 Alright, hello everyone. Thank you so much for coming out to this Law Hour slash Jane Polishlin expert residence lecture. Our guest of honor is Mandy Woodlands. She is a DAL alumni, graduated in 2006. She is a reformed corporate lawyer and molecular violation who is now the CEO and founder of Jellyfish. Yes, okay, excellent. So I'm going to let Mandy take it from here and explain kind of what she does and what her for every day looks like. Awesome, thank you. Thanks for coming. So I want to talk a bit about career paths opportunities and entrepreneurship but mostly about why lawyer should or shouldn't be entrepreneurs. So why me? I obviously come from DALA. I'm currently the entrepreneur in residence at an organization called Bounce Health Innovation and our goal is to increase the number of MedTech startup companies in Newfoundland and Labrador. I have a Masters of Technology Entrepreneurship and Innovation which was post law school and as you mentioned in my bio, I was a molecular biologist and a lawyer and I'm also a business coach. And so I come to that from an interesting path. So how many people here came to law school from a business degree? Everyone who didn't come from business, what did you study before you did law? Just shout it out. Sci? Sci, science, engineering. We do like humanities. Public relations, awesome. English lit, there you go. So when we talk about paths, pre-law school is the same as post law school in terms of the number of paths available to you. Every single piece of your background and who you are will lead to where you're going. And of course sometimes you can better solve the problems you want to solve as an entrepreneur than you can as a lawyer. So what do we think about when we think about lawyers? The stereotype is obviously very buttoned down typically very driven by precedents, not very comfortable with risk, very reactive, not very innovative. Lawyers are in the 90th percentile for skepticism, not particularly surprising. And also research has shown that lawyers have the lowest resilience or the least amount of ability to bounce back or deal with a setback of any profession. Which is kind of surprising because to go through a lot to kind of get to law school, to get through law school and apparently we're not very good at bouncing back. When we think of entrepreneurs we think of this different environment, right? Working from a coffee shop, kind of remote working in some cases. We think of people who are visionaries, who are good at execution and collaboration, and who are passionate about what they do and always like a little bit of madness. So I always say like this is my favorite like workshop of me because as an entrepreneur you have to be a little bit crazy. So a lot of grades in history were very financially stable, secure, socially acceptable path to a very respectable career. And you have this clear path. So when I graduated, which seems like yesterday but was 12 years ago and I didn't come to law school until I was older, this was a this was a path and this is what success looked like. I went to law school, I wrote an article, wrote to my exam. You became an associate in a firm. You paid your dues and then when I started it was you worked for six years as an associate and then you became a partner. That was it. If you were halfway as decent, that's what that looked like. You had a partnership at a big firm or a small firm or you became an in-house counsel. And that path was very specific. Lawyers traditionally controlled all facets of their market and we still do to some extent. So education, licensing, practice standards, ethics, delivery, insurance regulations, so a bit unique in terms of the professions in that kind of start to finish control and regulation of what we do. And what we sold and sell is illegal expertise. So by design, law has been exclusionary. And I'm sure you've all, whether it came from before law school or since you've been here, heard over and over about issues with access to justice, issues with diversity and tolerance of the profession, we have made it seem historically that only a very few are qualified to solve these challenges. As lawyers, we often solve business challenges that we classify as legal to keep things within that realm of our control. Lawyers crafted language, procedures, a very insular homogenous culture to differentiate ourselves from the rest of society. And this delivery of legal services was very contained. So it was really important that nobody else could practice anything called legal services. The language was very important. As you know, everything you read is a whole different language than what the rest of the world uses. Not in most cases because it needs to be, but because we've created this situation. Historically, it's been very labor intensive. We perform the work with no necessary regard to client objectives or the value provided, but with digging into every single possible solution and answer and challenge. There was no such thing as budgets or price predictability, knowledge management. Those things weren't in a law firm's MO. And there was very little competition. So historically, very frowned upon to poach clients from other law firms. And a lot of lawyers believe their credentials and intelligence entailed them to success. Where's an entrepreneurship? We know business is about something completely different. And it's a little bit more determined on your merits. I love this photo of a lawyer. It's probably about 70 years old. And it comes from this hard work that you did to get here. And believing that having a law degree and having done well academically, and having worked with a prestigious firm or in a prestigious place, gives you the credentials to be successful in anything that you choose to do. And honestly, every single one of you are able to be successful