Augie Rakow of Orrick - Legal Tips for Venture Backed Startups

Augie Rakow of Orrick - Podcast Transcript

Scott Orn:	RACKOW RAKOW OF OFORRICK ORRICK
Augie Rakow:	Welcome to Founders and Friends with Scott Orn at Kruze Consulting. I have a very special guest today - Augie Rakow, from Orrick. Welcome, Augie.
Scott Orn:	Hi there. Nice to be here.
Augie Rakow:	Augie has been kind enough to come and join us in our office. Vanessa has known Augie for a couple of years now. A lot Augie’s clients are our clients. We know he’s one of the best start-up lawyers out there in the Valley. So we wanted to have him on the podcast.
Scott Orn:	Very kind, thank you.
Augie Rakow:	He’s blushing. He’s blushing. So maybe you’d just start off by talking about how you got into law and how you found your way to start-ups.
Scott Orn:	Sure. It’s two parts. My father was a software entrepreneur when I was a kid. He started a software company in 1982, a pre dotcom. It was a training company. If you’d buy computer, it would come with a disc that was his company’s disc that would teach you how to use a computer.
Augie Rakow:	Wow. So it was the first thing someone put in. It was the first introduction to the PC.
Scott Orn:	Exactly. And the products were called ‘Teach yourself Word,’ ‘Teach yourself Dbase 2,’‘Teach yourself CPM.’ That kind of old stuff. It was cool stuff. And then I wasn’t at all thinking about startups or anything like that myself for a long time. I majored in History in college, and went to Divinity School and realized that a lot of things that attracted me to Divinity School and studying the History of Theology was not to become a pastor, which is funny because there is a pastoral element what I do now, but it wasn’t really so much to become a pastor.
Augie Rakow:	A counselor. In times of darkness you’re there for the founders and good times too. RACKOW OF ORRICK
Scott Orn:	Yeah. You’re talking about things that really matter. I particularly like to do it. People have different styles. I like to get into the economics of what they are talking about. I can do that. People like to get into the technology, and I can do that. But what I really like to do is to get into what it means to the founder personally. I like to know what they’re hoping to get out of a certain discussion or transaction, or what they are worried about might go wrong, or what they are hoping how it would look if it goes really well. That personal angle on it is what I like. So I grew up with the software entrepreneur father and by the time we called it a computer company, that was enough to distinguish it from a computer company, which cracks me up now. Because they want to know if you represent any other drone company because they don’t want them to compete.
Augie Rakow:	And this whole industry is going to be so huge.
Scott Orn:	It’s going to be so huge. We’re going to be cracking up calling it a drone company.
Augie Rakow:	It’s like the dotcom, back in the days.
Scott Orn:	Yeah, everything is the dotcom. It’s like SaaS. Is that really what distinguishes SaaS. Aspects of it, but not almost every software analysis to look-But I actually think theology and law are very similar as academic disciplines at least, that the course skills that you learn in school and use in the background in practice. You’re essentially looking at statements that we’ve made about difficult situations and how to handle them historically. What do you do if someone steals your idea? What do you do if someone told you they’d do something and then doesn’t? What do you do if someone takes money from you. These are really similar questions. Let’s say the statements that we make in the law about how to handle the situation. At what point does it mention that it belongs to someone. At what point is an invention obvious or not relative to another one. These rules we club with are human generated rules. They are not physical science concepts. They are not medical science concepts. They are human values concepts, and they are embedded in lengthy statements about how we handle situations. RACKOW OF ORRICK The core discipline both in theology and law, as I see it is to look at those statements we made in the past think about we think about how to handle certain situations, and they tend to be pretty tough situations where there’s pain or great joy. They are intense situations. What did we say in the past about situations? Is that still valid? How do we dance around what we said in the past versus plunge right into it? And then how do you apply that to the resolution of day to day problems. Like, ‘Should I forget my brother and sister? Am I okay to divorce my spouse?’ These kinds of values-based questions. Both disciplines have tried to give answers to these day to day problems. What do I do if someone stole this? What can I do if someone stole this?
