Welcome to the world of venture capital, brought to us by this week’s guest Evan Zimmerman. Evan is one of Forbes 30 Under 30, a Founder and Venture Capitalist, as well as sitting on the boards of several organisations. In this episode, he shared the insights he’s gathered from his impressive career, as well as his advice for other people who want to get into the tech startup or VC space.  

So why should you be listening in?  

You can hear Rob and Evan discussing: 

• Evan’s extensive career 

• How Jovono and Edge were founded 

• The Nonobvious Newsletter 

• How technology will shape humanity’s future  

• The five investment factors  

Transcript

Rob Hanna 00:00 

Welcome to the legally speaking podcast. I’m your host Rob Hanna. This week, I’m delighted to be joined by Evan Zimmerman. Evan graduated from the University of Chicago in economics and was a visiting undergraduate at Harvard University. Evan then studied at the University of California Berkeley School of Law, urbanism. Through his work with Edge, Evan has been recognised in Forbes 30, under 30 in 2023. He’s also the founder of Joe Bono, a personal venture capital firm and co founder of mighty ventures, Evan was the chairman of the Clinton Health Access Initiative, Technology Council advising technology of global public health. He is a member of the strategy board for the broad Centre for Regenerative Medicine nations featuring in the likes of TechCrunch, the Barclay technology Law Journal, and the South China Morning Post. So a very big warm welcome, Evan. 

Evan Zimmerman 00:54 

Thank you so much for having me. It’s really exciting to be here. 

Rob Hanna 00:57 

Oh, it’s a pleasure to have you on the show. And before we dive into all your amazing projects, experiences to date we do on a scale of one to 1010 being very real, what would you rate the hit TV series suits in terms of its reality of the law? If you’ve seen it?  

Evan Zimmerman 01:15 

So funny story? My, I’ve never seen suit, but I have seen my wife watch suits. So I actually can’t answer this question. I would give it like, I would give it probably like a, you know, like a four or so. You know, there’s some, the details are just completely wrong. Like in terms of the way law school works. And, you know, when it talks about all these various motions and things like that. But I would say in terms of like the culture, you know, it’s way more fast moving and smart talking, and all these guys have all these social problems. But I think there’s a little bit of truth, in the sense that not everything is legal. I think that’s the one thing the show really gets right is that a lot of what lawyers do is like interacting with each other interacting with their clients, doing negotiations, thinking about the strategic considerations, or what they do. You know, it’s, this is total, sort of a bit of a divergence, but I actually met the guy once who created house, one of my favourite TV shows from when I was younger. And it was sort of was known as among all the doctors I knew as medically accurate, but they sort of turned it up to 11. And you’re not that was the guy’s process. He had a whole network of Doctor consultants. He said, I want this to be really real. Tell me something you encountered, and they would say it, and it’d be weird. And then he’d say, All right, I’m gonna make it even weirder in this way. Would that still be accurate? They’d be like, wouldn’t be believable, but it’d be possible. And he’d be like, great. That’s this week’s episode. I don’t think the seats people followed that, that same process. 

Rob Hanna 02:57 

I love that little story. And I love your answer. And I love the fact that there’s, you know, a person in the family that is sort of an avid suits watcher, because it was something I was quite keen to sort of include law, but we should move swiftly on to talk all about you. I packed in quite a lot in the intro, and there’s quite a lot to unpack there. So would you mind sort of just briefly telling us a bit more about your background and career journey today?  

Evan Zimmerman 03:22 

Sure, definitely. I mean, I have one of the most unusual career backgrounds in technology. Actually, I started the work that I do, you know, so so as you mentioned, I went to university, I was technically an economics major. But I was really more of a math major in practice, university, Chicago had a very unusual structure where they didn’t have major specific classes. So at most universities, there’s like calculus for engineers, which is different than calculus for biologists. At the University of Chicago, there’s just one calculus, it was for the math majors. And so I just took a lot of math courses because of that incentive structure. The only reason I didn’t take more than one major was because of, you know, I get there were a few required classes where I was like, What am I doing? I don’t need a triple major. I went from there to my to law school. In between, I did some of the things that you talked about, like with the, with the Clinton Health acquisition about America, you mentioned the Venice banali, that kind of thing. And so my sort of professional career, which sort of happened around all that NAFTA was really always very entrepreneurial. So very first business, I got involved in patent licencing consumer products, who has a you know, not the typical business. Then I went on to start a venture capital firm. There’s a fun story about how our first major exit actually involved patents. And then now I’m doing edge today we’re Y Combinator backed. We are using AI to help practitioners create patents. It’s been quite a ride, and you learn a lot of things along the way. And I’m happy to, I’m really excited to talk about some of those things I learned and how these weird detours all really connect together to what I’m what I’m doing now.  