on whatever you choose to do. The entrepreneur is definitely a very different animal. So when we think entrepreneurship, we think of this picture, oftentimes of a startup or a place where we have these big quotes on the wall that says teamwork makes the dream work or things like that very different than a very old fashion office with a lot of books and certifications. A lot of times entrepreneurs don't pay themselves because they need to pay their employees first. They may need to lay off employees when their business slows only to rapidly scale up again. When they get busy, you often spend extra years living frugally to get a business off the ground. And when it does start, it may be extra motivated to succeed because we've experienced failure in the past and want to prevent it from happening again, which is a little bit different as well because I'm in a law school, the vast majority of us build up a significant amount of student debt or spend a lot of money and time not working and earning other income. And so lawyers traditionally are known as lacking the hunger that entrepreneurs and business people have because they haven't failed as much. So when they get in the ring in business against other entrepreneurs, it sometimes can lead lawyers to be less effective than their counterparts because they're not as hungry. They don't put as much thought into things like how hard they need to work, how they'll manage things, how they keep costs down, how to be aggressive at marketing, how to continuously improve and innovate. And instead of looking backwards, be very much looking forward. Well, it's not true across the board lawyers are notoriously poor marketers. How many people have seen a really bad ad for a law firm? Everybody, right? Many of the largest law firms view marketing as undignified, right? We don't need to solar services. It's beneath us. The message is the reputation quality of the work should be all the marketing you need. But that's not true in 2018. Most attorneys are often not the best managers. So for those of you who didn't go to business school, how many of you have taken courses on how to manage people? Very few, right? It's not something we learn in law school. It's not something we're trained in outside of that. And often as soon as you leave law school and start practicing law, you're managing someone. As a consequence, most law firms are led by lawyers who have no training of business or management. The way you're taught to think and see the world operates as a lawyer shuts down nearly every entrepreneurial instinct. Our job and what we're taught is to forecast every conceivable thing that can go wrong for your client, and then protect them against it. To remove ambiguity and uncertainty. With whatever time you've got left, you focus on the legal structure in place to maximize the upside. But that's nearly always secondary to protecting against the downside. In part, because it's more easily quantified, as because what clients hire you to do, and if you miss a risk and things go south, you're going to share the blame or take all the blame for the hit. So this kind of failure mindset is key to a job as a lawyer, but a total disaster to the role of an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs need to understand risk. They need to understand the need desire possibility. They also need to be pathologically optimistic. That's not something that's trained into you as a lawyer. You need to believe the impossible can be done on almost an irrational level. Don't get in the water with sharks, but at the same time, you need to think if I did, I'm going to survive. Uncomfortable. Uncertainty, ambiguity, the unknown is just day to day in entrepreneurship. And so it was really interesting when we saw, I say when we saw I'm old, but I'm not that old, the first wave of legal innovation in kind of the 1970s. And Mark Cohen wrote a great article in Forbes sometime in the past year or two. And he had this quote I love, which is this way of thinking as lawyers persisted into the 70s when law like basketball entered the free agency era. And so we started seeing more recently all kinds of other legal solutions. I could have put hundreds on the slide. These are just I know the girls from prior legal and record lawyer and legal zoomer, one of the ones that are most well known. If you talk to any of these people, a lot of them will say they think like an entrepreneur, not like a lawyer. Entrepreneurs have to take risks that would make a lot of lawyers uncomfortable. Lawyers are tied to rules and deadlines. But as an entrepreneur, you don't know what your day will look like. The guy who founded Rocket Lawyer, Charlie Morris says, you know, you have a lot of similar skills in both fields, including tenaciousness and resourcefulness. Telling clients you can't do that is probably the easiest advice to give us a lawyer. And certainly there are many times when I had a client call and say, hypothetically, if I wanted to do this, in the easiest sense, was just don't do that. If the lawyers are those who figure out the best lawyers are those who figure out how their clients can achieve their business goal. We're talking about business lawyers in that case, and achieve their objectives within the law. Basha Frost Rubin, who's one of the founders of prior legal. For her, she said, lawyers have trouble sometimes seeing that perfect is the enemy of good. So many of us can be crazy perfectionists. And we need to fight the impulse to go through like 10 rounds of edits that have diminishing returns, we're going to move quickly and be okay with done, but not perfect. There's a lot of interesting research on leaving the law. So we know that a lot of people who graduate law school don't practice. Of those who do practice, a lot of them leave within the first five years. And then