Augie Rakow:	What’s a really interesting comparison because the case law in the United States or Delaware is effectively like the parables or stories that come from the Bible or any other religions cortex. It’s a really interesting analogy.
Scott Orn:	Yeah. It’s similar to what they called theology’s systematic field. Law is very similar to systematic theology where you try to make statements about big topics but have those statement be consistent with other statements you’ve made about other big topics. And that’s hard.
Augie Rakow:	Yeah. That’s a lot of money spent on Sunday discussing this kind of stuff.
Scott Orn:	It happens in the courts; it happens in academia. And it trickles down. We receive digested versions of those practicing lawyers, or practicing pastors. We receive digested trickle-down versions of those discourses which have been happening for hundreds of years, and apply them to resolving day to day problems.
Augie Rakow:	It’s a really interesting perspective. I never thought about it like that, but I totally get it.
Scott Orn:	They are the same thing. In one you make money, and in the other one you don’t.
Augie Rakow:	So that’s what drove you to law. It was a way to apply that and be a counselor for the companies and the clients.
Scott Orn:	Yeah, the way I got into law was actually closer to theology, to me anyway. I was in graduate school and I had a lifelong interest in Japan. I had been studying Japanese language since I was 12 or so. It was in Japan that I came RACKOW OF ORRICK across a Japanese textbook on Japanese Constitution Law written by a Japanese Constitution Law professor for Japanese law students. It was in Japanese. Using a dictionary I worked my way through the book. And I fell in love with the discourse. I thought this is how I’d like to use my brain. I remember in particular this one case in 1973 in Japan. They had this Supreme Court case about how to apply this one criminal law statute that provided for a heavier punishment for killing an older brother than for killing a younger brother. There was a guy who had been convicted of killing his older brothers - no legal question of the guilt, he was convicted of it. But in the sentencing phase; he had killed an older brother. He had challenged his sentence saying there was a law which provided for a heavier punishment for killing an older brother as opposed to a younger brother - which had been on the books in Japan for hundreds of years - was inconsistent with the new post-world war constitution which required you to treat people equally under the law, and not discriminate based on that. He won that case. It was a landmark case in the year that I was born, in 1973 in Japan. What I liked about it in the constitutional textbook, the professor lay out the popular perception of these court cases is that the question that initially needs to be decided, and then the answer. It will get stripped out in all the media coverage If you’re reading a New York Times article about some Supreme Court decision in the US - what will get stripped out is the legal reasoning. People get this perception that the judge is shooting from the hip. This should be okay and this shouldn’t be okay. It’s not that. It’s really more like doing an audit where you’re trying to reconcile what these books say over here with what those books say over there and what these receipts say over there. You’re trying to reconcile all these statements made about similar situations. I like using my brain that way.
Augie Rakow:	Do you think you’ll go someday where you –you’re a partner now at Orrick and you’ve done very well. Do you think you’ll go into being a judge? Or being a constitutional scholar? It sounds like you have a real passion for it.
Scott Orn:	I do. But I’ve moved away from that. As a nerd as a kid and in the academics that was all that I knew, but as a first few years practicing law - well, even before practicing law I worked for a judge in RACKOW OF ORRICK law school for this one semester. I remember feeling like what I was doing working for that judge was my favorite - and still is one of my favorite ways to use my brain that I’ve ever used it. I like to think that way. I was originally a litigator where you do more core, legal analyses. I really enjoyed the law in that, but I actually found the facts boring. I wanted more messiness in what I’m trying to do at the end of the day. In a certain way litigation is trying to clearly win on this claim and defend this claim. It’s that clarity of focus that enables the rigor that I really love. But it strips away a lot of the non legal stuff. I like the messiness of trying to build something out of nothing and put things together. The funny thing is it’s not my core–
Scott Orn:	Ambiguity with the founders. Augie Rakow; Personal relationships seem more complicated and interesting to me.
