Starting where to?...

On February 6, 2012, I left my job as a lawyer to co-found a start-up which aims to launch its first iOS application, “where to?”, in the middle of March.

Lawyers are, by their very nature, risk-averse people and I’ll readily admit that I was nervous, excited and scared to quit my job to do something so…original.   

I’m going to use my blog for the next few months to write about the process I’m going through trying to start an iOS application.  I’ll try to write about development, hardships, feelings and any other thought that pops into my head.  Why am I doing this?  Maybe its because I read “One L” before I went off to law school, and liked the idea that someone had logged their experience and shared it with others. Maybe I want to be able to recount the process I’m going through and my reactions/feelings to this process years from now.  Maybe its because people are actually interested in how I’m doing this, and blogging is a great way to satisfy that (albeit limited) demand.  Time will tell me why I’m doing this; right now, I only know I am. 

I have very little technical background and I’ve only been doing this full-time for about two weeks, so keep that in mind when I say this is hard.  As a lawyer, I was used to having to pay attention to detail and having to work long hours.  I can unequivocally say that, not surprisingly, this is harder.  First, it’s just hard to get into a routine.  When I was a lawyer, I used to hit the gym every morning by 7:30 and be in my office with breakfast by 9:45.  There was a routine, and it was routine.  At the moment, I have no routine or structure.  Sometimes I go to the gym after work, and sometimes before.  Many times though, I don’t go at all.  Why?  Because I’m generally working as soon as I wake up and exhausted after work. 

I’m sure a number of people think that I have no job, and don’t do anything productive during the day.  My sister came to visit me earlier this week, and I think she was of that mind until she realized how much work my partner, Steve, and I actually do.  While I do work fewer hours now than I did as an attorney, it’s because I can’t work as many hours. 

Steve and I generally wake up and immediately start reviewing work that our graphic designer or programmers have produced.  Since our graphic designer lives in Romania, we try to get him comments on any designs he has produced as early as possible in the morning, so we can go through numerous iterations of our graphic design features a day.  Usually, we pass each other comments once or twice in the morning via email and then meet by 11 so that we can work alongside each other.  The past few days, we’ve worked until about 7 or 8, which is certainly fewer hours that either of us put in as attorneys at our firms. 

The reason we’re exhausted after work, though, is that we’re intensely focused while we are at work.  I generally never check the news until we’ve finished working for the day.  We’re constantly looking, commenting, thinking or discussing something about our application.  We often think an idea we have is great, and talk about it for hours, only to realize that it’s not feasible or that it would take too long or cost too much to create/incorporate before launching our app.   Sometimes we realize that we’ve overlooked an incredibly important concept our application needs, and start scrambling for a way to plug that huge gap.   And sometimes, we’re just lost. 

Trying to bring an original idea like “where to?” to fruition requires an incredible amount of creativity.  I am in awe of the men that have walked before me and started their own companies based on a creative idea-thinking outside the box takes a lot of energy, drive, and self-motivation.  

Brining an idea to fruition is also an emotional rollercoaster.  There have been days that I’m incredibly motivated, think we have an amazing idea, feel like we’re incredibly productive and am really happy.  There are also days when I’m dejected, realize that we can’t plug a hole in our application that I wish we could, find myself unable to focus, and feel depressed.   The one constant, so far though, is that I am focused on work.  When I’m at restaurants or meeting other people, I’m thinking about work.  When I was at lunch with a friend on Friday, I wanted to run back to work because I realized we had a few pressing issues we needed to address.  Work is hard, but I’m excited to get to it! 

My Departure Memo...

DEPARTURE MEMORANDUM

OF

MOIZ ALI

Today is my last day as an associate at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP.  I am leaving to co-found a technology start-up and am aiming to launch my first iOS application, “Where To?”, by March 15.  My contact information remains:

Moiz Ali
XXXXX
New York, NY

I can always be reached via my personal email address, me@moizali.com.