Rob Hanna 05:14 

Yeah. And I’m really keen to go through some of these companies and ventures, you know, through what I call is life, basically the journey of life. So let’s, let’s start maybe a call. Yeah. With with Mighty Mug was, I think before leaving college, so what was Mighty Mug all about? And where did your interest in investing in starting your own company come from back then?  

Evan Zimmerman 05:36 

Yeah, definitely. So Mighty Mug, which is sort of connected to MIT Ventures is actually another example of patent licencing. So the story sort of starts before, you know, when I was actually a little kid, my dad’s inventor with over 30 patents. And so he invented this thing called Smart grip, super cool. Another family approached my dad about licencing, the patent, and he did not became Mighty Mug, it was a super successful product with like millions of units sold. And, you know, I was involved a little bit, that’s why it says, you know, founding, but I got more and more involved as time went by. And then by the time I graduated college, it was time to sort of expand the venture. And so we formed a separate company, where I was a more direct co founder, where we licenced the technology, and they were sort of like mighty mud, there were a number of best selling products that actually use that technology. And it was just really fascinating. You know, there’s all of these things that are kind of unique, when you’re in the consumer products world, there’s some things that are unique as well with the patent licencing world. I think the thing that’s most interesting about the consumer products world, so two things, the first one is that everyone’s trying to get IVIG. So there’s all of these people who are constantly, you know, standing in the way of you and your customers who you’re trying to reach in a very many to one marketing way. Oh, there’s some interesting connections between that and, and the legal world, because you have so many small practitioners. So it’s kind of the, you know, there’s enterprise sales or small medium business consumers on the even more extreme side, in terms of many to one marketing. And like I said, there’s everyone who’s trying to get a cut the retailer, the various social platforms, you know, 10 years, 1020 years ago was the infomercial people, the TV channels, newspapers. And then the other thing I thought was just kind of interesting, was really there, there’s there’s very bit of a different economics to consumer products. They, you know, it’s probably the industry I’ve seen, that has the most variance, and the unit economics, you have some things that are these, you know, goods that are almost commodities, the margins are as low as retailers almost, then you have some things that have really unique inventions, they get a brand. And then those are the things where people like, oh, I can’t believe it cost this much. It’s just plastic. And you just want and actually patents are a really big part of that, like patents are able to extract really high licence fees on the gross revenue before you even have any costs that are factored in. Because it helps you get that pricing power, that differentiation. It’s interesting how a lot of these things are related. Some of the things that let you maintain your margins are also things that help you reach consumers in the first place, because it’s new and different.  

Rob Hanna 08:30 

Yeah, I love that. And I’m all about sort of, you know, innovation, new things, and, you know, really trying and testing. So from there 2016, a big year, because I also founded my company, KC partners in 2016, you founded your Bono, which I love the name, I said off air, an active venture capital helping factor firstly, with venture capital, because terms just get chucked around willy nilly these days. Could you give us your definition of venture capital and talk us through how jovoto operates?  

Evan Zimmerman 09:00 

Definitely. And I think that the biggest thing that’s changed is, so my idea of venture capital is that it’s, it’s it’s risk capital that helps with the actual formation of companies. And that’s what we did. I mean, of course, there are some later stage investments like we participate in the series D of enduro, which is a defence company, but defence technology, we really focused on the technology aspects. So the the name devono was actually after John von Neumann. And those that sounds a lot like the first, you know, syllable of each of his name. He is a really famous scientist. I think he was the smartest person who ever lived. And just in terms of literal IQ. They called him the mark like an alien. Actually, when he was around, he worked on the Manhattan Project, new Albert Einstein, all those people. And the thing that’s kind of interesting is that venture capitalist changed a lot over the years. So there’s this really book by Tom Nichols called VC is a history of venture capital, I think what really stood out to me is, if you look at the really early days of venture capital, like, you know, Jean Kleiner, Don Valentine, Arthur Rock, those guys were really interested in going early, a lot of times they helped create, the companies that were there, they got really deeply involved. Like they’re, you know, Kleiner Perkins, like, some of the founders actually have names on some of the patents behind companies that they, you know, helped create, like tandem computing. And the thing that has sort of changed today that a lot of you know, first of all, they get a lot less of the company A’s take, like 50% plus the company, so they feel less like co founders. But there is a lot less involvement, I think the people who are there a lot less operational needs to be. And the other thing is the stages have changed so much, because it’s harder to IPO post Sarbanes Oxley, which is a regulation we have in the United States, that made a lot harder to go public, you now have a lot of people call themselves venture capital, but they’re really private equity. Like the main reason they call themselves venture capital instead of private equity, partially, it’s marketing for the asset class they invest in. And partially, it’s because the United States, private equity has an implication of a control stake in the company. Whereas a lot of the late stage venture capital doesn’t do that. In fact, the percentage they own is lower, oftentimes, the early stage venture capitalists, so that was sort of my twist was I wasn’t trying to run your company. But we actually helped companies do things. So one example was, my dad, and I invest in this company called Z kit through devono, along with some of our friends and business partners, and my dad joined the board, it was really fun to work together, and he helped them get a software patent. Those are very hard to get these days. And what’s amazing, is it secret thing got acquired by Walmart for over $20 million. And so, you know, why did they get acquired because of this pattern, and it was something that, you know, would have, and by the way, the patent is just sort of the thing that sprung, you know, a way of protecting the technology that sprung from the mind of the founders who are incredible. I mean, one thing you learn with venture capital is that the founders, you have nothing. But sort of to get back on track. Yeah. So when you get back to get back on track, the thing that was really interesting there is it’s something that you wouldn’t normally think about getting, it’s certainly something that a technologist founder, right, they’re not patent practitioners, they don’t have the experience to get it, they may not have seen the value of it, because a lot of times it’s their first company. And that’s still really value add. And again, sort of another example, where throughout sort of the, throughout my story, you know, patents were this really big part of success, like, you know, really clearly associated with success. And the companies that made in the ones that didn’t No clue their companies and in the portfolio that have succeeded without necessarily getting patents, you know, no, no proof formerly known as notarize. That’s a fun legal tech startup. And that’s an example of one that, to my knowledge, they don’t have any patents. But still, it’s something that can really make a difference. It was cool to see that.  

