In this week’s Geek in Review, we sit down with Patrick Waldo, CEO of Unicorn Forms and proud Houstonian, to explore the intersections of data, document automation, and legal tech innovation. From the vibrant startup culture at Houston’s ION and the Capital Factory’s SXSW House event to the regulatory grind of form design, Waldo shares how his journey—from working in compliance-heavy industries to launching a playfully named but technically serious platform—is reshaping how we think about document-driven workflows.
Waldo pulls back the curtain on Unicorn Forms’ approach to digitizing and structuring data trapped in PDFs. With a background in regulatory intelligence, he understands firsthand how critical, yet painfully inefficient, static documents can be. Unicorn Forms aims to transform the “eight-and-a-half-by-eleven world” into structured, field-driven digital tools. By mimicking the look and feel of familiar e-sign interfaces while embedding structured fields and integrations like Calendly or Stripe, the platform bridges the gap between legal formality and technical interoperability.
Security and compliance are at the heart of the conversation as Waldo outlines the different levels of electronic trust, explaining how Unicorn Forms distinguishes itself with hashed documents, timestamp authorities, and encryption standards that exceed many traditional e-signature solutions. He highlights how many professionals—especially in legal, healthcare, and finance—aren’t aware of the risks they take when using non-secure PDFs for sensitive data like social security numbers or payment details.
The episode also dives into the often-overlooked role of data ontologies in making government and enterprise forms interoperable. Waldo describes the complexity behind something as seemingly simple as a name or address field and how lack of standardization leads to inefficiencies and errors. By applying his years of ontology-building experience, Unicorn Forms aims to enable more intuitive, human-readable, and system-compatible data capture, with real-world use cases already in place—like improving film permitting processes for the Houston Film Commission.
From a startup perspective, Waldo gets candid about fundraising challenges, the paradox of needing metrics to raise money and needing money to build metrics, and how early-stage companies must balance marketing, sales, and product development. He emphasizes the value of angel investors and local ecosystems like the ION and the Canon, while acknowledging the rising bar of investor expectations in today’s post-2023 funding environment.
Finally, Waldo shares his philosophy behind the Unicorn Forms brand—born as an April Fool’s joke but grown into a conversation starter and signal for early adopters. With Party City swag, a pink logo, and a message that draws in the curious and the creative, Unicorn Forms is redefining legal tech not just through software, but through an intentional, approachable identity. As Waldo looks ahead, he sees opportunity in pairing strong data engineering with AI tools—not just to automate, but to make legal and regulatory processes smarter, faster, and more human-centered.
Listen on mobile platforms: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube
[Special Thanks to Legal Technology Hub for their sponsoring this episode.]
Blue Sky: @geeklawblog.com @marlgeb
Email: geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com
Music: Jerry David DeCicca
Transcript
Greg Lambert (00:00)
Everyone this Greg Lambert with the Geek in Review and I’m here today with Stephanie Wilkins from Legal Technology Hub. Hey Stephanie, I understand you want to talk to us about agents today.
Stephanie Wilkins (00:07)
Hi, Greg.
Yeah, I do. It seems to be the thing everyone’s talking about today. It’s definitely one of the hottest topics. You’re probably hearing the term agentic AI pretty much everywhere it feels like right now. LTH has been covering agentic AI since late 2023, actually. So if you’re looking for content that will help you understand more what agents are and how you should think about them and what makes agentic AI different from what we’ve previously thought about as advanced AI, we’re a good source for that. When it comes to agents, there are a lot of different definitions
out there, everyone hasn’t quite agreed on what it is, but are different types of agents that means they’re cropping up in legal tech from chained prompts to fully autonomous systems. But essentially agents are that are able to undertake workflows end to end rather than reply step by step to an individual query.
In 2025 so far, we’ve seen a lot of agentic announcements coming out in legal tech. While one of the most recent was LexisNexis Protege, which is not just an in-app AI assistant, it is truly an agent. But we’ve also seen major agent announcements from companies like Legora, Harvey, BRYTER, DeepJudge, and several more. And we pretty much expect that we’ll see a lot more of those announcements coming out across 2025. It’s going to be one of the hottest topics of the year. So we’ll see more tech
products released with agentic AI at the core. And so what we always try to do is answer what does that mean for you? rise of the agents, if you will, means there are a lot of new considerations in terms of how to evaluate and buy AI that’s agentic as opposed to what you might have gotten used to in the last couple of years. So to help you stay up to date, we’ll be publishing content to help you work through all of those new complexities. You can find it by checking out our content on legaltechnologyhub.com and also remember to sign up for our newsletters.
you won’t miss an article.
