Successful innovation by growing or established companies are examples of this — one of the superpowers of scale is being able to devote large amounts of capital to essentially new ventures without having to return to the capital markets incrementally and therefore pursue growth incrementally. Eg Apple. I would say this is the main advantage of scale.
There are two quite different motives for building a company.
One is the financial comparison between building a company and working at one. This is a straightforward risk-reward tradeoff. When you think about it you will consider things like stability and the impact of stability on other things you want to achieve in life, like family; you will also consider things like how to make starting a venture as safe as possible and gaming what you build based on likely exit; you will think about freedom, meaning freedom to do other things.
The other kind of motive is the desire to build an empire, to run something that is yours and to leave a mark on the world. People who are motivated this way don't think along the lines of risk v. reward or stability being sacrificed or freedom being earned; they don't even think about the reward from exit, except incidentally, as a way of building the big thing they really want to build or as a way of keeping score. People like this just don't think life is worth living (for them, not for other people) the other way; their overriding goal is to build a great organization doing great things.
It's important, I think, to understand which of these motives is active when you're thinking about starting a company --- or joining a startup at an early stage. If you are a type 2 person, you won't be happy until you're building that kind of organization for yourself.
CS Disco Inc. makes eDiscovery software that helps lawyers find evidence faster in major cases and investigations. We are 10x faster than our competitors at search and document navigation; have a lawyer-friendly, lawyer-focused UI; and have pricing that is both 1/2 that of competitors, or less, and perfectly predictable. Our customers include 5 of the top 50 law firms and 2 of the top 5 insurance companies.
Disco launched in January 2013 (bootstrapped) and closed a Series A with LiveOak Venture Partners in December 2013. Our team includes the youngest graduate of Harvard Law School; the former CIO of Sonic Foundry; two YC alums; ex law professors; ex litigators from Vinson & Elkins, Hogan Lovells, Camara & Sibley, Perkins Coie, and Pillsbury Winthrop; and engineers from NASA, Hearst, PROS, and Tutorspree.
We are hiring in all departments (see link above), with a particular emphasis on: (1) QA engineer; (2) a great content marketing person; and (3) sales reps with > $1M quota doing B2B SaaS in the legal vertical or a similar space. We are also in the middle of a retained search for our first VP Sales. We will consider (paid) intern candidates in all departments for the summer.
All positions require relocation to Houston (no income tax! everything is cheap!). Email engjobs@csdisco.com for engineering positions and apply@csdisco.com for all other positions.
Disco is a VC-backed startup that makes ediscovery software for lawyers. 5 of the top 50 law firms and 2 of the top 5 insurance companies in the world use Disco to find evidence faster in major cases and investigations.
We are hiring engineers (C# .NET, Lucene, RavenDB, HTML5), lawyers (commercial litigators, for customer-facing and product roles), and salespeople (with experience selling into the legal vertical).
The team (csdisco.com/about) includes a YC W11 alum, the former CTO of Sonic Foundry, and alumni of Vinson & Elkins, Hogan Lovells, Pillsbury Winthrop, Camara & Sibley, Fulbright & Jaworski, and Dewey & LeBoeuf.
Disco makes 10x faster, 10x cheaper ediscovery software for law firms and corporate legal departments. Try a demo with Enron's emails at http://demo.csdisco.com.
We are bootstrapped and have month-over-month recurring revenue growth of 35%, 150%, 40%, 114%, 30%, and 41% for the past six months. The team includes the youngest graduate of Harvard Law School, a cofounder of TrustEgg (YC W11), and the former CIO of publicly traded Sonic Foundry.
Engineering challenges include (1) scaling our infrastructure from 4 TB / 20,000,000 document databases up to 40 TB, 100 TB, and larger sets; (2) automatically classifying documents (e.g., finding engineering documents related to safety tradeoffs) based on prior lawyer classifications within a database or in other databases and on automated analysis of primary law; (3) fully searchable logs of searching and tagging decisions and beautiful visual analytics from search results; (4) rendering native documents into PDF without information loss (e.g., track changes, hidden fields, etc.) and rendering PDF elegantly across browsers (non FF pdf.js issues) with support for selection-based and search-based highlighting, redactions, annotations, etc.; and (5) fraud, error, inconsistency, and document destruction or omission detection.
C#, .NET, RavenDB, Lucene.
