The Things Everyone Assumes Are “Standard”
Every startup has a category of decision that lives just below the threshold of real debate. It’s the stuff that feels too minor to slow down for and too boring to pull into an all‑hands. When it comes up, someone calls it “standard,” there are a few nods around the room, and the conversation moves on.
These “standard” choices accumulate quietly. A clause that seems like boilerplate in an offer letter. A stock option exercise window copied from a big‑tech template. A data retention policy pulled from a previous company’s handbook. None of them are obviously wrong. They’re just context‑dependent. They work well enough somewhere that feels enough like here.
In the early days, borrowing standards like this feels efficient. You’re trying to ship product, win customers, and close your first real hires. You don’t have time to reinvent equity plans or argue over whether non‑competes will survive the next round of regulation. If a trusted advisor or another founder says, “This is what everyone does at your stage,” it’s tempting to accept it as settled law.
The last several years have shown how quickly that law can change. Jurisdictions that once tolerated broad non‑competes are tightening their stance or banning them outright. Data protection regimes have layered new consent and retention expectations onto old boilerplate privacy policies. The rise of generative AI has turned once‑uncontroversial language about training and usage rights into a legitimate source of concern for employees and customers. Equity terms that assumed everyone could exercise options within 90 days of leaving now collide with a reality in which fewer people can write a six‑figure check just to preserve upside in an uncertain company.
From the inside, none of these shifts feel dramatic in the moment. A lawyer tweaks the template to stay inside new rules. Finance decides not to prioritize extending exercise windows because runway is tight. HR keeps using a familiar performance‑review form that quietly encodes old expectations about what "good" looks like. Each choice is small. Together, they harden a set of defaults that may no longer match the company you’re becoming.
The weird thing about “standard” is that it stops people from asking why. When someone sees a four‑year vest with a one‑year cliff, they assume it must be the only rational option, not just the path of least resistance. When they see arbitration language or IP assignment terms, they presume someone else has weighed the tradeoffs and decided this is the right balance of risk and fairness. In many cases, no such conversation ever happened.
The problem usually surfaces later, and almost always in response to an outside question. A candidate asks why your equity plan doesn’t allow for longer post‑termination exercise when they’ve seen other companies shifting in that direction. A customer’s legal team pushes on your data‑use language because it doesn’t reflect modern AI practices. An acquirer or investor digs into your employment agreements and wonders why they look like they were written for a very different kind of business.
In those moments, the phrase “it’s just standard” starts to sound thin. It’s not that the decisions were terrible. It’s that no one remembers the reasoning because there wasn’t much to begin with. What felt harmless to borrow now looks like a set of commitments you’ll have to unwind on someone else’s timetable.
This is how fine print turns into cultural and strategic debt. It encodes assumptions about who has power, who takes risk, and how value is shared, often without anyone ever saying those assumptions out loud. A 90‑day exercise window tells employees something real about how easy it will be to walk away with their upside. A broad license to employee inventions can affect whether your most technical people feel comfortable experimenting on their own time. A “standard” arbitration clause influences how approachable leadership feels when something goes wrong.
The wider ecosystem is making these questions harder to ignore. Employees compare notes across companies about equity plans, severance norms, and dispute processes. Investors increasingly have their own views about what is acceptable on data and AI use. Regulators are more willing to ask whether the things that used to be standard should remain that way. In that environment, “we copied it from somewhere else” is not just unsatisfying; it’s potentially costly.
The point isn’t that every startup needs to become a bespoke policy shop. Most don’t have the time or legal budget for that, and reinventing everything from scratch is its own form of overreach. The point is to treat the word “standard” as a prompt, not a permission slip. When you hear it, it’s worth asking at least once: standard for whom, and in what conditions? What tradeoffs did that standard encode, and are they the ones we actually want?
If the answer is yes, you can keep moving quickly with more confidence. If the answer is no, the best time to adjust is before the fine print is tested by a crisis, an audit, or a public narrative you didn’t plan to be part of. In the end, the things everyone assumes are standard are often the most powerful levers you have over how ownership, compensation, and power actually work inside your company—and the easiest to overlook.
