Boost Your Legal Workflow Efficiency with airSlate SignNow’s SaaS Conversion Funnel for Legal

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greetings everyone I'm excited to welcome Kathy Zoo co-founder and CEO of streamline AI to the show Kathy welcome thank you so much fun it's great to be here yeah great day yeah great to have you here so let's kick this off tell us a little bit about your background sure yeah so I have a non-traditional background to entrepreneurship I actually spent um the last 10 years plus as a lawyer and so I started my career very traditionally at a big Law Firm I had a wonderful um beginning you know where uh Wilson sonsini gave me a lot of training as a young associate and I was on the corporate side which meant that I had a client list of about 30 plus startups and I was responsible for incorporating them you know helping to support them through early financings and that's when I really got bitten by the the startup bug and um from there you know wanted to go in-house and Medallia which is a Enterprise SAS company they focus on creating a customer experience management software for businesses and maybe lots of people in the audience have actually taken a medallion survey asking about their experience without even knowing about it so I worked for them for about four years working on all manner of different types of commercial deals and really fell in love with commercial transactions and that's also where I learned the ins and outs of how a SAS business is run like what does recurring revenue mean and what are the you know what's the importance of getting paid up front and why you never want termination for convenience in those SAS contracts I really learned a lot of a lot about that and then doordash hired me in 2018 to lead to grow their commercial legal team from scratch I was their very first commercial lawyer and uh you know really faced all sorts of exciting challenges when it came to scaling there was massive growth as you can imagine in those years and I was with them for also four years uh and this software and this the idea behind streamline really germinated um through the course of those experiences at Medallion doordash just looking at the needs and you know what legal teams were going through yeah really interesting so started on the legal side and then you know when you were say an attorney at a law at a law firm so you're helping startups and did these happen to be Tech startups or just a range of industries that you helped they were mostly in Tech but they did run the gamut I think I remember one company was trying to create um a way for consumers to order to book flights and and get access to Deals and expose those deals and within my my corporate group actually one of the senior Associates I worked with um was very very early with helping to support Airbnb and I think they try to recruit her as a GC and another senior associate Incorporated YouTube from scratch so you know we really were the hotbed of all of this exciting activity right in the in the valley yeah that's interesting so lawyer you know law firm and then you went in-house working in SAS and Tech and then I assumed through that I was because I was going to ask it I'm sure somewhere along the line you felt a pain point you know in just your day-to-day life as an in-house attorney in-house general counsel and so was it the experiences at Medallion doordash where finally you're like boy I'm kind of seeing a pattern you know this repeal pattern or pain point that I should now go take this and start a company that's you've got it that you hit the nail on the head that's exactly right so when I was at Medallia what we were doing was um stitching together you know very low cost software right Asana an email and using zapier to generate you know some some automation to link the two and using that to track all the requests coming in from from the business so so taking a step back a little bit I think this is helpful to set the context for the audience that legal teams you can think of legal teams as service providers within the business there are very very highly educated very expensive support teams and they get almost 100 maybe 95 of all of their work day-to-day from different questions and problems that are generated from the business I'm trying to launch a new product line what are the legal considerations I need to get this deal done can you sign this contract or maybe as simple as hey I'm just starting to explore something where is our NDA so think of that but magnified times like a thousand right and at Medallia I already saw some ways in which that very simple homegrown system was not optimal um and and we can go into details if you're interested but generally it's just there's there's pain because it's not designed to support a legal process but at doordash imagine that pain you know a few paper cuts now magnified to a a million times that amplitude because I'm here just me supporting thousands of people at a company where the transaction volume is just not only through the roof but it's growing right it's doubling every single couple of quarters maybe every quarter so that pain very quickly became unmanageable and I can't hire people fast enough to address this problem so to answer your question I'm like I knew exactly what I needed yeah to the point where I could even design the product I knew where the buttons would be located I knew where the details needed to be and all I needed was an engineer right to really partner with me and bring this to life well that's a perfect uh transition into streamline AI so tell us what does streamline do yeah so streamline is an intelligent intake and workflow automation software and you can think of it shorthand like a jira for legal only much much easier more delightful to use because it's been purpose built for legal teams for from day one unlike a lot of the other generic tools out there for project management or task tracking right streamline helps you to gather requests from all of these different systems from slack from email from wherever the business could be submitting requests groups it all together into one place so it's easily searchable if you get asked questions three months down the road you don't have to spend time combing through your inbox and it has automation