Contracts, agreements, and licensing are definitely not the most glamorous side of being a CTO. We didn’t sign up to manage legal documents—we’re engineers! Unfortunately, though, they come with the territory of a growing technology team. Whether you need to engage third-party vendors, review service-level agreements, or examine software licenses, a high-level knowledge of how each of these play into your world will be advantageous.
In this chapter, we are going to go over the basic contracts that are likely to come over your desk at some point, the role they play, and how you can make them work. To be clear, these are legal documents, with all the usual legal language that comes with that. I strongly advocate that proper legal advice should always be sought before you agree to sign, or produce such a document. Too many times, a headstrong engineer has inadvertently signed something they shouldn’t have, believing they understood everything contained within. Legal documents are not code—they don’t have a logical structure or a single computational value. A good CTO knows this is not their area of expertise and allows their legal counsel to articulate the spirit of what they are looking to turn into “legalese.”