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Ashish Walia

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27
first
2015-10-30
most recent
2015-10-30
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1
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podcast

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  1. “The biggest thing that I hope to accomplish with this is to sort of be the biggest virtual law firm that decentralizes the existing model and creates the most affordable, scalable and efficient solution for people that are looking to handle their legal work. We're getting there and it's going to be interesting to see how the next couple of years fold out.”

    2015-10-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 019: 500 Startups Week: Life As A 500 Startups Portfolio Company with Ashish Walia, Co-Founder @ LawTrades · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “The best thing about being a founder is that you have your own opportunity to create your own path. Whereas being a lawyer, you really don't. You come out of law school, you have to sort of work for someone else, get accustomed to working as an associate, and then sort of hope that one day you could make partner or inevitably start your own firm where you start the whole cycle over again. I very much enjoy the unpredictability of entrepreneurship and the total grind that it encompasses. So that's the best part about it. I love it.”

    2015-10-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 019: 500 Startups Week: Life As A 500 Startups Portfolio Company with Ashish Walia, Co-Founder @ LawTrades · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “So I use, I'm sure everyone tells you. Slack is what we really use a lot. I really use, I read a lot on medium. I'm really big on Quora. So, you know, those three apps are definitely what I use a lot, aside from Twitter.”

    2015-10-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 019: 500 Startups Week: Life As A 500 Startups Portfolio Company with Ashish Walia, Co-Founder @ LawTrades · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “I definitely, my favorite thing to read is definitely James Altacher's blog. He's so self-deprecating that on the worst day of you could have a terrible day, you read his blog and you will just feel totally fine. So I love hearing his stories.”

    2015-10-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 019: 500 Startups Week: Life As A 500 Startups Portfolio Company with Ashish Walia, Co-Founder @ LawTrades · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “That's a tough one. I would definitely say Brian Johnson, the founder of Braintree. But just being a single founder with no technical background, building a massive company that customers love that was very tech focused and then later doing what he's doing now. It's a fascinating story.”

    2015-10-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 019: 500 Startups Week: Life As A 500 Startups Portfolio Company with Ashish Walia, Co-Founder @ LawTrades · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “It's definitely zero to one by Peter Thiel. I read that during law school. That's really what changed my whole outlook. Being a lawyer and just doing something much bigger. So definitely zero to one.”

    2015-10-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 019: 500 Startups Week: Life As A 500 Startups Portfolio Company with Ashish Walia, Co-Founder @ LawTrades · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Absolutely, absolutely. And, you know, I think the challenge at the end of the day, it's not so much about the raise, it's more or less about building a good business. Gary Vanyerch told me when I went on his show, the Ask Gary V show, I think it was, you know, one of the early episodes to ask him a question. And he said, all you should focus on right now is just not even worry about raising money. Just focus on making a really good business and everything else will come. And that's sort of like what I tell myself every time. So I would really just stick to that message. And then that's how it happened. You know, we really put our heads down to build out law trades in those four months after I graduated law school and even while I was in law school and then lo and behold, you know, we had the introduction to 500 and then here we are today.”

    2015-10-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 019: 500 Startups Week: Life As A 500 Startups Portfolio Company with Ashish Walia, Co-Founder @ LawTrades · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “You know, the most challenging thing, I think, is just sort of finding those people that understand your vision, right? So we raised the seed round initially. It was like a very small pre-seed round when we had zero traction. These were just a bunch of angels, a small micro VC that came in on the round. So obviously that was very challenging because we didn't have much to show for other than a vision. So that was our big challenge at first. through 500 you know the big the biggest challenge for 500 was literally just picking up everything in three days and leaving you know and just sort of putting everything on the back burner for a while and moving to california for the next four months that was sort of that caught me by surprise you know i i wasn't expecting us to even get in at that point”

