In the past, legal scholars have analogized the contract to a product, a social artifact, and a form of technology. In this Article, we suggest that contracts may also be usefully analogized to swag. The term “swag” refers to branded merchandise that is given away for free to people who...

the past decade, there has been an explosion in seed financing for early-stage technology startups. Increasingly, this seed financing is channeled to these companies via an entirely new form of investment contract — the deferred equity agreement. One version of this agreement — the Simple...