How did your experience at MinterEllison - particularly your rotation through innovation - shape your approach to founding a start-up and developing an AI-powered tool?
My time at Minters was an invaluable foundation, setting me up to succeed in a high pressure environment, with both core analytical skills and soft skills like time management and working with senior stakeholders constantly being useful. The innovation rotation I did was pretty unique, and really helped shape my approach to founding Haast. My time there gave me the confidence to try and fail at new things, with the results of trials (whether successful or not) simply part of the learning process. It also helped me understand what large organisations wanted to see from a start-up before you could successfully trial with them - which provided a useful barometer of product readiness for us to begin approaching larger businesses.
What challenges did you face when transitioning from the legal world to start-up land, and how have you overcome them?
Moving from the legal world to a start-up had two key challenges for me. The first was significantly broadening what I was doing - as a start-up founder you (and your other founders) are responsible for doing nearly everything. That meant picking up functions across the board from marketing to product development to finance. For me, this was a really exciting challenge, which involved a lot of late nights getting up to speed with new skills, along with a willingness to just try things, and learn from mistakes (of which we made plenty). The second was a mindset shift from advisor to owner, where the ultimate responsibility for every decision rests with you and your risk tolerance. Making this shift has required a consistent effort to evaluate whether outcomes are acceptable from a business lens, even if they are less than ideal. This mindset shift has flowed through everywhere, with even a conscious effort made in the way I write and phrase emails!
Can you share some insights into the development process of your AI-powered tool, and how it helps organisations mitigate the risk of breaching obligations, such as consumer law?
Developing an AI powered tool has been an enormous effort - often in surprising areas. For example, we’ve spent a whole lot of time getting the user experience right and iterating that with customers to enable them to actually access the AI in an integrated and seamless manner. Similarly, a lot of development effort has gone into building a custom validation engine to ensure that the responses we get back from our LLM are valid - as it is awful for users to get back results that aren’t usable (and AI is far from perfect)!
Haast is an AI-powered reg-tech start-up focused on helping organisations proactively manage, monitor and reduce compliance and regulatory risk across their online presence. Simply put, we leverage AI to review all draft assets for compliance issues and then track and continuously monitor all digital channels (web, affiliates, socials) after the assets go-live to build an end-to-end “compliance firewall” that reduces risk, improves productivity and frees up valuable resources. We currently work with financial institutions (e.g., superfunds and trustees), Telcos and Higher Education to ensure brand and regulatory compliance across high risk areas.
As an entrepreneur, what advice would you give to anyone considering venturing into the start-up ecosystem?
Anyone considering founding a start-up needs to make sure that the problem they are solving is something they are passionate about, to the point they can obsess day and night - as it is enormously challenging (but rewarding!) work. It’s also a risky proposition, so particularly as a founder, you need to make sure that you are willing to fail fast (before you invest too much) and generally be comfortable with getting things wrong and a lot more risk than lawyers generally are. However, if you get it right, with a great founding team, it is great fun, an amazing learning experience and genuinely really challenging work!
Looking back at your journey so far, what are the key lessons you've learned that you'd like to share?
From my experience so far, there’s a few key lessons I’d highlight. Firstly, once you’ve built conviction, go full time on your start-up as soon as possible. Balancing a day job against your start-up is both a recipe for burnout and also for being unable to give it your best shot. The amount of progress we made after going full time was orders of magnitude more than the extra hours we were able to put in. Secondly, everything has to come back to the customer pain point you are solving. You have to be obsessed with your customer, and how you are solving their genuine problems (that they are willing to pay for!). Thirdly, you need a good founding team which goes much beyond just the skillsets you all bring - you need to get along, and be able to have difficult conversations with each other; you will be spending a hell of a lot of time together - so make sure you know them well. Finally, you will make mistakes - and a lot of them. You need to be able to turn these into learning opportunities!
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