Rob Hanna 13:23 

Yeah. And I love that, you know, you talk about patterns in that way from a very commercial perspective as well. Because, you know, I always say to people, you don’t necessarily want to be building businesses on quicksand and getting the infrastructure in place, and like you say, getting these organisation but you’ve got to protect yourself. Because if you get bigger and bigger and bigger, you’re going to get more people coming at you there’s going to be more competition, there’s going to be more threats to your business, inevitably, because you found something. So you want to make sure that creation of the mind that innovative thought even more so in an AI driven world where people are really looking for real innovation that you do everything you can to.  

Evan Zimmerman 13:59 

It’s a great point, I’ll add to that, that licencing is a really underappreciated aspect of this. You know, licencing is a little bit of a lost art today typically happens as a result of litigation or going across licencing deal to avoid litigation. But there are actually a lot of, you know, really cool licencing businesses like arm, Qualcomm makes a lot of money off of licencing. We’ve actually talked about both of those examples, and our company newsletter non obvious. There’s also obviously, you know, that was a big part of what I did was was licencing of patents. And there’s some interesting historical examples like Charles Goodyear, actually use patents, so the tire company as his franchising tool, so we typically think of franchising as licencing a brand and supply chain management because we associated so much with food. But patents have been used that way in the past as well. You know, the thing that you mentioned that I just want to highlight briefly is the Commercial thing that you mentioned. So, you know, that’s kind of the thing that’s really interesting about patents is that if you, you know, if you look, you know, people have in the past talked about getting rid of patents, there’s actually a big movement towards the end of the 19th century led by Otto von Bismarck to get rid of patents. And, you know, there’s basically this question of patents give you a monopoly, that’s literally what they are. And so a lot of people are very suspicious of monopolies. This was during the sort of anti monopoly craze of the we’re not crazy, but sort of the big movement, you know, that led to antitrust legislation. And the question is, well, what do we get for it? You know, do it, are we even incentivizing inventors to invent, because that’s sort of the justification that we’ve always had for patents back from, you know, the initial the original inventor of the patent system in Venice. And so in 1474, by the way, recently celebrate its 500th anniversary, but are 550th, I think, but the thing that’s kind of interesting about this is that, when you look at the patent system we have today, it’s more inspired by the American system than by the Venetian system, because the big difference is that the American system was far more commercially focused. For example, it was the first patent system to allow for licencing. The things that they did were meant to make it go quickly and efficiently. They had searching I think the US patent system was the first one actually have Patent Classification. And all these are to facilitate commercial use of patents, more so to facilitate invention. And if you look at the data, and people have started to publish studies on this, the main benefit of patents is not that it necessarily causes more invention per inventor, it’s that it causes technology to diffuse, which is an economics term for it means the technology isn’t go to waste. So the way that I would sort of summarise it is that inventors invent because who they are. They’re creative people. But it’s easy to think of inventing almost like art, but for engineers, but the inventions are less likely to go anywhere, or to leave the basement without the ability to patenting which makes because it makes it easier to commercialise. And of course, having more resources also means you have more resources to invent. Thomas Edison is probably the most famous example of this, because he guys original money by selling patents. That’s how he was actually he created, that’s actually how he was able to fund the light bulb, or fund himself long enough to get JP Morgan to fund the light bulb. That’s why he was so obsessed with patents, there was a reputation that Thomas Edison spent as much time in the patent office as in his own office. That’s the reason why because he got started by selling a patent. So I are multiple patents. So I totally agree with you that the commercial aspect is actually like, the key to understanding what patents are, they are fundamentally in the version that’s evolved a commercial aspect of the law. 

