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Comment by HenryKissinger | Hacker News Reader

Not a lawyer. What % of the body of text for a S-1 is standardized and copy pasted from a template? Just curious.

Not a lawyer but was an investment banker and took a few companies public. There's a lot that is standardized to start with (at least within a firm), but gets heavily modified as necessary for the company.

A draft is created, and then the company's executives, their legal, the accountants, investment bankers, and investment banker's legal all get in a room and go page by page through the document for several days. The legal team stays up late making the edits each night. Then it gets submitted to the SEC for review, and you get comments from them that have to be addressed. You submit the revised document with responses to their comments and keep doing that until the SEC has no comments.

Similar structure usually, here's a few others by Wilson Sonsini:

- Palantir: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1321655/000119312520...

- Cloudflare: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1477333/000119312519...

- Zoom: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1585521/000119312519...

The statements on never having paid and not intending to pay dividends is definitely a copy-paste :) I find the links in the summary to be valuable to check: letter from founders, use of proceeds, executive compensation, and summary with revenue&profit numbers. The CureVac S-1 [1] had lots of interesting details on the unique technology, methods, approach and early results, etc.

[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1809122/000110465920...

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