Shake: Abe Geiger and team want to standardize small business contracts

Here’s a Brooklyn story you’ve heard before. When Abe Geiger and his wife learned that they were going to have a baby, they realized that they were going to need more space. That’s when they decided to leave Manhattan a year ago and move downtown near Boerum Hill.

As Geiger launched his family, he was already a year through his first launch of a startup. He’s one of the cofounders of Shake, a legal startup that seeks to create simple documents to govern common agreements between people. We first introduced Shake in this piece about startups that demoed at Brooklyn Law. There’s a sea, in his mind, of agreements that are made without any sort of documentation, and that’s where he sees Shake can be a great advantage.

Geiger launched Shake with partners working at Google that he’d been connected with by way of Stuart Ellman, a Managing Partner at RRE Ventures. Ellman was also Geiger’s professor at Columbia Business School. The Stanford graduate finished up his work at Columbia and wanted to start something of his own. Ellman helped make it happen.

Though Shake is the first firm he’s cofounded, Geiger is experienced in the startup life.

“When I started college in ’99 in the Bay area, everything was crazy. I’d always been into gadgets growing up. Got the bug, I guess,” he said.

Geiger has worked for startups that helped connect alumni through branded platforms, helped kids train on their own to get better at soccer with drills customized to their skill level and at Palantir, a big data security company.

He mostly finds himself on the sales side of companies as he doesn’t have technical training, but he believes he’s also been helpful in product development.

“I like sketching and making wireframes,” he told us, “I have a decent sense for understanding the pain points. Coming up with simple solutions. I have a good feel for the user.”

His cofounders at Shake are Jon Steinberg, now of BuzzFeed, and Jared Grusd, now of Spotify. Grusd and Steinberg had been discussing a need to make simpler contracts for enterprise companies to use to make agreements with small businesses. It was a problem they had seen at Google but didn’t have time to pursue.

Geiger was about to have time, once he finished business school. Meanwhile, he had become interested in the freelance and sharing economy. He knew that other legal startups tended to go for big firms first, but the big firms end up wanting so many really specific changes that it ends up leading to a product that doesn’t look anything like you’re original vision. So instead, Shake went grassroots.

“I would love for this to be the standard thing that freelancers and small businesses use when they create contracts. At scale, you have access to data in aggregate. You have simple, standardized terms that make it easy to get deals done,” Geiger said.

One advantage of a standard platform like Shake is that by aggregating lots of contracts, the parties in a deal can know how closely their deal squares with similar contracts, easing mistrust and uncertainty.

Shake is not making money yet and the team is keeping its app simple for now, to ease people into the idea. Revenue will come from premium accounts with features, such as the ability to put branding on your documents. The approach will be similar to the freelance accounting tool, FreshBooks.

Shake is aiming to appeal to those somewhat sophisticated people in the middle of the market. The ones who aren’t so poorly informed that the law seems like magic, but the ones who aren’t so legally sophisticated that they want to modify every line.

“I think part of the reason that we are hoping that our timing is good is that there is enough of an expansion in this freelance and small business world so that there are enough people who are more sophisticated,” Geiger said. However, many of those people have still been closing deals without any documentation, so he believes they will see a Shake agreement as better than no agreement at all.

The company began work in September 2012. It had an early release in April 2013 and fully launched last fall. Shake employs 12 people, about half of which, Geiger said, also live in Brooklyn.