It has been a pleasure and a privilege to be associated with this firm and to work with and learn from such a talented group of people,including all of the attorneys, paralegals, secretarial and administrative staff whose efforts and dedication have made my time at the firm so rewarding.  I would also like to express my sincere appreciation to those who have offered me their guidance, support and friendship.  I look forward to staying in touch.

Best,

Moiz

My Last Day...

Today is my last day as an associate at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP.   It’s a custom at the firm for each departing associate to write a short email that’s sent around to the entire firm describing what the departing associate plans on doing after he or she leaves the firm and thanking his collogues for their mentorship and friendship.  I’ll post a draft of my departure memorandum here when it becomes available, but I wanted to provide some more thoughtful comments on my last day at STB.

Simpson is an amazing place to work.  Never in my life did I think I could be surrounded by hundreds of such talented, brilliant and hard-working people as I have been for the past 2.5 years.   I saw partners and associates routinely out-class and out-wit partners and associates at other law firms and at investment banks. I saw a senior associate work from Saturday morning until Monday at 5 p.m., with nothing but a 30-minute nap during the entire period. As a junior associate, I did the same.   Most importantly though, I saw attorney’s take ownership of work product and care about what they were doing.  In my Corporations class at HLS, we learned about the concept of agency costs.  At Simpson, we never had any.  The clients of Simpson are incredibly lucky.

At the same time, I think there are some things that could really improve the quality of life at Simpson for attorneys.  When you’re being recruited to big law firms, you hear things like “resources of a big firm.”  I never really understood what that meant until I started working at STB.  We do have incredible resources; a strong bank of precedents, incredibly smart people that you can reach with a quick phone call, and the word processing and technological developments you would expect from a firm that generates nearly $1 billion in revenue annually.   What we don’t have is smart staffing, smart technology or smart forms.  

Smart Staffing 

Smart staffing is more generalist staffing.  When I was a junior associate in the Credit group, our Securities group was slammed with work.   Even when I didn’t have much to do in the Credit group, I would never be staffed to the Securities group, even to do something routine.  Part of the resources of a big firm are people, and we should have more generalist staffing for junior associates.  Junior’s should “concentrate” on their group while they are rotating, but they shouldn’t be pigeon-hold there as they are currently.  As a Credit junior associate, I could perform Securities or M&A diligence as quickly and expertly as Securities or M&A junior associates.  Similarly, as an M&A junior, I could create officer’s certificates as easily as a Credit or Securities junior.  This became even more true after I rotated through those groups.  By the time I was in M&A, I had already rotated through Securities and Credit and could certainly perform diligence or draft officer’s certificates as well juniors in those groups. 

This isn’t to say that this should always happen or that we should have 4 juniors staffed to every deal like Cahill Gordon.  This isn’t to say that people should never have to work past 6 p.m.  This is only to say that it doesn’t make sense for some junior associates to have to work until 4 a.m. while others aren’t during anything even during normal business hours.   By staffing slow junior corporate associates to matters outside the group in which they are currently rotating, we’ll improve the quality of our work product, provide more experience to slow junior associates and improve associate morale.

I don’t think we could have “smart staffing” after the rotation process, as attorneys tend to specialize and the work becomes less routine.  During the rotation process, though, smart staffing makes sense.   

Smart Technology 

Smart technology is so simple and so time saving, it blows my mind that we haven’t implemented it.  It should be designed by someone who uses it all the time (an attorney!) and be frictionless. 

First, we should have a bank of precedents that’s incredibly easy to access.   Want a purchase agreement from Goldman Sachs?  You should be able to access our precedents bank, scroll down to “Purchase Agreements” and refine that search by scrolling to “Goldman Sachs.”  Then, you should chronologically be able to access the purchase agreements Goldman Sachs has agreed to and know who represented Goldman in each of those cases.  Want the form opinion for Cravath?  Go to “Opinions” and “Cravath”.  Anything more difficult then this is shameful.  When I was leaving Simpson, I was billing out at something like $500/hour.  It shouldn’t take me 15 minutes and cost a client $125 to find a precedent.  Instead, it should take 10 seconds to find 125 precedents. 