there's a certain percentage of a group that stay in law for their entire career. That has decreased over the years. So obviously, people change careers more often now than they did at any other time in history. And there's a guy named Harrison Barnes that's written a lot about leaving law. And he says, which in some cases is true. Once you leave law to start a business, you've pretty much kissed goodbye your career working law. I don't 100% believe that to be true. I know many lawyers who have left practice and gone back to it. But if you do something that doesn't involve practicing law, the legal world is not often super welcoming in terms of welcoming you back. It's like a guild is what he uses as an analogy, and guild punish people for leaving them. So if you leave a guild, you better be certain you're doing the right thing. And so he takes a very strict negative approach to this concept. For me, I think about it a little bit differently. So 75% of lawyers who practice law are in private practice. Of those 69% of them are in small practices, so 10 lawyers or less. If you're going to be in practice and affirm that size, you are essentially an entrepreneur in a lot of ways. You have to have some entrepreneurial spirit and skills, you'll be expected to learn through trial by fire, you'll need to help in business development, promotion the firm, understand the firm's finances. And there's so many other types of legal practice right now that there's a really good translation between those. The internet obviously is leveled the playing field significantly. There's a lot more news and coverage and openness about the legal industry. So people are more aware of trends. Legal technology companies have opened up a lot of access. But to look at it from purely the entrepreneur's side, Scott Walker is one of my favorite writers on that topic. And he says the number one reason entrepreneurs hate lawyers is because lawyers are deal killers. Because it's easier to say you can't do that than to figure out a way to do that. So his top 10 which I like are lack of from 10 backwards lack of clear and concise communication. I like to talk as lawyers generally, we're trying to have a full and well researched opinion, lack of communication, keeping clients in the dark, that goes back to what I talked to you about like exclusionary language, and keeping law in a place that's inaccessible by outsiders. Over-lawing. So again, going through more stuff than is absolutely necessary. Poor listening skills. Listening skills are important as a lawyer, but sometimes we don't take a lot of time to develop them. In larger firms, often the most inexperienced person is doing most of the work. Failing to prioritize issues. Going through the motions or don't genuinely care. Legal fees, of course, are often quite high. Lawyers can be very unresponsive because they're busy. And of course, deal killing. So good lawyers are able to identify significant potential legal problems. Great lawyers provide solutions to them. And so thinking about that communication issue and how that goes. The guy who invented BitTorrent tweeted in 2010, this is a long time ago, lawyers are like phone companies, their bread and butter is to trick you into racking up minutes. And so when you go into the world knowing that this is often the perception, I want to kind of switch the thinking a little bit. So I'm going to quote Elle Woods from Legally Blonde, because, you know, it's a great old movie. So she says in her like two line valedictorian speech, our very first day in Harvard, a very wise professor quoted Aristotle, and this is the Aristotle quote. And she says, well, no offense to Aristotle, but in her three years at Harvard, she came to find that passion is a key ingredient to the study of practice of law and life. And so I want to talk about why lawyers should be entrepreneurs. Lawyers are able to avoid many of the legal mistakes entrepreneurs make. So as a lawyer, you're probably not going to go into a business partnership without having a written contract or some agreement in writing. You're probably not going to give a presentation without knowing you have the rights to use all the images in your slide deck. For example, you're really good at risk mitigation, which is a really important skill as an entrepreneur. Attention to detail is something that as entrepreneurs, we often gloss over because we want to be fast moving and innovative, but attention to detail is good. Managing customer expectations is another skill that goes both ways and careful communication. So all the reasons I just listed why lawyers shouldn't be entrepreneurs are also reasons why lawyers should be entrepreneurs. Analytical and sequential thinking. So when I came from science, I came from a molecular biology background. I worked in a cancer research lab before I came to law school and thinking about scientific method, it applies both to law school and to entrepreneurship. And it's something that I thought was a disadvantage when I came to Dallas and was surrounded by people who had studied business and political science and understood how the law worked and I had no clue. But this concept of whatever your background using your analytical and sequential thinking serves you really well in any facet. Negotiation is a huge one. I have a client working on a deal with a venture capital right now, a business client and their engineers. And so, you know, we usually kind of check in every day, but they will without some hand holding give away the firm because they have no background or experience in negotiation, which is something most lawyers are quite good at. Communicating effectively or articulating a laying out an argument with simplicity and accuracy is something that's trained into you in law school. Making a really persuasive written proposal to get your