Charlie Hernandez Transcript
Clint Betts
Welcome to the CEO.com show. My name is Clint Betts. Today I talked to Charlie Hernandez, who is a serial entrepreneur, currently working on My Pocket Lawyer. Check out mypocketlawyer.ai. His thoughts on AI, his thoughts on business, the mission of the company is fascinating. I really enjoyed this conversation. I hope you enjoy it as well. Charlie, thank you so much for coming on the show. I'm so excited to talk about My Pocket Lawyer, your experience, and all this stuff. But my first question is, where did you get those glasses? Those are incredible.
Charlie Hernandez
Yeah. Well, I wouldn't get very far without them, unfortunately. I have the prescription of a man twice my age, so I think it's the novels of innovation over at LensCrafters that have taken this from what should be about two inches thick to what you're seeing today.
Clint Betts
I have terrible eyes, too, obviously with my glasses. But man, I love them. I love the frames. They're cool.
Charlie Hernandez
I appreciate that.
Clint Betts
Well done. Hey, tell us about My Pocket Lawyer.
Charlie Hernandez
Yeah, well, I think we started by recognizing that there was a big problem in the U.S., which is people are not getting the legal help that they need. This is something that goes all up and down the socioeconomic spectrum. You can imagine startups like ours, freelancers, small businesses, and even big companies that can afford lawyers; nobody wants to be spending money in those categories. Those are big cost centers. You would much rather put that towards growth, marketing, and hiring new employees, yet people face legal issues all the time. That's the nature of the world that we live in. And so you have to face that reality, but it also goes far beyond small businesses and companies like that. In the lower portions of the socioeconomic spectrum of our country, people really face huge legal challenges by not being able to afford lawyers. In low-income communities, 92% of legal issues go completely unaddressed without the help of a lawyer. In certain categories of case law, that number goes even higher. For things like landlord-tenant, where people are getting evicted, and for things like family law, where people are losing custody of their children, nearly 100% of cases go without the help of professional legal counsel. So that's what we're trying to solve. We are trying to make legal services accessible to everybody in the country.
Clint Betts
So, holy crap. I had no idea; 92% of all cases... What did you say? You should repeat that because that's crazy.
Charlie Hernandez
92% of all civil legal issues in low-income communities go completely unaddressed without the help of a lawyer. Across the entire country, it's about 84%. So, really, I mean, I think that a lot of people don't realize that, and that's one of the challenges that we face. When you think about a legal issue, you think about a criminal legal issue. That's what gets covered in the news. And anybody who's watched Cops will remember the audio clip that says, "If you cannot afford a lawyer, one will be appointed for you." But that's only for criminal legal issues. Under the Sixth Amendment in the U.S., you have a guaranteed right to counsel for a criminal legal issue but not for a civil legal issue. So for things like landlord-tenant law, as I mentioned, maybe your employer stopped paying your salary, and all sorts of issues that we have to face on a daily basis, and as citizens of the country, you're not guaranteed a lawyer. And often, people end up going to court themselves and self-representing. And especially when the opposing counsel or the opposing party has counsel, you're not going to face a very good outcome.
Clint Betts
So, how does it work exactly? They sign up for My Pocket Lawyer, and then how does it work from there?
Charlie Hernandez
So what we've done is that I'm very lucky to have worked with a really talented team of AI and machine learning engineers. And we've built this software where if you have a legal question, you come to us, it's mypocketlawyer.ai, and you ask it. And this could be any legal question you can imagine. We had somebody come to us last week. She broke up with her boyfriend, and they had adopted a dog together, and they were arguing over who was going to get custody of the dog, right? Simple questions like that. But anything from that to trying to onboard a new vendor as a small business or evaluating a job offer or a contract, ask any question you want. We will use the variety of technologies that we've built, some of which we have built in-house, some that we are leveraging large language models for. And we will connect to state and federal legal databases, case law, statutes, academic authorities to give you an answer as a lawyer would. We are providing legal information so that you can advocate for yourself and you can understand your rights. And where we can't answer the question, we'll connect you to a lawyer. But when we do so, we're going to arm you with all the information you need and all the information they need so that it is more efficient for both of you, and you don't have to spend the first two hours of time that you are paying for just trying to get through the basics.