Augie Rakow:	I guess also the more you interact with people, the more complicated and interesting it is. I felt the way. In many [ inaudible 00:09:12] professional we’re both helping and guiding these people through their entrepreneurial journey. And yeah, some of the craziest and most weirdest founders are (a) the most effective and (b) need the most help. Those people sometimes keep you up at night, too. And you’re like, ‘Oh gosh!’ They’re running off the rails or whatever they are doing. It is fun. It’s interesting.
Scott Orn:	The big part of it for me is - to put this in family context - my father is a software entrepreneur. My mother is a novelist - and the part that I get from her comes in this. What I like particularly about Founders is they are motivated by the stuff that doesn’t really exist yet. They take an idea.
Augie Rakow:	Yeah, they’re building a future. You said something super interesting when I asked the first question, you were like, ‘I ask the Founders where they are trying to go? What they are trying to accomplish?’ Can you talk about that more? I find that as a really effective paradigm for working with Founders. Can you talk a little bit more about that?
Scott Orn:	Yeah. In practice I’ll advice some of my younger associates, when you’re trying to figure out what someone is asking. They are coming with a question and there are a lot of aspects to the questions and a lot of things going on in this situation they are describing. And you don’t know where to start. It can be an RACKOW OF ORRICK organizing principle. So the client tells you, ‘This person said that. They did this. They did that.’ Okay I get all the messages, but where are you trying to go? What’s your ideal outcome here? It’s really one of the techniques from the lawyer’s side to bring some order to it, and to simplify the discussion. But in the broader sense, fantasy is an interesting concept, interesting thing to me. I feel fantasy comes up in day to day life more than we realize. After this I’m going to get up, walk out the door and go turn on my laptop - whether I realize it depending how conscious I am or not - I have a little fantasy about how it’s going to go. I’m going to go to my laptop; it’s going to work on the first try. I’m going to have a comfortable chair. You have this hope.
Scott Orn:	You’re going to drive some incredible knowledge. Drop somebody on their first email. Augie Rakow; Possibly. Yeah, even on the more mundane stuff. You have this kind of fantasy. I hope when I get up and go out have lunch, I hope it’s going to taste good. I like that human - I don’t know how to describe it.
Augie Rakow:	It’s like that hope. I think what you’re talking about is like dreaming and going towards those dream. I’m the same way. I wake up in the morning, and I work out. I try to visualize what’s going to happen. I feel like that brings me a lot of order, but also helps me be more effective and also as a better person. I know where I’m going in the day.
Scott Orn:	You develop a more unique voice for yourself. I love it in a conversation with a client where they come to a realization in the course of the conversation, that they didn’t have at the beginning. That’s like pay-day for me. I love that.
Augie Rakow:	Yeah. That’s what you’re in it for. You’re in it to help these people. Anyone and you could do many different jobs to make money, but you will probably agree that helping them get from point A to point B makes you feel really good. Seeing their successes as your successes and you’re also building your own practice. So you’re having these new clients, great referrals and things like that. But at the end of the day that one-on-one helping someone is really helpful.
Scott Orn:	I’m really lucky now that I’m at a point where I like all my clients. I don’t have any client where an email come in from them and I go, ‘Oh, shit.’
Augie Rakow:	I’m the same way. That was actually a major turning point. RACKOW OF ORRICK
Scott Orn:	It was a huge turning point.
Augie Rakow:	You know, we can speak about it. In Kruze Consulting, I think it was last October, we literally fired 4 clients - the 4 asshole clients - including one who was one of our largest. It was a really gut-check moment. It was so freeing after that.
Scott Orn:	You never regret it.
Augie Rakow:	Yeah.