Second, we should make redlining easier.  I shouldn’t have to save a document, close it, highlight two documents, right click, select “Deltaview”, hit “continue and then wait for a redline to appear.  I should just hit a single button while in Microsoft Word that automatically does all this for me, and allows me to keep the document I’m working on open.  On average, I bet that this would save every corporate associate 9 minutes per day.  That’s a lot of minutes.

Third, we should just have better hardware.  I’m pretty sure that the computer in my office was meant to run Windows 95, not Windows 7.  We ask corporate associates to bring in their own second monitors rather than providing one, even though this should be standard procedure.  Lets be more considerate as a law firm and improve the quality of our hardware.

Smart Forms

If you’ve ever seen the form Simpson Opinion, enough said.  If you haven’t, I hope you never have to. 

I started at Simpson on 9/21/2009.  I can still remember my first day of orientation  as a summer associate, and as a first-year associate.  I can remember walking into 425 Lexington Avenue with pride.  Walking out on February 6, 2012, for the last time, I leave proud.  Best of luck to you all...

Cutting the Cord

I cut the cord with my cable television provider in October of 2010.  In my brief 27 year existence on this earth, I've been "blessed" to have had Comcast, TimeWarner and RCN as cable providers.  As a customer, I can unequivocally say that RCN is the best and cheapest of those three providers-RCN provided me with consistent service and billed me at a standard monthly rate.  As a result, I was pretty happy to be with RCN; they seemed to be at the top of their industry.

The crazy thing is that consistent service and standard rates do not generally result in a company being at the top of its industry.  Consistent service and standard rates are the rule, not the exception, except in the cable television industry.

Since there are a bunch of news articles and press regarding cutting the cable cord, I thought I'd share my thoughts: 

-  Netflix.  Yes, Netflix and other methods of streaming content are the wave of the future.  I ordered Netflix when I cut the cord (I didn't get the DVD plan) and purchased a Roku a few months later to stream Netflix directly to my television.  Netflix Instant was weak when I originally got it back in 2010.  It has come a long way, but has much further to go.  Still, streaming Netflix is incredible.  It takes me less than 30 seconds to decide what I want to watch, and then to have that content appear on my television in HD quality.  The more titles it gets, the more obsolete cable will become.  

-  I'll never go back.  I shouldn't say never, but I can't see myself signing up for cable again.  Watching commercials seems barbaric, and having 1000 channels and "nothing on TV" seems ludicrous.

-  Fuck you.  Fuck you cable companies, for making me subscribe to the Animal Planet, UPN, Oxygen and MTV.  I only want like 10 channels and you make me pay for 150.  Of those, 140 suck, so fuck you.  If I had the chance, and it wouldn't harm anyone, I would throw a rock through the CEO of Comcast's window.  Fuck you.

-  I would never invest in a cable company.  Those 10 channels realize who they are, and they are looking to cut their cord with the cable companies too.  I would like to have the broadcast channels (NBC, ABC, CBS and Fox), ESPN and possibly HBO.  ESPN and HBO already have apps that allow you to watch television on an iPad (ESPN's allows you to watch live television and HBO's lets you watch something basically as soon as its aired on HBO).  At the moment, ESPN and HBO require you to have a cable subscription in order to access the app.  That will unquestionably end at some point in the future. When it does, and when the broadcast channels can provide more consistent service with a pair of rabbit ears, cable's dominance will be at an end.  Alea iacta est.

-  Comcast may think that by buying NBC, its preserving cable's dominance.  They're wrong.  Either Comcast will do what every other channel is doing with content (i.e. come out with apps, allow live TV to be streamed, etc.) or NBC will die.

Cable companies should die.  They do not provide content, they merely provide distribution.  And a majority of what they distribute is something people don't want but have to pay for.  Once they have a method of getting only what they want, cable companies will perish, and it will be their own fault.  Cable companies have chosen not to adopt a la carte pricing.  They have chosen to double down on their bet that they can charge you $50 for 140 channels of garbage.  They have chosen not to live in this century. They deserve to die.

My Greatest Achievement

Someone once told me that my greatest acheivement in life will have been attending Harvard Law School.  I'm going to prove them wrong.