Paige Finn DohertyFounding Partner, Behind Genius · Founding Partner at Behind Genius Ventures

how I learned what an apostille was

8 Aug 2023 · 1 min

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1:01

In this brief, first‑person narrative, the speaker recounts discovering the concept of an apostille when preparing paperwork for a Japanese venture‑capital investor (Gree) on behalf of Genius Ventures. The investor required a notarized resume, which the speaker initially provided. Two weeks later, the Japanese partner informed them that the document needed an apostille—a form of international notarization used for legal documents such as financial or marriage records. The speaker explains that obtaining an apostille is more complex than a standard notarization and describes the scramble to secure it at the last minute, highlighting the practical challenges of cross‑border document authentication.

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Do you know what an apostille is? Because I sure as heck did not. So let me tell you the story of how I found out what an apostille was. One of our investors behind Genius Ventures is a Japanese public company called Gree. So if one of your investors is in Japan, you have to file in Japan as venture funds. We go through the whole filing. One of the requirements is a notarized resume. And like, given that I started, uh, behind Genius at 23, my resume was like Pretty funny to be notarized. Like I was like, this is genuinely like a one-page resume. Like okay, I got it. So I get it notarized. I'm good. I send it to Japan. They send me an email like two weeks later. Like no, it actually needs to be apostilled. So getting a document apostilled is much harder than getting it notarized because it's basically like an international notarization. And this is common with like financial documents or marriage documents or what have you. So anyways, I got it apostilled at the very last moment. Um, but yeah, it was pretty crazy. That's how I learned what apostle means.