Greg Lambert (01:56)
was great. Thanks, Stephanie.
Marlene Gebauer (02:05)
Welcome to The Geek and Review, the podcast focused on innovative and creative ideas in the legal industry. I’m Marlene Gabauer.
Greg Lambert (02:12)
And I’m Greg Lambert and this week we are talking to Patrick Waldo who is the CEO at Unicorn Forms and a fellow Houstonian. So Patrick, good to see you again and welcome to the Geek in Review.
Patrick Waldo (02:27)
Yeah, Greg and Marlene, it’s great to be here. Thank you for the opportunity.
Marlene Gebauer (02:32)
Yeah, so Patrick and I met at the ION at the Biketoberfest and he has since joined the Houston Legal Innovators group and we’re very happy to have him. So again, welcome, welcome Patrick.
Patrick Waldo (02:44)
Yeah, and shout out to Oleg for putting on such a great event at the ION. By Octoberfest, we’ve been sponsoring it for, I guess, three years in a row since it’s first started. So it’s really grown from, I don’t know, maybe 20 or 30 people who showed up for the first time to now there’s like a band and, you know, all these sponsors. So it’s a lot of fun. I know it’s just getting hot right now, but October is around the corner. it’s a big deal.
Marlene Gebauer (03:08)
Everybody, it’s a big deal.
So, Patrick, we were chatting before we started recording and you had mentioned to me that you just recently got back from South by Southwest. So, how was it?
Patrick Waldo (03:23)
Yeah, that’s right. South By this year was really, really good. I always love it. I lived in Austin, so I guess I’m required as a former citizen to kind of hate on South By as it takes over that lovely city. But I always like the energy that it brings to the town, all the pop-ups, all the events, all the side things that are happening. It’s just a lot of fun. You can really feel it when you just walk around the streets. This year was a little bit different.
because we were part of the Capital Factory House event. We’re a portfolio company. joined last summer and they’ve been phenomenal in helping us on our startup journey. And this was really a South By within a South By, if you can imagine that. And what I loved about it is when you think about the earlier days of South By, and by that I mean, you know, 10, 15 years ago, even though it was still a pretty big event, you got to actually like meet people and talk to people and
and get that kind of intimacy of discussion, whether it was potential customers or folks you were meeting while you were getting breakfast tacos, or even investors or folks on the financial side. And the Capital Factory has done a really good job of bringing that back to this event, which they called House. And so they had a startup call on Friday, and then they had a conference all week.
So it started from basically nine to five. There were some launch parties, for example, that were related to that. And there was a backstage. So if you wanted to take a break and meet fellow founders or other folks, you can kind of get to the top floor and have those more private conversations or even do some co-working while you were there. So it was just a really lovely event and we got to meet a lot of really great people.
Greg Lambert (05:08)
I guess the key point is, did you see any really good movies or did you hear any really good bands while you were there?
Patrick Waldo (05:15)
So I didn’t attend that part. So I was kind of sticking to my lane. In prior years, I got to see some really cool acts. But this year, we’re really in our marketing and sales motion. So I was like, I don’t have time for South By. I’ve got work to do, unfortunately. But my sister is a filmmaker and she actually just premiered her short film at the Houston Latino Film Festival this weekend.
So there’s a lot of great film in Houston. I know a lot of people talk about the Austin film scene and the music scene, but Houston has a lovely film community here. Alfred from the Film Commission is amazing and bringing talent and movies to town. So Mo on Netflix was the big show that recently got released. So yeah, but so she was in town and we got to get breakfast tacos together. So shout out to my big sister as my
She teaches film at HCC so she’s my film hero.
Greg Lambert (06:06)
Nice, nice. Yeah,
Marlene Gebauer (06:07)
Nice, very
Greg Lambert (06:07)
I
have one side story on Mo. So apparently in the first season, there’s a shooting at a grocery store and it just turns out that that grocery store is like my neighborhood grocery store. And so when I watched it, cause I watched it like when it first came out and then I just started monitoring my local Facebook, you know, neighborhood group.