Scott Orn:	It’s going to sound very inhospitable here. I just let my client go this morning. I told them I couldn’t work with them anymore. I had been thinking about it actually for 6 months and finally did it. He was rude to our staff. And when I want associates to work with me, or help me on something, I don’t want them to wonder if it’s going to be a asshole client or not. I want them to go, ‘Oh, it’s one of Augie’s clients, so it’s probably a cool client.’ Also I can’t get work done.
Augie Rakow:	Yes. It also sends a super strong signal to your team that you value them over whatever billing.
Scott Orn:	This may all be edited out behind the scenes. It’s really important and you need that enthusiasm from the team in order to deliver for the clients you value.
Augie Rakow:	By the way those CEOs should be doing the same thing. If they don’t enjoy working with their lawyer or CFO or accountant, they should be making a move. That’s how you should do business. You should find the right people for you. So going back to the original question, how did you end up with startups? Because startups are super chaotic, but I find them very fun. I feel that you can make the most impact as an advisor. Is that what you were thinking? Or what did you see?
Scott Orn:	I was 2 years into practice and I decided I wanted to have my own clients. I had decided that earlier and I started to make the moves for it. I was a litigator at the time. I thought about ‘I wanted to have an industry that I follow’. I read the trade journals. I go to the meetings and I know what’s going on in that industry. Apart from my legal expertise, I wanted to have an industry - they know me and I know them. RACKOW OF ORRICK I started off with what was then called Clean Tech. It was fun. It was great. I did a bunch of stuff to get my name out there, and build up my own expertise, and learn and meet people, and build a network, and that kind of stuff. What started coming back in though, was a little bit more corporate work than litigation. People are not going to trust a second year lawyer which is litigation. It doesn’t happen. But could you incorporate my company as a second year lawyer. Possibly , yeah.
Augie Rakow:	It’s actually a great insight. It’s like betting the company on this litigation, not going to work, but I need help in getting the blocking, tackling and getting going.
Scott Orn:	Exactly. So the work that was coming in was a little bit more like corporate work. For a year I was trying to figure out how to service that as a litigator. Do I developed a network of corporate lawyers so I feed stuff to, and maybe they’ll refer stuff back to me? I danced around indirect ways of doing it. After about a year I was like, ‘Screw it,’ because I was getting to a point where I felt I was turning into a legal bimbo. So I’d meet someone, and I’d introduce them to a specialist who could help them. Then I just watched the conversation and tried to understand it. It felt substance-less. So I decided I wanted [inaudible 00:16:00]
Augie Rakow:	So then you became their go-to attorney and then you still do that probably a little bit, but internally at Orrick.
Scott Orn:	Yeah. Half of my own functional specialties is finding corporate work and doing financing. Really doing the financing - advising the board. The other half of the work is really being outside general counsel to refer companies for my clients. They need tax expertise. They need a litigator’s expertise. My role is to know how to speak. Someone said to me, and you hear this a lot; the CTO doesn’t need to be the best technical person. They need to be the best at explaining the technical stuff to the marketing people, and to the financing people and to the CEO, and managing your own team. Right. So it’s kind of a split role work. Half way it is tax question. My tax cut is $950 an hour, but if you ask them the question the right way, you can get the answer in 30 seconds. You ask them a question the wrong way, it can take an hour to if they even understand what your question is. But if you ask the question the right way get you can get an RACKOW OF ORRICK answer in 30 seconds. That’s my role is to know the facts that he needs to hear. And take those facts to him and bring back his advice.
Augie Rakow:	Also it is whetting, knowing which tax guy you’ve got to go to. Because you could end up with someone who doesn’t know what they are talking. And if the CEO doesn’t know - they are trusting you, you’re the guy who is making the decision for them. So you’re like the counciliary for each company. Is it general counsel at the company but also handling all their finances?
