Will "established players" buy into this?

[goodcounsel]

I'm just getting up to speed on this BEIPA project (and on the workings of GitHub generally). I am a lawyer who founded and manages a firm that serves, almost entirely, startups and entrepreneurs (or those joining or exiting such companies). We normally represent the company, formally speaking, though the companies we represent are typically controlled by a single founder or a pair of co-founders. We also strive to draft shorter, more readable legal documents. I appreciate the spirit of balance that this project is trying to promote in the relations between companies and employees over the issue of IP creation and ownership.

One issue that I'd like to acknowledge is that if a company and its founders try to be more reasonable / middle of the road with a document like this, they run the risk that later investors – especially institutional/professional investors advised by the types of law firms that draft very aggressive IP provisions – will object to it as insufficiently protective of employer IP and essentially force the company (e.g., in advance of a Series A round) to amend all such agreements back to one of the more aggressive forms. They might view going back to such typical agreements as "cleanup," though I imagine that the status of this project as an offshoot of GitHub's own employment agreement does lend it a good measure of credibility. Generally, in startup land, the desires of institutional investors – who take the approach of locking everything up tightly – tend to get a lot of traction in standard documents and are portrayed as "standard."

It might help to drive adoption if some high-profile, successful entrepreneurs or some well-known VCs came out in support of this as beneficial for both employees and employers. Something similar happened regarding the issue of post-termination exercisability of options; no longer is 30-90 day PTE seen as obligatory but it took some time to get there.

I hope this comment is not out of place.