Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast
The Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast covers the startups that develop and sell legal tech products and services. Through interviews with legal tech startup founders, investors, customers and others with an interest in this startup sector, the podcast's host, Charlie Uniman, and his guests will discuss such topics as startup management and startup life, startup investing, marketing and sales, pricing and revenue models and the factors that affect how customers purchase legal tech. In short, the Legal Tech Startup Focus Podcast will focus on just what it takes for legal tech startups to succeed.
Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast
From Frustration to Innovation: Building a Modern CLM for the AI Era
Matt Lhoumeau never expected to build a contract lifecycle management platform. After being kicked out of his home at 17 when he came out, he built and sold a gaming website, worked for French President Nicolas Sarkozy, and found himself tasked with renegotiating 500 vendor contracts at a major telecom company. That frustrating experience—hunting for contracts in file cabinets, building unwieldy spreadsheets, and missing critical deadlines—sparked the idea for Concord, the CLM that Matt founded and now heads.
Ten years after founding Concord, Matt challenges conventional wisdom about contract management. "I don't believe contract management is legal tech anymore," he explains, noting that 70% of Concord's customers have no legal team at all. Operations and finance departments handle contracts using templates and outsourced counsel when needed. This shift represents a fundamental change in how businesses approach agreements.
Matt reveals that simplicity has been Concord's secret sauce from day one. While competitors built complex systems requiring months-long implementations, Concord focused on creating something that "just works." Now, with the platform rebuilt from scratch to be AI-first, implementation time will shrink from months to days or even hours. Matt also notes that the integration of Model Context Protocol (MCP) represents what Matt calls "one of the most important technological changes in the next 10 years"—allowing AI systems like ChatGPT to communicate directly with Concord and other business applications.
For fellow founders, Matt offers hard-earned wisdom: trust your gut. "When you build a company, you seek advice from a lot of people... and everyone has an opinion," he reflects. "I tried to please too many gods instead of doing what I thought was right for me." Finding confidence in your vision, even when surrounded by different perspectives, ultimately leads to better decisions and more fulfilling entrepreneurship.
Ready to simplify contract management for your organization? Visit https://www.concord.app to discover how their AI-powered platform can transform your approach to agreements.
Hello everyone. This is Charlie Uniman, once again your friendly podcast host at the Legal Tech Startup Focus podcast. I'm here and delighted to be here with Matt Lumo, who is CEO and a founder of a CLM. We're going to talk more about what it does, more than merely saying it's a CLM called Concord concordapp, so welcome, matt.
Speaker 2:Hi Charlie, Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you for being here. Pleasure, Tell me how did you get to founding or co-founding Concord and get into the legal tech space?
Speaker 2:What's your professional journey? Oh, it's a very complex journey that should have not taken me to a CLM. To be honest, my background is a bit all over the place. I am French, as people will guess with my accent very quickly, but I'm in the US right now. I technically was not supposed to do any form of studies. I actually dropped out of high school when I was 17 years old, but by choice, my parents kicked me out when I did my coming out. So I basically had to kind of figure out my life on my own and I built the first company at that time, actually when I was 17.
Speaker 2:This is like the late 90s. I was playing a lot of video games at that time the first, you know, online video games back in the late 90s and I built a website about video games and that website became very quickly one of the biggest websites in the community in Europe, and so I sold it after three years to Orange, the telecom group. So I kind of like started to, you know, be in the internet world at that point. And then, you know, after I sold the website, I was building a website during the day just to make a living and I was very bored at home, and so I decided to stop learning Japanese at the French university with night classes. France is great because the university is about $300 a year for the tuition, so I was able to do this and I liked it, and I ended up with a master's degree in Japanese and also one in international affairs. Then I got into Sciences Po and HEC, which is like the French equivalent of Harvard and Stanford Business School basically. So I ended up doing a lot of studies but, you know, just by luck, I guess and I always had to work at the same time to pay for all of this, and so I had actually the opportunity to work with some amazing people.