Rob Hanna 18:05 

Yeah. And I think you’ve given some really good examples there. And yeah, just just highlighted the point. So if you’re a founder or you’re in the legal world, you know, this is something you really want to pay attention to were in 2020, you co founded edge. And edge is not just a tool, it’s a strategic partner in the patenting process, aligning the core needs of both investors and legal professionals to transform ideas into robust love that word defensible pattern, so works in very simple terms.  

Evan Zimmerman 18:37 

Yeah, sure. So in terms of what edge is, so what we aren’t is a PAP or a chatbot. And we also are not is a thing that tries to replace patent attorneys, there are a bunch of tools that are like, oh, you know, tell me what you’ve invented. And we’ll you know, we’ll write a patent for you. I don’t think either of those is the right approach. So what edge makes is it’s an assistant that’s combined with this platform that makes it easier to create patents for practitioners. That includes things like figure editing, a doc editor that kind of replaces Microsoft Word. I think it’s crazy that the average patent practitioner or even lawyer in general uses word that there hasn’t been like a legal vertical alternative to Word. And, you know, that, you know, all of that. And combined with that, or rather embedded in it is the assistant. So our assistant is what we call task based. So the idea is, if you think about chat, GBT, which I think every lawyer has, at this point, at least tried. It’s very freeform, right? And it’s also very separate from the actual way in place that you do work. It’s not going to put things out there formatted correctly. It doesn’t necessarily have the full context of what you’re working on. Sometimes the not edge might be off, it might make things up. So the way that we’ve done an edge is that instead of having something where you can, where it’s just a chat, and it’s like, who knows what’s gonna even do, it’s more like commands that are built into a document editor, that specific patterns. And so you can ask it to do things like describe a figure or create a definition or generate dependent claims based off an independent claim. And the focus is on that to save the time, rather than saying, write me a whole patent? Or answer literally any question. And the answer is not even gonna be right half the time. It’s way more focused on the on, like working with the creative process of the practitioner. 

Rob Hanna 20:49 

In terms of where you position it in the market. And like you rightly said, you know, I think there’s a lot of fear that goes out in particularly the legal tech world with these new products that it’s, it might replace, it might do this, but like you’ve just articulated really well there. This is a really useful tool, like a lot of these things. And if you use the tool, effectively, it’s going to assist you, it’s going to save you time and become more efficient, you’re going to get better results. So you briefly mentioned it, but I just want to touch on because it’s really good content, you have a newsletter on patterns called non obvious, which is that blog and the content that people can dive into that.  

Evan Zimmerman 21:20 

Sure. Some talk about non obvious. So non obvious, we focus on the sort of tagline is it is it news patent views. And and, you know, I think the thing that we try to do, it’s once a week, it’s not a heavy lift, as we try to cover some of these broader concepts. That I mean, we talk about, sometimes current events. So for example, we talked about, about a month ago, The New York Times versus open AI lawsuit, which by the way, I’m happy to talk about, I mentioned the the sort of history of patents, we actually covered that for a long read for our holiday issue. What I we tried to do is to, like I said, whether we’re covering a current event or whether we’re covering like a big trend, it is all something where we try to help people make sense from a different perspective. And so I’ll give you one example. So I mentioned last week, we covered AI, and how it helps legal professionals learn and how they should consider this in training their associates. And like I didn’t just talk about like, you know, clerking or whatever things their lawyer specifically talked about what are finance professionals doing, because AI is as big for that field. And I talked about theories of learning, like spaced repetition and the bloom effect, with citations to real academic papers, to talk about ways that it can be used to maximise the effectiveness. And to your point, it’s not about replacing or not replacing, it’s like, okay, how can we have the most incredible possible future? What would that look like? And then working backwards? How can we change the way that we educate associates to get there in a way that’s plausible, that you can actually try? That’s what we try to do and how we try to frame the things that we talk about.  

Rob Hanna 23:28 

Yeah. And I’d really encourage people to go over there. It’s a good content, highly, highly recommend. Okay, I want to get your advice for budding aspiring entrepreneurs seeking funding from venture capital firms, what would be the number one piece of advice, you know, people can get lost with lots of different pieces of advice? What would be maybe the number one, number one key piece of advice for aspiring entrepreneurs seeking funding from venture capital firms?  