built in so that it's handling approvals without you needing to babysit and you know shuffle things from step to step oh that's awesome and so purpose built for legal process and specifically is the in-house legal teams corporate legal teams that's important legal teams thank you for making that distinction because um law firms just work very very differently right and uh We've certainly spoke you know early days just explore um and and who knows like maybe down the road there could be use cases but for the immediate future for quite some time our focus is going to be on in-house legal and and the particular ways in which that's structured and what they do and you mentioned so you have you know law degree legal background and you had the idea saw the pain point and then your co-founder so did you partner then with a technical co-founder to to bring this to life I did I did so Julian has over 15 years of experience as a software engineer as well as a product lead uh he spent over five years at Google working on various different programs including helping to lead and build an internal learning program that had over a hundred thousand users uh and and Google Assistant as you know is there you know um AI assisted virtual assistant application and so he he's deeply embedded there has a lot of experience in AI which has become you know very integral right to to our software okay that's great and so what year did you found streamline in 2020 yeah that was the incorporation date but you know how these things go right so the ideas were shared and you know maybe a little bit before that at um and then Julian started building the product I was going to ask that because so many different stories kind of around where the idea was formed and sometimes a lot of agency turned into SAS so Incorporated 2020 but was this kind of incubating prior to that you kind of had the idea of mapping things out and then it's like okay I'm ready to make that jump exactly that's right and I'd say like for us you know maybe a little differently from other startups because I have the legal background I knew exactly what it takes to incorporate so we didn't wait that long um once you know we talked it through what's interesting is that Julian experienced the same problem on the business side and we call it solving the Black Box problem for legal and for business teams because business teams after you send something through to Legal you know you have like a team of three to five people supporting a company of thousands sometimes everyone thinks it's falling into a black hole um and it's not the legal team's fault they just don't have the right tooling and so Julian said well I'm seeing this problem even at Google and that's when it dawned on me if huge companies like doordash and Google and you know all these other people were calling up and asking are facing these challenges it's something that almost every single company needs yeah yeah definitely oh yep I absolutely see that so form 2020 then was it heads down coding the product the first MBP trying to get customers before the product was launched tell us how that kind of transitioned to you know did you build a product then start selling sell and build the product at the same time how'd that happen yeah that's a great question I think that's a lot a lot of what early Founders are struggling with right and for us you know it was really really important for us that um the customers that we brought on board uh really could see the value and also enjoyed using the product which meant that it couldn't be too early we really needed to invest in in the cycles and so Julian spent you know um way over a year really just heads down building um I would say was even more than an MVP by the time that we decided to test and you know uh started looking and and we found a couple of development partners and those are the true innovators right when you think about the crossing the chasm model you know these are the folks who are willing to come on board and give you a ton of feedback um in exchange for you know maybe maybe a a better you know economic package for coming on board um but it was paid right from the get-go so it wasn't like we were giving it away for free or anything like that and we iterated and made it better so for about three to four months it was just you know building out the new functionality that the customers needed and then we knew you know that we could go out more broadly to the market okay so really interesting so about a year heads down building the first MVP but like you said a little bit more than MVP to get it right found some early adopters got them on right away paid but then it sounds like you got a lot of feedback from those early adopters and then iterated on V 1.0 yes that's exactly that's exactly right and I was advising during this period of time I was still at doordash which is also a little unique you know I think that's a big question for a lot of Founders is when do I leave my time job to really fully invest in this and for me um it was enough on the weekends and you know uh in the evenings I I joke because I don't have kids that this really was my baby and it's probably about about the amount of time someone spends right um taking care of their kids so I spent all of my spare time on this and um you know learned how to use figma and and worked with an early you know product designer who gave gave me the the sandbox right gave me like a way of thinking about it because I have no background in product design um but like I said I knew exactly what it was that I needed as a customer and so I was able to work in that and work with Julian to create the product okay so still advising at doordash while Julian was heads down building the product and then when did you actually then make that full jump was it with the paid customers with the launch of e.1o or yeah great great question so we had about I think four or five customers on board um and it was you know actually just earlier this year that I made the jump in June to becoming full-time and and and the impetus around that was you know one the company got to a point where they were hiring they had employees and they really needed um a CEO to come on board to lead it was abundantly clear and then the other the other compelling event was we