Surface modification is a ubiquitous problem in chemistry and materials science. In fields as broadly separated as photovoltaics and in vitro cell culture, it is necessary to treat a surface so that it presents a well-defined interface permanently covered in a particular functional group. The most well-known technique in this area is self-assembly of alkanethiol and alkylsiloxane/chlorosilane coating agents to prepare selfassembled monolayers (SAMs) These techniques are effective, but have limitations including instability at high temperatures in the case of thiols and long deposition times. Generally, to use self-assembly to make a functionalized surface, it is necessary to synthesize and isolate a thiol or silane with the desired functional group, requiring a substantial amount of work. Because of these and other limitations, other surface functionalization techniques have been developed. Among these, the runner-up to SAM formation may very well be electrografting using aryl diazonium salts . These highly reactive coupling agents are easily prepared from anilines and can be reduced at an electrode, giving a thin, durable polyarene layer which is attached to the electrode surface by some combination of covalent bonds and sheer insolubility in common solvents. Diazonium electrografting, therefore, clearly does not produce chemically well-defined layers as does selfassembly, but for most applied purposes the polymeric nature of the film is not a major drawback. Two major factors limit the applicability of aryl diazonium electrografting for surface modification; the need to use an applied reducing potential, and the highly acidic and oxidizing conditions used in preparing diazonium salts from anilines. Diazonium electrografting is thus generally limited to electrically conductive substrates and aromatic substrates with inert substituents. Although spontaneous grafting through thermal homolysis or photolysis of aryl diazonium salts over a long period of time is also known, the process is slower and some studies find that the films formed are not as durable as electrografted films. To immobilize complex or reactive species using diazonium electrografting, the need for extremely stable substituents on the aryl ring is generally worked around by deposition of the commercially available 4-nitrobenzenediazonium salt followed by reduction to give an aniline-functionalized thin film. The aniline group can then be modified by various well-known coupling chemistries such as diimide coupling or even a second diazotization step. Plenty of interesting surface architectures have been made in this way ; however, it is desirable in preparative surface chemistry to minimize the number of separate steps needed to prepare a functional surface. Reactions which are quick in solution are much slower or even fail at an interface, and of course each step must be optimized separately. We therefore sought to design a simpler process of fewer steps for grafting-from reactions of diazonium salt layers.