Evan Zimmerman 23:57 

Sure, and I’m going to assume that, you know, we’re talking about more early stage, just for the sake of this advice, I’m actually going to slightly cheat and give two pieces of advice. The first one is I would just say run a process. This is a huge mistake that I see a lot of young entrepreneurs make, like, you know, don’t trickle it in, like make a list of people who are relevant to you who may be invested in something before maybe listen to one of their podcasts like on Legally speaking, where you were obviously should definitely go. And, you know, basically get a sense, just make a spreadsheet of like one 200 people, and just a one sentence thing of why you think they should, they should care. And then what you want to do is get all those planes in the air at the same time with an email that is short, customised, and will catch their attention within the first few sentences. Because that creates a sense of urgency. A lack of urgency is normal. One reason that deals don’t get done or I guess number two, number one reason is that your startup is not ready. And then the other thing I would say is proof points. So even if your startup is going well, there’s, you know, it’s not necessarily legible. Especially because at the early stages, you’re looking for green shoots. Off. To be honest, the a lot of early stage investors are not good early stage investors, they actually look for things you would look for in a later stage company they look for, like, what are your hardcore economics go dig, take me through a deep dive and give me statistics that you haven’t even been around long enough to tell me. You know, to some extent, you’re trying to filter those people out. But even with the people who are early stage, they’re looking for proof points and looking for proof points that you personally are awesome, and going to be able to stick to the business and proof points. But your business is starting to catch fire. So you know, anything that you can do to make your progress legible, like you have a big contract you’re working on, and it’s gonna take a little while, get an LOI. It’s a proof point that you’re on the path. I think that really the, the key thing here is, you know, even you know, even if you’re like, you know, leaving a firm and start a company, and you get your firm to agree to be the first customer, even if it’s small contract. For true earlier stage investors, they get that you’re starting, they get that you’re not going to be at like a million dollars in revenue necessarily. Like they just want to see indications that you’re starting to grow, and that what you’re getting onto could be something big. And so the things you can do to show that it’s not just in your head that like there’s some market response that’s visible, that’s legible, that requires you to have interacted with someone. Those are things that are good. Of course, if you’re doing a pure technology, that will be technical progress. And then think about what you can do to prove that you’ve hit some intermediate point, I’ll give you one example actually, for that we do with edge is we ship features, like almost every week. And the thing is that we do that by building iteratively. So one thing that happens is that a lot of the features we build are actually sub features towards a bigger product that we’re putting together. So like our figures, right, it’s become a really fleshed out product, but we actually released it one feature at a time. And so what happened, so what we could have done is we could have waited like a month to put together our figures product. Instead, we did it week by week. And so not only did it make it so that we were running so much faster and improving the product for our customers really rapidly. It meant there were also proof points, proof points matter for customers too. And so they could see us really rapidly improving. And they’re continuing to see that I mean, we still release features that are really, really fast rate. But sometimes you can’t necessarily see the big picture that’s going on in our head. But we’re building towards something big. And that’s the thing that you should be doing to an entrepreneur. And that will help you, you know, build, you know, rapport and prove that you’re on the right path to investors.  

Rob Hanna 28:10 

You know, again, really good advice. And yeah, everything you’re just saying, you know, it’s it’s simple, but not always easy. And taking this advice and acting on it is so important. Like so many people just kind of go off on a tangent as an entrepreneur are far more likely to get a higher success rate. Okay, I want to talk about some of your interviews, because in one of your interviews with medium, five things I need to see before making a VC investment, you share some of the factors to be mindful of a growing market, a hard or delightful product, a great founding team, why now an execution speed. So would you mind just briefly touching on those five, four factors and a little bit more details? And that’ll be helpful for our listeners? 

Evan Zimmerman 28:51 

Yeah, definitely. I would say the growing market is actually one that is pretty unique to me. You know, there are so many examples, you know, Jenson Wang, who started and Vidya you know, small company says he likes to be in $0 billion markets, I think that’s a really great way of putting it. One thing that I learned, actually, from my consumer days, is that if you, you know, we talked about like marketing channels. This is what inspired this, this idea. A lot of times what mattered less in a successful marketing campaign was how not how big the platform that you market on is, but whether it’s growing or not, because when it’s not growing anymore, it’s zero sum, you already have people who are there, and they’re fighting with each other for market share. Whereas with a growing platform, there’s still new eyeballs to go around. And I think that’s true for markets as well. You know, with markets, you have, you know, there’s there’s so many benefits when it’s growing, especially when it’s growing into something that could be big, right? When you’re starting a new, a new company, you want it to be somewhere where there’s room for something that’s new. So that’s the idea behind the growing market. it. I mean, why now I think that’s the thing that we kind of talked about. But I think the sort of general thing to mention is that for almost every successful business, there is a version of it that failed in the past, because it was too early, and a version and a competitor that came after that failed, because it was too late. And the winner who you’ve heard of has already won. And usually, if you dig deep, you can actually find these these failure stories, you just are less likely to have heard about them, because most failures are not spectacular. flameouts, like, you know, webbed van, for example, you know, like, one example is Amazon has a toy department that’s been really successful before that, there was Toys R us.com, which flamed out really badly. So, which was actually a separate venture capital back company crazy enough. So by benchmark, so that so that’s an example. So that’s sort of why now. I think, you know, some of these we, I think we covered when we talked about some of it some of the VC history, as well. But, you know, I think that when you start a company, those are five really, really great points, you know, that, that, that I think it’s good I brought up in that interview, I will say one last one that wasn’t in there, that I wish I had. And that’s showing why you are personally really awesome. I think that, you know, I gave that interview a few years ago. And I think that the main thing that I have really learned in that time, or one of the main things on the venture capital side is that on the early stage, things change so much, you may not even be doing the same thing that you originally started out doing. And so a lot of what you’re doing is being along for the journey. And so you want to be with people who you think are great, and you want to be, you know, as investors. And so a lot of investors know that they know that what they’re really looking for, is not even necessarily the best idea, it’s actually the best person who has found the best idea, or can iterate to make the idea, the best idea. So I think just really showing, it’s not credentials, necessarily. It’s, you know, showing that you are incredible that you are fast and agile and a quick thinker and creative, and how great grit, you can deal with hardship, because it’s inevitable, you’re gonna face so much hardship, that is going to filter out some of the people who you don’t want to work with. By the way, filtering out is a great thing. You don’t want to please everyone, while at the same time, making a little easier to get investment, frankly, because people want to invest in people who they think are going to do a great job. Like one thing that you’ll hear sometimes is I don’t care what this guy is doing, I would invest in it. I’m sure that’s a phrase, you’ve heard someone say crass about you or one of your friends.  

