jzieger2

Jon here. I’m the executive director of RILabs and the former GC of Stripe. Our guidance obviously takes a pretty strong stand on suspending services to Russia. We recognize reasonable minds can differ on this, but feel strongly that tech doesn’t exist outside of the rest of the economy or society and should play its part to support the effect of sanctions.

In many cases it's true that an S-Corp or LLC will be preferable for a business, because they can be treated as pass through entities (under the IRS check the box regulations) and not subject to federal income tax at the corporate level. But S-Corp's have some significant limitations for a startup company seeking investment--most importantly, they cannot have multiple classes of stock.

As others have mentioned, we've started with the C-Corp form because we think it will be what most of our users would prefer initially, but we'll look at expanding it to other forms.

The technical requirement of the rule is that the stock is (a) subject to a substantial risk of forfeiture, and (b) not transferable. Some stock option plans have an early exercise provision, which, if used, has the effect of converting the option to stock, but subject to restrictions that meet the requirements of Sec. 83(b). Stock options that are subject to an early exercise provision would no longer qualify for ISO treatment.

I think people do these things mainly to deal with inadvertent disclosure (e.g., an incorrectly addressed email) or further downstream distribution of an email. The idea is to have some indicator that the original sender meant the communication to remain in confidence (which may be required to maintain, for example, attorney client privilege, or to preserve trade secret protection). When they are affixed automatically to every email (as they are by many firms), I really doubt they work. I'm not aware of any case where the existence of this kind of disclaimer has been a factor, and I suspect most people put this in the "it couldn't hurt" category, rather than really thinking it'll be effective. Would be interested to hear if anyone is aware of evidence to the contrary.

Hi (I'm Stripe's lawyer). Litigation discovery is something that any company needs to think about when crafting its email policy. But whether an email goes to a few individual recipients or to a broader list won't impact whether it needs to be disclosed in discovery. The seemingly private email between two or three co-workers will almost always persist in someone's inbox for a very long time, and ultimately be discovered.

In most cases, the kinds of emails you are talking about -- where someone says something that can be mischaracterized or otherwise damaging to the company in the future -- are a result of poor judgment. And that's where I think Stripe's policy has a distinct advantage. When people know they're sending things to a broader group of recipients they tend to be more thoughtful in how they communicate and just avoid saying many of the imprudent things that would be troublesome in future discovery.