Clint Betts
How do you make it accessible for everybody in that low-income bracket? How do you make it accessible? I imagine you have to do different languages, for example, and that type of stuff.
Charlie Hernandez
Absolutely. So what's been really helpful here is that this actually isn't the first company that I founded. I founded a company called Crediverso about four years ago or so. And that's a financial technology platform built for recent immigrants to the U.S. We were trying to connect people who didn't have access to financial products and resources in the same way that other members of our community take for granted, to things like bank accounts, and loans, and credit scores, ways to send money internationally. And that's a really challenging set of issues to tackle. Because as you said, a lot of these people don't speak the language, they don't watch traditional news media. They're not as easily accessible as a typical consumer. And so we've taken all of the learnings that we generated from what we did with our work in the financial product space at Crediverso and translated that into what we're doing here. I would say it is a much broader market; this isn't just recent immigrants who are having challenges with legal issues, although that's absolutely one of the areas that really need our help. It's anybody up and down the socioeconomic spectrum. So, the platform is available in any language. You can ask a question in Spanish, get an answer in Spanish, upload a document in Korean, and get an answer in Korean, and we can help you navigate it that way. But it's also, I think, very much a factor in trying to make the legal language accessible for the layperson. So, one thing that lawyers love to do is overcomplicate things. As a lawyer and victim of doing that myself, my fiancee will tell you that I cannot give a simple answer, cannot give a one-sentence answer. And I'm probably doing that same thing right now in this answer. But what we try to do with My Pocket Lawyer is take really complicated terminology, legal language, and legalese and make it simple and accessible for the layperson so that they can understand what their rights truly are.
Clint Betts
As CEO, how do you decide where to spend your time each day as you're building out the product? I assume you're getting customer feedback, feedback from your engineers. Like a CEO, how do you decide what to prioritize particularly even in the product itself and the app?
Charlie Hernandez
That's a great question. It's one of the hardest parts of the job. There is seemingly a never-ending series of fires that need putting out, and it's somewhat a measure of triage. We're a very small team. It's me, a handful of engineers, and a couple of folks who help out with operations, business development, and marketing. But we are not a major corporation. We're not a major law firm. Yet somehow, in the past two months that we've been live with our beta, we've been able to help more people with their legal issues than any law firm in the country. So I'll pause there because that's, I think, a really important piece of how scalable this-
Clint Betts
My word that is incredible.
Charlie Hernandez
... Yeah. And so, to answer your question, it means there's something new to deal with every single day. It can range from dealing with marketing issues to building out different distribution channels to making sure that people are aware this even exists as an option. Because there's a big communication and education process to let people know that, "Hey if you have a legal issue, you no longer need to either just Google it or pay $500 an hour for a lawyer. There's something in the middle that can help you for all of those other challenges that you have." It's a measure of spending time around financing, making sure that we're doing fundraising appropriately, and working with the right investors. It's a measure of regulatory consideration. So we're dealing in the space of legal information and making sure that we are advocating for people the right way and communicating reliable and comprehensive and accurate information. So there are many things to take into consideration at any given point. And it has not been great for the number of gray hairs I have on my head, but I think we're doing a really important job to help a lot of people with something that's a big area of need.
Clint Betts
So what does a typical day look like for you? Because we talk a lot about self-leadership here at CEO.com, and what it means to lead. If you can't lead yourself, you can't lead others, that type of a concept. What does a typical day look like for you?
Charlie Hernandez
I keep a pretty regimented structure, maybe too regimented. Sometimes, I wake up pretty much at the same exact time every day, eat the same thing for breakfast, and do the same time workout. And what I've found is that everybody has a different model for their day that makes them successful. And for most people, that model is not 9-to-5. You put me in an office from 9-to-5, and I get a 45-minute lunch break. I'm going to be extremely unproductive. But you let me set my own hours, you let me work when I have the motivation to work and the energy to be creative, to problem-solve things that need creativity, and the willingness to chase down the things that just need attention, and I'll manage that in a way that fits my productivity maximization process. I suppose you could call it that. It's different for everybody. I know what it is for me. I know the hours of the day that I need to be working, the hours of the day that I need to be out, getting away from the things that are on my mind, and trying to give myself an opportunity to think more creatively about them. But it starts with keeping a very well-structured routine, getting lots of sleep, eating well, spend a lot of time with the people I care about. And that puts me in a good position to solve the problems that need solving.
