a co-pilot on their account.
Some features: it doesn't allow transactions while they are asleep, can block all transactions online except for merchants that you allow, limit international spend, and they have a feature that you can forward any email that you are curious about and it'll tell you if it's likely to be fraud.
Leo does a great job explaining why VC's want liquidation preferences.
But founders/employees want them too! With all the crazy founder-friendly deals of 2021, I never heard of one in the US without a liquidation preference.
Why? Liquidation preferences allow the VC bought securities to be treated as "preferred" and reduce the common stock price in the 409a valuation report, allowing early employees to get options at low prices.
If VC's invested in common stock the strike prices would be much higher, making it less lucrative to be an early employee.
In parts of Europe there is different tax treatment for options and employees generally don't own as many shares due to it... and some of those companies don't have liquidation preferences. I believe Klarna (Sweden) doesn't have preferred shares, meaning the huge swing in valuation they had over the past few years is not as bad as it seems.
TBH the whole 409a thing is a charade & we probably need to clean up how we do accounting & taxes but until we do, preferred shares are here to stay.
We're focused on B2B software companies, so we don't have any templates for that use case. I'm not aware of publicly available templates serving bespoke manufacturers, but I'd love to learn about them if you find any
In the long term, we'll expand out from that. It will be industry by industry, since the contracts you need for eg manufacturing or catering are going to be very different than software.
Some of our agreements, like the NDA, are already used in other industries since they are more industry agnostic
Do you know of any similar resources in the Family Law area? (not sure how to specifically word my question, but helping someone with some custody related issues - and wondering if there is some resource I could be aware of to help?)
Else, was going to turn to the GPTs and see what they may muster, but any even general direction pointers would be appreciated?
IANAL, but there are some things where you should really get expert advice. Child custody is one of them.
I think with legal docs generally, you have to decide what the stakes are and act accordingly. In general, keep in mind that most lawyers won't take a case unless there's someone with deep pockets to sue. So for that $20k loan you give to a friend, a boilerplate template is fine; if they don't want to pay you back, a lawsuit is gonna cost you more than the loan anyway. You've got a new startup for website monitoring with 20 customers? Worry about growing your userbase, not the remote chance that you get sued and something in the boilerplate docs you used wasn't worded properly (of course, once you raise significant money or have significant revenue, those legal docs become much more important, and also this doesn't apply if you are working on something with significant risk, such as a medical device).
But child custody isn't one of those things. It is high stakes, the chances that your counterparty will sue you are very high, and a bad outcome might be one of the worst things that can happen to you. Personally, the possibility of losing custody of my children would be much more worrying to me than any financial lawsuit.
I have a friend in a messy divorce. With custody, all rational thought has gone out the window. Cost of lawyers? Doesn’t matter, sue! Need to comply or get fined? Don’t care. Court ordered therapy? Don’t feel like it.
The pockets that fund this behavior will be empty at some point. But until then, primal irrational impulses are running the show.
In a case like that, the difference between the right legal docs and the mostly right docs would be huge.
Legal divorce proceedings are like wedding planning, except every professional around you instead has a financial incentive to make you as angry and mean as possible, because it means more billable hours.
To be honest; We need a "divorce/came-into-money-IPO/WTF do when tech couples split?" TECH DOCUMENTS (For all parties - but specifically their kids) thingy...
Prenup for assets, judges in family court for kids. Why no docs for custody and kids in general? Because a disinterested human needs to make the decisions at the time the exception occurs.
(have volunteered some time as a guardian ad litem, and most in my circle are divorced, from the homeless to a billionaire)
Unfortunately, I don't know of any resource besides an attorney that would help with a custody issue. I'm sure that's rough, and I hope things turn out as well as possible for your friend and their family. A few other resources that are outside the commercial realm are:
this seems ripe for disaster. hopefully, you weren't serious. as with all things, I'd really hope anything in the realm of legal documents from GPT would be then consulted with an actual lawyer
In a contentious custody case, this is very true. If the parents are splitting up and agree on a plan that they both like, the lawyer becomes far less necessary. Although then the lawyer is very cheap and probably still worth it.
I'm about 99% sure calling it "creative comments" is just a brain slip (or TTS error) and you meant "creative commons," but because that really would be a creative change, and the 1% chance that I'm wrong has a really big risk when dealing with a company familiar with legal documents, I just want to confirm?
Thanks for checking, and unfortunately it seems like my original comment is no longer editable. I'd like to blame autocorrect, but I think I was actually typing before I had my coffee this morning
I've saved so much time using CommonPaper at my company. Many agreements are still negotiated, but even the cover-page concept makes it that much easier to understand what is being argued.
It reminds me of the oligarchs in Russia, license raj in India, privatization in Mexico etc…
being close to political power lets folks buy up crown-jewel assets at a fraction of their true value.