CodeBase - Playbooks for Building Startups: Disruption Case Study - Danae Shell

Hi, I'm Denae. I am the co-founder and CEO of VALA. And VALA is a self-representation platform for consumers who can't afford to go to law firms. You can think of us as IKEA for law. If you can afford to have someone build a kitchen for you, you should pay them to do that. But if you're like the rest of us and you need to do it yourself, we give you all

the instructions, all the tools and materials that you need. And that's so important because people need access to justice. Just because the laws are there doesn't mean they can get used. And that's what we're here all about. So VALA started not

get used. And that's what we're here all about. So VALA started not because I'm a lawyer or my co-founder was a lawyer. We were both technologists. VALA

started because we were senior women in the tech industry who saw a lot of problems with discrimination, harassment, all kinds of issues ourselves and with other people coming to us looking for support and advice. And we kept seeing the same stories happening over and over. And the story always seemed to end with,

and then they just left. And that didn't really seem fair. And to be honest, we just got really mad about it. And so we started digging into the legal industry and trying to understand why is this happening and is there anything that we could do with our skills and technology to address this huge societal problem.

And what we came up with is this idea of, well, legal services are so expensive because lawyers have to charge by a hourly rate and it's a pretty inefficient system. What if we allow people to manage their own cases? So we started working

system. What if we allow people to manage their own cases? So we started working on that in 2019 and registered the business just after the lockdown in 2020 and have been working through all kinds of ideas and MVPs and iterations since then and launched our open beta in April of 2022 and are now

helping people win cases. We've had a few case wins already. We didn't know when we started VALA what the product was actually going to be. We just knew what the problem was, that millions of people didn't have access to justice and that there was no accountability when the law was broken. It turns out that in order to

actually solve that problem, we have to reinvent the legal services delivery model and we have to essentially disrupt the way that the law services model has worked up until now. That's been really fascinating to do. especially because

the legal services industry doesn't seem to be that upset about it. I think they know that they need to be disrupted. And the interesting thing about disruption in this particular industry is that because the people who can pay seem to be able to pay a lot, Legal services industries have been pretty happy with like the top 10% of the market and everybody else not getting access to anything.

So yes, we are disrupting this model and we're completely changing the way that legal work is going to work. But in a lot of ways, I think it's going to benefit the status quo as well as creating brand new jobs for a bunch of people who have a lot of expertise that people can use, but just don't

fit inside that traditional law firm kind of model. But it is changing very much the status quo. And I've learned a lot from the accounting industry about how you can do that in a way that doesn't upset the people who are already there and how you can help them understand that you're growing their market instead of eating their lunch. So the really fascinating thing about law tech is how do

you take something that's so human powered at the moment, even pen and paper powered at the moment and turn it into a scalable digital service. And I think it's a very hard problem because nobody's done it before, right? You know, we've seen fintech happen, we've seen all these other industries get digitized, but not yet law tech.

And it's very difficult because of the hourly billing model and the way that law firms are set up at the moment. They're really not incentivized to be efficient. And

so technology has really never had a foothold. Why would you save time when you could bill for that time? But the problem is that's alienated about 80% of the market of people who need legal services, which is where we got really interested in the possibility of scaling that with technology. And luckily, a lot of the people who work at Vala, including its two co-founders, came from the online accounting industry, which is

another, you know, pretty old fashioned kind of black box industry that has gone through digitization. So what we learned by working at FreeAgent was

digitization. So what we learned by working at FreeAgent was a lot of the work that a accountancy firm and a law firm does has nothing to do with accounting or the law. It's administration, it's chasing down requests for things, it's paperwork, and it's not fun for anyone to have to do. In the law firms, it's often paralegals who get asked to do this

to do. In the law firms, it's often paralegals who get asked to do this stuff. And then it's not even generally paralegals in the firms. It often gets like

stuff. And then it's not even generally paralegals in the firms. It often gets like formed out to these big paralegal chop shop kind of places. And that work not only can it be digitized more, but the client themselves can do it and are actually in a better place to do it as long as you make it super easy. So that's the real insight that we've brought from the accounting industry. Just like

easy. So that's the real insight that we've brought from the accounting industry. Just like

now, you know, taxi drivers and hairdressers, they have their own accountants because they can do their books on their phone. It's that easy with the assistance of technology. And

that's what we're doing. We're shifting the locus of control to the consumer. They own

their case, they manage their evidence, they generate their own documents, and then they share their case to the lawyer in order to get that support. And that's much cheaper and much more scalable. If I think about where I want Vala to be, say, in five years time, the impact that we'll have on the world. The first one I really want is I want to create, I call it like the age of

accountability. So when it comes to employment specifically, and when it comes to