needed to raise you know to raise capital and it wasn't really possible we we tried in the first couple of conversations say well I'm coming on board I'm coming on board but no I really really needed to be fully you know in seat in order for that to happen makes a lot of sense and then where are you located do you have a location or a virtual no no so we actually um are headquartered in Millbrae we have an office space here um and and I also live you know in Millbury as well so it's been a really really delightful experience for the first time in my life I can just walk to work it's never been the case it's great but a few of our early employees our head of customer success as well as uh a few of our Engineers um have relocated to be here as well so we can all work from the same place and and that's been great very very helpful early days to whiteboard together and to perform together in the same place that's great and then tell us what's your team size right now yep so we just hired our seventh full-time employee she's a very senior very experienced sales leader super super excited to have her on board starting early December um and we also have um you know a handful of consultants and advisors who who help us as well okay and anything you're around to want to share around the scale your company er range anything like that yeah so um we're about to cross over the the 10th customer threshold and we have several hundred thousands in ARR and we're targeting to cross one million uh sometime next year uh that's great so across uh one million AR next year fantastic congratulations and then tell us how a little bit about your go to market motion how do you find uh these in-house corporate attorneys yeah absolutely um so you know a lot of it is through the professional networks that um that have sprung up over the past you know three to five years or so um legal is incredibly tightly networked and and I think that's something that not everyone really realizes um but you know there are all sorts of you know forums and discussion boards and in-person conferences and so it it's really you know Word of Mouth through that sometimes someone's asking a question around oh who what else are you doing for intake is anyone you know doing anything and people hear about um about us there and then recently we've had two news articles um that have generated a lot of Buzz we've been very very fortunate um The Wall Street Journal ran an article and and quoted Us in that and then there was another article published in Alm which is one of the largest legal Publications they have a website called law.com and then formally announced their fundraising um there so so that generated you know quite a bit of inbound activity as well okay so sounds like now and you just hired a sales leader you said but sounds like through just Network effects through these you know legal networks conferences Word of Mouth to lay on these you know first handful of customers then yeah exactly and I think next year we'll invest more in a you know in an outbound strategy um but I do think we need to be a little bit different and more creative these days because we're all receiving hundreds of you know cold Outreach emails um so it's about finding the personal message right that really resonates with people yeah definitely and then how much Capital have you raised today so it looks like you just raised a three million dollar seed round as that total Capital that's exactly right we were completely trapped up to then okay and then you know great you know segue into this next question then what did you see what were those triggers that said it's time to raise some Capital you know did you see something some product Market fit something that said I think it's the right time to raise some money and now invest this in the in the business yeah exactly all of that right I mean we had paying customers and customers who were deeply engaged with the product it wasn't just you know using it a little bit here or there they were running you know their uh multiple different streams of legal requests or all of it through through our platform um we we had about 100K in ARR um and you know we also saw that the market was starting to change and it was important to to Really double down our efforts although what was really interesting was I think once the market shifted and changed that's when we actually started getting even more interest from investors um because I think investors were realizing that um they they needed to look for businesses in traditionally underserved areas um and and you know what I what I joke is that the unsexy has become the new sexy because people are becoming more conservative and so we were actually over subscribed um and there was a lot of interest and I think it's because we demonstrated we had that early product Market fit right customers loved using the product they were talking to other people about it they were referenceable and we were generating real real dollars in the legal Niche uh I mean it seems like you hear about say the the you know General blanket like attorneys slow to adopt and what do you see you're an attorney you know do they are they willing to adopt new technology to the dependence like is this a law firm is it in-house corporate Council what do you see as far as adoption yeah I think that legal teams are starting to realize that they need to change and they need to do something different right especially with the economy changing I think that's just shining a light on a problem that already existed but now it's even more exacerbated because you can't just throw bodies at the problem headcount is literally getting Frozen and so and the volume of work that's not going anywhere so unless you want to lose the people on your team that you have today you need to look for automation right in ways in which to you know free up the super expensive time right that you have on your team and have them actually solving the big problems rather than figuring out how to serve an NDA for for the hundredth time to the person who's asking for it because they're new to the company they don't know what's going on um so so to answer your question I think historically legal really were Tech laggards because you know they they were mistrustful they they think about things in terms