Clint Betts
What do you read? What reading recommendations would you have for us?
Charlie Hernandez
Yeah, I read a lot of fiction. I read a lot of classic novels. I just finished reading Moby-Dick.
Clint Betts
Oh, great.
Charlie Hernandez
Let's see. A lot of these books it's funny. The first go around, I saw them in my life it was in middle school and high school when they were thrust at you by an English teacher. And like many students, I probably skimmed them and or didn't read them when I should have. And now I go back and realize there's a reason why these books have been around for so long and why they've been so enduring, and I have really been able to enjoy them and appreciate them now. And I wish I had the first go around when I had somebody who was actually trying to sit there and explain why they were so important to me. So that was a wonderful book. One of my favorite books is Heart of Darkness. And I actually just had the opportunity to meet somebody who worked on the film Apocalypse Now, so we were able to compare notes. Because Apocalypse Now is based on the Joseph Conrad book, Heart of Darkness. Incredible guy; this was the first movie he worked on in his entire career was Apocalypse Now, which is one of the most successful films, I think, both critically and from an audience perspective of all time. So hoping that we can replicate some of that success here with what we're doing at My Pocket Lawyer.
Clint Betts
Given how deep you've gone into AI, what are your thoughts on the future of AI, its implications on society, and how it's going to be used within companies like yours?
Charlie Hernandez
That is an extremely important question. My fiance was reading the story of the Tower of Babel this morning. Not a lot of people know this, but that's a story about how technology can be used either for good or for bad. And so, in the story, just to remind people who maybe haven't read it recently, the people who are building the Tower of Babel want to build a tower in the heavens so as to make themselves famous. As they begin building and they realize what the technology that they're capable of can do, they get to the point where they're no longer building for the right reasons. They're building for a harmful set of reasons. And so I look to what technology can do now, and we've created unbelievable technologies over the past 20 years, and absolutely over the past six months in one year with what we've seen with AI. These are technologies that have unbelievable implications for positive impacts on humanity, but they are also very dangerous. I mean, you just think about, take it back to the first technology, fire. Fire has given us everything that we've been able to accomplish as a species, but at the same time, it can be horribly destructive. So when I look at AI, I think there are considerations with regard to ethical development, responsible development, that especially when you're dealing in these categories that devolve high stakes such as financial advice, healthcare advice, legal information, you really have to develop them in a responsible way. And I think that's why it's so important that, especially when you look to the field of legal technology, the field that we're operating in, you have to have involvement from lawyers. I'm a lawyer. I went to law school and took the California Bar, and we started building this with a focus from day one on how to build it in a way that was respectful of the regulations that were created by lawyers who came before us. That were observant of the challenges that consumers and small businesses face as a result of those regulations, and trying to innovate ways that put the consumer first. So, as you look at what AI can do, what all these technologies can do, they have unbelievable implications for positive impacts on humanity. But they need to be built out in a very responsible way.
Clint Betts
As a lawyer in particular, but even as the CEO of an AI company, what do you think about when it comes to regulation? Are these big tech companies easily able to get regulatory capture? It's hard for smaller companies to compete because the regulations would favor them. Does that make sense? It's like this open-source versus closed-source problem.
