What should you expect from the Startup Sidebar podcast? Who is the show for, and should you listen? Tune-in to find out (hint, it is for entrepreneurs and business owners/executives about legal lessons that others have learned the hard way). We hope these conversations will shed light on legal issues that you may encounter as you build and grow your business.
We hope you enjoy the show!
Transcription
Samar Shah [0:03]
Welcome to the startup sidebar podcast. This show is all about legal issues that entrepreneurs have learned while building and scaling their businesses. Often, these are the lessons that they might have learned the hard way. In every episode I interview startup founders or entrepreneurs about one specific legal issue that caught them off guard. We go over how that issue came about, how it impacted their business, how it got resolved and the lessons they might have learned along the way.
By way of background, I am a patent attorney. I worked at some of the top tier law firms in the United States and have represented companies such as Facebook and Google on patent and patent litigation matters.
I am also the founder and CEO of Outlier Patent Attorneys, a boutique law firm that specializes in patent matters for software and tech companies. Now, you might be wondering, why is an attorney interviewing startup founders about legal issues? But in my experience, here's what I see maybe way too often when attorneys talk to clients about complex legal issues. I see the client's eyes sometimes glaze over. But the reality is very different when I hear two entrepreneurs talk about some legal issue that they're dealing with, they actually get excited. They treat stories, compare experiences and outcomes as well as the struggles along the way.
Samar Shah [1:19]
My personal theory is that entrepreneurs like talking about legal if it has the right business context associated with it.
Samar Shah [1:26]
And look, it's not always the lawyers fault. Sometimes it's impossible to work through the logic tree of a particular legal issue without isolating some of the variables and abstracting the others. So that's the premise of the show. The idea is that entrepreneurs will find legal interesting if they hear other entrepreneurs talk about it. Specifically legal is interesting if entrepreneurs talk about legal issues within the context of real world business problems. I am not here to give you legal advice. Nothing in any of the episodes should be construed as legal advice. But, I do hope that our discussions here will shed some light on to legal issues that you may encounter in the future. I hope this show helps you do some pattern recognition and helps you create appropriate frameworks and mindsets around legal issues.
Samar Shah [2:11]
That's the show. If you want us to discuss a particular topic, feel free to send me an email or visit us on our show notes page. I hope you enjoy the show!