    2015-10-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 019: 500 Startups Week: Life As A 500 Startups Portfolio Company with Ashish Walia, Co-Founder @ LawTrades · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Yeah, so 500, we really wanted to go to 500 is because they're so focused on distribution. And I think that that was the one thing we really wanted to nail was, you know, how could we get more distribution? What kind of experiments could we run to even get more customers? And I think that obviously we're product focused, but I think it seems like YC tends to have more product focus engineers that they're looking for and 500. An interesting thing that I'd love for you to link up to is there's a core question where Dave McClure really writes about the cultures that tech stars, YC and 500 all have. And if you look at it, it's funny. It's like 500 founders tend to be geeky hustlers. They tend to be very social, community-driven, etc. Like, I looked at that and I was like, that is literally us. And I just think the”

    2015-10-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 019: 500 Startups Week: Life As A 500 Startups Portfolio Company with Ashish Walia, Co-Founder @ LawTrades · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Right, and I'm sure that a lot of those companies come from recommendations from existing founders. So definitely, definitely try to get your foot in the door with them.”

    2015-10-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 019: 500 Startups Week: Life As A 500 Startups Portfolio Company with Ashish Walia, Co-Founder @ LawTrades · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “So I did that with a few other people, and I think that combined with our traction and our unit economics behind the business was enough for them to give us a shot. So I would really say for anyone that wants to get in, focus on just getting some early validation and show that there is some opportunity with your business, and then also try to just get connected with people within the network. Because if they vouch for you, I think 500 is invested in over like a thousand companies”

    2015-10-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 019: 500 Startups Week: Life As A 500 Startups Portfolio Company with Ashish Walia, Co-Founder @ LawTrades · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Right, so I mean, for us in particular, I don't know if they do this for every company. For us, what they seem to really care about that I think help us get in was, you know, one, we had about two or three people recommend us after they learned about their business. What I did was I found, you know, I literally, once I had one recommendation, I tried to get connected to other 500 mentors or founders, Stelli Fdi, I'm sure you know Stelly. He's a mentor at 500. He was also on my podcast. He knew what we were doing.”

    2015-10-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 019: 500 Startups Week: Life As A 500 Startups Portfolio Company with Ashish Walia, Co-Founder @ LawTrades · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “She loved what we were doing, the traction we had so far, and then she invited us in. And then literally four days after that, we picked up everything from New York and just moved to California. So it was a wild ride the last couple weeks.”

    2015-10-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 019: 500 Startups Week: Life As A 500 Startups Portfolio Company with Ashish Walia, Co-Founder @ LawTrades · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Great question. So as you know, as a guest on my podcast, I started a podcast to drive traffic to my website LawTrades. And one of the guests I had on my podcast was a good friend of mine. His name is Rob Cucci, and he has a company called Pigeon, where they sell care packages to college students. And he actually went through 500. So it just so happened that I told him about our business. And we've always been very revenue focused since day one. And told him about our numbers and whatnot. And he was like, hey, you should apply to 500. The deadline's going to come up in literally about a week or two. It was sort of out on the whim. We ended up applying a couple of days before the deadline. The next day we got an interview from Brian Wang, who just happened to be in New York City that day and told us to come into an interview. So we have the interview. The next day later, we have another interview via Skype with Elizabeth.”

    2015-10-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 019: 500 Startups Week: Life As A 500 Startups Portfolio Company with Ashish Walia, Co-Founder @ LawTrades · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “So we have pretty strict standards for the lawyers that come onto our platform. So generally what we look for is attorneys that have big law experience that are sort of tired of the work-life balance. And inevitably, a lot of people will work in big law and leave after three or four years to start their own firm because you have a family, you sort of want to not work 100 hours a week and sort of operate your own way. So those are the attorneys we go after essentially a lot of small boutique firms and a lot of solo practitioners. And they have a lot of flexibility. They could essentially work from a beach and get clients on law trades and make a living. So it's great.”

