S2 | E7 — Min-Kyu Jung (Co-founder & CEO at Ivo) on creating AI-powered legal assistants; the journey from NZ corporate law to leading a hot Silicon Valley startup & why others should move there too.

Min-Kyu Jung is the CEO and co-founder at Ivo, an AI contract law assistant for legal teams, which has raised $6.2 million in funding total from investors including Uncork Capital, Fika Ventures, GD1, Phase One, and Daniel Gross.

Min-Kyu got the idea for Ivo (previously Latch) while working as a corporate lawyer in New Zealand, when he saw how much time, effort and money were spent drawing up agreements. His entrepreneurial streak got the better of him — drawn to what he saw as “low-hanging fruit”, under-optimised processes around him in the legal profession, he taught himself how to code in two months and took the leap to start a startup.

Ivo works in Microsoft Word to explain legal terms, determine if clauses are market standard and instantly create a summary of an agreement to help speed up the process.

After a cold outbound DM landed him an angel investment from Daniel Gross in San Francisco, he moved his whole team over for an initial three months — and never looked back. He thinks other kiwi founders - at least those who aspire to be at the frontiers of AI - should do the same, and issues a challenge to other founders to reflect on where they need to locate to maximise their chances of success.

He’s not afraid to roll up his sleeves and do the work to sell, get connected with people... even if that means lots of cold outbound:

“Kiwis tend to be modest and avoid making impositions on others. You will need to overcome this cultural quirk and simply cold email / DM people you find interesting.”

We talk about how social capital flows in the Bay Area, and how it helped him build a local network, recruit his team, land hundreds of customer conversations, and more:

“The SF Bay Area has a strong culture of paying it forward. Successful people here are often willing to spend time and social capital helping founders with no network if they seem to be working on something interesting.”

We talk about his thesis for AI product development, how founders should think about designing user experiences, how Ivo handles issues with Large Language Model (“LLM”) reliability and hallucinations, and how he’s preparing to leverage ever more powerful AI models to his advantage in coming years.

This was a fun episode to record — we look forward to your feedback!!  

Where to find Min-Kyu online:

* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/min-kyu-jung/

* Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/mkjung

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