From EdTech to LegalTech: Ed Kendall's AI-Driven Journey

So hi Ed, good afternoon, how are you doing today? Very well thanks Ren, it's a very sunny day, crisp, September day, so all good. Yeah, and really nice to connect with you again and thank you for taking time to have a chat with me and for all of the listeners of this podcast. So I'll quickly introduce you. So Ed is the current head of sales of Genie AI, AI is taking over the world. He was the full ahead of sales at boat clips. And so with that in mind, I just want to start by asking you, why don't you share your story with us and let's start with the origin of boat trips. What was that about? Yeah, absolutely, no problem. So I joined boat clips out of university back in 2015 when the business was very small. Through four people in a little glass box in more gate in North London. And boat clips is an tech business. And what it does is essentially compile the world's best and brightest kind of video content education into one library and platform that integrates with other tech products in e publishing networks in virtual school networks run by ministries and matches to the curriculum. And so I designed to enrich learning for all students around the world when they're learning online. And we work with some of the biggest video brands, Ted talks and Bloomberg and Guardian and some very big customers as well from Pearson to ministries and the union Singapore. So that's what we developed. I supported and helped grow that business for nine years. In many of sales capacity. We grew the business from zero revenues when I joined up to 10 million dollars of ARR in 2022 and we position the company to sell it to private equity, which we did in 22 as well. And so that was my story with both lips. I really enjoyed that journey from north to 10 million. I really enjoyed kind of building the sales function for the company building up that sales team. And so my next venture, my next sort of. So my next thing is to switch industries look at a different space, but rewind the clock in terms of the stage of business and to look at again that sort of pre revenue stage and growing from north to 10 building out of team. And the whole sales process that entails. So I have as of this summer, June is new head of sales. So I think that's what I'm going to do is to go to the organization. I will. What an amazing story at a night, all my respect to individuals that like to jump in the water again and start all over from scratch, especially after hitting as you were saying that 10 million tap. So I'm dealing with kids to dealing with lawyers, if I may put it that way. Interesting. I wouldn't say dealing with kids exactly because both lips is a B to B business. So you weren't selling to business customers with business motivations rather than directly to students or to schools or to teachers. I don't think that the golf was that big in terms of how we sell and genie is also a need to be company selling to businesses with business motivations. But obviously the function of the products is quite different. The motivation for buying the products is quite different and the industries and the industry to domain knowledge is quite different. I guess what attracted me to another B to B business was the opportunity to learn about a new industry. The legal industry in this case, but also about AI obviously because AI is what we're at a constant frontier in terms of what AI can do and that I thought was very exciting. And as I was doing research and I might be completely wrong. So correct me if I am. Genie is like a massive legal library that you're building. Is that right? And if yes, how does that work? How do that support the businesses? Great question. And so these are vault over the years of its existence, the company responds to 2017. The initial starting point was to create a very large library or human generated legal templates, I should say, so generates it by lawyers from a kind of legal panel, which we still work with today. The company has evolved to add AI features and tools to that library that allow for lawyers to draft and review contracts with AI assistants. So really we're trying to support that contracting activity in particular of creating a new document from scratch and reviewing and negotiating existing documents. And so this is as a function, it's typically a pretty, the glorious task for in house legal teams. And for law firms. And we want to save those users time by using a platform so that they can apply their time to more kind of high value, tragic work that they were trained for ultimately. And so we want to do that, that legwork for them with our platform. Oh, wow, that's. I love that. I love the sounds of that. And would you be able to talk a little bit about the various AI models that Jean is using, for example, if it's GPT 4 or Claude 2. And that's a terrific question. This is this is stuff that I've dove into over the last few months, which I find fascinating. So the way that junior works and what makes it so smart is that we do partner with some of the best in class, large language models for us. That's GPT 4 and called 3. So whenever you get a request to junior on the platform, it is interfacing with those those elements where junior does its own magic. And where it gets much more sophisticated is in the algorithmic layer that we apply it on top of those elements. And in that layer, we have a couple of different processes that are taking place. One is legal context building. And