of risk but things are really really changing um and and this new um you know this new group of professionals have actually come into being then they're called Legal operations professionals that didn't even exist over seven years ago frankly um right so now you have people who all they do all day long is evaluate software create processes help legal teams to work more efficiently interesting in legal operations professionals and that makeup can be attorneys and non-attorneys then as just kind of that in-house legal team that's exactly right A lot of them are actually non-attorneys they find their way maybe previously they were business business analysts maybe there are contract managers and they had to implement tools to help contract management and then broaden their scope to looking at other you know areas of operations within legal and sometimes you also find you know lawyers like myself so when I was at doordash um I was leading Commercial Legal but there was such a operations process building software component to what I did that I advocated for the creation of a legal operations function which still exists today and so you know this is happening across the board um lots of General counsels are hiring legal Ops as their second higher third higher because they realize it's so important yeah it makes a lot of sense and so just having gone through a fundraising processor raising 3 million seed anything you want to share any Lessons Learned you know that you'd like to share to other Founders or other Founders going through the fundraising process right now definitely yeah so one of the one of the biggest Lessons Learned is really watching to see where the investors are getting tripped up when you're going through your deck because it may not be obvious you may spend so much time creating what you think is a perfect deck and you keep running into the same question that the investors are asking you and maybe it's about competition maybe it's about go to market maybe maybe it's traction and you're showing them something but it's not telling the story in in the way that they can digest and understand like it makes sense in your mind but it's somehow so what we found is we needed to actually build two more slides out when it when we talked about an adjacent space it wasn't competitive um it's an adjacent space which is the contract management space it's a very very mature category tons and tons of existing you know companies already in that space and all the investors were concerned about you know are you going to run into a headline like you know uh conflict with them are they going to subsume you somehow we had a perfectly clear story in our minds but it wasn't coming across with our first version right once we built out the additional slides all of a sudden completely unblocked everyone got it so I really really recommend that to Founders um is to to figure that that out um and then the other part that I've heard too is it is really important in this climate to demonstrate some level of traction um otherwise it's just very difficult right because investors are becoming more conservative for them to to put money into your business why is this going to work okay I love that I love that so yeah if you see kind of eyes glazing over they're just confused maybe you need to tweak the pitch deck add a couple more slides to get through that so love that so really appreciate your time today Kathy and as we wrap up what's next for your company what's coming up that's exciting yeah I think you know three things one is keep coming out with new features that Delight our customers we recently released a slack integration as well as an RM Cloud integration and people's eyes just light up when they hear that because it really makes a difference um the second is growing a customer footprint and keep bringing on the right folks to partner with you know those early adopters people who are super energized and excited right about partnering with a startup and then the third is building awareness around intake and request management as a as a pretty new category um people have this pain but it's about educating people and thinking like you know this is an actual category there are companies out there like streamline um designed to solve this problem and that's yeah I just want to pause there for some such an important point you know you talk you hear about oh it's hard to create you know new say software category but is this something where the pain is out there there's that really a name for it they're going their experience that that pain but now you're just trying to kind of brand it as a category you know because it's not you're not really creating something new it's just like hey you're doing this right now whether you know and we're just going to call this you know X or legal intake that that's exact because without the knowledge and the education people are just thinking oh my only option is to use jira or to use Asana or to use these generic tools right or or maybe there's just isn't anything that truly solves this from a lawyer's perspective or from a legal person's perspective um so so absolutely Ben it's building that that level of awareness um just for the existing problem and the other component too is having people be aware that this is a fundamental problem they need to solve first or very very early it's not something you shelve while you focus on all these other things because it's structural it's foundational to how you grow a healthy team that can then support scale how you can hire people in the right areas right and plan yeah I love that that Foundation framework you know which I teach a lot of my assess metrics courses of building the foundation first and then we can progress from there so it makes a lot of sense so Kathy really appreciate your time today sharing your story your background and and a little bit about streamline and then if listeners would like to learn more uh where should we point them online yep .streamline.ai so very easy to remember it's just our company name and they can also find me on LinkedIn as well Kathy Zhu perfect well go to streamline streamline.ai to learn a little bit more about Kathy and her company and Kathy again appreciate you sharing your story today yeah thank you so much ben it's been delightful