Growing Lean
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Growing Lean
From Attorney to Entrepreneur: Marc Snyderman's Journey Through Leadership, Investment, and AI Innovation
Embark on a fascinating journey with entrepreneurial virtuoso Marc Snyderman of NextPoint Ventures, as he details his leap from legalese to the language of leadership and investment. Transforming from an attorney to a COO, and now a managing partner, Marc's narrative is packed with rich insights into fostering company growth and the strategic moves that make it happen. His expertise in corporate and securities law intertwines with tales of scaling an IT and engineering firm, providing a unique perspective on what it takes to pivot and thrive in today's economy.
Stay captivated as we navigate through the realm of AI, dissecting its role in modernizing customer service and HR, and weighing the human element against technological prowess. Marc's adeptness at balancing efficiency with the irreplaceable human touch shines through our discussion. Moreover, discover how to connect with Marc and delve into his extensive knowledge on law, business ethics, and more through his various social media channels and his website. This episode is an arsenal of wisdom for anyone eager to grasp the nuances of entrepreneurship and the subtle art of strategic investment.
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Hey everyone, welcome back to the growing Lean podcast sponsored by Lean Discovery Group. This is your host, dylan Burke, also known as Teage. I'm happy to be here with Mark Snyderman, founder and managing partner of NextPoint Ventures. Welcome, mark.
Speaker 2:Well, thanks, thanks for having me. It's great to be here.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm excited to learn more about you and your business. So, to get us started, can you give us a little bit about your background and history and how you ended up doing what you do today?
Speaker 2:Sure, it's kind of a woven tale of it starts with being an attorney and kind of ends up as both an attorney and an entrepreneur. So I started out as an attorney in New York City in one of the corporate doing corporate and securities work. So working mostly in the fashion industry ended up moving on to an in-house job with one of the cable companies when they were going public, which, you know, for a young business attorney is like sort of the dream that you know you get to do an IPO and you get to buy into the IPO and then, of course, you know you watch the stock open and then you watch the stock just fall for six months while you're in total lockup because you can't do anything with your stock. So but it was a great experience. I had, you know, four or five years learning mergers and acquisitions, public filings, corporate and securities and really actually became really familiar with what I was best at, which was working with technical people and technology and translating what the engineers and technical people were doing into plain English and writing really good agreements and helping them talk about what they do and shed a good light on it from a security standpoint.
Speaker 2:Left there and ended up with an IT and engineering firm which started out as an attorney and ended up being the chief operating officer. I actually ran that company for about 10 years as the chief operating officer, helped support the growth and we grew the company from 75 employees up to 300, had a vision for where we could go with the company and just decided actually in the end it was best for me to leave. And I still consult with the company, I still manage some programs for them, I still are outside attorney, I started a law firm and then I started my entrepreneurial ventures. So next point, ventures grew out of that and really what it is is. We focus on strategic investment, strategically investing our time, energy and funds and capital in companies that are inflection points really, that either are stuck in their growth phase or they're just starting out some of them. So we have both our own concepts that we're trying to bring to fruition as well as bringing other people's companies to the next level.
Speaker 1:Okay, amazing. And what is your overall business strategy at next point ventures?
Speaker 2:I would say that the strategy is really to focus on growth. Growth, right, and what I mean by that is that can be growth by leveraging technology. We have a technology house in Serbia. We have about 40 developers over in Serbia that can help us support technology initiatives, marketing, manufacturing, you name it. We kind of play in multiple levels and wherever we see the biggest need we can throw resources at that project to help push it over the inflection point.
Speaker 1:Okay, amazing, awesome, thank you. How have you adapted to changes in the economy globally over the last, I think, five years since you started?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I mean it's definitely been an adventure, you know. I would say, you know I'm lucky in that I've spent a lot of my career working from home or from satellite offices. My entire law firm is built as a virtual firm with the concept that you can use WeWorks or small offices if you need them, just to have a place, but never really building those big offices ever again. And you know so I kind of had that already in place, so I've always been pretty affordable. So that helped a lot In terms of, you know, the economy. It kind of became, you know, because you being, you know, networking became really difficult. I would say. I would say that's probably one of the biggest things that hit, you know, somebody like me was, you know, okay, well, you know, I used to go out and be out and about and networking events and all these things and all of a sudden there's nothing, you know, because you can't go anywhere. And Zoom became your friend. But I also have a large social media presence that I've developed over the years. So I spend, you know, I invest in building content. So I have a pretty decent content library that I build on a monthly basis and try to release, you know, small form video both on LinkedIn, tiktok, instagram, to build a brand and build knowledge and show the content that I have, and I think that's been highly effective for me in terms of bringing more business in, in terms of the, you know, making projects happen.