Marlene Gebauer (06:07)
nice.
Patrick Waldo (06:10)
Mm.
Mm-hmm.
Marlene Gebauer (06:31)
next door
Greg Lambert (06:31)
to wait until somebody caught
Patrick Waldo (06:31)
Mm-hmm.
Greg Lambert (06:33)
that it was at that grocery store just so that everyone in the neighborhood could go ballistic that Netflix was showing a shooting in our neighborhood. So went over about like I thought it would.
Marlene Gebauer (06:38)
Hahaha.
Patrick Waldo (06:45)
Hmm, all good. Well, the film commission here is actually a client. were one of our, they were our very first paying clients. So all of the film, TV, music video, you know, all the productions that are brought to town get registered in our platform. So it helps them track their impact on the creative economy in the city. So as you get those reports and are you hiring local caterers or local talent and all the different things they can get those statistics.
Marlene Gebauer (06:46)
Nice. Nice.
Patrick Waldo (07:12)
from their PDFs, which is really what we’re all about.
Greg Lambert (07:15)
Data-driven decisions, imagine that.
Marlene Gebauer (07:17)
That’s
right. All right. So Patrick, you you had a very diverse career and you’ve said Unicorn Forms is a, I love this quote, is a data company that happens to live in an eight and a half by 11 world. So can you explain how you’re leveraging data to improve document management processes for legal professionals and how your approach differs from traditional document management solutions that are often based on PDFs?
Patrick Waldo (07:23)
Hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, I love that question. And in terms of my career, I spent 15 years building regulatory intelligence So were used by the largest food and beverage manufacturers and the biggest brands. We worked in consumer packaged goods and cosmetics. And later I got to do some work in pharmaceuticals. And whether it’s a warning letter from the FDA or a notice of inspection or whether it’s
how to, you know, all of the compliance around purchasing a material or an ingredient that goes into your food product. All of that happens in PDFs. And so there’s a lot of data that’s contained in documents. know that’s regulatory is kind of the black sheep of the legal world, right? So often when we talk about, you know, legal stuff, we want to talk about, you know, maybe we’ll talk about mediation or estate planning, but really we’re talking about, you know, litigation or…
contract law or we’re talking about corporate law in various ways. And yes, regulatory compliance is important, it’s legal, but often you’ll see matter experts that have a PhD in chemistry that are leading the compliance efforts rather than a legal team or the legal team will be a part of that process, but maybe not the head of that department. I have maybe a somewhat unique entry point to
the legal tech space, but ultimately what you see in many areas and we’re actually, we’ve got a partnership with Weevolve, which recently did the Dibank accelerator here in Houston, and they’re doing sports contracts. And there’s an amazing amount of data that’s contained, whether that’s pay or name, image and likeness rights, which is huge for college players. And all of that is contained within the contract.
in as data, as fields, if you will, in addition to all of the legalese elements that maybe you’re more familiar with in terms of are these clauses good or bad for whoever you’re representing? Is this good for the player? Is it good for the agent? So that obviously is important when you’re talking about the negotiation of a contract, but it ignores the data tracking.
that can occur within those types of contracts. And the example that I like to bring up a lot is the Capital Factory is wonderful in tracking the state of investment within the state of Texas, as well as nationally and internationally. And every year they give a sort of summit on the topic and they have all this data. Well, there’s just a lot of money that people are paying companies like Deloitte and other consulting folks to basically go through these documents and one by one,
retype all that information that could be structured data. Whereas if they were all our customers, we could create basically a data sharing agreement where all that data is now anonymous and you could have a live ticker of, this Texas company got a deal and this was their value cap and this was the discount and this was the whatever else. And that could just be a Power BI dashboard.
the VCs and angels and, you know, like Houston Angel Network and whoever else wanted to integrate and create that as a dashboard. So when you think about data management that requires a concept called a field, right, as a technical term. And if you’re using word you’re using a PDF or if you’re using Google Docs or whatever word editor or document editor, you don’t really have fields.