    2015-10-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 019: 500 Startups Week: Life As A 500 Startups Portfolio Company with Ashish Walia, Co-Founder @ LawTrades · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “More legal technology into the profession. And there's certainly, like my law school was, they're starting incubators for attorneys that want to become solo practicing attorneys right out of law school, which is something that should have been done 10, 15 years ago. So it's funny to show you how archaic it is, I had a property class, which is a mandatory class in law school. And you would literally get penalized if you were to bring your laptop into class. So you couldn't even take notes on a laptop. They literally wanted you to sit down and write all your notes out. And in my mind, I'm thinking for crying out loud, it's 2,000, at that time it was 2014. You tell me I can't bring a laptop to glass.”

    2015-10-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 019: 500 Startups Week: Life As A 500 Startups Portfolio Company with Ashish Walia, Co-Founder @ LawTrades · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “So I think it really stems from two core issues and it's an insanely, like you said, it's very archaic and you're learning essentially the same cases, the same statutes that attorneys or law school students learned 10 to 20 years ago. Inherently, law school does not teach you to be entrepreneurial at all. It's looked down upon to come out of law school and be an apprentice with an attorney and get an attorney mentor and practice by yourself. You're encouraged to go out and find a job and work under a partner and be an associate. So I think that most of most people in law school end up going that route. They end up finding a job and working under someone. And when you sort of do that for a couple years, I think it really negates becoming entrepreneurial. So hopefully I think that law schools now are sort of catching on to integrating.”

    2015-10-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 019: 500 Startups Week: Life As A 500 Startups Portfolio Company with Ashish Walia, Co-Founder @ LawTrades · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Just go out and pay 100 grand for an MBA. So much of it for free, and it's so much more practical. So a lot of everything I learned so far has really been because on my commutes, I'm listening to the ASCII V show, I'm listening to Tim Ferris interview someone like Brian Johnson and figure out how non-technical founders were able to grow massively successful businesses. And I loved it.”

    2015-10-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 019: 500 Startups Week: Life As A 500 Startups Portfolio Company with Ashish Walia, Co-Founder @ LawTrades · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Yeah, I really just resonated with this message because what I try to learn when I was learning about entrepreneurship was I realized I'm not a product guy. I'm not going to code out the best website. But what I could do is I'm really good at sales. I could make customers feel great. I could make our attorneys feel excellent and deliver them a great service. So I really tried to find entrepreneurs that had that sort of background. So I watched the Ask Gary V show. I read all of his books. I also read a lot of blog posts by Jason Calicanis. I watched this week in startups around the time where I really got started, ironically how to start a startup at Stanford was just really getting out there, which was the perfect timing for me because literally it learn from these resources and it's like better get it's better to learn from these resources than it is.”

    2015-10-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 019: 500 Startups Week: Life As A 500 Startups Portfolio Company with Ashish Walia, Co-Founder @ LawTrades · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Yeah, absolutely. I think that there's, you know, when you're running a company and just trying to be that unicorn, be that company that really sets things off. There's so many days where you're going to face a lot of stress. You're going to face a lot of ups and downs. And a lot of times your normal friends that have comfortable jobs can't really relate to it. So a lot. They don't really get it. And so there were certainly a lot of times of self-reflection and just really being alone and really thinking about how I was going to build things and whatnot. So fortunately for us and every other person thinking”

    2015-10-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 019: 500 Startups Week: Life As A 500 Startups Portfolio Company with Ashish Walia, Co-Founder @ LawTrades · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Thank you. Thank you. And by the time I graduated, we had already raised a small seed round. We had some traction. And then lo and behold, now we're in an accelerator. So everything has been very, it's just been a wild ride the last two years or so.”

    2015-10-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 019: 500 Startups Week: Life As A 500 Startups Portfolio Company with Ashish Walia, Co-Founder @ LawTrades · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Yeah, so the idea came about halfway through being in law school. And, you know, it's like right around towards the end of my first semester of my second year of law school. And Rod approached me and said, hey, let's bail this out. We could definitely make a really good platform for businesses and lawyers. And the first version that we built out was absolutely horrendous. We had zero traction. It was simply a lawyer directory service. No one was really using it. Around that time, while I was in law school, it was sort of a blessing for me because, you know, I was living off student loans while I was figuring out everything. And, you know, it helped us really get the product right. So I graduated law school about four months ago. Yeah, four months ago in May. Big conflict.”