foot in the door somewhere is something that really comes from a lot of your law training. Confidence without arrogance is another really key skill. So hopefully you're developing that while you're here. Teamwork and leadership are both really important. And the ability to research was something I saw this morning in Professor Anderson's course. Four students gave presentations. They were fabulous and inspiring. And it really strongly reminded me because I work with a lot of non lawyer students. The advantage to law school training and presenting a really well researched topic. You have all learned time management and analytical skills. Those are critically important in being an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurship, if you have tunnel vision, you'll fail. Same as in law. You have to look at your competitors. You have to know those who have different but complimentary goods and services. You have to forge partnerships. Successful entrepreneurs read a lot and read widely outside their fields. And this is a critical skill as an attorney as well. Firms run by CEOs with a legal background or actually associated with a lot less corporate litigation. Compared with the average company, lawyer run firms experience anywhere from 16 to 74% less litigation, depending on the type. So what drives that need to fix problems and remove inefficiencies. And it's fascinating because people assume lawyers want to litigate. But in reality that's I mean court is a lot of fun. But you know as an outcome for your client it's not the best outcome based on the time and the cost and the pain and fullness of going to trial. Both entrepreneurship and law are hard. The guys who founded PayPal, the woman who was the inspiration for Wonder Woman, Elizabeth Marston, she was involved in developing systolic blood pressure testing which led to the first polygraph. These are all people with law backgrounds that founded amazing entrepreneurial endeavors. So if you want to be an entrepreneur you have to really examine your tolerance for risk and ambiguity. You have to switch from that perfection to done, not perfect. Well a really small amount of entrepreneurs are natural born entrepreneurs, most are not. Most entrepreneurs have some level of natural born drive for that but a lot are just trained into it. In the end this is what I've come to believe. The lawyers who make the leap and hit the ground running were somewhat entrepreneurs in lawyers clothing but it's as much or as little as you allow it to be. The other thing I always want to mention is that you can be a real entrepreneur without pursuing entrepreneurship full-time. Entrepreneurship can be a bit of an exclusionary club sometimes too and a bit clicky and a lot of entrepreneurs like to shame someone who has a side hustle or some sort of hobby business but you can be a true entrepreneur without pursuing entrepreneurship full-time. So this is like one of my all-time favorite quotes. As a lawyer you need to think like that too so that you're not necessarily just a lawyer, you're not necessarily just a business person. You have all these things around you whether you're practicing in private practice or you're working in a non-profit or you're doing policy work or you're pursuing entrepreneurship. You yourself are a business which is why I wanted to bring that up to talk about opportunities. Your opportunities are really endless. You can work as an entrepreneurial lawyer. So there's so many great new firms like Axiom and Elevate. Deloitte now has a legal department as just praise Boater House. You can be entrepreneurial and practice law full-time despite a lot of people who say otherwise. There's so many entrepreneurial legal enterprises. One of my friends just founded a company last year that's using blockchain to execute legal contracts. And so he's an engineer but needed to partner with a lawyer for the legal piece. Everything from like robot lawyer, Lisa, rocket lawyer like I talked about before, logics, doxley. All those are legal enterprises that are tech companies. You can start your own firm which makes you very much an entrepreneur. You can work as a lawyer inside a startup. Obviously legal consulting, bounding a startup, becoming a partner in another startup, buying a business yourself and you're becoming a Dell alumnus, an alumnus of the Schulich School of Law. That is a super powerful network. I noticed that the other listen experts two weeks ago mentioned the importance of that network. And it's really true. I wanted to kind of double down on that to use your network in whatever thing you pursue. You need to definitely keep your non-lawyer friends, particularly if you want to be an entrepreneur and meet new people and hang out with entrepreneurs. You need to read, read some more. You need to really cultivate your mentor relationships and don't discredit the amount that you've already learned and experienced because you at this point could already mentor others. You've come this far. You have a lot of skills and experience and knowledge to transfer and mentorship really works both ways. So that's really important. I love this David Lynch quote because it really pulls into both law and entrepreneurship and just life in general in terms of everything that was made by anyone started with an idea. So for you in determining a path, whether it's career path or an opportunity or a one-off thing that you want to do, if you can catch an idea that's powerful enough to fall in love with, it's one of the most beautiful experiences. And so it's one of the reasons I wanted to talk about like designing your purpose. And how many times have you heard like follow your dreams or pursue your passion or anything like that? Lots? Once? Nobody? Yeah. Lots of times. We hear that throughout our lives, right? And sometimes, lots of times, it's