What that means is you need to use AI to extract that data and the AI in the document space is getting better and better, of course, but it is so much easier when you think about it as a data engineering problem rather than an artificial intelligence problem. So what we’re trying to do is to provide structure to documents so that they can become interoperable, they can become integratable, they can become systematized in a way that
they’re really not today. And we see that as a huge impact to the legal industry as well as the industries that we work in.
Greg Lambert (11:38)
Patrick, let me back up just a little bit on this and get a little more basic information from you. So does Unicorn Forms look like? Is it Word or is it a different interface? If I’m a user of the product, what am I seeing when I’m using the
Patrick Waldo (11:57)
Mm-hmm.
So we try to make it look and feel just like the eSign solutions that you’re familiar with. So that can be dragging in fields, whether that’s a signature field or first name, last name, address, any kind of field that you want to create. We can apply in a drag and drop interface. We also have a form interface, so just like job form, type form, Google forms. And then we have our own document editor.
And that’s important because we were able to provide all of the interactivity and data sharing within our product by basically reinventing what a document editor looks like. And under the hood, it’s basically all structured data. But what that allows you to do is to say, well, I have this intake process and I want to integrate with Calendly and Stripe. So you see this very commonly among mediators, right? So they need to book a mediation, pay the fee.
and then sign a couple contracts to say, they’re going to do this mediation. And it’s a pretty simple integration. we’re actually partnering with another Houston company called Bridgital to help lawyers and mediators do that type of automation for their clients. it looks like what you’re familiar with. So we didn’t want to make it super different because we know, especially within the legal space,
folks want to see something that they know, right? And lawyers love Word, you know, above all. And that’s actually a big barrier to lot of innovation within Legal Tech. So you’ll see a lot of Tech startups creating plugins to Word so that they can get some of their online features because a lot of their users just resist using any other product. we see that in our space as well, but our sweet spot is less in the drafting collaboration.
side of things and more on the, I’ve got this standard agreement that I’m pushing out. So this would be better for like in-house counsel for a corporation where they really want to systematize and create cookie cutters rather than the, you know, other lawyers who are really creating bespoke or unique documents that they’re drafting, you know, for their clients. And they might be starting from a template of sorts, but they’re really drafting it and thinking through the problem at hand.
rather than like, yep, here’s our standard agreement for these things and maybe we’ll negotiate a little bit, those are sort of like, negotiate these boxes and not everything.
Greg Lambert (14:22)
Now, you’ve named off a lot of things so far that, and I think a lot of people’s ears might have perked up when it comes to a lot of sensitive information that goes into these documents. I’m sure there’s a significance in the importance of the data security around the information that people are putting in when using unicorn forms.
and you’ve mentioned, you pricing, name, name, image and likeness, a lot of, personal identification information that’s that’s there. And I know that in the system that you have, you built in some extra layers of security, such as hashing and separation. So would you mind just kind of explaining a little bit of the of the.
technical behind what you’re doing to protect people’s information and especially when it comes to legal professions and how critical it is protect that information.
Patrick Waldo (15:18)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, I love this question. Cyber security is one of my favorite topics and I find myself really bringing awareness and educating customers about this. So I do think it’s really important, especially given my compliance background that compliance is sort of baked into the core of what we do.
so most people are not aware of what I like to call binding, high trust and high security. So what makes a contract legally binding can be as simple as us shaking hands and saying, we’re going to do work together. Right. It’s low trust, low security. So it’s, you know, one person’s word against another if there’s a dispute. Right. And that’s where really
we care about security is in the case of disputes, not when things go well, it’s when things go not so well. You’ve got a disagreement of some kind. The next level up is you send an email and you can actually for free, you can copy and paste an image of your signature. You can use preview if you’ve got a Mac, you can use Word, you can copy paste your signature.
