Y&A Legal

Choosing the right legal structure is one of the first and most consequential decisions a startup founder in India makes. Get it wrong and you may find yourself restructuring just before a funding round, or worse, dealing with a cap table that no investor will touch. This guide, written from the perspective of a startup […]

A modern startup is a thin layer of product on top of a thick stack of vendors. Cloud infrastructure, payment gateways, payroll software, customer support tools, analytics SDKs, AI APIs, marketing platforms — each one is governed by a contract that the founder usually clicked through without reading. Most of the time, that is fine.

Most founder disputes are entirely predictable in hindsight. One co-founder feels she is doing more work. Another wants to slow down. A third wants to pivot or quit. Without a clear, written agreement signed early, these tensions become legal disputes — sometimes existential ones. A well-drafted Founders’ Agreement is an inexpensive, high-leverage piece of insurance

Many founders treat POSH compliance as something to think about “once we hit 50 people.” That is a mistake — both legally and culturally. The Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013 — popularly called the POSH Act — kicks in much earlier than most founders realise, and the consequences

Founders love to build product. They love to talk to customers. They rarely love to sign agreements. Yet the single most predictable cause of avoidable founder pain — disputed equity, vendor lawsuits, employee defections, IP leakage — is the absence of basic agreements at the start. This article walks through the contracts every Indian startup