really hard to know what that means. I don't know, I don't know what I want to be when I grow up. I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up. And so one of the key things is figuring out what success means to you. So when I talked in the beginning about that traditional path, that was what success looked like because it was what we were told success looked like. If you didn't become a partner in a large law firm, then you weren't a success as a lawyer. And that was just how we as a group judged that term. For me, success means freedom. So that's my personal definition of success. If I'm successful, that means tomorrow I could hop in a plane and go somewhere. Or I can do what I'm going to do tonight, which is hang out with a bunch of tech entrepreneur friends while I'm in town. Does anyone have like a really great personal definition of success for themselves already? Yes? No? Curious. Something really good to think about. One of the companies that I follow the most is called IDEO. And IDEO is essentially a problem solving company. They're based in San Francisco. They've been around a long time. And they work in the field of design thinking, which is essentially solving a problem using ideation. And so they talk about as a kind of a side topic, designing your own purpose, which is one of the most complex and intangible challenge of any challenges you could ever have, because purpose isn't a singular thing. It's more of a mindset and it's a journey of experimentation and self discovery. So you need to really know yourselves that when you're faced with a key decision, you know who you are making it easier to decide where to go. So I actually work with business owners and individuals to map out kind of what their purpose is. Is it look at all the skills you have? What activities you spend your time on? What topics you care about? What you're curious to explore? And then figure out what can't you live without? Anyone tell me one thing they can't live without? Already? You're all good with anything? Terrible answer, but peanut butter. Peanut butter. That's a perfect answer. Food in general. Food in general. Yeah, but there's always like something that's higher priority. Anybody else? No. Your phone. Wi-Fi. A friend, a pet. Nobody cares about anything. Law school has changed you. Knowing you sleep would be more sleep would be good. But it's something we don't ask ourselves on a daily basis, right? What can't you live without? Where do you feel like you have the most impact? When do you feel most in flow? Particularly while we're in school, we are singularly focused for the most part, right? You get to the next thing. You have milestones and objectives and deadlines. So taking some time to think about that. Spending some time on an idealist, which is somewhere between a to-do list and a bucket list. So not either. It's aspirational, but it's also kind of near term intangible. It's really helpful too. So you can write down the things you want to accomplish and then just pick one and make a plan to get it done. Sharing what you want to do is also really helpful. So there's a law student at another law school that's a friend of mine from entrepreneurship. She decided to go back to school. And we talk all the time about what she wants to do when she's finished because day to day, week to week, it's something different. So she messaged me two nights ago and said, I think I want to do an LLF. Like you're in your first term. But it's because she spends a lot of time thinking about this, like where do I want to go at this and what inspires me and what am I passionate about? So we talked about what she's going to do is actually reach out to some people who practice in that area. And within a day she heard back from someone that said, yeah, just come hang out with us, like learn a bit about this topic. So she can see what it is. Feel it get a feel for whether it's a good fit or not and have some ideas. But without sharing that, it would she would have kept it internal and it's really good to share. And you need to really balance action and reflection. And those those things are really important, whether it's in law or entrepreneurship. The other thing is talking about our difficult stories, whether you're a lawyer or an entrepreneur. Bernie Brown is an amazing woman who writes a lot about failure and success and personal challenges. Often, particularly as entrepreneurs, we're a bit better at this than as lawyers. We attempt to disown our difficult stories to appear more acceptable or more whole. Certainly as a lawyer, I wouldn't broadcast the fact that I have lots of tattoos and I don't wear nice shoes most of the time. And those are very minor things compared to when we talk about mental illness or other particular life challenges. But our wholeness depends on the integration of all of our experiences, including the falls. It's so important. Difficult roads lead to beautifully beautiful destinations. And so as lawyers, we need to talk more about mental health. We need to talk more about addiction. We need to talk more about inclusion. And this is such a good time with entrepreneurship that both fields struggle with this. Both fields lead to significant challenges of mental health. And both fields are well known for having high numbers of people with mental illness, depression, anxiety. And so I think it's a way that as a lawyer or an entrepreneur, you can really think about what you want your life to look at without trying to disown your negative experiences. One of the best things about entrepreneurship is that failure is celebrated. We have a thing with our students at Memorial that's called a failtail cup. And you actually win money for being the biggest failure that term because you try. And you got a good story about trying and failing. We need to do a little bit more than