Jason Boehmig On Raising $183 Million To Make All Business Contracts Easier

category creation requires like a little bit of predicting where the market is going to go um regardless of your existence as a company and then orienting your company towards that it's the gretzky like skate to where the puck is going to be yeah we're so we're exactly 250 people uh not even a rounded number there we we've got four hubs so we've got a new york san francisco indianapolis and a remote hub alrighty hello everyone and welcome to the deal maker show so today is definitely an exciting guest you know i guess that is a recovering lawyer just like myself and i think that we're going to be learning quite a bit on his journey uh definitely not the journey that he thought you know like he would he would embark on because say no one really in the family was an entrepreneur but we're going to get into that but remarkable what he has been able to accomplish so i don't want to wait make you wait any longer so without further ado let's welcome our guest today jason bimick welcome to the show thanks for having me here it's a it's an honor so originally born in pittsburgh so uh how is life growing up there um life growing up in pittsburgh was actually really interesting um from a historical perspective actually uh one of the things i talk about is growing up in the shadow of some of these um industrial titans that existed in pittsburgh of you know the carnegie museum and the frick conservatory and um but actually kind of like a depressed economic environment i grew up in the 80s in pittsburgh and the population was just going through a lot of decline and um you know economic hardship so uh interesting to to have lived in a place that was once the center of industry but uh was going through a kind of tough economic environment uh when i was growing up and after after i mean you you obviously went to university you did north carolina and then you decided to go into investment banking so lima and brothers so i obviously at that point you know investment banking was the time where dollars were flashing you know everyone making rain but you had to face you know quite the not so fun you know part of it so tell us about this yeah i mean it was a great way to start the career actually um i learned a ton and the reason i decided to do it actually coming out of school was hey this is a chance to to learn a lot about finance which i studied economics in school but you know it's it's one thing to study a topic and the other to actually learn it as a profession and kind of looked at it as i'm going to come in i'm going to do a two-year stint at one of the great investment banks i loved working at lehman and uh learn a lot and then figure out what i want to do with my career as a next step i'd always thought about law school but wasn't really sure so looked at it as just this two-year stint to learn a lot and from that perspective was was really successful and ended up sticking around for for four years and doing an internal transfer over from the ib side to the sales and trading side of things got it so obviously once everything i i guess a crashed i mean everything was imploding and everything you decided that law school maybe that was the the thing that you know pushed you to to really go for the next chapter in in your career which you felt that it was law the way to go but but you decided to i mean you you were in in in the city in new york city i mean here we're talking about the city where you have like most of the big law firms and you know i actually used to work in midtown tour a law firm called king and spelling but you know why why did you decide you know to go to san francisco to practice law when you have some of the biggest firms in the city where you were living for so long yeah i mean so part of it the journey was really this understanding that i wanted technology to be a a big part of my career um at lehman brothers i had the fortune of sitting next to some quant traders and it was the first time i realized there is a revolution in the way that we work uh happening like right underneath our noses uh these quant traders were able to tell you things about bonds or securitized products that no one even if they'd sat on a training desk for 30 years was like capable of of processing in their mind you had to process it through computer code and so that really sitting on the desk there and seeing that planted the seed of technology seems like one of the great historical transitions of our lifetimes and it it's exciting to play a small role in that and the center of that universe um you know particularly back uh in 2008 when i was leaving lehman brothers and uh 2012 when i was graduating law school was definitely san francisco and to some extent remained that but uh that that was really why i definitely had the snobbish new york viewpoint of san francisco of its backwater and no city is as great as new york so it was begrudgingly um that i moved to san francisco to to practice law uh after cutting my teeth in new york so i'm sure that you know it's interesting here what what you got in terms of experience because on one end you had access to the investment banking side of it so you were able to see how deals were done you know what maybe made good companies you know versus bad companies and now you were going into law where you were able to really take a good understanding as to how contracts you know are really written how to really prevent you know from making mistakes when it comes to putting pen to paper and you did that for a few years so i guess what were some of the things that