Rob Hanna 33:08 

You know, you want to be that guy. Yeah. And it’s the age old story, isn’t it? People buy it and get people to really kind of buy into that vision that you have, then you’re going to be so much better off. But one thing I want to briefly talk about is because you’ve mentioned it there, and it’s so important in any business, not just the legal world and entrepreneurial world, but it does so many different things is is grit resilience, because you do you know, you do get you do get knocked down a lot. You know, we both here sat here today, I’m sure had a number of our kind of own setbacks. But you know, you’ve had a wealth of experience founding co founding companies, what have been some of the challenges you’ve encountered along the way? And how do you manage to get yourself over them? 

Evan Zimmerman 33:42 

Yeah, I mean, I think that there’s this idea. It’s called grit. Grit is so typically in the psychology literature, it’s defined as perseverance and passion for long term goals. It’s associated with it is not actually a big five personality trait, but it’s associated with the Big Five personality traits. And I think that the thing that’s kind of interesting about it is that there are so many ways to describe getting through problems, you could muddle through it, you could just sort of grit your teeth. But what I love about the idea of grit is that it’s very associated with these long term goals, and that there’s that term passion. You’re passionate about it. And that helps you get through a lot of challenges. For me, it’s always about focusing on what am I going towards there. There’s a there’s this TV show The incredible life of your the unbelievable Kimmy Schmidt. And she goes through a hard life. It’s a comedy show by Tina Fey. So it’s not it’s not depressing. And he says, There’s nothing you can’t do for 10 seconds. And that’s how she gets through to the next 10 seconds, no matter how hard it is. I think that’s a really great way to think about it. You know, one An example that I’ll give is just, you know, finding the right customers. I mean, right now we’re growing. But at the beginning, the very beginning, we weren’t at the beginning, it was, you know, how do you even get people to talk to you? How do you get people to even if even for a guy who like, you know, went to law school went through Y Combinator? How do you convince people to take the risk on you? So one, one issue that we faced at the beginning is, everyone’s interested, and everyone wants a case study? Because no one wants to be first? Kind of a chicken and egg, right? So, the SO WHAT TO THE so the hard truth of what we did? Is everyone goes, Oh, what was the trick? And the trick was, there was no trick. That’s actually with Harry Houdini, that was a lot of the trick was that there was no trick. You know, there was one guy who actually saw him get out of a, of a supposedly impossible handcuff. And at the end, there’s a lot of blood on his wrists, he just made it through. That was sort of his trick. So what we did to solve this problem was just we were like, Okay, can I reach out to you when we have a case study? And they were like, Sure. And so we just, the reality is that this, there’s this book called Crossing the Chasm, everyone should read it who’s doing technology sales, and it’s where the term early adopter comes from. And they basically break technology buyers into five categories, early adopters on one extreme, and the in the late adopters. Or on the other hand, the truth is that there are some things you can do to try and select for those people. Like if you go to an AI, legal tech conference, you’re probably going to find more people who are early adopters, but you can’t guarantee it. And so there’s really just a cycle, you have to deal with meeting people and seeing if they’re one of the people who’s willing to take a risk. And you just have to deal with a lot of rejection. And then you find a few of those people. And then you go back and you say, Listen, we met a month ago, we met two months ago, you said you want to see a little more progress. Since then we brought on some more customers and released some new features. Can I do a 15 minute call, just to tell you about the progress we’ve made. And these are people who are mostly interested, right, it’s not like they think what we made was garbage. And so they’ll take the call. And then you have an opportunity to show some new features. And to talk about some of the new proof points, the social proof like we talked about, and make say, Hey, listen, I have some of those case studies for you. And now you’re in a position to overcome that. That objection? And now I think we’re still dealing with some of those. But the next stage is okay, some people want to work with the market leader. That’s sort of the next phase. So okay, how do we establish ourselves as the market leader, and we’re just going to keep having these there, Brian Chesky, who started Airbnb have this really great quote, because he used to be a professional weightlifter before he started this 100 billion dollar company. And he said, starting a company is a lot like lifting weights. It doesn’t get easier, you can just lift more weight.  

