Today we’d like to introduce you to Adam Kerpelman.
Adam, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
I’m a serial entrepreneur, so I’ve started a bunch of businesses. At a glance they probably all look pretty disconnected, but I’ll try to string it all together as quickly as I can.
I had already started two businesses before I could drive. One making websites for people, the other taking photos at sporting events. This was like ’96 or ’97 so, the web was still pretty new and photography wasn’t digital yet. So, that’s where it really starts.
Those businesses sort of faded away as I started to focus on my own swimming career. I grew up in Baltimore, which turned out to be a bit of a national hub of swimming, and I was pretty good. I spent years training alongside Michael Phelps at North Baltimore Aquatic Club, held a few state records, and then went on to the University of Virginia where I was an 18x D1 All-American. I retired after Olympic Trials in 2004 and quickly turned that drive back to business.
Like so many out here, I was drawn to LA by the entertainment industry. Throughout my photography years, I had always tinkered with video cameras, but during college the first HD cameras started to come out, and this converged with my love of photography and movies. Pretty quickly I was getting gigs as a video camera operator. As school wound down I decided I wanted to figure out how to go pro, so I headed to LA to go to film school. I quickly realized that I’d learned the basics “by doing,” so I teamed up with some of the film nerd friends I’d made at Virginia and started my first real company, a digital production company called One Step Productions. I ran that for almost six years. We got a steady flow of work producing music videos, web content, stuff like that. We used some of the budget to work on our own cool projects, and I’m still really proud of some of the cutting edge work we did there. I’m pretty sure our web series “Rules of The League” was the world’s first “trans-media” web series, in 2009. We had whole interwoven story arcs between the characters that took place on Facebook and Twitter, and inside jokes from those arcs that would show up in the next week’s episode.
Increasingly our clients would ask us about other aspects of digital content. They’d ask if we could also build the website or an app to house the content. The answer, of course, going back to the beginning of my story in 6th grade with HTML was “yes.” In fact, the overhead on a website is considerably lower than video, so we ended up taking on more and more web and app work. Around 2011, I shut down the production company, teamed up with a partner (another UVa connection) and started a software design and development company called Kerplinq.
With Kerplinq we successfully kept the momentum going, doing work for all kinds of clients. But, it was what we would call “boring work for good money” and after a company retreat we decided to drop all of our clients, raise a little money, and take a crack at an idea we had brewing in the mental health space. We called it Therapylinq. It was a video chat platform to connect therapists and their clients and to do so in a way that would make the whole process easier and cheaper. Unfortunately, back then, building this kind of app was wasn’t easy or cheap. Tools like Stripe didn’t exist, so it was a monster hurdle just to allow people to pay with a credit card. The biggest thing we ran into at the time was regulation. Telemedicine laws have gotten much better, but back then we ran into all kinds of problems with the possibility of connecting doctors and patients across state lines, if only by mistake. After a year of working on the project we ran out of capital and had to call it, shutting down both Kerplinq and Therapylinq.
After spending almost ten years running companies, and the last year on a heck of a sprint to build something totally new, I was a bit burned out. I took some time off to decide what I wanted to do next. My parents are both lawyers, so I grew up with an interest in the law and exposure to legal practice. Law school had always been my “more realistic” plan back in college, and thoughts of the law started to creep back in as I was thinking about what to do after shutting down Therapylinq. We had tried to take a swing at something big in the healthcare space, and what really held us back was something legal: the laws around telemedicine. This was the beginning of my inkling that the legal system was next up for pretty massive disruption, but unlike our blind swing with Therapylinq I knew I needed to learn more. So, I took the LSAT and started applying to law schools. If nothing, I figured, it’d be nice to have someone else making my schedule for a few years, instead of managing teams. I started law school in 2013 and finished in 2016.
While I was in school, I worked part-time as a digital marketing consultant through a new company I spun up, High Fidelity Digital, while the last pieces of my current project, Juris, came together. Although I considered the possibility, I knew fairly quickly that I didn’t want to practice law. This allowed me to take law school as an academic exercise. I learned the true ins and outs of the function of the law, the legal system, and government. And, as planned, did so with a mind toward technology and disruption. At the same time, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and conversations around smart contracts where just starting to break out, and naturally they worked their way into my studies. I wrote papers with titles like “Decentralization and the Law” and started on what would become the Juris Whitepaper, an effort to imagine a fair and legally enforceable dispute resolution system that would work within the contexts made possible by international treaty, blockchain, and smart contract tech.
After school, I took all of those learnings and launched Juris, where I’m co-founder and CEO.
Along the way, I also started a podcast that’s been doing pretty well for the last few years. That’s called Zengineering. Me and my co-host talk about the philosophy of technology. (My undergrad degree was in philosophy.)
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
It definitely wasn’t a smooth road, but such is startup life. Especially in media production, most of your job is putting out daily fires as you try to coordinate artists, deal with the elements, things like that. But, shutting down any company is never easy, whether it’s successful and it’s the right time, or the whole thing has blown up. It’s like going through a breakup.
I think the biggest struggle as an entrepreneur is just dealing with a certain degree of loneliness and isolation that comes with the territory. Sometimes you’re chasing an idea that no one else sees yet so you’re on your own. Sometimes you’re managing a killer team, but as the boss you’re kind of isolated at the top. It took me a few rounds of burnout and recovery to really feel like I know how to handle that side of it. It’s definitely not on your mind when you’re 23 and think “Hey, I’ll just start my own business doing this stuff!”
Juris and Zengineering Podcast – what should we know? What do you guys do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
At Juris we’re building the Dispute Resolution System of the Internet. This means the kind of dispute resolution and legal system you’d expect for the digital world we all live in now. One that’s accessible, affordable and fair. Whether you’re dealing with debt collectors, running a huge online business, dealing with a car accident, or an obnoxious landlord, we believe you shouldn’t be cut out of the system or denied your rights because you can’t afford a lawyer. We’re building a system where tools exist to help anyone to do more without a lawyer, but one that also allows lawyers to do even more to help their clients and find new ones. We’re actually about to launch our first tool we’re calling “DebtSettle.” It lets people who are being harassed by debt collectors take some of the same actions a lawyer would to get them to leave them alone, but for a tenth of the price.
The whole project, building the full dispute resolution stack, is a huge task, but we think it’s a pretty important one. Better legal tools can open up access to justice to millions of people in our country, if not billions of people worldwide.
Zengineeering Podcast, on the other hand, is the fun side project that keeps me sane. It’s an awesome chance to keep growing and expanding personally through deep (and weird) conversations about emerging tech and the world around us with some really cool people.
What moment in your career do you look back most fondly on?
Going to olympic trials was pretty cool, and finishing law school as the “old guy” in the class, or getting to present our work with Juris at Harvard? But it’s hard to say, asking an entrepreneur about proudest moments is sort of like asking which of someone’s kids is their favorite. Every project launched and completed, every company started and sustained, every team assembled, every failure and the lessons learned from them are a source of pride. I’m pretty proud of the podcast, it’s hard keeping a creative side project rolling for that long.
One time I ate two dozen Krispy Kreme donuts in a sitting to beat Michael Phelps in an eat off. Let’s go with that.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://getjuris.com | https://debtsettle.co
- Email: [email protected]
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/getjuris
- Other: https://zengineeringpodcast.com
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