You can actually, if you do a slash S, I don’t know if you know this, it’s a little hack. If you do slash S and then type in your name, the courts recognize that as a legal signature. So there’s many ways to create legally binding signatures, even electronic signatures, that have really no security and no trust behind them. And when I talk about trust and security, I mean them in a highly technical way because…
All of the eSign solutions on the market, including us, use a trust authority, which applies cryptography to the documents. And what that means is there’s a timestamp from a trust authority. So this is the trust model, not the trustless model like blockchain or web three or things like that. So the trust model says the US government says that these organizations called trust authorities, which we’re more familiar with in terms of like SSL certificates,
to ensure the web is safe for financial transactions and any transactions on the web are safe and secure. And so we have what’s called a document signing token. So it’s a very similar process where you can lock and have a hash of the document, which means it’s tamper-proof and fraud-proof. So if someone says, nope, this is the contract that was signed,
we can say at this time the server produced this document with this hash from this timestamp, and that is all a court admissible. It’s basically the equivalent of a wet signature. And that’s important because there are many, products that offer electronic signatures that don’t do any of that. You know, a click-through agreement is just a checkbox, but it may not be using a timestamp authority. So it’s important
when we talk about disputes, what is court admissible? What is on the burden of the person in dispute? What is the burden of the company? And how can you help them through that process to show that this happened at this time for these reasons and that you tracked the whole process? Like we sent this email at this time, they opened it at this email address from this IP address, they went to the page. So all of those things get tracked and that’s what enhances the trust.
The last part of this is the certificate is actually in someone’s name and we’re the only eSign provider that can sell you that trust certificate should you want that. And that is more important in areas where there’s more regulatory complexity like in Mexico or the European Union. The US actually has some of the weakest eSign legislation in the world. So when it comes to trust and security. So in Mexico,
for example, or in the European Union, you can use basically a USB device to sign your document. And that’s kind of like signing with your driver’s license. And that represents, that’s what’s called an advanced electronic signature. And that is the highest form of trust and security. And unless you work in the DoD, no one is signing that way, right? So we have, it’s sort of,
interesting in the US that we have some of the weaker security and trust legislation on the market. And so we try to take it that extra level by saying, hey, you know, this is what an electronic signature actually means, just so that people are aware of it. This is what’s legally binding. This is your risk profile. So you can say, yep, I really don’t need any of that. I don’t care. Usually you start caring when you get fined, right? Or you get into dispute.
Marlene Gebauer (19:48)
you
Patrick Waldo (19:49)
They’re like, no, I could have done something different, but that’s more of a marketing issue. Making people aware that cybersecurity is important is a challenge. And then lastly, the data contained with it, we encrypt, of course, in transit as well as at rest. We’ve got multiple layers of hashing. And that’s important because when you think about social security numbers as a great example, or credit card numbers,
So many people are using eSign tools that are not PCI compliant, that’s the payment card industry, for things like credit card authorization, right? So like GEMS, for example, will do this. They’ll keep your credit card on file so that they can charge you later because they know that if they get you at the door with your credit card, they can just charge you two weeks later, you know? And there’s a surprising number of spaces that use that and it’s really not.
PCI compliant at all, which means you’ve got credit card numbers and social security numbers and other information that’s not really masked, or it doesn’t get masked when it gets sent back to you as a PDF via email. And that’s a huge problem because when we talk about in transit with documents, it means both HTTPS, which is the protocol that encrypts our web transactions, but it also means attachment via email.
which is highly insecure. And I think lawyers need to particularly understand how we’re sharing information when it comes to PDFs, that there’s a real lack of security concern in many areas. Unless you’re maybe at a bigger, like we have a partnership with Latham and Walkins and they have a secure portal, but I’ll be honest, many lawyers I know that have that available to them are like, oh, I have to set you up and oh, it’s a drag. And so, you know, I get it, but security is important.
Marlene Gebauer (21:29)
Hahaha.
Greg Lambert (21:32)
Let me
just send it to you via email and we’ll make it easy.
Marlene Gebauer (21:34)
Yeah, yeah. I’m
just surprised that banks and other organizations aren’t demanding this and saying, isn’t everybody using this type of technology?
Patrick Waldo (21:49)
Yeah,
well, it’s interesting because when you talk about HIPAA, for example, HIPAA is far more of a privacy agreement or framework than a cybersecurity framework. So as legislation changes and as there’s more requirements at the state level or at the federal level for higher security, then people will need to comply and they’ll be forced to do it. But if they’re not forced to do it, then…
Marlene Gebauer (21:55)
Yeah.
Patrick Waldo (22:16)
They’re like, well, what do I need to do? What am I required to do? What’s the best practice? What’s my budget? And what we’re trying to do.