    2015-10-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 019: 500 Startups Week: Life As A 500 Startups Portfolio Company with Ashish Walia, Co-Founder @ LawTrades · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Right, so it's sort of what you hit on before. It's you're going to forego a comfortable salary, you're going to forego nice dinners all the time and benefits, all this stuff that comes with having a full-time career. And inevitably, I don't think that this is for everyone. You know what I mean? I think that it's such a risky path. There's so many ups and downs daily, so many stresses, et cetera. So I think that you really just have to examine what you want out of your life. regardless of whether or not law trades ends up being a powerhouse company five or six years down the road I think that the path of you know figuring it out myself and really working my tail off and hustling you know like that's what I really want to do so you know figure out what it is that you want to do and just go for it and you know the rest will sort of you know pave your own path around it”

    2015-10-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 019: 500 Startups Week: Life As A 500 Startups Portfolio Company with Ashish Walia, Co-Founder @ LawTrades · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Yeah, exactly. And I've heard that from so many people that I really looked up to and I thought that if I already know this now, why not just pursue entrepreneurship? It was something that was always in the back of my mind and I didn't really have the right, I didn't know what problem I wanted to solve or anything like that. And then all of this sort of came right onto my lap and I thought that this was the perfect opportunity to go forward. So it was certainly nerve-wracking, but rewarding at the same time. And yeah.”

    2015-10-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 019: 500 Startups Week: Life As A 500 Startups Portfolio Company with Ashish Walia, Co-Founder @ LawTrades · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Yeah, so that's a great question. During law school, I was sort of in the top of my class. I studied with good people that ended up getting those high-level six-figure jobs right out of law school. So it was extremely nerve-wrecking to sort of forgo the law school route or the lawyer route and to jump into a startup. And the reason why I did it is because I really looked at what the next five years of my life would probably look like if I became a lawyer. And it wasn't really appealing to me at all. And I'm sure you heard Peter Tiel say himself. It's like when you join a law firm, it's something that everyone on the outside wants to get into it, but everyone on the inside of that law firm wants to.”

    2015-10-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 019: 500 Startups Week: Life As A 500 Startups Portfolio Company with Ashish Walia, Co-Founder @ LawTrades · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Which ends up costing a lot more money down the road to fix all the mistakes, or you're stuck paying almost $600 an hour for some high-level law firm for routine legal work. And that's where we really thought there was a huge opportunity because there's so many boutique law firms and solo practicing attorneys that left those big law firms without the high overhead that are looking for more work. And we found that as a great opportunity to sort of connect entrepreneurs to them. And it's been going well. We're saving a lot of people money and making the process much more affordable. And also generating a stream of income for attorneys. So yeah, that really set it off for us.”

    2015-10-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 019: 500 Startups Week: Life As A 500 Startups Portfolio Company with Ashish Walia, Co-Founder @ LawTrades · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Yeah, absolutely. So I went to undergrad in Queens, New York, and after undergrad, I went to law school, and halfway through law school, I sort of started thinking about a different career path. After talking to a lot of different attorneys that I met while I was in law school, reading a lot of entrepreneurial resources and listening to podcasts, I really started thinking more about entrepreneurship as opposed to being a full-time lawyer. It was a great opportunity because halfway through law school is when we started thinking of the idea of law trades with my co-founder Rod. And the whole idea behind it was to sort of decentralize the major corporate law firms because inevitably when an entrepreneur is faced with some sort of legal issue, whether they want to start their company or just get some basic legal work done, there are two options before we existed were to either go to a bottom of the barrel, do it yourself legal service.”

    2015-10-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 019: 500 Startups Week: Life As A 500 Startups Portfolio Company with Ashish Walia, Co-Founder @ LawTrades · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source