law, not obviously to a client's detriment, but in terms of learning and trying things and experimenting. I want to leave a lot of time for questions. But, you know, in wrapping up, I think about figuring out your mission and doing our mission at Jellyfish is to do good work with good people for good people. So our work is good. We want to work with good people. And we only want to work for good people. One of the joys of being your own boss is you can choose who you work with and who you don't work with, which is great. And we have our list of priorities in the wall at the office, which is everyone's pets, internal employees, and then clients. Because if you don't look after what's most important, you can't be successful on the outside. And my favorite, favorite mantra personally. And I give talks on this all the time is called Woobar. So it's wake up, be awesome and repeat. So you've got multiple ways to reach me. I want to leave tons of times for quite time for questions and discussion about entrepreneurship, career opportunities, alternate paths, and happy to chat with anyone anytime here offline wherever. Thank you. Questions? Sure. You love this organization. I like people you see so kind of law school and have this idea about leadership and really like doing folks straight into something like that. Or start with a more traditional group and realize that and then jump into something I don't think there's more defined one or the other. It really depends on how much you know what you want to do, or how much you know you don't like something or know what you don't want to do. So for me, I practiced law for 10 years. I was really unexpected because I actually didn't intend to do that time flies. And I wouldn't change that for the world is excellent experience. I worked with amazing people and got so much training, not just in law, but in life and entrepreneurship. But I have lots of friends who never practiced who just use their law degree as a stepping stone for other things. And that's, I think the beauty of a law degree is the doors that it opens. Yeah. You talk about how what it is. I'm curious though when or how do you know when your skepticism actually is legit? How do you figure what that line is? I think you don't. I think that's why science is interested in studying those kinds of things. There's probably more in depth like neurological research that I'm not up on in that field. But I think to some extent it becomes obvious to you with time that skepticism is either justified or is just part of your nature. You know, everyone has that one friend is just like jaded about everything skeptical about everything that's just in their nature. Everyone also has that one friend that is ridiculously optimistic about everything. And all the rest of us are kind of somewhere in between. And I don't think there's a way to know and I think that's one of the great things about you know, entrepreneurship and using a startup model of lean startup where you just prototype test it, fail, move on prototype test, iterate, which I think you can do in any field of knowing what works. And so instead of deciding whether your skepticism is justified, it's testing it and seeing. It's just my thoughts on it. Questions. Yeah. You mentioned student debt earlier in your talk. I'm just wondering how you're just making that move from, you know, financial security and stable legal job into, you know, being off the government for the first few years. This is an excellent question in terms of student debt and leaving something financially secure. In my mind, nothing's actually really secure anymore. It used to be certainly so I graduated university my undergrad 20 years ago and started working for the Department of Fisheries and Oceans and this federal government job out of an undergrad biology degree was like the best thing ever. Very much unionized pay or finished work at 3.30 every day. This was some people's kind of holy grail. But those jobs went away. And so something that's secure is a bit of a fallacy. But for me, yeah, it was a big choice. It was a big choice to come to law school. I quit a job in research to go back to school and encourage that and then to leave law and go to entrepreneurship. I think it comes down to happiness and your definition of success because financially it is exceptionally painful. I talk to startup founders every day. I have it's this is probably the first year I've paid myself in at least three years. So you have to be comfortable with a lot of your peers thinking you're a bit crazy. I go to my lawyer's friends' houses and they have all kinds of nice things. I'm like, yeah, I'll get there eventually because I'm so happy doing what I'm doing. So you have to pay the bills and sometimes particularly as entrepreneurs, that means working while also working on your passion. So it's why I talk about like side hustles and other kinds of business of managing both while you get to a place where you're able to do that. But it's a real challenge and it comes with that comfort level with uncertainty and not being financially stable because you're so passionate about solving the problem that you're working on. There's no good answer because anything even that looks like an overnight success in entrepreneurship really took a long time. So it's the willingness to live very poorly to get to where you want to be. Yeah. I mean, everyone has an opinion on that. If you Google that, there's hundreds of articles saying leave at this point. Think about leaving at this other point. To me, it's just really personal. To me, there is no right answer. I know a lot of people who call themselves senior entrepreneurs who didn't start a business till after they retired from their lifelong career. I know a lot of people who call themselves senior entrepreneurs who didn't start a business till