Charlie Hernandez
We see it a lot in our space, in the space of the legal field. So interestingly enough, it is actually not the large technology companies that are the victims of regulatory capture. It's often the bar associations and the lawyers themselves. So, as you can imagine, lawyers like to be the only ones who get paid to give legal advice. When lawyers can look at technology and maybe incorrectly assume that it's one that might put them out of a job, they can feel very threatened by it and feel very challenged by it and try to implement regulations that resist the introduction of that technology. That's something that we're very aware of and considerate of, and we have tried to very thoughtfully and intentionally engage with all members of the legal profession to make sure that that doesn't happen. Because I think when we look at the way we've structured our business model, we don't succeed unless law firms succeed. And so we are not going to put lawyers out of a job. We are going to create much, much more work for lawyers. That is not the only thing I said at the beginning of this conversation? It's something like 84% of all legal issues go unaddressed. So, we want to help get those legal issues to law firms and lawyers so that they can address them. We want to create a more efficient, seamless way for them to be able to help those cases and help those people while it still makes financial sense for them to do so. But it's not just the people who are out there who currently aren't being helped to have legal issues; it's all the people who don't even know they have legal issues. So I like to give this example. I'm out here in LA, and if you've ever been in LA, you've probably driven on the 405. If you haven't, you're very lucky, and I hope you don't ever have to. It is one of the most traffic-freeways in the entire world. About ten years ago, they decided they were going to do something about it, and they added two new lanes on each side of the 405. So everybody, when they saw this, they thought, "This is amazing. There's going to be so much less traffic. Can't wait to drive on the 405 now." What's interesting is that the opposite thing happened. All these people who previously took the bus, who biked to work, they got back in their cars because they thought, "Oh, there are two new lanes on the freeway. It's going to be way less traffic." And all this latent demand emerged that hadn't existed before. That's what's going to happen when you create legal technology and introduce it into this field. All of the people who didn't realize that they had legal issues, who didn't think that going to a lawyer was an option, all that latent demand will come out of the woodwork and create a way bigger economic pie for lawyers to participate in. So, in this instance, technology is not shrinking the economic pie. It is, by far, expanding it for all of the participants. And the industry shouldn't be afraid of it. They should embrace it.
Clint Betts
How have you handled the work-from-home hybrid, everybody in the office, and that whole thing that every CEO is trying to navigate right now?
Charlie Hernandez
Well, what's funny is this is now the second company that we founded that is entirely remote. I think it involves a good measure of trust in the people you work with and individual responsibility. I was describing a moment ago how everybody has a different productivity method, and you have to trust that the people you are working with are going to get their work done, whether you see them doing it or not. And we have an unbelievable culture and trust in My Pocket Lawyer. I think last night, I had a deliverable come up at around 7:00. I'm a very early worker, not a late worker. So I worked until about 10:00 and handed it off to folks who were late workers on the team. They were working until 1:00 or 2:00. And then I woke up, picked it right back up until they woke up, and then handed it right back to them. And so it's a bit of a baton handoff that lets you leverage the different working styles of different people on the team. Whereas if we were all forced to be in the office together, you wouldn't be able to have that type of collaborative work. You get a different type of collaborative work, but you don't get to leverage the different working styles and different skill sets of employees who are honestly best left to work independently in many cases. So that's been a wonderful thing for us. And I think another wonderful thing is that if we were to have had a physical office this entire time, we would've only been able to leverage the talent pools of the Los Angeles area. And honestly, again, going back to the traffic, really only one portion of LA. Because you don't want to be working in West LA and living in East LA and driving back and forth, it really limits you in terms of who you're able to hire and who you're able to work with. Having a remote workforce, we have employees all over the U.S. We've worked with contractors in South America and Eastern Europe. I got off a phone today where we had, I think, four different time zones covered on the call. So it's, I think, a very productive thing for a small startup especially, and I'll just mention one last point on this. You look to the cost structure that a law firm has, for example, and how we're able to pass on so many of these cost savings to our consumers. I was talking to somebody last week who said there is a photographer who takes a lot of photos of lawyers and law firms, things like that. This lot are his clients. He went to take a photo of a client and met them in their office. They were the only person in the office. They had the top two floors of one of the biggest buildings in Century City. That's all part of a cost structure that gets passed on to consumers. We don't have that cost structure at all, and we can pass all those cost savings on to consumers.
Clint Betts
Yeah, that's a good point. The cost of an office is something that needs to be taken into consideration when you're thinking about the work-from-home hybrid stuff. I wonder, though, the people who are like, "Everybody, come back to the office." It's all about culture for them. And how do I develop a strong culture within my company? How do I develop values for my company? How do we come up with those if we're all remote? So how would you answer those?