you learned uh maybe like some no-nos that that you saw with your own eyes that you knew that if you ever were to start a business you would never you know perhaps do yeah i mean i think one of the things that i i was able to internalize working on wall street and then making the transition to the law is it really is important to have a motivational connection to the work i enjoyed finance but it wasn't the the job i felt like i could be happy at for the next 20 years just in terms of natural interest in the subject and it did influence how i thought about the my career in the legal profession and being willing to take that pretty big step back in my career i mean working on the street for four years it's not a ton of time but it's enough to get pretty senior and a lot of my colleagues were doing really interesting things and all of a sudden i had just taken three years off of my career to go back to law school and i was a first-year associate you know eight years deep almost nine years deep into my career was kind of like starting over again but the the perspective that i gained was it it's okay to start over if you've if you're closer to the center of that that passion and place that you feel like you can get curious about for the next 20 30 years um and i i really do think that one single lesson is is attributable to a lot of the success of ironclad like we've just gotten more curious on our space than anyone else there's been 30 plus companies doing what we're doing but the the level of questions and the the depth of um curiosity is much higher at ironclad than than our competitors and and historical competitors as well so let's talk about then that transition from fenwick and west where you were an attorney all the way to really bringing ironclad to life at fenwick and west you were exploring with technology perhaps like building your own like site things or your weekend projects you know so to speak so what kind of like i mean a lawyer i mean a lawyer coding is is kind of like strange so i guess how or or perhaps like building stuff in that nature so so tell us you know like what perhaps um triggered you really building stuff or what kind of stuff were you building that really push you over the edge to really you know think hey maybe you know like there's something that i can do here more as a business yeah i mean there are some i would say my inspiration for doing this was was really the quant trader and that's how i kind of wanted my practice to to work if you think about what the quant traders doing they're using computers in a new and computer language in a a way that helps them do their core job which is trading they're still functionally trading they're not just pure coders they're the objective is to trade better and gather new insights that help you make better trades and that was really how i conceptualized my my technology involvement at the law firm i'm still going to be a lawyer i'm just going to be a tech enabled lawyer and it turns out i'm going to have to build a lot of those that tooling myself because it's just not in the market my intent was never to build the technology my intent was to go find it in the market and it was only when i couldn't find it in the market that i realized i'm gonna have to make this if i want it to exist so went out like hired a coding tutor um taught myself to code over a multi-year time span and really started making very very simple applications as simple as writing a visual basic script that would automatically compare a set of documents in one folder with the set of documents in another folder and generate a bunch of pdf red lines um you i mean you as a lawyer know the amount of time you spent like clicking buttons to make a red line for a deal packet it's like actually insane and what i was really trying to do was not the the really high end work but just the low level administrative work and that just proved to be a lot more fruitful than i would say i thought it would be going in i thought i would discover ways to do this that existed in the market and i thought that i wouldn't be able to get as far as i did just hacking together on my own time and nights and weekends and once i started to go down that rabbit hole i realized there's really a market opportunity here uh especially around this common problem that the every business has which is making and keeping track of its business contracts yeah so then so then tell us about the moment where you know all of a sudden you said this is something that i have to do because because obviously you know for you it was not a good time you know you had like close to 300 thousand dollars in student you know loans which is you know outrageous you know like it's just broken the whole education system but anyway that's a different conversation but i guess here you are not in the best situation to really start a business probably people you thought you were nuts because you also as a lawyer were probably making a decent living to be able to repay you know that amount back so so tell us about that process because i'm sure he was full of uncertainties and probably not a not a good not a good you know position to be in to start a business yeah i mean it was it was frightening i'll be honest but it also like it was frightening but it also felt right at the core of it because it did feel like i could see something in the market that i was comfortable making a huge bet would be more of a thing than it it was when i started and it really did feel like i had this insight that i kind of recognized from the trading floor which is this is going to happen it's definitely