Scott Orn:	You’re outside general council sort of role. Companies will typically tend to hire a general council in-house. Usually they maybe spending $300,000 or so a year on legal. That’s about the point where they start. It’s actually a critical point for the audience. A lot of times people think that they hired a general council to reduce the legal fee bill and to bring it inhouse. Unfortunately it doesn’t work that way, that they hire the general council in-house because there’s too much to do. In a lot of ways they actually end up spending more once they hire general council, because now there is someone who can actually do all the stuff that was backlogged.
Augie Rakow:	The new general council is doing a ton of deal contracts, revenue generating things and also handling - as your team builds you also have HR problems and things like that. We try to convey this too. In a very similar way, a company brings in a VP of Finance or a CFO at Series C, and replaces us. We’re totally cool with that. You have to do that or else you’re going to drown, because the complexity gets so incredible. So you still stayed with the company. You’re still attending all the board meetings and helping them at general council that just got brought in through some really sticky problems, I assume.
Scott Orn:	Yeah, usually they have those areas that they are strong in. Maybe it’s a company that needs regulatory expertise, they brought in a GC as regulatory expertise. He’s also done the stuff [inaudible 00:19:07] but their strength is really regulatory. And maybe they don’t really understand how cap tables work, or maybe they were a public company. The first time one of my clients hired a GC that only dealt in public companies, I was actually intimidated at first. I thought they deal with more RACKOW OF ORRICK sophisticated stuff. I like the early stage. Probably the incoming GC deals with much more sophisticated and I don’t have much to offer. The GC came aboard. And the GC didn’t understand the first thing about a lot of private stocks, etc. Yeah. They had no idea. And they kept confusing. I didn’t realize our private company practice is as sophisticated as it is.
Augie Rakow:	Yeah. It’s a really good feeling.
Scott Orn:	It’s a great feeling.
Augie Rakow:	It’s also awesome for that person, because they know you’re the expert. It’s that whole ‘Answer the question in 2 minutes’ thing. You just knock it out.
Scott Orn:	Yeah. It kind of surprised me.
Augie Rakow:	So you talked about helping them through the journey. What are some of the things you see, that you have to jump in and help the early stage founders? Some lessons or even funny stories are always awesome.
Scott Orn:	It’s funny when you say funny stories. There is a total story that comes to mind when you say funny story.
Augie Rakow:	You don’t have to use any names.
Scott Orn:	I was wondering if it was going to be funny. There was this really sweet founder. I really liked them a lot. They were from Mexico, Chile and Argentina. There were three of them there, doing something in Latin America. They’d worked with some other lawyer - their friend who’s been to law school. When we started working with them their doctrines were a total wreck. I mean everything. You couldn’t put a cap table on this. We probably spent about two months and probably $12,000, just making closing balance of all the stuff that they had. I sent it off to the guys. Three days later I got an email back saying, ‘Hey, I want to transfer 1% of my share to my sister. Is there any way we can do it without all the paperwork?’ What had you been doing for the last 3 months? Sure. Do it on a handshake.
Augie Rakow:	The ‘friend-who-went-to-law-school-who-does’ is a very expensive lesson for many founders. We get a lot of calls and people are just getting going. I’m always like, ‘Call Augie. Or call a Silicon Valley lawyer for the job.’ Because they will avoid so many crazy expenses by doing it right. You guys know how to do everything correctly. RACKOW OF ORRICK
Scott Orn:	A lot of it is about finding the short cut. A lot of times the founders are like they just want and NDA and just want this or that. They want a junior lawyer to do it for them. A lot of times it takes a certain amount of experience to know what corners can be cut, what corners can’t be cut. They say cheap programmers are more expensive than the expensive programmers.
Augie Rakow:	It’s the same. Jason Lambkin, the guy who does SaaS had a great post where he’s talking about the best value you get is by paying a high hourly rate to your lawyer, because they’ll knock that for you in 15 minutes or half an hour and you never have to do it again yourself. A junior lawyer would take 5 hours to do it and probably mess up that.