Rob Hanna 38:07 

Very true. His journey. And there’s so many lessons in his journey as well. And I’d highly recommend people go and look on YouTube, some of his interviews and just some of the wisdom that he that he shares. But I want to talk a little bit more about your market recognition and some of your thoughts because you have, as I mentioned, the introduction been recognised in Forbes 30, under 30. Last year, and in one of your recent venture capitalists, you state technology changes humanity’s capabilities, and therefore our ability to influence the world around us. That’s powerful quote, how do you foresee technology continuing to shape humanity’s capabilities in the future? And waterskiing?  

Evan Zimmerman 38:44 

Yeah, I mean, so you talked about humanity at large. So I wrote an article for a journal. Like, I don’t know, a year and a half ago now. funny little story about it. So I talked about AI in the article and chat, GBT came out in between acceptance for publication and publication. It took two months. So we actually had to edit chat GPT in the product literally didn’t exist when when I when I wrote the article. And so what I did was I look back at the Industrial Revolution. And I found there actually kind of four categories of of technology, labour saving technology in general. And I use these four examples of jobs to describe what occurs, coal miners, elevator operators, farmers, and bank tellers. And the thing that was just kind of interesting, is that if you look at these jobs, they’re all fundamentally different than they were at the time. You know, coal miners is a job that almost doesn’t exist anymore. There were more than you know, there were in 1923. That was the year that actually peaked in terms of the number of coal miners not the percentage of the economy and coal mining the act. Total number of people, there were like hundreds of 1000s. That was only like a few 10,000. Today, in the United States, elevator operators that job that doesn’t even exist anymore. Farming went from what literally half of all people do to like 1% of people. And then when it comes to bank tellers, the ATM, everyone thought it would eliminate that job. But what it did was it changed it. So the number of bank tellers did have per bank, but the number of banks actually increased a lot. So the total number of bank tellers increased significantly. And you know, there are these four categories, but the thing that sort of stays the same, is that our, you know, this was sort of the, the, the solution to the Keynes paradox is that our demand is infinite. So we always find things that are new, you know, at the end of World War Two, Lord Maynard Keynes, who was really wonderful economist, probably one of the best ones to ever live, thought we only work 20 hours a week. And that didn’t happen. Why not? Because you didn’t get more productive. But because we had sort of infinite demand, we kept deciding, well, my life has improved. Some people call it the hedonic treadmill. I want more stuff. And so we worked harder to not stay in place. So how is technology going to save society, a lot of people mean information technology. Number one is it’s not just information technology, you know, people are inventing, and actually deploying now, new supersonic planes, were going to be going to space within my lifetime, perhaps, probably regularly within my children’s lifetime. Where, you know, solar power is now getting so cheap, that the promise of to energy too cheap to metre is going to be fulfilled, maybe buy nuclear and nuclear in the future. But definitely from solar, with batteries for the backups. That’s physical technology. And there’s stuff we haven’t even thought of yet, that people are going to be coming up with, like, all kinds of things just like synthetic foods, there’s gonna be another green revolution, all these medicines, those are physical things. And then there’s on the information technology side, because everyone loves talking about AI. And the way that I think about it, is it kind of gives everyone a superpower. So we actually talked about this on non obvious a few weeks ago, or no, it was over a month ago now, of this, of this study that was done at the University of Minnesota law school. And what’s really fascinating about it was that there’s this thing that everyone’s kind of seeing where the people on the low end get helped more than the people on the high end. It’s actually an equalising technology. So if you’re not such a great lawyer, you’re probably going to benefit a lot more from you know, a tool like edge than someone who’s maybe not as good, but was also really interesting is there’s this other subtlety, which is that’s in terms of sort of output. It doesn’t account for things like basic errors, which is a huge part of what edge actually helps with over 20% of patents actually get rejected because of an error, not because of like an issue with the patent. But the other thing that I think is really interesting is speed. Even the lawyers who are super experience, got tasks done, like with maybe with a small increase in quality, but way faster. And what that means is that you can do more, you can serve more clients, there’s one thing I hear from a lot of lawyers is I ran out of time to do this thing I want to do, I ran on a budget to do this thing that would have been good for the client. Now you have that time and budget back as the same thing outside of the law. Where how many scientists didn’t have time to review certain papers where maybe they could have found an insight that would have led to their next big breakthrough. You know, how many teachers ran out of time to prepare their lesson plans or to give individualised feedback to students because they were doing the routine grading of papers, or have tests for things that everyone does over and over again, you know, how much time is spent by let’s see doctors filling out paperwork for stuff that they already did. You know, there’s, you know, I think that the biggest takeaway when I thought we learned about the elevator operators, I won’t get too deep into in the interest of time want to be respectful of your, of your of your audience’s time, but it’s a really interesting story where elevators used to be operated by people. And basically that that Job went away because people were afraid of not having the person until they realised that they didn’t need it and then overnight that jobs disappeared. And the thing that was just really interesting is that, you know, today we will have people say Oh, think of the elevator operators, but at the time was actually considered a bad job. The pay wasn’t that good worked long hours, it was considered low class. Those people pretty much all found other jobs, everyone’s better off because we now have safer element and more automatic operators or elevators without the operators. And those people moved on to bigger and better things. And I’m reminded of actually something that someone told me, literally just yesterday, I was talking to a future customer. And we were talking about how the word processor got rid of the typist in law offices. And we were talking and I was saying, hey, like, do you think that with some of the tools we’re doing, we’re going to eliminate the paralegal for you, which is a job that I just think I actually worry about, because a lot of people become paralegals to help them go to law school. And he said, Actually, no, they’re just wasting a lot of time right now on routine tasks, I have other things I would rather have them do. And your job is your software is actually going to allow them to do that. So I just thought that was a, you know, really interesting thing that sort of connects to this story of the, you know, of the 80 of the, the ATM. And as I mentioned, or and the and the elevator operator, where so much what’s going to happen with technology and technological change is going to be the freeing up of time to do other things, while being more productive and less error prone. And finding things that some of which we can imagine today. Like, I wish I had more time to do X, he’ll be able to do X, some of which we can’t. And that’s amazing. 

