Your company hires a registered agent to be the bearer of bad news. It’s strange, but true. Mail from your RA can only mean a few things, none of which you’re looking forward to. The mail could be an annual report notice, which means paperwork. Or it could be tax forms. In rare cases, it could be notice that you’re getting sued.

There is good news. Your RA is actually a friend. When you get mail from your RA you know it’s something that deserves immediate attention. Your RA won’t be sending you any junk mail. Imagine missing a tax filing, or even worse, failing to respond to a lawsuit. Those mistakes have real financial teeth. An agent dedicated to making sure you get notice of those types of things can only be a good thing.

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When setting up a new company it can be surprisingly difficult to get an overview of what fees you will be paying, who you will be paying them to and when you will be paying them.

Even though the fee system in the U.S. varies between service providers and states, there are many similarities between them. Fees can generally be classified in two categories: (i) set-up fees and (ii) maintenance fees. Set-up fees are one-off fees which you incur when setting up your company and maintenance fees are fees which you will be paying each year.

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Tiger Woods’ website prominently features his handwritten signature. He also “signs” each of his blog posts with the same signature image. This signature can easily be copied, reused, and misused. I can “sign” this post just like he does.

I can also take this image and print it out on a contract. Perhaps I may need to do some photoshop tricks to make it look more authentic, but bottom line is that a handwritten signature or its image isn’t very secure.

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Names keep entrepreneurs up at night. I recently read this post about Redmonk Development’s odyssey to claim ownership of their chosen handle. While their case never went to court, it took seven years for them to receive full web domain rights to their name after a slow and frustrating process of securing the official hand-over from the previous owner of redmonk.net and @redmonk.

This reminded me of another “what’s in a name” battle that I witnessed play out in a very different venue. In late 2002, I went to a punk show in my Texas hometown to see American Nightmare, a Boston band I had seen play the year before. I ended up seeing American Nothing, a band noticeably weighed down by litigation.

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Founders often make a critical mistake when they setup a company: they forget to create a vesting schedule for themselves.

Usually it happens for a practical reason. When founders fill out the incorporation documents they list themselves as shareholders and, by default, these shares have no restrictions. An entirely separate contract must be drawn up and signed for the founders to create a vesting schedule. This costs money.

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Back when John Hancock signed the US Declaration of Independence in 1776, contracts were drafted by hand and signed by hand. Now, over 200 years later, lawyers usually draft contracts on a word processor and then print them out to sign. They may use spell checking, cut and paste templates, but the process is still lawyer creates contract, paper version printed and then signed by hand.

Our goal is to change this. As a legal product, “declaring independence” is not common, while another product, Incorporation, is quite common with thousands of companies incorporating every day. The legal contract creation involved is repetitive, making this an ideal process for us to automate.

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“Business art is the step that comes after Art. I started as a commercial artist, and I want to finish as a business artist.”

Andy Warhol recognized the undercurrent of business running through the New York art world long before his contemporaries. Even as the banner of Abstract Expressionism was raised high by artists and the US establishment alike, Warhol envisioned a cool, detached idiom wholly alien to the passionate spontaneity of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newman. In 1957, less than a year after Pollock’s death, Warhol incorporated Andy Warhol Enterprises, Inc., and went on to single-handedly create an artistic philosophy that would influence generations of “business artists.”

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Cory logs onto Etsy and purchases a pair of artisan-made cufflinks for $80. Shipping to his house in San Francisco costs an additional $3.50 USD. Though Etsy is a Brooklyn-based company, the seller, Oak, is located in Boston. What sales and use taxes do Cory, Etsy and Oak owe?

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A hot red sports car that bleeds sex and speed ambles past Tiananmen Square. Perched on the hood is a logo of a horse rearing on two feet. Everyone who has fantasized about buying a dream car knows the name Ferrari and could pick out its horse logo faster than Seabiscuit.

However, China’s 1st Intermediate Court and the Review Board were apparently deprived of such decadent daydreams. Ferrari was unsuccessful when it opposed and later appealed a merchandiser’s registration of the Ferrari horse emblem. Both levels of court ruled that the horse emblem was not a famous trademark warranting protection. Notices by the Supreme Court in recent years have explained that well known trademarks are evaluated on the basis of whether they are well known within China, not worldwide.

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“A statement of the financial position of an administration for a definite period of time based on estimates of expenditures during the period and proposals for financing them b : a plan for the coordination of resources and expenditures c : the amount of money that is available for, required for, or assigned to a particular purpose.” – Definition of “Budget” by the Merriam-Webster Dictionary

A lot of things can kill a business. Not taking the time to do a proper budget is a fundamental one. Relying on lenience from your creditors when this happens is another one.

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