Scott Orn:	This happened a few months ago. There’s an older guy, one of my mentors at our office. He’s probably one of the oldest * on this group. We had a client that wanted an audit response letter. The auditing firm sent over this letter that was not what we typically deal in. We were figuring out what they were getting at. And we hadn’t pushed back, it was diplomatic because the client wanted us to just do what the auditor wants.
Augie Rakow:	And the auditors can seek vengeance on you and do something really mean.
Scott Orn:	Exactly. We spent a day and a half - probably an hour and a half over a day and a half - trying to chase down their people, and finding out why they were asking us to do this letter this way, and telling them I’m not sure I’m getting traction here. So I went to this older, one of my mentors and he was fantastic. We got on the conference call. It was a 9 minute call. He just went through different people on the call. He said, ‘You want this, and you want that to happen. And you over there, you want this right? Why don’t we do this?’ And they went okay, and it was done.
Augie Rakow:	That’s amazing.
Scott Orn:	And I was [inaudible 00:23:43] trying to find out what each of them wanted. He knew what they wanted, and he was just confirming it.
Augie Rakow:	Because he had the experience. Those are great moments. The cool thing about your focus on startups, and our focus on startups is that often times we hear a lot of the same questions over and over. RACKOW OF ORRICK So our knowledge builds very, very quickly. And we can leverage that. I can say that we can probably be able to answer the question within 2 minutes because we answered it 25 times. Any other funny stories that jump to mind or even just regular mistakes that people can avoid?
Scott Orn:	The last big deal I did was maybe about 6 months ago or so. We sold Cruise Automation to GM. It was huge deal. We sold it just north of a billion. This is all public. We signed the deal. For the founders who haven’t been through this, you sign the deal, and then you close later. It’s not like in financing where the signing and closing all happens at once. You sign the deal and then you have a month or so, where there’s a bunch of conditions to closing. So you negotiate all these closing conditions, you sign. You take on the legal obligation to satisfy all these things and you run around for a month or so trying to satisfy all these obligation and then you get the money and the deal closes.
Augie Rakow:	Is this kind of a regulatory review?
Scott Orn:	Yeah exactly. Maybe there’s someone’s consent you need to track down in order to actually do the deal, or whatever. We signed the deal and it got announced publicly. This guy showed up and said he owned half the company.
Augie Rakow:	I read about it on Hacker’s News or something like that.
Scott Orn:	I’m not going to go into the larger details. Anything that I would talk about would just be stuff that’s discussed publicly. I don’t know off the top of my head exactly how it’s put in each of the public documents, but that was an intense negotiation. So many decisions had to be made really quickly. It was really neat to see that client, Kyle, in that case. It was really neat to see him sort through and prioritize. Often you hear the question that what makes the founder a good founder? To me there are two things that I see. One is in terms of a good founder, or a talented CEO or a company that’s really going someplace. One is a sense of tempo. You get the sense of tempo. You meet them. You talk 4 days later, and shit had happened.
Augie Rakow:	Getting stuff done. I totally agree.
Scott Orn:	Getting stuff done. This feeling of momentum. You can’t put your finger on it. And I feel the speed that the client’s moving at when you first meet them even RACKOW OF ORRICK before you they become your client, at a party or whatever where you get a sense of that tempo. And 2 years later, it’s the same tempo.
Augie Rakow:	They can’t change. That’s the kind of person they are. Vanessa and I know joke that we know within one month of working with a client if they are going to be a successful company or not. Because that speed is the single greatest indication of success.
Scott Orn:	I think that’s true for us. I don’t think that’s true for VCs, and what I mean by that is that a good client for us is one that needs work, that likes to work with us, that pay their bills. They refer their friends maybe. Whether they are going to have a business and be able to raise money - you could possibly hit that baseline of having enough of a business that we would want to engage with them. You can tell that really quickly. I would not say that I was that Kruze was going to be - that’s a different level of judgment.
Augie Rakow:	It’s interesting, because I feel that I can tell, not always but you can see those guys making progress.
