Lately we have YC, TechStars, Founders Fund and others open sourcing the documents they use to open a Delaware corporation and set up the investor structure in the right way.

Fred Wilson recently posted on his blog regarding standardized funding docs, where he actually prefers them, because they make it easy to understand how things are structured, when you enter into talks with VCs. I suspect that many VCs appreciate this.

http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/03/standardized-venture-funding-docs.html

So that leads me to ask ... how much more needs to be done that is not covered by the standard docs? If we assume that the investors are your friends & family and aren't out to do a high powered negotiation -- they just want to set things up correctly and keep going.

1. Can we do this ourselves by reading the docs and filling in the blanks?

2. Can we get a lawyer to look over it for a couple hours and help fill in the blanks? (Much cheaper than a custom opening of a company)

3. Could anyone outline the steps that we'd need to take if we wanted to use one of these documents and work with our investors to open a company correctly? Preferably with a convertible note?

I want to set things up correctly, but at the same time I am wondering what I would be paying the lawyer to do. This isn't a rhetorical question, I really just want to know what I'm missing and what the pitfalls would be if I tried to do it myself.

I'm sure a lot of entrepreneurs have the same question. They probably would have written it in a more concise way though :)