ENGINEER -- For engineering roles, send a resume and examples of your work to Gabe Krambs (krambs@csdisco.com). We are hiring for both UI positions and infrastructure positions (see above).
SALES / OPERATIONS / MARKETING -- Working with channel partners, delivering demos and training, working with end users to receive and load new data, escalated support, work on collateral, etc. These are jack-of-all-trade positions at a quickly growing startup. Email a resume to CeCe Cohen (cece@csdisco.com) to apply.
Disco is 10x faster, 10x cheaper ediscovery software that lawyers use to find evidence from millions or tens of millions of documents and emails collected in investigations or litigation. Search Enron's emails: http://demo.csdisco.com/
Our CEO is a litigation partner and the youngest graduate of Harvard Law School (at 19). Our COO is a cofounder of Trust Egg (YC W11). Our CTO is the former CIO of publicly traded Sonic Foundry. We have $400k in seed funding from Casi Labs, the technology division of a law firm, and are currently raising a VC round.
Customers include some of the largest law firms in the country (K&L Gates, Morgan Lewis), midsize law firms and litigation boutiques (Susman Godfrey, Gibbs & Bruns), and large corporate litigants (AIG, Cameron, Orix, Westlake Chemical). 60% month-over-month recurring revenue growth since January 2013 launch with 0 churn (no customer has yet left).
ENGINEERING - We are looking for 1 front-end engineer or designer with tech skills and 2-3 back-end engineers (C#,.NET, IIS, RavenDB, Lucene).
Problems include: (1) scaling highly performant (1/3 second search, 1/10 second document navigation) database and search to 10TB+ document sets (tens or hundreds of millions of documents); (2) automating document classification based on lawyer classifications of other documents within and across databases; and (3) real-time processing, analytics, and search of corporate email and documents in place, i.e., automating the internal audit and compliance function at large corporations.
Send a resume and code samples to Gabe Krambs at krambs@csdisco.com. Market salary.
SALES AND MARKETING - Sign and support channel partners (vendors who sell software and services to law firms and corporate litigants) and develop and present marketing material at trade shows and sales pitches. Graphic design, public relations, and proven sales skills strongly encouraged.
Send a resume to CeCe Cohen at cece@csdisco.com. Base plus commission.
If you want to work in law or legal technology, you should contact us even if this particular product doesn't seem immediately interesting.
We build tools to help great lawyers do more. Our first product is 10x faster, 10x cheaper eDiscovery software called Disco.
Disco ingests, analyzes, and indexes hundreds of thousands to tens of millions of documents per case and allow lawyers to search, review, and produce them for use in court. The idea is to help lawyers turn raw documents and email into evidence.
We are funded by Camara & Sibley LLP's internal technology group, Casi Labs. Disco customers include big firms like K&L Gates and Morgan Lewis, medium firms and boutiques like Adams & Reese, Winstead, and Gibbs & Bruns, and corporate litigants like AIG, Cameron, and Westlake Chemical.
The team includes a YC W '10 alum, the former CIO of Sonic Foundry, the youngest graduate in the history of Harvard Law School, and lawyers from a variety of big firms. Tech stack is Lucene, RavenDB, C# / .NET for application, and C for machine learning.
We are hiring for engineering (work on classifying documents based on features of the documents, data set, case, primary law, and lawyers' past classifications of other documents), operations (handling collection and ingestion of data and interfacing with customers), and sales ($60k base + 10% commission, first month commission only).
Send applications to krambs@csdisco.com for engineering and operations roles and to cece@csdisco.com for sales roles.
Camara & Sibley LLP (www.camarasibley.com) is hiring smart programmers (back end and front end) and designers to work in our new special projects division (called "Cassie") developing products that help lawyers practice law.
Experience with PST and PDF formats and search / tagging at the ~10M to ~100M document scale is helpful, but not required. Camara & Sibley and its clients will be our first customers. Cassie is funded entirely by Camara & Sibley.
In addition to Cassie work, you'll be in the middle of an active law practice that handles high-profile socially important tech cases (e.g., Apple v. Psystar and Psystar v. Apple, intervenors in Google Books, Thomas and Tenenbaum) as well as low-profile commercially important (8 figure, 9 figure) matters. We do a lot of international work, especially with Brazil and China. It is the ideal position if you've always had an interest in the law as well as technology.
Although all positions are initially in Houston, you may have the option of moving to our newly opened Singapore office in the future.