Speaker 2:You know, I think it just became you had to get leaner, you had to get meaner, and you had, and you had to use technology more effectively, and I think you know we're always all trying to reach for. What does that mean? Right, how do I, how do I leverage things? Right, there's so many tools out there. And then you get stuck in a tool and you try to figure out okay, well, is this really the place I'm supposed to be? Like? You know, I would say we were using Mondaycom a ton for project management, and you know, and it is super effective and you can do a lot with it.
Speaker 2:But then you run into what happens when people aren't keeping it up to date and you know you have team members that aren't as adopted or aren't. You know they're not as bought into it. You know, do you switch to another one? Do you go to ClickUp? Do you go to? Do you use a different goal setting mechanism, or do you just dump it all down and say forget it all? So I think that's a struggle, that I think I don't know anybody that has a sort of lockdown right. I'm all kind of trying to figure out you know what tools work with what tools and how do you make it work the best? And you know, I mean I think you know email is just torture, right, because we all live. You know we kind of live in it. But now you know I have, you know, maybe 15 or 20 different email addresses that I use. That's it becomes really hard to keep track of it all right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, 100%. And to the point you made about networking becoming hot, I can totally relate to that. Working COVID, I was working as a realtor real estate agent is what we call it and you it's not the same like bumping elbows, it's not the same as shaking hands or no, in general like networking you. There's nothing like a old handshake and yeah, it's still a bit awkward, like especially with the older generation Like I don't know whether it's to go into a handshake or fist bump or elbow.
Speaker 1:Yeah elbows and fist bumps, Don't? They don't do the same as a handshake.
Speaker 2:You know they do not, so At one point for one of, for one of one of my investments, the we actually came up with a really interesting. We had these, we had those, you know, the rubber band, like the rubber kind of band, things like these for charities and stuff. Yeah, it made ones for our company that were red, yellow and green. So if you were a green one, that meant you were like you're kind of you don't really care and you're willing to go in, you could you come in for a handshake or hug them all good. Yellow was kind of like hey, or arm, arm, bump me like you know, like, or give me a kick in the shin or something. And red was like don't touch me, I am, like you know, a covert fear.
Speaker 1:That's amazing. I wish I thought of that back then.
Speaker 2:Really well for like cuz we were having an event, we're like, what are we gonna do? Like, you know people don't like you. You know people, some people want to do something. And then we're like, yeah, we could do red, yellow, green, was. It might work really well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's nothing worse than going in for a handshake and then someone blocks you. It was such a weird time, but I'm glad we were a little bit.
Speaker 2:I think I'm okay. Exactly, my shots are up to date. You want to see my car?
Speaker 1:Exactly exactly. And back to the point of like making use of tools that are available to you Besides for the ones you discussed, are there any like tools, especially now with the release of AI into the mainstream? Are there any of these new tools that you are making use of regularly?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I would say you know we've started to use, you know, chat GPT. Obviously I think everybody's kind of looking at it and you know leveraging it in some way. You know I would say you know some of my projects. We've been looking to do Different AI based tools that we're using. You know on our own that we've kind of built out our own tool sets, but obviously you're always leveraging. You know what's out there. I think there's a lot to do and a lot to think about when you're, when you're going to figure out AI you know I mean chat GPT you gotta remember you're using old data, so you got to really think about when you're using it and how you're using it.
Speaker 2:Yeah you know, I think there's a lot you can do in terms of customer service, all those kind of things, that that front-facing initial, you know. Okay, how are you handling your customers when they have a complaint or they have a question, you know, so that they feel like they're being touched and not just being, you know, routed by a telephone system. You know there's definitely, you know, a lot you can do there. You know we're, I would say I don't think we've been tentative I mean, maybe tentative is a good word right to say in terms of how far we wanted to push the use of AI until we're really comfortable with what it's doing and how it's responding to things. You know, I mean, I know a lot of people that have jumped into it. I know that the eight you know, in particular, like HR tech. There's a whole lot going on in HR tech for, like, responding to resumes, responding to, you know, for staffing and those kind of things. And it scares me because I always remember back to the like.
