How to Start
JobNob (founded by a GSB alum) connects cash-strapped startups with professionals willing to work for traditional or alternative compensation—i.e. including people working part time or for internships. I attended their Ivy League Happy Hour event a few weeks ago and hung a shingle:
Above: WorkPlayLove “booth” at JobNob event—btw, anyone interested in collaborating with me on WorkPlayLove.com, please shoot me a note.
Also got to meet and learn about some Bay Area entrepreneurs. As someone new to the Bay Area, what’s fascinating to me right now is why and how people go off and start ventures. Everyone seems to come about it a different way.
Below, a few exchanges with local entrepreneurs discussing how they’re getting started:
Above: Dean Vanech, Founder of Podo Legal
What is Podo Legal?
Podo Legal is an elite discovery and litigation support company serving law firms and corporate legal departments. We assist our clients with a more customized approach to defining and executing large document reviews than legal staffing agencies can. Our key advantages are having a short list of the best contract attorneys available and the built-in accountability of having a stakeholder of our company directly involved with client projects at all times.
Who’s your target audience and what do they like best about your service?
Our target audience includes law firm litigation partners and associates; and GC’s/AGC’s in corporate legal departments. We’d like to think they love the combination of high-quality work based on our decades of experiences with large document reviews; significant savings on legal spend; and the flexibility of on-demand services.
How did you get started?
We’ve worked at several large law firms and in-house as well. With a view of what matters to corporate end clients and a strong ability to work seamlessly with law firms, we see a better way to deliver crucial outsourcing/insourcing services on large litigation matters.
What have been your highs and lows at the company?
The highs so far as we launch have been the enthusiastic responses from our target audience about our high-level approach to an area that too often is a pain point for legal teams to get great results from their service providers. As for lows, none so far, although business development in the legal services market is always a challenge!
What’s this week’s top priority?
Getting the word out about our offerings.
What’s next for your business?
Deciding on a location and printing business cards!
Who is one person your business would benefit in meeting?
Any law firm or in-house litigator who’d like better results in their document reviews while meeting their business goals.
What matters most to you about your business?
We are former doers of this kind of work and buyers of these types of services. So, what really makes us tick is delivering fantastic results to our clients while keeping costs in check.
Jesse Hammons, Founder and CEO, Zaggle
What is Zaggle?
Zaggle is Personal Relationship Management. We layer social media on top of Personal Information Management in the same way that Palm brought digital technology to paper calendars and notebooks.
Who’s your target audience?
Early adopters who want to decrease the cognitive overhead of scheduling casual face-time with Family, Friends and Professional contacts.
How did the idea come about?
In silicon valley especially, many social groups are centered around email lists, yahoo groups and google groups. Zaggle is the product of many years of frustration with trying to use email to coordinate face-time.
What past experiences best prepared you to lead Zaggle?
Product experience from my days at Apple, Social Media experience from my days at Slide. I also have very broad and deep experience with loneliness, perhaps counter-intuitive but I think it’s a huge advantage here.
What’s your top priority this week?
Identify Co-Founders
What about Zaggle matters most to you?
The most important breakthrough for Zaggle is creating a platform where the user has top priority over all other stakeholders. Just looking at CrunchBase there is a list of over 70 companies supposedly working with "events". But all of these so-called competitors have sold out to the event promoters. At Zaggle we care about our users first, promoters last.
