Over the last two years, there has been a wave of disruption created by innovative companies. One of the most exciting things coming out of the pandemic was the movement of startups built around taking things that are mundane and tedious and finding a solution to vastly improve upon them.
For instance, the boilerplate contract has been around forever. Tech startup Ironclad is changing the old-fashioned agreement. Founders CEO Jason Boehmig and chief technology officer Cai GoGwilt are, respectively, a former corporate attorney at Fenwick & West and a software engineer at Palantir Technologies. Together, they built a team of 400 Silicon Valley engineers, lawyers and legal professionals committed to building a simple, flexible and open solution for legal teams by creating a suite of workflow and analytics solutions to help companies draft, manage and learn from business contracts.
The company’s platform streamlines manual review processes, organizes communications, like emails and comments, and collects snapshots of every version of the contract. Ironclad collects contract data, then lets users make simple, Google search-like queries to figure out who does what and when.
The firm contends that contracts are business decisions trapped in administrative tasks and digital contracting brings teams, processes and data together to make better, faster business contracts. Ironclad’s software does all of the work, freeing legal teams to do what they do best.
GoGwilt has two degrees in computer science and electrical engineering from MIT and has spent his career in software development. He thinks about contracts like code. The lawyers and contract specialists are like the engineers writing the code and the legal system is like the computer. “The data locked inside of contracts governs the entire business,” Gogwilt said. “It governs in many ways the entire economy in terms of the relationships between businesses. In a sense, the world of contracts is like the operating system for society. So, by building a system that helps unlock the data in contracts, we’re helping to build that operating system.”
Ironclad has a wide array of clients across a variety of sectors. They include L’Oreal, Reddit, Fitbit and Dropbox. Examples of the use cases are seen in healthcare companies that leveraged Ironclad’s services to shift to telehealth delivery channels. DoorDash is able to more easily scale the number of restaurants it can work with. The software enables the Texas Rangers baseball team to sell seats and suites, and if a game is canceled, its proprietary software will amend the contracts.
To help with rapid growth, Ironclad brought aboard its first remote executive, Ambrosia Vertesi, as the chief people officer. Vertesi was previously the people executive at Duo Security and Hootsuite and operating partner of investment firm Operator Collective.
Since Vertesi has a unique perspective on remote work, she will take the lead in cultivating and building the startup’s hybrid hub model. Ironclad plans to have four hubs—San Francisco, New York City, Indianapolis and a remote option.
Vertesi said about this intriguing work model, “I’m excited to bring my experience and point of view as a remote leader to help navigate this path forward both for Ironclad, and open-sourcing this knowledge with the industry as a whole.” The new chief people officer added about the work style, “We touched on our adoption of a “remote” hub– alongside San Francisco, New York and Indianapolis–and we definitely see that as a muscle to build and something that’s here to stay.” She added that this hub approach “will play a big part in scaling culture for our team, and making sure experiences align for both our in-office and remote-first employees.”
“We’re investing a lot now into ensuring our [cultural] experiences align across all areas of the company, and in each location–including our remote hub. A lot of this is foundational work, but a big part is around cultural and development investments, like our bi-annual companywide retreats–which we hold in-person to build connectedness and collaboration with our teams, regardless of location,” Vertesi said.
“We’re also implementing a virtual aspect to our paid intern program–where, alongside San Francisco, New York City and Indianapolis, there will also be a program for remote interns. This program focuses on both summer interns and a new grad program as well, both of which include in-depth mentorship, networking events and mixers, a speaking series, and of course, real-world experience. The majority of our intern program will be remote this year due to Covid, but this virtual aspect is particularly important as we navigate the future of work moving forward–which has become very much a part of the working-world experience.”
In addition to Vertesi, Leyla Seka and Helen Wang joined the team as COO and CFO, respectively.
Source: Forbes
