We've got a few career changers amongst us here in the Wakefield bureau. Maybe that's why we like 'em. Here we feature three attorneys who turned in the legal spurs to build startups.
Josh Warrum, ADstruc drummer: Josh played gigs nearly every night in college at Kent State and toured for a year after graduation. He then headed for law school and worked in music and licensing law at Warner Brothers and the Beanstalk Group. Josh leveraged the hustle required to be a musician and the contract and negotiation chops he picked up in law to start ADstruc, the outdoor advertising platform. ADstruc was a TechStars '10 grad and is a growing team of nine in SoHo.
Michael Horn, Craft Coffee: "The company's new, but I've been working on the idea for ten years," Mike told us, referring to Craft Coffee, his subscription-based artisan coffee start-up. He realized he wanted to build things more than be a lawyer. So he left Cahill Gordon & Reindel and taught himself to code, learning Ruby on Rails in a six week self-imposed lock-up. Law taught him professionalism, he says: "You learn the discipline. You return every email, and check every document."
David Greenberg, UpdaterDavid, founded Updater after leaving Cravath, Swaine & Moore. As a lawyer, he worked on transactions that regularly made The Wall Street Journal. Working with companies at that level made him more comfortable building large partnerships with Updater, which is the largest change of address utility on the web and just took up new space in Flatiron. Got a start-up idea yourself? Start here for a weekend immersion or here if you dig the learn-to-code route.
Now go forth (and tell bad barrister jokes).