Starting something

Today is my 12-year anniversary in business.

I founded a law firm with my best friend from law school on February 20, 2009 — in the middle of the Great Recession. Joe and I used to disagree about the official founding date because he was in trial until the following Monday, February 23, and so, technically, didn’t start until then. I guess that’s why my name came first on the letterhead! (Actually it was my lawyerly argument that anything other than alphabetical order implies something, and it was just a happy coincidence that "C" comes before "S." I'm still proud of that one.)

Our first offices were at the top of an unmarked staircase above a Liberty Tax near Rice Village in Houston. It was tax season, so we had to tell prospective clients to look for the guy dressed up as the Statue of Liberty and spinning a sign, open the unmarked door, and climb upstairs. It was me, Joe, and one associate in one big room with a conference table in the middle; the offices were meant to be temporary, so we hadn’t done a buildout and there were no interior walls. We had a sofa that we found by the side of the road, a phone shaped like a football, and a Keurig machine that my now colleague Scott Upchurch had given us as an office-warming present (he perhaps wisely, and definitely sensibly, declined our offer to come with us at the time, although he later joined me at DISCO). 

We started the firm with no clients and no real sense of how to run a business. I was 24. I like to think we were good lawyers, even then, but that was all we had. Our first few months were spent taking people out and trying to drum up business; our biggest decision was where to go for lunch. Two months in, it was looking like a horrible mistake. We lost money that year; I poured every cent of my savings into the firm to make rent and payroll (and when I say every cent, I mean it). But we got our first big case. Then our second. And then we got some momentum.

The firm outgrew our original offices, which, remember, were supposed to be temporary. But construction kept being delayed on the offices we were supposed to move into. I lived a few blocks away. To cope with the space challenge, we put a few desks in my living room. And then the firm colonized my entire first floor. And then all of my house except my bedroom. Things were like that for a year and a half. Eventually we gave up on the buildout and moved into some real offices in Williams Tower, picture below.

I remember we had a big environmental case and our meeting with the government’s top lawyer was in my living room. We went to lunch afterward and due to a scheduling mix-up an associate candidate came along; the government lawyer asked her when she had joined the firm and she said she was on her interview. We had a case against a big tech company in San Francisco; they brought their general counsel and two huge law firms; I brought one associate who had to be sworn in by the judge before the hearing started because he had just passed the bar.

Those were the days. I remember in the hard moments reminding myself to savor the good ones. I was confident that the difficulties would fade into memory and that I would want to remember the high points. And that is more or less what happened. But as high as the highs were, the lows were low. At one point a large insurance company failed to pay my client’s legal bills and we had to sue them to get paid, which took forever. It was the first of only two times I’ve had to lay people off, which is the hardest thing you can do in business. And I honestly didn’t know if we were going to make it. 

You can tell when you meet a founder who has been through the fire. It’s dangerous to bet against someone like that. Founders who start something because they just can’t live with themselves if they’re not building the vision in their mind — those founders will do whatever it takes to make that dream a reality. Where there is a way, they will find it. But that way is rarely easy. I would never recommend starting a company to someone for whom it was really a choice. (Instead: come work at DISCO!)

I had a hard time deciding to leave the practice to start DISCO. I loved practicing law. As a litigator, each case is a new story, a new cast of characters, a new industry that you get to learn, and that you then get to teach, to judges, to juries, to the other side. And often, at least if you pick the right cases, you are helping people secure justice, helping people protect what they’ve built, helping secure a bit of fairness in an unfair world. But the flip side of this is that every case ends. With each new case you start over from the beginning. 

With DISCO, instead of building cases that always end, I get to spend years building an institution, an organization that can repeatedly win at missions that matter. I’m more proud of the company that we’re building than I am of any product or any deal. Some founders find that their companies outgrow them, that they miss the “early stage.” More power to them: they are the geniuses who start company after company, serial entrepreneurs. But I never felt that way. I wake up each morning with the same fire I had back then, but with the backing of a team that’s able to achieve so much more than our little band could in the early days. And the benefit of some hard-won experience.

The law is important, and it is broken. At DISCO we believe — and I believe — that technology can go a long way toward fixing the law. The rule of law is the greatest solution humans have ever come up with to the problem of human conflict. Strengthening and defending the rule of law is a mission that matters, one that, in my mind, is every bit as important as organizing the world’s information or sending the human race to Mars. That’s our big “why” at DISCO.

To those of you out there with a dream, ask yourself if you really can’t let go, if you can’t stand not trying and you can’t tolerate failing. If that’s you, then go for it, and go for it now: you can’t prepare for the fire, but if you give it your all, if you do everything that can be done, and if you surround yourself with the very best people you can find, you can come out the other side, and you can come out strong. That’s how impossible things happen.

Happy Firmiversary!