this is where our model is trained against that big library of templates that I mentioned earlier. To understand kind of legal domain expertise. And a broad range of different jurisdictions as well in its response. So that's where it gets this kind of context. So we can this legal process refinement. So we use prompt engineering and technical clients to encourage junior to act and think that junior lawyer would in all of its tasks. So it goes through certain steps that the junior lawyer would take, using a response. It may be encouraged to look at previous scenarios and examples of the tasks done. So that again, it produces a very legally accurate reply. And then finally, all the functions of our AI are vetted and reviewed consistently by our legal panel as well. So we're always having human eyes set on our tasks and our AI model to make sure that it's producing accurate responses. Echoing what you're saying, how there's that whole joke of, oh no, with all of this a star AI stuff humans are going to be out of a job soon. But obviously in this case lawyers, I'm guessing are not going to be out of a job soon. What are your thoughts? Or lawyers or any industry for that matter. And then we have balance between AI assistance and human expertise. Where do we draw that line between, you know what, let's just depend on the AI to do this versus the. We still need to maintain that human expertise. Yeah, it's a fascinating question. It's obviously a lot bigger than just the legal text spaces net. And then we can impact the workforce and people's jobs. Obviously we talk to a lot of in house legal teams, which is our primary customer base. On a daily basis. And when we talk to them what we find is first and foremost, all of those in how the legal team just stretched in time that the amount of work they have versus the amount of time they have. And then when they look at the spread of work that they're doing, they normally reflect that a lot of work is going to be done. of the contracting work and this could be things as basic as formatting a documents like it could just be ABC formatting for example is essentially the grunt work that they feel probably overqualified to be needing to do in their daily routine and then much rather spend their time interfacing with other areas of the business or being on calls or responding to litigation and so that kind of contracting area is one that's really crying out for the assistance of something like AI and so we never view us as replacing lawyers rather equipping and normally we look at it and lawyers normally agree with this as well as genie is providing kind of 80% done on the contracting workflow in five minutes yeah that's 20% the really valuable stuff at the end is what the loyal will do in provide of course yeah and I like what you're saying and then if I was just move away from the lawyer side you're building a whole sales team in an area and an emotion and traction for genie a i sales are you using AI in that sales process yes yeah we do use some AI for that sales process obviously there's automation in kind of all areas of business at the moment the sales process that we're following sorry Rani did you have another question I don't know good at all I'll hold back we'll jump back we'll do a quick edit the sales process that we're following at the moment is a product leg growth strategy with kind of sales assistance and so we have through organic growth nearly a hundred thousand users of our platform and a hundred thousand different companies using us and then ultimately I'll be having lots of sales conversations with the most high-value customers across that spread those that we believe are our kind of ICP and those will convert into some of our most loyal customers in the long term so that's the goal and within that sort of exchange from product led to the sales assistance there's a good amount of kind of automation of communications and automation of kind of processes within the platform as well when uses the trialing out genie for the first time yeah okay and the question I was going to ask is as you talk to other entrepreneurs startups people in sales roles what advice would you give people building sales teams what are the for example the top three things that you would consider critical to have a successful sales team or department or action generated out of sales I think that's a really good question if I were going to pick 3D and I'll caveat this by saying that I haven't started to build out the sales team at genie I'm building the processes first and establishing means sale which I think would be my first kind of top tip would be to establish that process first establish the first sales before bringing in more junior salespeople so they're not running around like headless chickens essentially yeah yeah and that I've seen work particularly well I've had experiences where we've hired too fast without this person in place and it can be quite difficult to retrofit and retrain to a particular playbook so that's my first kind of top tip the second would be ideally hiring from industry or hiring from the people that you're selling to we've had really good experiences at both clips of hiring people who actually were part of our customers so taking the businesses that we had sold to and then poaching or nice way moving across some of those people to join us because they had in-built empathy for the people that we were selling to which is always super super valuable and something that's very hard