Speaker 2:I remember the story of and I think it was either it was either Amazon or Google Was the was one of the first ones to have released before chat. Gbt came out. Their real AI, their, their real AI brain, and they had tested it with Resumes, right. So they tested it. They basically said here's our highest flying people in the company and here's their resumes. So, okay, find us people using this, you know, find us people that are going to be these kind of that are going to get us here. Well, what they didn't realize was they created a highly racist engine Because, you know, they looked at you, look at the, their current executive pool. It was, all you know, white males and Everything. It and it, the AI engine, basically learned from that and didn't find anybody in the resume pool that wasn't even though it, you know, it just started, figured it out and found only white males again. So I still think there's a lot to think about.
Speaker 2:And how do we do things that think? I mean, obviously, for calculations and things that AI can do at lightning speed. We should be using it all the time. I say I use it for idea generation or cutting down things that might, if I have to brainstorm something and it might take me or my team, we do a brainstorming session. Nothing wrong with starting with asking the AI tool to do some brainstorming for you, because it's going to give you tons of ideas, right, yeah, and that's a great starting point and I think I try 80, 20, most things, right. You say, can I get you 80% there? And then you could do the 20% that you need to do to make it really what it needs to be. We definitely use I definitely use AI, I use some AI and some of my social media postings right, and I'll use it again. I'll use it as an 80%. You know where it captions, but then you got to go in and tweak it, right, I don't do anything where I let it just go.
Speaker 1:Yeah, 100%. When ChatGVT was first released last year, or when I first heard of it, I was using it for everything, for emails, for anything I could think of. And then I slowly started realizing that, or the more I looked into it, the more I realized that it was giving you the average answer, so what the average person would want to read. And I slowly started thinking this is actually really annoying, because people are getting so many of these generic ChatGVT written emails that it's actually more effective, even if it's short and less precise, to have a personal written email. So for things like that I use my brain and I like that about me. But then for, like, making meal plans or exercise routines or anything like that.
Speaker 2:It's amazing.
Speaker 1:Or brainstorming names for like shops or e-commerce stores, which I've done in the past, like it's excellent for that. But, like you said, you've got to be careful about what you let it do for you, because it can get a bit weird and dangerous if you let it do too much.
Speaker 2:Yeah, people always say you can't tell what it's written by ChatGVT and I say I can tell every time.
Speaker 1:Yeah exactly Like. Unless you're an insane prompt engineer, you won't be able to get it to write a human-type message.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I agree 100%. And what have been the biggest challenges for you in terms of your business and how have you overcome them?
Speaker 2:I mean I guess it depends on you know. I mean I said there's, you know, I have multiple businesses. I guess I'll start with, you know, from the law firm perspective, I have a vision of, you know, a better legal system that supports what I mean by that is, a system that's built better to support businesses, right? So what I did was I said you know, why don't businesses use lawyers more? Right? Why do they think they should be using Google so much? And if you look at it really, it all really falls back to one thing it's cost, right. It's not because they don't think lawyers are still good at what they do. It's because lawyers cost too much and they charge too much and the whole model is really broken, particularly here in the United States and in South Africa. It's a very similar legal system. So my guess is you probably have some of the same issues, yeah. So what I did was I said why don't I take it and look at it more like a startup and treat businesses the way a startup would treat them right? I won't have, you know, big offices. I'll keep really lean. I'll use tech. So I do use lots of different tech that some of the AI based for contracting, evaluation and understanding, but always having the legal oversight over top of it. And then there's you know how do you charge, right? So if you go to subscription and flat fee models, you can change the game right. So that's kind of been a game changer. The challenge is that sometimes people look at the service and they say you can't, possibly it's too cheap. Right, it's the. Which is so bizarre to me, right? When somebody says, well, why is it so inexpensive? Well, because I changed the model. That's why. Because I don't have a building that has. You know, I'm not on the 51st floor of some building with, you know, 40,000 square feet of space and 30 attorneys and 20 paralegals and 15 secretaries that I don't need. I don't need any of it, exactly, okay, right, I can do what they do and you just need me, and maybe I need an associate or maybe I have another person, but it doesn't matter, right? The model's totally broken. So the model's created an inertia in the bit in the sector that you have to. You have to kind of push through that hurdle. So the way I've pushed through it is really a lot of this, right? Yeah, it's social. You know a lot of social posts thing, a lot of blogging on the way the industry is and how do you push through an industry. So it is.
Speaker 2:I like to say, you know, I like disruptive tech, or disrupt anything disruptive, right. So, and that can be anything from you know, it doesn't necessarily have to be trying to blow an entire small business. I'm really trying to blow up the business lawyer business for small businesses. Right, that's my goal is to shatter it. Right, but that's okay. Right, but it could be some smaller too. Disruptive can just be. You know, you took a process and you made it that much better that you disrupted that piece of the industry. So, most of the things that I do try to disrupt something you know.