accountability. So when it comes to employment specifically, and when it comes to people being mistreated at work, harassed or discriminated against at work, I want people to know that if they're going to do that, that the people that they're doing it to can actually fight back. that they can do something about it. And my goal

is to create this chilling effect, this accountability that doesn't exist now, that means that they'll have to think twice about it. And so maybe we can prevent this from actually happening, because they'll be like, well, you know, there is VALA, so they can actually do something about this. So we better double check with HR before we sack that person or whatever it is. So that I just That would just be so

amazing that we actually create a cultural change by creating accountability in that system. And then beyond employment, I want the same thing for tenancy. I want the

system. And then beyond employment, I want the same thing for tenancy. I want the same thing for the government and immigration. I want the same thing for abusive husbands.

Like there are so many different places where power... gets to do whatever they want because there's no accountability. So my vision for what VALA is really is about creating accountability in a lot of different places. I often get asked about prevention and whether or not we should be focusing on preventing problems rather than, you know, litigating them

or dealing with them with the sharp end. And I really think of, you know, other people can be the carrot, but VALA is the stick. How I think we're going to achieve this cultural impact is by essentially taking medium complexity legal issues in every common law

jurisdiction in the world and boiling them down to their atomic elements so that our software can work anywhere. And those atomic elements are all the same. Yes,

law is incredibly complex everywhere, but every common law system has a case with a judge, sometimes there's more than a judge, sometimes there's a jury. It always has evidence.

It always has a timeline of what happened and witness statements. And so we can build on those atomic units and then we can go everywhere and we can teach people how to use those atomic units everywhere. And it's just like, think of us as Xero for law, the online accounting software. So in the same way that everyone

across the world typically uses the same basic accounting system, double entry bookkeeping, we can take that same atomic element, you know, a person in India doing their accounts is doing the same basic work as someone out in California. that's what

we're going to do for the law. That's how we're going to scale it out.

And we'll do that with the DIY element of the platform. And then we'll find the people in each of those countries who support people in the legal system, not just the lawyers, but the people who work in the charities, the people who are working as paralegals. And those people will be able to help them check their documents,

prepare for court, and basically represent themselves better. So we'll create new labor markets in each of those areas as well and a new income stream for people who traditionally have had very inflexible kind of job options. For me, the most exciting thing about being a founder, there's probably two. One is to see

the impact that you dreamt up on a whiteboard actually happening in real life. And

I'll give you an example. If you think about the core hypothesis of what VALA is, it's this idea that we solve small problems at small amounts of money millions of times over instead of big problems for people with lots of money. So

we solved 2000 pound problems instead of 200,000 pound problems. And we had someone just last week who won his tribunal case and he was awarded 2,500 pounds.

Now that's not a lot of money in the grand scheme of things. And if

he had paid a lawyer to support him, they probably would have charged him that or maybe even more easily to secure that win. he only paid us 250 pounds for the support that he got from us so he was able to you know pay bills that money was very important to him and seeing that hypothesis of you know we can do this at scale for millions of consumers seeing that like

play out in real life that that's incredibly energizing the other thing that i find so energizing about being a founder is building a company and building an incredible team of people who are motivated by the same things that I am and who, you know, want to learn and grow and that I'm able to give them

this exciting kind of growth opportunity and help them shape their own careers. I think

that's one of the privileges of being a founder and one of the biggest responsibilities as well. And I enjoy that part of it just as much as I enjoy,

as well. And I enjoy that part of it just as much as I enjoy, you know, the impact on the consumers and on society as well. The most challenging part of being a founder for me, it has to be maintaining and keeping my energy sustainable. It's even more acute as a solo

founder. I think it's hard to anticipate when you start a business, what is going

founder. I think it's hard to anticipate when you start a business, what is going to take away your energy and what's going to give you energy. But the more self-aware that you can be about that going in, the more you can set up kind of support networks for yourself and avoid the things that are going to take away your energy, because especially at these early stages of a business, you are the

business. The business doesn't exist without you. And, you know, if you disappear for two

business. The business doesn't exist without you. And, you know, if you disappear for two weeks because you've burnt out, then nothing happens. And that is a big responsibility. And so I take that responsibility of maintaining my own energy really seriously. And

responsibility. And so I take that responsibility of maintaining my own energy really seriously. And

for example, when, um, When I realized I was going to be need to be a solo founder, I spent a month putting together more support for me talking to other people who had managed companies on their own, really brought in like a personal board, brought in more advisory setup, brought in coaching to make sure that I could still maintain my energy and Sometimes it's easy to forget when you're just

in the day to day and things are exciting and you're having fun, but the downsides will come as well. And being prepared for that and setting up your support network, I've found that so important to do because those downsides can be incredibly challenging and I can't, I can't stop.