Speaker 2:I spent a year working for Nicolas Sarkozy, the former French president. I was reporting to the chief of staff during the campaign that got him elected in 2007. So that was a very interesting moment. I was 24 at the time learned a lot. I also learned that I don't want to work in politics, and so after this, I spent a year working for the founder and for the CEO of the second biggest telecom company in France called Iliad. Xavier Niel. The founder is often described as the French Jeff Bezos Amazing entrepreneur did a lot for the community of startups since then.
Speaker 2:And so what happened over there is I was reporting to the CEO and we just bought a competitor and that competitor was losing a lot of money. So the CEO asked me when I was in his office. I was like hey, matt, I want you to renegotiate 500 contracts we have, we founded vendors so we can save millions of dollars. Here you are, and so you know that was about 15 years ago, and so I was young and very, very naive at the time, and so I just thought that he gave me the best mission ever. There was a lot of money at stake. He trusted me with this, but after basically five minutes I realized that he actually gave me the worst job of my life. I spent six months doing this 15 years ago.
Speaker 2:I had to find all the contracts in file cabinets, the old school way. Obviously, we couldn't find all the contracts, so I had to sometimes contact some of our vendors to ask if they had a copy. It gets very awkward when they can't find the contract either. And then, once you have the contracts, you have to read them. You build an amazing Excel spreadsheet with 52 columns, 500 lines, just to get an overview of where you are. And then you realize that you already missed a lot of deadlines and you're not respecting some of the terms in there.
Speaker 2:And then you start the process of renegotiating. So you send hundreds of work documents back and forth to your lawyers and vendors, et cetera, lawyers and vendors, et cetera. And so at that time, you know, there was the 2010,. I was coming home every single night so depressed, asking myself what the hell? Why are we managing things manually in a $6 billion revenue company when we have software for literally everything else? So that's basically when I started to realize that maybe I could do something about it instead of just complain about it from my couch. So that's how we built Concord.
Speaker 1:Wonderful story, interesting indeed, and I guess our listeners will know this. But at the risk of stating the obvious, you scratched your own itch. Yes, you had a great deal of frustration and itchiness in dealing with these plethora of contracts, so many of them so complex. Excel spreadsheets don't do it, paper doesn't do it, software can do it, and now we're in the wonderful world of Gen AI that can deal with text as no technology heretofore could have done. So I get, it Makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 2:You know, I do believe that frustration is the best engine when it comes to building a company in particular. If you do not understand your customer's problem, you're not going to be able to solve them. So make sure you leave them entirely, and then you can do something about it.
Speaker 1:Well, when you sit down with people, when they ask you, is it founder product fit, you can say indeed, it is, because I wrestled and I fought with this product or the products of the product, and now I know what I need to build.
Speaker 2:Exactly.
Speaker 1:How long has Concord been in operation in the market?
Speaker 2:So 10 years. So we started in 2014 in the US when I moved to America. We actually had a company before Concord my co-founder and I. We were in France at the time, so right after I left that company, we built the first company, the first contract management platform, with my co-founder. It was called Contract Live. It was a bootstrap from a garage in the center of Paris a real startup. And we failed and we built a product. It was nice. It was, you know, like the first cloud-based repository for your signed contracts Think Dropbox for your signed agreement back in 2010 in France. So try to convince people to put a contract in the cloud over there at that time.
Speaker 2:It was complicated. And also what we started to understand is we would sign the customers, but after a year or two, they would turn and they would tell tell us, well, your product is great, but it's actually very cheap. You should probably increase your price fees. But the problem is you can have the best repository in the world If you don't have the ability to automate putting the documents in the repository. Well, you're not going to get them. And think about it this way right, it's already hard enough to make sure that salespeople are going to fill out Salesforce when it's their full-time job and their pay depends on it. You're not going to get anyone to upload a contract to a CLM repository. It's not going to do it.
Speaker 2:And we basically started to understand why contract management has been honestly a failure since its invention. There were contract management systems for honestly a failure since its invention. There were contract management systems for the past 30 years, but they've not been adopted, I think. Even today, I think, the adoption of CLM is maybe 5% 6% in companies in America. So it's clearly not been working. Otherwise people would have adopted it. So we started to understand at that time that that was probably one of the reasons. And so, back in 2014, we decided to shut down entirely that first platform and to build Concord. And that's when I moved to San Francisco, at the time, in California. The reason I moved is because, you know, france is an amazing country for cheese and soccer and wine, but if you want to build a software company, it's better in the US. So that's why we moved here, and especially San Francisco area sure.