going to happen can i be a part of it happening like that's the bet and that's what i'm willing to kind of of take the risk on but i i'm willing to bet anything that this will be more of a thing you know five years from now than it is right now and i feel like i've got a pretty good fighting chance at actually being part of that the creation of it so um and that that thing of course was a system for business contracts like a more automated and streamlined and uh internet-enabled and connected way of creating a business contract and a better way an automatic way of keeping track of the terms in business contracts and um so it really was like quitting was this moment of this is gonna happen i'm comfortable betting my career uh on it and fortunately we live in a place where uh silicon valley uh where you know even if the it doesn't happen like what's the worst thing that could happen i could go bankrupt yeah my student loans still get discharged but i've kind of already started over with the legal career anyway so let's do it um and i was i was in a position where i wasn't in a you know relationship or didn't have kids where i felt like i was only impacting myself and only making foolish decisions for myself so it was enough to put me over the edge to take the leap so what ended up being the business model of ironclad for the people that are listening to really get it yeah uh so ironclad has uniquely i think always been focused on the same thing which is helping companies create and manage business contracts we we kind of have this belief as a company which is really what led me to to quit my job and and start up with my co-founder and that belief is that there needs to be a digitally native way to make and keep track of business contracts it's really kind of nuts that something that every business in the world does which is make contracts there's no standardized or singular way to do that like if you and i were to even make an nda and we're not using ironclad we're gonna maybe like download a template from somewhere where i'm gonna maybe like put it into google docs or email you a microsoft word file when you send it back i'm probably going to redline or we're going to do some track changes stuff um if i have to get it approved on my site i'm going to like randomly send that around my organization uh if we're going to get it signed let's open up another browser tab oh we need to like save that as a pdf first um then maybe we're going to load it into any signature platform then if we want to keep track of the information in that we're probably going to like do some manual data entry in a spreadsheet maybe or a customized you know cms or something and it's just like why are we opening 17 browser tabs to make a business contract that doesn't make any sense so uh like the kind of life's work is to just streamline that into a easier process and and capture the digital information in that like there's some pretty good terms that nda you know we might want to know if um that information is applicable in some other deal intelligently um and if there's payment terms in a contract that we make we probably want to actually like send that to our financial system so those payment terms can actually happen um and you know from that perspective connecting it to a comment you made earlier i think lawyers do code um i don't think that laura's code in programming languages that like computers can understand yeah but if you're writing legalese like you're coding and it's the same type of um work and so part of what we're doing is connecting those a little bit more explicitly is letting lawyers actually write code you don't have to learn javascript but you can write a contract that's going to act like software and not act like a pdf got it so then i guess in in this sense you know why do you think there hasn't been because i mean you guys basically created a new category here so why do you think that there hasn't been maybe that much innovation around maybe like the legal you know type of a segment around what you guys were doing why is that the case so a couple reasons and i think a lot of folks even in our market miss this and a lot of it's hard for buyers to even understand the real art to what we're doing is building a customizable configurable and robust system for all business contracts that you can create and manage them on and so like it's like you and i could probably just like hack together in the time of this call a cool ai demo that would like scan a contract and pull out a a clause or two and that's great but the reality is like you're not going to use that in business because it's wrong 10 of the time and it's impossible to figure out what 10 of the time it's wrong on and so you might as well just like do the manual data entry right um what what's cool about ironclad is it's got all of the enterprise-y things that a customer would need to like hey if this contract has this language in it when it comes back like you can automatically trigger this fallback provision and it's going to go to joe in finance if it's above ten thousand dollars per your company policy and we're also going to send the payment information to netsuite when it's done and we're going to send the customer information to salesforce and so like just nothing in no one action in that is complicated sending data to salesforce like triggering an automated approval but if you look at the landscape pre-iron cloud and the landscape post ironclad it's like 17 different systems that's handling that um that contract round trip and what we've really done is is build the layer the like beautiful interface layer