Thinking about founding a startup? First, build a community
Robert Ambrogi and Andrew Arruda speaking at the panel, “Create Your Own Legal Tech Startup,” on Thursday at the ABA Techshow in Chicago./Jason Tashea.
Building a technology startup is about finding community, customers and knowing how to filter advice.
Kicking off the first round of ABA Techshow panels on Thursday, Robert Ambrogi, the founder of LawSites blog, and Andrew Arruda, the CEO of Ross Intelligence, opined on their own experiences and what they see in the technology startup world in “Create Your Own Legal Tech Startup.”
“We are in an unprecedented area of growth in the technology area,” but “there has been surprisingly little innovation in the legal market,” said Ambrogi to a packed conference room at the Hyatt Regency in Chicago.
Showing a series of slides from Thomson Reuters and LawGeex, Ambrogi attempted to show the scale and diversity of offerings in the legal technology space. Only a handful of the companies displayed were more than 10 years old.
Ambrogi and Arruda built their presentations on a listicle format, which distilled their most salient points.
Ambrogi’s points hammered home the need to build a company with the intent to solve a particular problem and, by doing so, improve the lives and work of attorney customers. He also added the need for market and historical research to understand the landscape and the need for transparency.
Arruda agreed, however he said that research was only the appetizer to what could be a multi-year process of building a company.
“Once you get it out there, reality sets in,” said Arruda, who co-founded Ross in 2015. “That’s when you’ve got to work really hard.”
Drawing on his own experience, Arruda made clear that his points were focused on starting any business.
Before anything else, he noted that the idea that seeds the company has to “scratch your own itch,” meaning “that you have to get mad, you have to have that passion” for the problem you are looking to solve.
Transcending three of his points was the idea of building community and garnering feedback. Finding “other crazy people like you” to be your co-founders and a village of like-minded people that will help the company grow are both foundational to a successful company, he says.
Overlapping the two presentations was the perennial business advice of listening to one’s customers.
“The startups I have seen that do well aren’t sitting in a garage somewhere,” said Ambrogi. “They are getting out, getting to know people.”
More broadly, Arruda echoed Ambrogi’s view, saying that while it is important to garner feedback and listen to everyone, it is also important to learn how to filter out information that isn’t relevant.
“Not everyone’s opinion is something you will have to listen to and engage with,” he says.
Similarly, he noted that a company does not have to take money from everyone offering it. If a company is not inclined to take a phone call from a potential funder at 11:00 p.m., then it is worth reconsidering if it wants to work with them, he claimed.
Ambrogi complimented this point by saying that a company can choose to grow organically and skip traditional fundraising entirely.
After 45 minutes, the panel began to wind down and Arruda took a step back to distill the information the audience just heard.
“All advice you get from an entrepreneur, founder or early employee, take it all with a grain of salt,” concluded Arruda. “You have to find your own truth.”
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