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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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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“Debugging is twice as hard as writing the program, so if you write the program as cleverly as you can, by definition, you won’t be clever enough to debug it.”

-Brian Kernighan (the first publisher of “hello, world” and the K in AWK)

As a tech startup, each engineering hire is extremely important. We’re writing clever programs to solve real-world problems, so if there’s any merit to the quote above, we better keep hiring new engineers that are at least twice as clever as we are today. Here’s our process for finding those superprogrammers. The first step is to answer a programming problem that we send by email. The next step is to come in for an interview.

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