John Wires

Lawyer for founders & shareholders of tech, software, cybersecurity & e-commerce companies. Author of The Law for Founders available at

[John Wires @johnwires]

After years in the works, I am excited to launch The Law for Founders: A Guide to Protecting Your Startup. You can read the intro and grab your copy at https://t.co/tGQ34xRQUF

The book is a legal roadmap to implementing your business idea and understanding the legal framework around your business.

Why I Wrote the Book

Over the past 10 years, I found myself explaining the same legal concepts to clients before decisions could be made. I sat one evening and outlined a core list of legal issues founders should be aware of before starting out. That outline became the framework for this book.

Too often, I’ve seen founders wish they had consulted a lawyer sooner. Decisions they made, agreements they signed, or risks they took—without fully understanding the implications—can have a lasting impact on the success of a business.

I wrote the book to bridge that legal knowledge gap for Canadian founders. My goal is to help founders understand how the law impacts their startup and the business relationships they form.

What’s Inside?

You'll find real-world examples, cautionary tales, and actionable information—all in plain English, intended for founders, on topics like:

- Negotiating co-founder and shareholder agreements
- Corporate structuring
- Raising capital
- Protecting intellectual property
- Hiring and firing employees and contractors
- Selling your business

[John Wires @johnwires]

@SteveSaretsky Still on the fast track compared to the Eglington LRT in Toronto.

[John Wires @johnwires]

Will be interesting to see how this impacts the value of a business. When you go to sell your company, a part of the value may be the AI knowledge/loops/context/agents etc that you built into the business.

[Satya Nadella @satyanadella]

https://t.co/vLmiBKTtX3

[John Wires @johnwires]

Love these stories.

[shirish @shiri_shh]

bro immigrated from Mexico and took a $28/hr contract welding job in 2015.

didn't even know what SpaceX was.

they gave him $10,000 in stock and let him buy more through payroll deductions.

that stake is now worth $880,000.

and he's one of 4,400 employees who became millionaires on Friday. welders. technicians. cafeteria staff.

[John Wires @johnwires]

@jaiyagill First due diligence question for the best investors.

[Jamie Sarkonak @sarkonakj]

Promoting VPNs while also working to effectively ban them, wild

[John Wires @johnwires]

@Cloudflare, this should concern you too given the privacy features of 1.1.1.1 and WARP.

[Windscribe @Windscribe]

We won't be far behind if C-22 passes. In its current state, VPNs would almost certainly require us to log identifying user data.
Signal isn't headquartered in Canada so they can just shut off Canadian servers, but our HQ is. We pay an ungodly amount of taxes to this corrupt government, and in return they want to destroy the entire essence of our service to basically spy on its own citizens.
Not happening. We'll move HQ and take our taxes elsewhere.

[John Wires @johnwires]

@globeandmail @JanelleChalouhi 😢

[John Wires @johnwires]

Bill C-22 has eaten the Canadian tech-policy oxygen this week, mostly on the encryption fight. Apple and Meta are doing the loud part.

The read for a Canadian SaaS founder is more interesting.

C-22 sets up two tiers. "Electronic service provider" is defined as anyone that creates, records, stores, processes, transmits, receives or makes available information electronically — basically every SaaS, hosting provider, messaging app, and AI inference endpoint operating in Canada.

That tier still carries baseline obligations: inspection powers, audit and compliance orders, administrative monetary penalties, and the machinery to actually comply with existing Criminal Code production and preservation orders. And the Minister of Public Safety can pull any individual ESP up to core-provider-equivalent obligations by ministerial order with Intelligence Commissioner approval — those orders can be issued in secret. So any small SaaS provider could become a target of the government to produce information on people.

Tier two is "core provider": a subset of ESP, listed in a schedule, selected by Governor-in-Council regulation. Core providers carry the heavy obligations — technical-capability mandates (the intercept/extraction tooling), metadata retention up to a year, and so on.

Telcos are the obvious first-listed class. The expansion lever is the schedule itself — Governor in Council can add classes of ESP to the core-provider definition by regulation, no return trip to Parliament.

That's the part Canadian SaaS founders should be tracking, not the encryption talking points. Whether your service ever lands in the schedule will get fought out in regulatory consultation and rulemaking.

[John Wires @johnwires]

@privacylawyer Reads like they could ask for API style access to the information they demand.

[John Wires @johnwires]

Front door?

[Public Safety Canada @Safety_Canada]

(1/2) Fact or Fiction? Bill C-22 will require electronic service providers to create backdoors to their systems.

Fiction! C-22 would not require backdoors.

[John Wires @johnwires]

So many new tools for helping agents be autonomous. Cloudflare and Stripe are both on 🔥 in this space.

[Cloudflare @Cloudflare]

Starting today, agents can now be Cloudflare customers. They can create a Cloudflare account, start a paid subscription, register a domain, and get back an API token to deploy code right away. https://t.co/qFgCivQTTi

[John Wires @johnwires]

@StephenPunwasi @christoaivalis The last decade has been defined by the government cutting big cheques with no due diligence, security or preference.

[John Wires @johnwires]

@FT Of all the initial use cases of humanoid robots, I didn't have this one on my list.

[John Wires @johnwires]

In Canada, a $1 trillion company is controlled by 85,120 shares.

Brookfield Corporation has about 2.24 billion Class A shares trading publicly. It also has 85,120 unlisted Class B shares sitting in a Computershare trust.

Beneficial interests are split in thirds: Bruce Flatt, Jack Cockwell, and five senior Brookfield executives jointly.

Those 85,120 shares elect half the board.

The economics sit with the 2.24 billion. The control sits with 85,120.

I wrote about this exact split — ownership vs. control, and how Zuckerberg used super-voting shares to keep Meta while owning 13% — in The Law for Founders, Chapter 4 (Raising Capital).

Dual-class isn't just a Silicon Valley trick. It's Canadian too. https://t.co/wNnkaRnMvw — free.

Canadian politics side note, Mark Carney was recruited to Brookfield by those in control.

[John Wires @johnwires]

"Stay headquartered in Canada" is the right thing for Cohere to say on the reported Aleph Alpha combination.

Whether it holds up is a definitive-agreement question — parent jurisdiction, governing law, board composition.

Press lines and deal terms aren't the same thing.

https://t.co/7encObR093

[John Wires @johnwires]

The US Supreme Court declined to hear Thaler v. Perlmutter — no copyright in AI-generated images. No human author, no protection.

Untested in software, but does the same logic apply to software code?

GitHub says Copilot now generates 46% of developers' code. Google says 25% of its code is AI-assisted. Those numbers are on the rise for most companies.

So here's the question for software shops building custom platforms and apps for clients:

If your code is substantially AI-generated — can you even assign ownership of it? Is there anything capable of being owned?

🤔

[John Wires @johnwires]

Online payments space is changing fast.

[Stripe @stripe]

https://t.co/m1LvWf3PBz