Loving Work Again after the Pandemic

February 2021: the worst seemed to be behind us. Vaccinations were ramping up and the economic recovery was under way. Things were returning to normal, but I questioned whether we should return to how things were Pre-Pandemic. Experiencing 2020 was like living through the movie Groundhog Day, with each day blending into the next. As we emerged out of the Pandemic, however, time felt more finite and scarce. The traditional definition of work seemed a little out of touch with reality. Where you worked and when you worked were drastically less important than the technology that powered what you did and how fast you could do it.

These ideas swirled in my head as I reconnected with a former colleague, Tony Thai, a venture finance and private equity M&A attorney that I’d met working at the Yellow Pages. Our offices shared the same wall and we would often be the only two in the office working late into the night. Since we were both so busy, I didn’t get to know him right away. On one occasion I was convinced he hadn’t eaten for a few days and must have been starving (it was that or his complexion defaulted to sickly). On a whim I just left him a banana. We bonded over that initial interaction and discovered our love for technology and how it was going to change how we worked. We would geek out about the engineering/design and the business impact that certain tech solutions could deliver. More importantly, we shared the desire to attain efficiency in order to spend more time with our loved ones.

Fast forward to early 2020, Tony had quit his job at one of the largest international law firms and took his team, including his co-founder Jace Lynch, to pursue a startup called HyperDraft. HyperDraft’s mission is to empower attorneys with software to tackle the mundane and tedious parts of the job quicker and better so they have more time to focus on what matters in their practice and their lives. This vision resonated with me and reminded me of the conversations Tony and I would have back at YP. I was impressed by the product design and understood the market opportunity because of my own experiences interfacing with the legal teams.

Since I’m the “finance guy” let me briefly touch upon the market analysis and problem that HyperDraft is solving.

• No viable end-to-end solution exists for lawyers to create their deliverables. There’s a fragmented ecosystem of point solutions or all or nothing solutions, but nothing in between.
• Record M&A and Venture deals worth $10 trillion in domestic transactions since 2013 and a shortage of attorneys in the last year to do the work have created a business need for technology that can manage deal quality and throughput.
• The Pandemic has accelerated the adoption of digital solutions by an average of 7 years and the one leading category is the use of advanced technologies in operations which we aim to be a leader in.
• The demand for deal acceleration and the need for technology solutions paves a huge runway in front of us.

All these market conditions come together to create a huge opportunity, which, in addition to the fantastic team and product that had already been assembled, is why I joined HyperDraft. Having seen so many small, midsized, and large enterprises from the inside, I strongly believe that HyperDraft is uniquely poised to capitalize upon the market opportunities. I am very grateful for everything that has brought me to this point and unbelievably excited about what is ahead.

Tony and Jace also each wrote about their personal journeys and what they want to achieve which you can read here and here.