over all of those other systems and where we've found true white space we've we've actually built it but you know like you as a lawyer i mean i used to use a separate redlining software i used it as a separate document managed software i used to separate word processing software and like in the digital world that stuff needs to be combined together and there's just a lot of technology decisions that need to be made to do that in a way that's usable and configurable absolutely so i guess in this case for you for ironclad how much capital have you guys raised today it's 180 something i believe it's 187 it might be 183 um you're putting me on the spot there but say over 180 million let's say over 180 million that's a 100 accurate so i guess for you guys i mean it's probably has been an incredible journey when it comes to to raising money especially when we're thinking about a new category here that you were developing i mean now maybe it gets easier you know to convince and to and to talk to people because because you have all the historicals and all of that stuff but i guess at the beginning i'm sure that it was quite a beast to be able to get people comfortable with and enrolled in in what could be possible with it so how has been that journey and that progression from one financing cycle to another one all the way up to your serious d that you recently closed yeah yeah i mean it's it's funny you bring up an interesting point which is i think like everyone loves to say like oh fundraising's easy like you must have it so easy and you know uh not complaining here we certainly have incredible partners but fundraising's never easy it's always um you know convincing folks and building a business that that folks are investing hundreds of millions of dollars in is uh that doesn't happen lightly um and it is a heavily diligence process um i once applied for like government work uh earlier in my career and like uh went through a pretty intensive background check um for that uh fortunately didn't pursue that career path but uh the sequoia you know background check much more intensive like there was people from all walks of life like getting interviewed about me and um there's really deep dives on diligence that the the best investors do um and not just on like the fundamentals of the business but two three layers down within your org like who are the people working there um and it's been kind of interesting and fun to to watch how the best investors make decisions and we have excel and sequoia and uh bond capital bond capital and um y combinator of course so we have a nice spectrum into that into that world so i guess say you know talking about diligence because you know especially with the with a legal background you had an idea of of what diligence was about you know especially being on the other side like pushing pushing paper right pushing the contract but i guess saying for you what was the most surprising thing you know being the one that was receiving the diligence what was the most surprising thing that you discovered from and obviously we don't have to mention names but that some of those investors did to really get down and really understand you know who was behind this business or what was this business about yeah it's interesting so i think like a commonality among all investors is they care about fundamentals and i think that's investors of all all levels i would say having observed probably hundreds of investors at this point and their their process the best investors in the world are more focused on people than other investors and they will spend more time relative to other investors investigating people um and like giving you their reads on people and uh doing background reference channel checks on people that are like more detailed and and more layers removed from the network than other investors um and i don't know this is a data point of one but if i've drawn any conclusions from being on the other side of hundreds of investors it's that the folks that have the best reputations it's deserved and it's because they'll go a couple layers deeper on the personal side of things not only on the business diligence side of things got it so i guess sam one of the questions that come to mind is here we're talking about business contracts right but one of the things that that is super interesting to me is that you know definitely for ironclad one of the things that that has been remarkable is is the community you know and how you guys have been thinking about community uh to really push this this thing forward so so talk to us about why community has been a big driver for ironclad yeah i love this topic and i i think there's some lessons that are applicable to other segments as well if i had to draw one piece of advice or or learning it would be that if you are doing category creation which i think we are you have to do community because category creation requires like a little bit of predicting where the market is going to go um regardless of your existence as a company and then orienting your company towards that it's the gretzky like skate to where the puck is going to be uh type of thing and if you're going to create a category you kind of have to you can't just will that category into existence it's category prediction might be a better um term than category creation you just have to skate to where that category is going to be i don't think you can actually do a lot to will it into existence and um you know a company that just kind of like thinks up a category and then tries to go to create that i don't think we'll be successful but a company that tries