Speaker 2:Especially San Francisco, and so we were able to find amazing investors very quickly over there, and no one knew us. We had everything to prove and we were given the ability, and 10 years after, we're still here.
Speaker 1:Well, I can go down many paths with that. I practiced law for 40 years as our listeners have heard me say in New York at what they call big law law firms, and then tried my hand at a legal tech startup 10 years ago in fact. The problem we found was that it was all cloud-based. We didn't want to go on-prem and talking to Big Law 10 years ago about putting documents in the cloud. It was a deal, a transaction management platform, the cloud. It was one thing that everybody seemed to have been hostile towards. Have you found and does Concord? Is it on-prem or is it only in the cloud? And have you found cloud reception finally being? Thank the Lord, it is not on-prem or is it only in the cloud? And have you found cloud reception finally being?
Speaker 2:Thank the Lord it is not on-prem. We try to do on-prem with the previous company. It is a nightmare having to deal with people. It's horrible. Thank God it's not like this anymore. We are entirely in the cloud. Ten years ago it was a topic. It is not anymore. I'm not even sure if people still know what on-prem means. Sure sure.
Speaker 2:So it's been very, very different, but it's interesting because of your background in Bigelow, right?
Speaker 2:What's fascinating to me when it comes to technology is indeed, 10 years ago, when it comes to contracts, convincing people to put them in the cloud was complicated.
Speaker 2:But what has been very interesting for me to see over the last year in particular, that I do believe that Bigelow is actually one of the fastest and most serious adopters of AI, and so I think the question is not quite often you know even me, I think I used to think that, well, legal people, legal profession, they're just not really tech forward, right, they are more classic, et cetera. But I don't think that's true. I think I understand now that the technology at the time was just not good enough. It didn't bring enough value, and I think what we see right now with the speed of adoption of AI is because they bring actual, real value, and so everyone in the legal world will adopt it very quickly, and so it's interesting. Right, it changes a little bit the perception that even I had for a long time about legal professions. It wasn't them the problem, it was us. It was the technology Not good enough, value was not clear enough, and now that's changing not good enough, value nervous, not clear enough and others changing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I have to say that there is a cultural divide between the way most businesses operate in law firms. Not only cultural business model has a lot to do with it, but I do agree with you. I think that if you make a compelling enough proposition today, adoption may not automatically follow. There's other work to be done customer success and onboarding and the like. But it's true I have tired my listeners by saying for me, someone who even 35 years ago, who was interested in tech as a hobby, started looking at legal tech and tried to persuade my partners to adopt it, being reminded we build by the hour and we shouldn't be too efficient. And they would wink when they said too efficient. But you know, it's now a 35-year overnight success. And yeah, big law has surprised me and I quite agree. I think that some of the fastest adopters now assuming the product works and gives value, and value over replacement is easy, but real value, because the replacement is just a horrible drudgery then I think you're going to get there.
Speaker 1:But I have to say, having been surveying the legal tech vertical for some time, there are a lot of CLMs out there. Your right adoption is not as great as it should be, but I don't think it's a function only of how good the CLM is. I think it's a matter of marketing and a matter of persuading the lawyer, getting the point across that you add value. What is it about Concord? And I've looked at your website. I'd like your tagline don't manage the CLM, you know, don't manage the contract legal manager. Absolutely right, but what's the secret sauce? What do you find it is? And you don't? I don't expect you to divulge any proprietary information, but just for public consumption. What is it that you think drives adoption? And not only adoption, but taking it off the shelf and actually using it, not letting it become stale shelfware?