Speaker 2:Right now we're looking at, you know, so we're building out a new platform called Ucree with the goal of blowing up the user generated content marketplace, because the marketplace is it's so disjointed. So, if you're a social media person, you make videos, you do TikToks, you do your photography and you're in a small town in the middle of the country, right, and you're really good at what you do, but you have no way and you have a nice little following. You're a micro influencer, maybe have 5,000, 10,000 followers. You're a brand like Coca-Cola and you're saying, wow, if I could get to that, that's a really good market for me. They have no way to get to that person right. The levels they have to get through and research will have to do to get there, it's gonna take forever.
Speaker 2:So the whole idea is, if you build the platform and build a model for them, you could disrupt the market right, because you could build a really good network of these user generated content influencers and give them a platform to connect with agencies and brands. So and that came from my social media team that I was talking with them and saying, hey, what's a problem that you guys are seeing and that they said that's a problem. We said, well, why don't we look at that? Why don't we build something for it? So that's how the concept comes about. So we kind of trying to break through that and push and use technology right. So I have a tech house in Serbia. Like I said, use that tech house to build something, to try to break through.
Speaker 1:Okay, 100%. Yeah, and on that point you said about people being worried about such a low price. I also find that super interesting because I've been reading Dr Robert Cialdini's book Psychology of Persuasion and that's actually one of the levers of persuasion is price adjusting, because they did an experiment where this jewelry store was struggling to sell their jewelry so they kept discounting the prices and discounting and nothing changed. They didn't make any more sales, they actually made less sales. And then one day the owner of the store left a note for one of her employees to say, hey, reduce everything by 50%. And the employee accidentally read it by increase everything by 50%. And they did that and they had the best sale day of their life.
Speaker 1:Wow, really interesting. Yeah, it obviously industry dependent, but people associate a higher price with a better product and that's such a crazy thing to do, because when you're trying to disrupt markets and industries, the biggest thing to come down on is price and there's just like quite a fine line between like a realistic price and something that seems so ridiculous. It's too good to be true. Yeah, and I think it's super interesting that point.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, it's like you're always trying to figure out, like, how do you, like you know, look, the whole idea is to make it, the product or the service, more accessible and buying it, and so you're always trying to figure out okay, what's the price for that?
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I always compare it to like diamonds, for example, like if you told your fiance you bought her diamond ring at a 50% discount should be most of the time she'd be very upset about it. Yeah, they want you to pay a lot of money even though it's the same product.
Speaker 2:The same exact product.
Speaker 1:It's super interesting how people's brains work with money pricing. I also just realized we are running out of time. But yeah, I wanted to ask you before we go what advice would you give to other business owners looking to succeed in your industry and actually business owners in general.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean you know, yeah, so I do a lot of like, you know, startup advisory work and you know help, try to help people, you know, get their businesses moving. I always say, you know, product market fit first right, before you spend too much money on everything you know, really figure out that you tested it and know that what you have is going to actually be something that people really want. Just because you think they want it and you may want it and you talk to one or two people, that's not enough. You got to really do the research and test that out, because you could spend a whole lot of money and a whole lot of time building something and then find out that it doesn't really fit the market and there's really not a lot of need for it.
Speaker 2:And that's from my own experience, right, I've done it myself, right, I built the piece of software that you know I really thought was like because when I ran a business, it was a great piece of, I built it for myself. I thought it was amazing and I thought, and I had one or two people say, wow, that's really great, I would love to get that. Well, that was one or two. You need like a hundred, right? So I don't know why those just shot up. That was weird. But you know the I think you know that that is probably one of the places where I say you really need to focus your efforts in the beginning is doing the homework before you really get moving.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I couldn't agree more on that and I appreciate that. Thank you, and thank you for your time today, Mark. I've really enjoyed learning more about you and your business. What is the best way for people to reach out to Mark Snyderman if you have any offers for them to take advantage of or if they're looking to follow your journey?
Speaker 2:Sure, yeah, I mean you can follow me on. I'm on social media, everything is all the same. Mark Snyderman, m-a-r-c-s-n-y-d-e-r-m-a-n. That's on LinkedIn, instagram, tiktok. I also have a TikTok called bizlogi and there's a whole lot of videos there for you know, people just interested in learning about different portions of the law, different thoughts on ethics, on business. I put a lot of, I put a lot of content out, so that's probably the easiest way. Wwwmarksdydermancom. You know and you know my email is all in there and you can, you can reach me anywhere from there.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Thank you so much, Mark Thanks a lot, really appreciate it.