to identify a category that's going to exist and the market hasn't figured it out yet i think that's where i'm going to make my bets on on category creation and community allows you to be a better predictor of where a category is headed or where a need is headed that will a category will form around than other um like means available to you as a software company so i'm a lawyer like you and really what we did is we just got curious about the lawyers in the early days and the in-house legal departments and from there the legal operations folks who are often non-lawyers working in in legal departments and so we we kind of just got to know them as people not just like what they would want in a piece of software but like you know where do you live like what's your family like what do you read on the way to work uh just really curiosity about their lives and we found forums to do that which we still have today um they're often pretty nerdy forums like we have an event coming up tomorrow called rooftop law school we've done since we were like four person company and it's people reading a legal case together and discussing it and all sorts of folks come to this like potential prospects come to it random people come to it um but just like creating that forum for people to be nerds about their profession lets you learn about a lot about it in a way that you know the bigger companies are not holding rooftop law schools and trying to get there to know their customers at that level that's really cool so i guess same in this sense you know for the people that are listening and watching uh to get an idea on the scope of the operation or perhaps even the size of ironclad anything that you can share you know in terms of numbers maybe numbers of employees or anything yeah we're so we're exactly 250 people uh not even a rounded number there um we we've got four hubs um so we've got a new york san francisco uh indianapolis and a remote hub uh we just announced our first uh big acquisition it's a company called pacsafe that's the basis for our indiana hub and um they're a really interesting addition to our kind of product arsenal in that they do click wrap in terms of service agreements so think about how many of those are exist on the web packsafe is powering hundreds of millions of those uh number one provider in the world uh in terms of quality of product and uh pervasiveness in in the enterprise around click crap and really just fits into our our vision of creating the digital business contract so yeah 250 people 180 plus million raised series d stage uh based in those four hubs including remote and um we're we're moving very cool uh and i guess you know imagine if if you go to sleep tonight jason and you wake up in a world where the vision of ironclad is fully realized what does that world look like ah that's an amazing world um so that world looks like ironclad is the platform for business contracts and a lot of what folks are excited about with ai or blockchain is possible on ironclad uh and you know when you sign a contract the information automatically flows over to your payroll system and uh lights up a great big green check when um that payment has actually been received and your sales folks always know the latest customer information and diligence happens in a snap because all of the contracts at every company are are automatically organized and tagged and searchable and existing in in one place so it's a world of like very seamless and sophisticated business contracting very cool now imagine that i put you in a time machine and you're able to go back in time to go back in time perhaps to that time where you were still a practicing lawyer at fenwick and west and you were thinking about maybe a world where where you would launch your own thing your own business and really put you know all those products that you are seeing and and solving them now with a solution so if you were to have a chat with your younger self with that younger jason you know that was still a lawyer and give yourself one piece of advice before launching a business what would that be and why given what you know now great question i think it's something about um like know thyself um i i that's been one of the highest leverage things for me is is as a ceo you know a lot of roles like there's a prescriptive way to grow i think the job of the ceo is to keep up with the pace of the organization and really like lead the pace of the organization and as a founder like there's no training for this job there's no training for being a founder ceo and you have to do a great job so the only tool you really have for aligning those two things is self-knowledge and personal growth and it's like deeper than just professional growth so um investing in that and and like getting serious about committing to that um is something i've learned to do but i probably could have learned to do earlier and i think that would pay the highest dividends if i was able to to get there faster wow i love that so i guess say jason for the people that are listening and watching what is the best way for them to reach out and say hi yeah so uh we have chat on our website um i i've loved this feature um best way to reach out to ironcloud is ironcloudapp.com and um there's a number of ways to get in touch on there but give us give a try on the chatbot um actually it's not even a bot i think there's a person behind that so um give us a shout there amazing well jason thank you so much for being on the dealmaker show today thanks for having me it's been a pleasure

2021-06-05 03:32

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