Charlie Hernandez
Well, I was talking to another friend who's a founder recently, and they just raised their Series B. For those who aren't in the venture community, basically the stage and maturity, the size of a company can often be tracked by using the stage of fundraising that they've gotten to as a proxy. And so you start with a pre-seed, then you raise a C, then a Series A, Series B, C, D, and so forth. And usually, around Series D or E, companies will either exit via an acquisition or an IPO. And so this friend of mine, he just raised a Series B from a fantastic group of investors, and one of the challenges he was facing had to do with scaling. So when you raise that amount of money, you need to put it to work quickly and productively to grow the company and to offer those investors a return on their investment. For him, that meant doubling or tripling the size of his sales force. When you have to go through that fast of a hiring process, that fast of a training process, and you're growing the company that quickly, and by the way, if you're growing in that area, you're growing in many other areas to your previous question around how to triage your time, I'm sure he was being pulled in a million different directions every day. So, it is very challenging as you start to scale and have an entirely remote workforce. Because you don't get the opportunity to have as many touchpoints with your team members as you do when you're a small team, you may not be able to develop the relationship and trust in those team members to know that, "Hey, maybe their best working hours are from 10:00 PM to 6:00 AM. That's just how they work. But I trust them to do it even if I don't see them doing it." So, I can see that challenge as you grow a company size. We haven't scaled that size yet, so we've been able to work very productively from a remote environment. Our culture is fantastic. I love the people I work with. We share a deep passion for the mission that we have as a company to democratize access to legal services. But as we scale, that's certainly something that will be at the top of our minds.
Clint Betts
Yeah, yeah, that's super interesting. Who's a leader or an example of a leader that you admire?
Charlie Hernandez
Oh, that's a very good question. I try to look to people who are both within and outside of my industry to gain learning and to give me a model to strive for. And one of the challenges in answering this question, I think, I often find, is that as you're working with people who are trying to be helpful in any way they can to your business, they'll often say, "Let me introduce you to so-and-so. They're going to be a perfect person for you to talk to." And maybe this is somebody who, they're multimillionaire, they've built and exited multiple companies, and they're in their retirement age. And that's fantastic; I love talking to those people. They can share amazing stories and incredible insights. But honestly, it's not the most relevant information for an early-stage founder. The best person that I can talk to is somebody who was exactly where I am right now, one year ago. And so, honestly, I end up looking to friends who are founders who, as I said, the one that I mentioned a few minutes ago, run an unbelievable company. He's Series B, so just a couple of fundraisers around the head of where we are, a couple of years ahead of where we are. He gives me unbelievable insight into how to think about fundraisers, how to think about operations, how to think about scaling and building out distribution channels, building out defensible moats around our technology, and how to work with engineers. So while I think the common answer for a question like this is, "Oh, Steve Jobs or Elon Musk." Really for me it's the early stage tech founders that I get to work with and interact with. Maybe we share a common investor, maybe we've come through similar backgrounds, that's who is the most influential from my perspective.
Clint Betts
How much money have you raised to this point? Sorry. And how do you think about fundraising?