Speaker 2:Simplicity, Simplicity yes, I think the secret sauce is just simplicity. I think, at the end of the day, you know, when you look at the history of contract management systems, I think you're right. I think it's not just about how good the software is, but it's also how easy it is to implement it. Yes, it's a customer success, right? And the number of times we have customers coming to Concurapp and telling us like, well, we've been working with that system, that system, and we've been in implementation for the last 18 months and it's still not live, and they're usually very complex systems that are therefore very expensive yeah, we've heard this story over and over and over again. It's actually, and it's funny we well, I don't know if it's funny, but we had a significant customer recently, a big enterprise company. I don't know if it's funny, but we had a significant customer recently, a big enterprise company, who basically told us that they were actually thinking of leaving Concord and decided a process to do so. So when we asked them why, they were like well, you guys, you look more like, you know, adapted more to like small, medium business. And it's true, most of our customers are typically companies below 1,000 employees. They're bigger than that and so they were like're like, well, we just don't think that we can scale with you. We got very big and we need to be able to scale, so we're going to go from one to the classic system out there. It's interesting because they launched the full process in the rsv didn't really tell us until uh, three months before the renewal they basically told us well, actually we were looking to change. We started implementing another system. After spending three months fighting to implement two templates, we realized that actually you guys are the best we can scale with you because we can make it work right away. But you guys at Concord have a serious problem because we feel like we have to go to another system to scale system to scale. So you guys need to change your marketing.
Speaker 2:So it was very interesting to me to hear this, and I think it was fascinating to hear a big company starting to realize that speed to value really matters, that going through a very long implementation at the speed of business today is actually what will probably make your ability to do anything. And so what's pretty exciting is we always targeted more the SMB part of the world because we always wanted to have something that just works. I'm 42 years old, I grew up. I'm old enough to have known the old school system the Oracle of the world, and had to deal with it, and I'm also young enough to have started using systems like Slack or Notion and they just work, and CLM should be doing the same thing. It is not okay to spend six months or nine months in the implementation.
Speaker 2:To answer your question, concordapp is that we wanted to just make it super simple, and I think we're not in the market for that simplicity. But what I'm excited about and we're about to release in October, a full new, entire rebuilt version of Concord we basically, over the last two years, just killed everything we had. I mean, we're still here. We decided to rebuild everything from scratch, to be AI first.
Speaker 2:I don't believe that you should build AI as a layer on top of an old school system. You should just rebuild everything for us. That's what we did, and so what's exciting for us is that you know, I always wanted to be able to promise to customers that we can get them up and running entirely in a matter of days or hours, and we are going to be able to do this now because AI is here to assist people in their implementation, to automatically tag all their contracts, build their folder structure, et cetera. So I think now we are finally going to be able to deliver on the promise we always wanted to be able to keep, and that's thanks to AI today.
Speaker 1:Yes, and, of course, when you talk about simplicity, it's very important. Lawyers very good at focusing, applying concentration to their substantive work, but they don't want to be bothered beyond clicking a button or perhaps a few.
Speaker 2:Who does yeah, Do you want to be bothered?
Speaker 1:Well, you know the only people that do are nerds like me who like to play around with computers. But not every lawyer is like that, of course. And yet, and of course, apple's iPhone it's one of its big selling features. It was and is. It just works. But there's the trade-off that Apple has made compared to the Android system, where you can do a lot more, you can play around with a lot more things, you can persuade yourself that it's more feature-rich. So there's a bit of a trade-off. But I think that what I gather from you is you want to preserve that all-important, simple, easy-to-onboard, low-slope learning curve UI UX, without sacrificing functionality, I think well, I think you're right.
Speaker 2:I think there's only the trade-off. I think, however, you're right about this. If you want the simplicity that just works, it's Apple. If you want something that can, you can really configure, it's going to be more Android. But you know, I think it's a question of choice. We made the choice to be able to focus on simplicity, and so Concord is really a system that works for any team.
Speaker 2:When you think about it, there are a lot of people working on contracts every day in a company. It's not just a legal team, of course. It's actually, if anything, it's the legal team. That is the least amount of people working on contracts. When you sign a customer contract or a sales agreement, it's the sales team working on it, and then the CS team and then the financing itself Legal, quite legal quite often and review it because it's a template.
Speaker 2:So we built a system that we worked for 80% of the use cases, not so that that's 20%, and that's my choice. If you know, if you are like a legal team working on very complex contracts that can go into litigation, etc. We are not the right system for you. There are better systems that are going to be more vertical and focused on what you need. But if you're more of an agile company about 100 people and you just want to get things done very quickly, if a lot of your contracts are templatized and what really matters is not the legality inside the contract but just getting them through a process, then in that case we're probably the right person for you.