Rob Hanna 46:43 

And I think the other piece to add to all of that, which I agree with is you know, saving the time giving this you know, efficiency levels can help reduce burnout stress across a number of industries. And this is why I’m a big advocate for technology for good to help us work smarter. And as I say get that right balance back where people from years and years and years have been burning out. And so it’s a really important point. Okay, this has been an absolute masterclass Evan, as I knew it was going to be start to finish. So have one final question before we look too close. And that would be what would be your advice for the what would be sort of your one piece of advice from people listening today who have been inspired about the world of startups VC in tech? 

Evan Zimmerman 47:25 

Yeah. So I would say that my sort of number one piece of advice for for like startups and technology, I would say, I’ll give a different one for each, I would say for technology, learn what it means to be a good buyer of technology. You have to approach it the right way. I would say lawyers and practitioners especially I mean, not used to having to buy things, what do you need to start a law firm right to two people in an office. That’s it. procurement is a huge, huge part of what makes a successful, you know, someone who’s successfully practising their craft when they have to buy tools, and that’s gonna be part of the future of the law. So I would say for lawyers, and practitioners, definitely learn what a good procurement process looks like, and fight for your budget to be able to make those decisions and try to make those decisions, you know, quicker because you’re losing opportunity cost competitively, by making a decision on procurement too slowly. And then I would say for startups, number one, be willing to work with startups. I think that a lot of times in a fast moving field, the risk is waiting for someone who is too, too established. And you can always just say, No, you can stop using something. But the other thing is just do it. If you want to start a startup, like the number one thing you can do now is just to do it. You know, I I definitely advocate diving in. But I will say that, certainly, especially if you have like a kid in a mortgage, at the very least look for that proof point. Like, can you get a technical co founder to work with you on the project, even if it’s just starting on the weekends, to the point where once it’s real, you know, you will both leave feel comfortable and believe in enough they will leave your jobs? Can you get one of your employers to be one of the first customers like those are things to to think about but they’re all bending towards action and just doing it? 

Rob Hanna 49:28 

Yeah, I love that. And I’m all about that on the show. I’m all about just you know, Nike had it nailed down many many many many years ago. And it’s so so true. And this has been great as I mentioned so if our listeners which I’m sure they will want to learn more about your career, Edge devono where can they go to find out more feel free to shout out any social media handles any website links walk so much. 

Evan Zimmerman 49:48 

Thank you. So look, you can learn more about in sign up for our product with edge.com. So the startup is called edge and the URL is with edge. So just two words.com You’ll also find our newsletter non obvious there. The URL for that is blog dot with edge.com. I will also encourage you to follow me on social media on LinkedIn, my LinkedIn handle is, is EJ Z, it’s just slash in slash EJ Z. And I’m also on Twitter, which is I suppose now called x, where my handle is at EJ Zem. I would really love a follow really love to hear from you. You know, shoot me a message shoot me an email. I love giving demos. I love getting people signed up. And I honestly I just love talking to people. We’re doing something interesting. Like, just hit me up.  

Rob Hanna 50:47 

Yeah, and you’re definitely doing lots of interesting things for the legal and wider community. That’s for sure. So, thank you so much. Once again, Evan. It’s been a real pleasure having you on the show. From all of us on the legally speaking podcast wishing you lots of continued success with your pursuits, but for now, over and out.