after they retired from their lifelong career. There's no right or wrong. It's really about what makes you happy. One of the best written articles I've seen talked a lot about how when they finally realized that they weren't passionate about solving their clients' problems and they were just going through the motion, that's what triggered them to leave because when you looked at that list of why entrepreneurs don't like lawyers and one of the biggest things was if they felt that they didn't care about their problem, they interviewed a number of lawyers who said, yeah, you know, I'm kind of stuck in this and I made this curve for myself. I'm not leaving but I don't care. It doesn't make me happy. I dread going to work. That's definitely an indicator that maybe you should do something else but it's whatever is right for you which again is not an answer but that's a lot of law, right? It's all gray. Yeah, it's definitely a lot slower for law to accept side hustles. It's funny because I did a talk on side hustles last year and didn't realize the controversy in that term created because there were a lot of craftspeople who found the term side hustle offensive because they felt like it didn't fit their side business. So whatever you want to call it, it's slower in law because certainly as an article student and as a lawyer depending on where you practice there are regulations around having another job or another business, right? So it's important to consider those. I think that's one of the reasons why it's been a lot slower to infiltrate than other professions. The other thing I think is that a lot of it is tied to this reputation piece of being a lawyer in that more traditional environment and how what you do outside of work affects the perception of your professionalism and your ability to be a lawyer. I mean, when I started the first time I went to court it was still required that if you wore brown shoes the judge wouldn't talk to you. So things have changed a lot but you can see where we're coming from is quite different than a lot of other professions. I have a colleague that graduated from here the same time as me and she runs a very successful food blog and we talk a bit about this concept of entrepreneurship and law and how it works for her in her side business but she works as an in-house counsel so it's a little bit different. So I think it's evolving like anything but law is definitely slower. We're an old, very traditional profession as a whole. We've evolved significantly but it's much slower and a lot of that has to do with regulation. Yep. Great presentation. I just wanted to ask coming from you talk about like going for a degree where you don't do anything really good but you have to drive and you want to know if you have great ideas or if you're coming from an American age etc. but you aren't really into the finance aspect. Do you think that as a citizen manager would you as an example talk a lot about like technical and what not to do not that person but you're very interested in doing something like that what kind of what does that person like that Yeah, that's a great question. So that's me essentially I think coming from any background you can be a great entrepreneur the key is to understand and accept that you don't know everything and that you need other people so when I have anyone call to get advice about starting a business I always talk about your A team you need an account, you need a lawyer you need an insurance person you need like a bookkeeper these are the people that need to do those things if one of those is your thing great you can cover that but otherwise whatever that laundry list of things you need to do to run a business you need to rely on others as an entrepreneur you need to learn a lot of that stuff yourself because you can't afford to hire for all of those positions you're not going to have a chief marketing officer day one unless you have a lot of cash in the bank that you want to burn for no reason you're going to need to understand especially when you're hiring people that you're able to understand what they're doing so I'm not a technical person but I know enough about the technology that I can have a conversation with technical people and those are all the things you pick up from the entrepreneur those cross skills for me I felt like I didn't have any experience in accounting marketing business at all I'd never taken even so much as one business course so I went back and did my masters in technology entrepreneurship and innovation and for me that was really helpful because I felt like I got that educational piece we learned start up metrics and start up finance but you can learn those quite easily we have evolved to a society where a lot of education is open and accessible online when you look at MOOCs and online courses there's so much you can learn and teach yourself through those things but to me it's all about using the people around you to talk to other people I think there's no barrier really to starting something that you want to start just because you don't have those pieces of expertise then you figure out the past that's best for you I have seven entrepreneurial work from students this term six of them are engineers and one is a business student and they all are required to do either a course in entrepreneurship to take a program at an incubator or to do a Udacity course online and all of those things it just depends on what works for them and how they learn and what they want to learn and who they want to learn from but they're all getting those skills from those different places no? no questions? sure I'd just like to thank you so much for coming to speak to us today it definitely gave me a lot of new career paths out of all degree that have taken me on thank you so much and thank you for coming out today thank you