News from Members 🎉

This edition:

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Plattekill reported around 34” of fresh snow this last week, and a week of cold temps ahead.

We have over 150 NYC founders joining us to take over the mountain this Monday Feb 2nd (leaving and returning to NYC that same day). Check out the agenda here.

We have just a few Round 3 tickets left. Get yours here!

Shaunak Turaga is the Co-founder and CEO of Docsum, an AI-powered contract repository and negotiation system used by legal and revenue teams to accelerate deal cycles and gain clarity on their commercial relationships. Docsum combines AI-assisted redlining, contract analysis, and post-signature reporting to give companies visibility into risks, pricing, renewals, and obligations. Shaunak founded Docsum in 2023 and has been an active member of NYC Founders Club since 2024.

“The beginnings were kind of a scrappy prototype. At the time, the magic was being able to chat with a PDF, right? So the first versions of ChatGPT, you couldn't have external file upload, right? And so we built a chat-with-PDF app, and we made it a little bit more legal focused. So we had some metrics that you could pull specifically about contracts, and really we're thinking about contract review and thinking about like a Google Docs editor for legal, and that's what we got into YC with.

The original intention of the app was to build for other startups. So, you know, startups are negotiating. They typically don't have budget or time to be able to work with outside counsel. And so our intention was to get into YC and try to kind of validate our idea with early-stage companies.

[Our first few customers were] in our batch. We were meeting other folks that were like, ‘Hey, we're signing this deal,’ or, ‘We're meeting this enterprise,’ and trying to test the product with them. It was mostly early-stage companies where founders were leading negotiations themselves. It was through the batch that we learned a couple things:

We take what we can get, and so that's when our focus towards the end of the batch really focused towards B2B enterprise SaaS companies, focusing on in-house legal counsel, where they had a perspective. They were really informed about the product, and the outcomes they wanted to drive, and really building for them.”

“Couple reasons. One is, I'm an East Coast kid. I grew up on the East Coast. I actually grew up in New York City when I was younger, I grew up here in Flushing till I was eight, and then moved to North Carolina. My wife's family is also on the East Coast, in North Carolina as well, and then my co-founder, Alex, his entire family is in the New York/Pennsylvania area.

From a timing perspective, it just made sense. If we had the opportunity to just be proximally close to family, that's a big thing that we wanted to prioritize.

Number two, I love the feeling of being small in New York City. We have this little world of legal tech and working so hard and all of these things, but as soon as I step outside of the office and I'm walking home, there's a million other people that are kind of all thinking about other things.

It's very humbling to be in New York and seeing people experience success that's outside of the world of tech. Whether it's dance or food or other avenues for success, I think is really humbling, and it's just a joy to be around other people that just wanna be the best.

I think New York is amazing. And I think one thing that was tough for me in SF was as beautiful as the place it is, it was hard for me to continue to stay in a place that relatively had a homogenous culture, you know? And being in New York City is something that just brings me a lot of energy, and I think that is something that makes me a better founder.”

Read our full interview with Shaunak here.

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– Aakash, Adam, Mike, and Jordan

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