Speaker 1:Yeah and I think a lot of legal tech founders who are lawyers former lawyers just can't get their heads around the fact that first there's an 80-20 rule that you can apply. Of course, when you're a lawyer, it's 100-0. Everything has to be perfect. Everything has to be researched to the nth degree. It's what I call the Russian army theory of lawyering.
Speaker 1:You throw bodies at it and keep chewing up ground. But there's a whole world out there of practical-minded business people who have to deal with contracts and want the 80% nailed and will call in their counsel for the other 20% in their counsel for the other 20%, but still want to pay for a system that will work with the 80%, avoid the necessity of calling in counsel and just get the job done because it works.
Speaker 2:And let me tell you the thing is, you're right about one thing. First of all, I am not a lawyer.
Speaker 1:Yes, that's right.
Speaker 2:I mean I studied public law in.
Speaker 1:France. Good for you, by the way.
Speaker 2:Good for you. Yeah, I'm not a lawyer, and so, first of all, that's why I also do not necessarily just think only about the legal aspect of a contract. It's obviously important, but I think contracts are first of all a business process. Yes, Whether you hire someone, you sell something, you buy something, there is a contract in the middle, and so what's fascinating to me is companies spend literally billions of dollars every year in software to automate everything but the contract piece, when it's in the center of all their processes. That's what we're trying to do, right, but now I want to tell you something that I know is a bit controversial, but I actually believe that what we do is not legal tech.
Speaker 1:No, I get it.
Speaker 2:I get it. Yeah, I don't think contract management is legal tech. I think it used to be, but I think it's just in people's mind oh, contracts, they call a lawyer. But I don't think that's true anymore and I believe that actually more and more, contract management is not whatsoever a legal matter. We work with a lot of SMEs About 70% of our customers now 70% have no legal team Zero. They have outsourced everything and contract management is entirely managed by operation and finance. It doesn't mean their contracts are not properly vetted, it's just automated. They have templates and they have outsourced console when they need it. And so I believe that contract management is no legal tech anymore.
Speaker 2:And I believe that the role of the legal ops you know we've seen a massive rise of the legal ops role over the last 10 years I think it's going to disappear and I was just recently presenting a webinar for CLOC, the organization around legal ops, a very famous organization in the US, and I said that that I think LegalOps is going to disappear.
Speaker 2:That was not very well received and I understand. But the reality is look at this, you know it's interesting because I think LegalOps was a necessary evil. You had to have someone in LegalOps because the systems were not very efficient, because you had to plug 12 different systems that would not communicate with them and you had to do all that work. But at the same time, at Concord, I remember when, seven years ago, I needed to have a Salesforce operation manager, a market operation manager, someone to manage our billing system, and we had basically five, six different people per system. We don't have any of this today. The system works better together. We regroup things and so I think legal ops, if the platforms start to be better, especially with what's happening today with AI and with technology around MCG I don't know how much you're familiar with this I think legal ops you're not going to need it anymore, not right now, but I'm talking, you know, three, five years from now.
Speaker 1:So people can still have a job, I get it. And when, in my email correspondence with Matt, I asked for him to state a contrarian view I don't know if the one you just espoused was that view about legal ops, but it is contrarian, it is controversial, but I think you're right. Right, and I'll even take it further and say that with the advent of these AI-driven systems dealing with language natural language as well and sometimes badly as they do, but it's getting better Today is the worst we'll ever see. It'll always be improving. There are controversies about how and in what direction that improvement will go. I think that, much to the chagrin of many practicing lawyers, there's going to be a lot of shrinkage in what lawyers do, not just legal ops dealing with operations, but with lawyers, both on the retail side, the consumer side and even, I dare say, on the business side.
