Employment Agreement for Startups
Hire your first engineers without lawyer-fee panic.
Employment agreement built for early-stage startups — clear role, compensation, equity reference, IP assignment, and at-will status, all in one signable document.
Free to start — No credit card required
Your first ten employment agreements set the cultural template for the next hundred. This contract assumes a startup hiring environment: at-will, equity-eligible, IP fully assigned, with confidentiality and non-solicit clauses sized for an early team. It's the document new hires sign on day one before they touch the codebase or customer list.
Why startups need a employment agreement
- IP assignment from day one prevents future disputes about who owns the code or designs.
- At-will employment language (where applicable) preserves flexibility as the team evolves.
- Equity references the option grant without conflating the two documents.
- Confidentiality and non-solicit clauses protect customer lists and team relationships.
Common scenarios
First engineering hires
Standard at-will offer with base salary, equity grant reference, and full IP assignment for everything they build.
Senior leadership hires
Same template plus optional severance, longer notice period, and explicit confidentiality survival.
Convert contractor to employee
When a contractor becomes a W-2 hire, this agreement supersedes the prior contractor terms with clean IP and confidentiality language.
Clauses to pay attention to
Common questions
- Do we need a separate option agreement?
- Yes. The employment agreement should reference the equity grant, but the option grant itself lives in your stock plan and the option grant notice. Mixing them creates problems if the option terms change or the employee transitions roles.
- What about the offer letter — is that the same thing?
- Many startups combine them. The offer letter sets the headline terms (salary, equity, start date) and incorporates the full employment agreement by reference. Some use a separate, longer employment agreement that the offer letter points to. Either pattern works as long as one document is clearly authoritative.
- Are non-competes enforceable?
- It depends heavily on jurisdiction. California broadly bans non-competes for employees; many states enforce them with significant limits; the FTC has been moving toward a federal restriction. Most modern startup employment agreements rely on confidentiality and non-solicit rather than full non-competes.
- Should the IP assignment cover work done before joining?
- It should explicitly carve out pre-existing IP — you don't want to accidentally grab the side project they built before joining. The standard pattern is: full assignment of work created during employment that's related to the company's business, plus an attached schedule listing pre-existing IP that's excluded.
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