Scott Orn:	Yes, I knew they were a real business. They were going to raise money. I knew they would need advice on stuff, and be able to pay for it. I knew they would be at that level. But I wouldn’t say that I knew they were going to exit for a million dollars in 6 months. No way. It is definitely not that.
Augie Rakow:	So you can see the foundation getting built and the flip side of that is that people who are talking about the same thing two weeks later or a month later and haven’t actually done anything.
Scott Orn:	It’s going to continue the way it’s still going. Those are just fun clients that you work with too, for all the different reasons.
Augie Rakow:	As a VC those guys need action too, because as soon as they’ve put money in the company, the burn rate is - it’s like the clock effect. It’s ticking and it’s only 12 months or 16 months of runway after the investment company. So they need the same thing.
Scott Orn:	And the tempo is not how fast they talk.
Augie Rakow:	No. Often times the most thoughtful people - you’ll sometimes you’ll get on a call and they will be very deliberate and slow.
Scott Orn:	Very big steps. RACKOW OF ORRICK
Augie Rakow:	I learned early in my career not to misjudge people. I tend to talk fast, and I’m never the smartest person in the room so I know that there’s many thoughtful people out there.
Scott Orn:	Yeah, it feels the same way - so the tempo thing. And then also the other thing is and this I really learned working with definitely Kyle at Cruise, but it crystallized before that. Parker Conrad who was personally one of my favorite clients ever. I really like him. I like working with him. He was wonderful. Challenging.
Augie Rakow:	By the way, we’re huge Zenefits fans. We’re a top 5 channel partner. We probably have a hundred fans on Zenefits, so we’re a big supporter of the company.
Scott Orn:	What I really saw in him was a quality that you might call a judgment, but it was the ability to look at a bunch of data and inputs, and advice and messy situation that doesn’t have a clear answer, and the ability to make decisions about what you are going to care about; what are you going to focus on; what are you going to care about; how are you going to prioritize. It’s the balance. It’s not all good founders do this. It’s not that. Here are seven things competing for your attention, or seven factors that go into a decision, or seven different concerns that you’re balancing for. And you know how you are going to come up with a framework on how you’re going to organize and think about them and just make a decisions. So when we would talk to him about issues he would have a number of things that he cared about that he was managing with us, and he had those with marketing. He had those with finance. Each of those were - kicking things to monitor and balance and assigning weight to them. There was no right answer. That kind of judgment.
Augie Rakow:	That has specifically regulated components of it, but it’s also a software company and you’ve got startups of one of the early clients. I think that was one of the most moving fast, growing super quick. It created a service, that we’re still putting ton of our companies on Zenefits. It’s so valuable. But then also having this interface with the insurance care, that’s one of the slowest companies in the world, and the regulator. You really had this working out for you.
Scott Orn:	He was making the decisions that nobody had made before. So you see that when you see Founder and Friends thinking through the issue. It’s that quality of thought about what you’re balancing and why. How important it is RACKOW OF ORRICK to you and what it’s that important. And what would be different, how it’s importance would change if this or that were different. That kind of thinking.
Augie Rakow:	I also find the final step of that is communicating back to their team, and explaining why they made that decision, or why they are going in that direction. Because then they get the rest of the organizational line behind them. And I find the people who can do that they made that tough decision and they got the ship pointed in the right direction.
Scott Orn:	I didn’t first hand witness what they did internally, but yeah.
Augie Rakow:	Augie, can you tell everyone where they can find you?
Scott Orn:	Sure. If you Google ‘Augie Lawyer,’ it will come up. A-U-G-I-E like Augustine.
Augie Rakow:	Augie is a partner at Orrick. He’s amazing. We do tons of work with them. Tons of startups. He’s a great guy, and he’s also lots of fun hanging out with.
Scott Orn:	Thank you. Good to see you too.

Augie Rakow of Orrick - Legal Tips for Venture Backed Startups

Explore podcasts from these experts