Speaker 1:There's this core, this irreducible nut, this diamond of human judgment, nuance, experience, reputation, relationship that humans can bring and that, or at least the next I don't know how many years maybe I should say months will not be going away sphere, and to the great benefit of the people who have to pay too much for legal services, that's going to shrink. That automatable area will grow and the amount of work that has to be done by highly paid professionals will shrink. And thank you for describing Concord as well as you have. I get it and I appreciate it, and I think it's a great thing that you're able to bring that service to large-scale enterprises, but also SMBs and SMEs. What are you on your hobby horse for? If we haven't covered it already, what do you feel most strongly about in the field of what you're doing? Call it legal tech, call it operations, call it contract management. What do you wake up feeling enthused about promoting in our vertical? Mcp, MCP, okay, MCP, MCP.
Speaker 2:MCP.
Speaker 1:So that's the model context protocol, that's the ability of these large language models to API, in effect, into other applications. It's the USB protocol for it.
Speaker 2:That's right. You plug it in and it works.
Speaker 1:Right, and where do you see that having such an impact? Or is it a silly question, because it's going to have an impact in just about everything?
Speaker 2:I believe it is one of the most important technological changes I'm going to experience, probably in the next 10 years.
Speaker 2:I think it's more important than AI itself, because it basically allows AI to actually do what it can really do. Ai to actually do what it can really do. The problem today is we all have used AI. You have to have GPT, you have AI in Concord, you have AI in different system, but they don't communicate to one another. So you are actually limited in what you can do. Mcp is that USB key that you can just plug.
Speaker 2:We're about to release, in October, our MCP server. We're one of the first CLM. I don't know anyone else that has done it so far. So you know when it's going to release. I think it will be one of the first, for sure. And what does it allow? It's basically going to let you from ChatGPT to plug to Concord and ask ChatGPT about your documents in Concord and do actions on your document from ChatGPT in Concord.
Speaker 2:So why is this important? Well, yeah, first of all, it's nice you don't have to open Concord if you just have a question about a contract. That's cool, right, that's nice. But that's not just this. Obviously, because other systems are also building MCPs. There are already MCP connectors on ChatGPT for Hotspot, for Notion, for Gmail, from your calendar, so you can plug all of your different tools into Agipiti.
Speaker 2:And then what can you do? Well, in October, if you're a Concord customer, you'll be able to tell Agipiti hey, I just received a new contract from that sales, from that sales business, in my email. Can you please put that contract in Concord, send it to the right person, set up a meeting with Patrick so we can review it and update the opportunity, etc. Cetera. So this is the kind of thing you're going to be able to do thanks to that technology. It's fascinating and it's also such a change of how you interact with software. I'm really really much of a product guy. I design myself till today. Sometimes, the software is something important to me and this simplifies everything. No more complex UI, no need to build a report manually. You just ask the AI and you can pull data from HubSpot and merge it with contract management information from Concord and you have the report. It's life-changing, it's super exciting.
Speaker 1:And then to go on with your example, you can then ask ChatGP to put a meeting on Joe's calendar or Patrick's calendar and make sure my notion is updated to reflect that meeting on my calendar and put that task, that I want to speak, that I want to research some of this ahead of time before I meet with Patrick at the meeting. That's on my notion calendar.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the way I would describe it in different ways. Like you know, it's like AI is equivalent of like when we invented cars. Cars are great, right, but if you don't have roads, you can't go anywhere, and so that's literally what's happening we're building the roads for AI to be able to connect really things between different points, and it's super fun to do. It's also one of the reasons we basically rebuilt entirely the platform. You know it's frustrating for us. You know we're at Concord because 10 years ago, we were famous on the market to be one of the most forward-thinking company at that time. 10 years ago, we were the first company to put an online editor in Google Docs in a contract management system. So you don't companies to do this, and now everyone does this. It's a very classic feature.
Speaker 2:But the last two or three years, we were perceived kind of late on the AI game. We didn't put a lot of the bells and whistles that you can find right now. But it's not because we missed the train. It's because we actually made the choice to rebuild everything from scratch, to be AI first, instead of being just as a layer on top of the older system, and so the reason I'm so excited is because we are about to release this, in just a couple of weeks. It's a lot of work to get there, and the MCP has been the center of all of this, and so, yeah, I think we are about to really experience a massive change of productivity and, yeah, I'm excited.