to teach is that empathy you know the ability to be on a call and so I actually recognise that problem because I was in your position I was in your shoes only a few months ago that's huge yeah so that would be my second top tip and then I think the third would be particularly with remote teams encouraging a culture of shadowing and people sitting on calls and collaborating on calls with customers to understand best practice across a team for selling and a sales approach I've always found that to overcome silos within a remote sales team that's the best method but simply one-on-one coaching is to actually encourage people to collaborate and be on the same customer call to see how other people do it that's a really great way of learning by seeing, by hearing, by doing as opposed to yeah being away on your own in a room those are really that's really solid advice thank you for that and then my last question and so you were in ed tech and then you transitioned into legal tech what's common between those is they're both tech but they're somehow very different fields what's been like the biggest brain bash or confusion or just reality check that you experienced as you made that transition if any no that there have been too many which is why I'm forcing to think rather than not enough I think but for me that there are lots of differences in the style of approach that's required for the legal sector as compared to education I think the sort of personas that I was talking to in the education field had a range of different motivations including kind of impact on students particular that look quite different in the aspect for lawyers lawyers as teams as in house teams typically find that they have a couple of competing priorities so obviously mitigating risk for the business alongside cost saving time saving and supporting kind of revenue generation for the company at large they struggle with kind of a perception in the business that they are a cost center where actually they can be in some ways a value generator for a company if they reduce that time to close and agree in new business so the motivations are very different and sometimes the personalities can be very different to what I'm used to in education where the motivations might lie both in the business objectives but also in the kind of impact for students and for teachers of the products that's being put out to market so that's probably been a big mindset shift for me alongside obviously learning a new industry in the language of that industry yeah and then if I was just to tie that okay one more question how would you tie that to purpose so having a purpose at work and in what you're doing because I one of the things we're trying to create with this podcast is it just have people think of purpose leadership or purpose work environments transitioning from education to legal from helping future generations to helping businesses how do you tie that to purpose I promise that will be the last question yeah it's a really it's a really good one like in terms of purpose I've always wanted to be part of high impact businesses that have a kind of social benefit as well and that's really loud and clear at a genie so the way in which I'd see a raffle you put say is that contracts is quite an ugly word we actually prefer the word agreements if we were going to be able to choose the department instead but what that means is what we're affecting at genie is the speed and strength with which a company can create relationships and with which those relationships conform internationally and that's an amazing thing not just for kind of business growth but also for connection on a human level as well as a corporate level so that I think is a really fascinating thing. And then second to that, I think the goal really is to make in-house lawyers lives a lot easier. And there's some really interesting studies about what lawyers would do if they actually had a more normal work life balance. It's some other careers. And there is a lot of the meaning of the fact that lawyers are so strict and they have to work over time and occasionally on weekends. And a lot of lawyers say that if they were to make improvements with AI as a big one, that they would spend more of that time for leisure, for family, for friends. And that I think is incredibly worthwhile. Huge. Yeah. That's enormous. And you always see in movies or TV series that the persona of the lawyer always behind this huge stack of paper reading through details. So yeah, that's beautiful. This has been a really enjoyable conversation, Ed. I've always enjoyed talking, working with you. I love what you're doing with Jeannie. I think Jeannie is going to do a lot, everything that you were saying. I also think one thing that I feel around Jeannie is, with lawyers usually comes this sort of-- Gary. Hello, it's a lawyer. But somehow there's this really nice human, gentle, purposeful side to Jeannie. Which is really beautiful. So thank you for making the world a better place with what you're doing. I hope the viewers listening to this episode also find this an interesting content. Once we release it, you'll be able to reach Ed through his LinkedIn through Jeannie if you ever want to continue the conversation about legal tech. Sorry, Ed, I don't want to speak with you on your behalf. That's you. That's OK. Right there. OK. Yeah, and so with that, thank you for taking the time to speak with me. I really appreciate this. And I will see you soon. Thanks right here.