Among the lessons Logikcull co-founder Andy Wilson has learned in his 16 years as CEO is, if you’re running a data processing business out of your apartment, you better keep the AC dialed in at 50 or the servers will overheat.
Wilson and his company have come a long way since those seat-of-your-pants early days, when Logik Systems emerged from the shreds of a printing business to become one of the fastest growing eDiscovery vendors in the U.S.
“I was like, wait, you’re printing out emails at 25 cents a page so they can be read by attorneys for $350 an hour?” he recently told LexLab director Drew Amerson, the host of LexLab’s “LexBlab” podcast.
“This used to be a terrible process,” Wilson says of eDiscovery. “Very expensive. Very slow. Shady pricing. We decided this thing needed to be turned upside down.”
And so, in the dead of the Great Recession with its largest customers peeling off left and right amid steeply declining litigation budgets, Wilson and Logikcull co-founder Sheng Yang decided to blow the whole business up and start over.
They knew there had to be a better way -- better than hacking at emails so they could be turned to paper and inhaled by an army of highly-paid contract attorneys.
What if discovery didn’t have to be expensive and risky and slow? What if they could take all their learnings -- all the positive ones -- and bake them into a product that just did all the grunt work for you? And what if that product lived in the cloud so it could be accessible to anyone, anywhere at any time?
From rocketing up the Inc. 500 to playing cards to keep the lights on, Wilson shares what it takes to build -- then rebuild -- a leading software company, and why Logikcull’s mission to democratize discovery keeps him going a decade and a half later.
“If we don’t, people won’t have access to justice,” he says. “Data is like a big new darkness. Logikcull puts a flashlight to it.”
The conversation, recorded in front of an audience at the UC Hasting School of Law’s LexLab incubator, is available below.
LexBlab: Episode 9 - How I Built This with Logikcull CEO, Andy Wilson