Charlie Hernandez
It's an interesting space that we're in right now. Legal technology is perhaps one of the hottest segments in venture capital right now. There has been this wave of excitement around the applications for generative AI in the legal profession. And there is a common consensus that the entire legal profession is about to change. But what's interesting is that almost all of that funding has gone towards enterprise legal technology, meaning software that is built for lawyers inside law firms. That's a wonderful thing. Because it promises to make lawyers more efficient, to help them see more clients, to deal with more cases, and ultimately hopefully to pass some of those cost savings on to consumers. The challenge is because this technology is very new, it is so far only accessible to the largest law firms. So, rather than increasing access to justice for people at the lower end of the economic spectrum, it is, unfortunately, somewhat having the opposite effect. By only the large firms having had access to legal technology, these small firms end up falling further and further behind what those large law firms are able to do. So, to get this back to your question about how I think about fundraising, we very intentionally pursued building technology in a field that has been largely unaddressed by the venture community and even by other tech founders. We are building consumer legal technology. So this is a technology that's accessible to consumers, small businesses, and everybody in between. It's not for big law; it's not corporations who are doing large M&A transactions, bankruptcy deals, and things like that. We're here for the little guy. And I think what's interesting is that even though for every $1 that is spent on corporate transactional legal services, $2 is spent on legal services by consumers and SMBs, small and medium-sized businesses, it is not an area that has had much attention paid to it by the venture community. So, when I think about fundraising, it really is an educational process. We have to communicate to investors, "This is what we're building, this is why we're building it, this is the problem that we're solving. And here's how we are innovating on the technology side to solve this problem." So there are a few other companies in this space, but not many, not enough. There need to be far, far more companies innovating in this space. But we often commiserate on how much of our time is spent on just trying to help people understand what we're doing. I think another thing that I see is, and I'd be interested to see if folks who are trying to build med tech and other fields like that see the same thing. But in legal tech, there are very few lawyers who have gone on to be involved in the venture capital industry, either as an investor or as an operator. And those worlds are often very, very siloed from one another. The only touch points they have are when a venture fund hires a lawyer to do some of their work or a startup raises some money and needs a lawyer to drop the documentation for it. But in terms of an open pathway of communication that actually bridges the dialogue gap between these two spaces, it is very infrequent. So, I very much enjoy talking to other lawyers who have gone the route of venture capital. Again, either as an entrepreneur or as an investor, because again, we can commiserate on many things.
Clint Betts
What are your thoughts on the current macroeconomic environment and really just the state of the world? Because as a CEO, you now have to think about that stuff. Whereas previously, maybe 20 years ago, a CEO wouldn't have to think about that stuff and could focus on their business. But it seems like CEOs are being called to think about that stuff and have a take on that kind of stuff in today's world.
Charlie Hernandez
It is a very broad and very important question, and I think the question that you have to ask yourself as an operator of a company, as an entrepreneur, and as a founder is, "Where can I have an impact? Where can I have a positive impact on the work that I'm doing?" And I think both with the work that we've done at Crediverso and the work that we're now doing at My Pocket Lawyer, we've been given a really fortunate opportunity to both build a big and profitable and enduring business, but at the same time have a very positive impact on a portion of the community that really needs our help. So I'll share with you a term that I wasn't always familiar with. It's called access to justice. And access to justice describes a movement or an idea that rests on the observation that everybody should have equal access to the rights afforded to them by our laws and our constitution, regardless of their socioeconomic standing, their race, gender, ethnicity, et cetera. It's an idea that I think is something we can all strive for. But as we were mentioning with those statistics at the beginning of the call, it's very much not the reality that we live in. Most people don't ever have access to the civil rights that they need. If you are only able to access your civil rights, if you can't afford a lawyer, then effectively, many people don't have those civil rights at all. So, that is the macro problem that we have set out to solve. And it is both a humanitarian issue because these are challenges, especially as you look at the cases of self-represented litigants who are going to court and advocating for themselves in very high-stakes scenarios. And often having very adverse outcomes when they're up against professional opposing counsel. Those are real stories. Those are real people with real problems happening every day. But it's not just the human side of it. It's also the economic side. By not arming our small businesses and most entrepreneurial members of our society with the legal tools that they need to start and grow businesses and succeed in growing those businesses, we are hamstringing the economic powerhouse of our country. We are limiting our growth. We are limiting what we are able to do on a global scale. I think so much of that begins with having access to the right opportunities, including legal opportunities and legal resources that you need. That's how we approach that question. That's the macro problem we are trying to solve. I think it is a big one. I think it is one that a lot of people don't even know is a problem, but it has massive implications on both the humanitarian level and economic level.
Clint Betts
You basically just answered this. But I wonder how you stay motivated, and it sounds like motivation's not a problem at all. Again, I think you probably just barely answered the question, but how do you stay motivated? What's going on?