Speaker 1:You should be. I think that's wonderful and I think you're right. If you waited a bit to be able to now deeply go into the roots of the system and rebuild it from the bottom up in order to take advantage of what's been happening, especially now, mcp, that was the right call. There's still a lot of room to make your mark and I think by waiting, you made the right call, one of the things I like to do on the podcast and as I indicated in some of the email correspondence. You've been at this for quite a while. You've been on the road all the way before AI and Gen AI in particular. What sort of advice would you like to give your fellow startup leaders who are working in this vertical selling to enterprises, marketing their tech? What do you think is something you'd like to leave with them from a business advice standpoint? Words of wisdom.
Speaker 2:I think my advice would not necessarily just be limited to people in legal tech. I think more in general for anyone building a company. I would tell them to trust their gut a little bit. I think it's very important to do this because I think one of the biggest mistakes that I've made over the last 15 years is I sometimes don't trust myself enough.
Speaker 2:When you build a company, you seek advice from a lot of people. You talk to your customers, you talk to investors, advisors, you have your VPs, etc. And everyone has an opinion Everyone and so I think one of the biggest mistakes that I made in the past in particular is I try to please too many gods in particular is I try to please too many gods. I had, you know, a board with different personalities, different vision of how the company could be, and none of them were right or wrong. There are different ways to do things, but I try to kind of do all the ways to please them instead of doing the way that I think was right for me, and you know I've been struggling with this quite a lot.
Speaker 2:I think you know when I pretend I have the personality to put myself a lot into question when there is a problem and answering what did I do wrong? What can I do better? And I think, quite often I think the answer was like well, nothing right or wrong, it's just. This is the way I want to do it, and there are other ways, but here it's still my company, so I should do it this way. And so trust your gut a little bit more. If you're building a company and you're still around after a few years, it's because you probably have something in your hands and you don't have to put anything into question because someone that you may admire tells you to do differently, and so that's. You know, I'm 42 years old. I'm still learning a lot about this, about myself, even recently and when you start trusting yourself, first of all, you have a bit more fun because you're doing the things that you believe in, and quite often it works.
Speaker 1:Yes, that's a good piece of advice, one I don't think we've heard yet, one I know we haven't heard yet on the podcast. And you know, I think too that, especially for lawyer founders bringing it back to legal tech per se, you know they are often insecure overachievers in school, always looking to get the highest grade, always looking to get the partnership brass ring. And lawyers are paid to second guess themselves, the situation, the circumstances, their clients. But when you are running a business, while second guessing has a role to play, you really do have to have some gut instinct that you can trust and learn to respect and not worry about pleasing. Everybody says. I who grew up a people pleaser. Well, I can't thank you enough, Matt, for joining me. I really, really enjoyed this. You're the first to talk about MCPs on the podcast, even during this era of Gen AI. It's a wonderful technology. Thank God, we settled on a standard as easily as we did with MCP, thanks to the anthropic folks.
Speaker 1:If people want to get in touch with you and I'm going to spell your last name it's L-H-O-U-M-E-A-U. Is that correct?
Speaker 2:Absolutely.
Speaker 1:I got that right, matt Lumo. And if people want to reach out to you or if they want to learn more about Concord, what do?
Speaker 2:they do. They go on concordapp, c-o-n-c-o-r-dapp, a-p-p. Or they can just email me directly at matt M-A-T-T at concordapp, concordapp.
Speaker 1:Wonderful, wonderful. Well, and where are you calling in from? Are you on the West Coast or now? We are in Austin Texas. Are you calling in from? Are you on the West Coast or now in? We are in Austin Texas. Oh, that's right. Yes, I remember learning From.
Speaker 2:Texas Company today.
Speaker 1:Yes, okay, great spot for technology. I agree, yeah, and I like the town very much. Well, thank you again. I am sure that we will, as I've often said and always said to my guests, run into one another face-to-face, needless to say, since and always said to my guests, run into one another face-to-face, needless to say, since, I'm a half hour outside New York City and we have a few good restaurants here. When you're in town, send me an email and let's be sure to get together. I will Thank you, charlie. Thank you, thank you for listening to the LegalTech Startup Focus podcast. If you're interested in LegalTech startups and enjoyed this podcast, please consider joining the free Legal Tech Startup Focus community by going to wwwlegaltechstartupfocuscom and signing up. Again, thanks, thank you.