Charlie Hernandez
It is funny you ask that. There's a very specific way I think about that because running any business is very hard. Running an early-stage startup is no different. There are huge highs and huge lows. As a small team, you can take credit for all those wins together, but you also have to shoulder those challenges as a small group. And so it can be very taxing and it can challenge your motivation, as you said. So, the very specific way that I think about staying motivated is to try to envision the people who are building this company to help. And it's not hard to do because we see them all the time. You walk into a courthouse, and on any given day, about 90% of the people, depending on the practice area and the type of courtroom that you go into, are going to be there advocating for themselves without lawyers. And you need to do nothing else than sit and watch for a few minutes to understand how, unfortunately, poorly equipped they are to be in that position. But it's a position that we as a society have forced them into. With the way that we have structured our regulatory environment, the way that we are limiting lawyers from being able to financially viably serve a big portion of the population, it's a situation that we collectively created, and it's one that we at our company are trying to do remedy. So when I have those late nights and those challenging days, all I need to do is envision the people who are sitting in a courtroom advocating for themselves and probably losing those cases, to realize why we're doing this and what the mission that we're trying to achieve is.
Clint Betts
Finally, at CEO.com, we believe the chances one takes is just as important as the chances one gives. And I wonder when you hear that, who gave you a chance to get you to where you are today?
Charlie Hernandez
Our investors. Our investors both at Crediverso and My Pocket Lawyer are people who were willing to recognize a problem that maybe didn't impact them personally. And you can imagine the challenges with raising capital around an idea that is very foreign to someone. So, I'll give you an example here that has always stuck with me. I was speaking with a friend of mine, a woman who's an incredible entrepreneur. Her early fundraising experience was around a company that was delivering breast milk from working moms in the workplace to their babies at home. Okay? So they're breastfeeding, and they need to get that milk in a convenient and fast way from one place to another. You can imagine the experience she had when she was pitching a room full of men in Silicon Valley and how big of a problem this was. Nobody understood it. In many ways, that story resonated with me. Because when we were raising money at Crediverso, we were describing a set of problems that affected low-income immigrant communities oftentimes who didn't speak English. That is not who you're going to find in a typical investment committee in Silicon Valley. So convincing our investors that was a real problem, well, convincing anybody that has a real problem is challenging if it's something that you can't see and touch, personally. But our investors recognized it very quickly. They understood the depth of the problem; they understood the approach that we were trying to take to solve that problem. And we are very much seeing the same thing now with My Pocket Lawyer, as you said at the beginning of the call. Most people are aware of the challenges facing the criminal justice system in the country. But the challenges facing the civil legal system are arguably just as far-reaching, yet they don't get nearly as much attention from the press, investors, or entrepreneurs. So I think if there's anyone to thank here, it is probably first our investors, and then second our team for being willing to take that journey with me and recognize the gravity of the problem and the potential that we have as a group to be able to solve that problem.
Clint Betts
I love it. That's incredible. And you're right; there is a very specific type of company and profile of entrepreneur that normally gets funded by VCs. I don't know how to change that, but you're exactly right. What about personally, though? Who gave you a chance personally?
Charlie Hernandez
That's a great question. Well, I think the obvious answer is I am batting way out of my league with my fiance. She is an absolutely wonderful person, and I do not deserve her even a little bit. So she gives me chances every day. She gave me a chance when we went out on our first date. She gave me a chance on the second date, and she gave me a chance last September when she said yes and agreed to marry me. So I'm very lucky to have her. She's an incredible person. She is a filmmaker, which is really interesting because I come from this space of law, and finance, and technology. And I had, even though I grew up in Los Angeles, very little exposure to the entertainment industry. So, when we met, one would think that we might not have had that much to connect on. But as a filmmaker, if you're in a director role, or a production role, or even a writing role, these are roles that she's all been in. It's very much the same challenges that you have running a company. You have a lot of people to orchestrate and challenges that come up that you have to solve. So we were able to connect very easily on that. And she shared with me on our first date a film that she had both directed, written, and produced, that's three things, called The Tent Mender, which addresses homelessness on Skid Row in Los Angeles. It's available on Amazon Prime if you're going to watch. And the first thing I did after that first date was I went home and I watched the whole thing. I had great respect for a field that I understood very little about and was really able to see a lot of commonalities. So directors and producers, they really are the CEOs of the entertainment industry. Films may be another area to go into for your next episodes.
Clint Betts
I love it. Charlie, thank you so much for coming on the show. It's been a pleasure.
Charlie Hernandez
Oh, pleasure was all mine. Thank you for having me. It's been lovely talking to you. Edited for readability.