Marlene Gebauer (22:25)
which is different, like the best
practice and what you’re required to do could be like two very different things. And it sounds like it is.
Patrick Waldo (22:30)
Totally different.
Absolutely. Yeah. And so we’re trying to make it cost effective to do the best practice instead of getting hosed on price because you’re sending maybe 50 documents a month. And most plans are locked at 10 a month in terms of the pricing plans that are available.
Marlene Gebauer (22:48)
So I’m going to put my data KM hat on for my next question. Patrick, you’ve spoken before about the challenges of interoperability with government forms and how many PDFs have poorly configured or missing fields. So.
How does unicorn forms address that problem and what’s your approach to creating human readable ontologies for the data?
Patrick Waldo (23:14)
Yeah, so I have a 15 year career building ontologies, particularly in regulatory compliance. And this is a massively important technical area. It’s also an important area when we talk about government efficiency, which is obviously in the news a lot these days. And we’re not going to necessarily chat about the approaches pro or con about what’s going on. But at the end of the day, the government
is a bureaucracy. And when you think about folks who write about bureaucracy, the only one who ever had an imagination around what bureaucracy could be was Kafka. And he typically thought of nightmares rather than joyous experiences. But bureaucracies at their core are document-making institutions. So documents are what government does.
and it’s how it’s the primary store of information. know, government contractors have created a litany of databases, which is great. We’ve seen some reports about, you know, the good and the bad and the ugly around, you know, government databases. And that is a huge problem when it comes to interoperability because the PDFs are really not interoperable. So even with what’s called an XFA form,
which is when you make a form fillable PDF, there’s very little controls that you can use in Adobe Acrobat. You really have to get under the hood and do like PostScript and other more advanced document editing to get dropdown menus. Or for example, most people will use check boxes instead of, you know, single select or multi-select. So there’s no like radio button.
There’s no like, I only want an integer in this field if it’s price. I want these fields to be required versus not required. So as you or like with the Department of Energy, which is a great example or the railroad commission forms that are here in Texas, they’ll give you all these reports that you’re required to fill in, but then you go to an online portal where you have to retype all that information. So it’s like the government is spending money creating form fillable PDFs.
which is fine, but then they’re spending money to create online interfaces to collect that information and then recreate the PDF. Whereas for us, it’s one process. So as you design the document, you’re also designing the form input portal. So that can be a form friendly experience. And you can see that online right now at the Houston Film Commission for the Motion Picture TV Registration Forum.
It looks like a web-based form, but it populates a document on the other side, and it applies that electronic signature. So all they had to do was put in an embed code in their website, and they were done. And when you talk about the data fields, which is really the key part of interoperability, it’s a plumbing problem. When you think about last name, family name, surname, these are all synonyms for the same field.
you can have full name versus first name and last name, right? You can have first name, last name, and then middle initial or middle name, you know? or addresses can be displayed in a variety of different ways. You’d be surprised how complex addresses can actually be when you get into data processing. It’s a lot of fun. But why aren’t address lookups like Google Maps, for example?
where this gets stored in a common format. And you can say, well, I’ve got a display issue in this form where I need address and suite here in this line versus address and suite in this line, or I need last name, middle initial, first name versus some other order. That’s a layout problem where based on the coordinates of the fields, this data needs to go here, here, and here. But from a data perspective, it’s just the same data.
Right? So from a structured data perspective, which is our focus, we want to make sure that the data gets grouped in a way that’s easy to do so that I can say, anytime I put the name of my business, it is the name of the business on every form that I complete and same thing for my end users. And that I can remember that the next time they come to document that I need to fill in some.
So that could be true for something as complicated as enrollment, or we do a lot of government benefit applications, which can be 20 pages long, right? With hundreds of fields. And that allows you, so for example, with one of our early clients, we took a review and approval process from 30 days to same day processing. So that’s what happens when you get the data engineering right.
and you can get interoperability between their enterprise systems, the documents, the mobile-friendly interfaces. And it just brings tremendous benefit, not only to the administrators who need to manage these processes, but also the end users that they’re serving. And we see a huge need for that in government. Government contracting for a startup is not very easy, but we keep putting in applications and we’ve got some exciting things that we’re cooking up right now.
Wish us luck. But yeah.
Greg Lambert (28:26)
Yeah.
Well, you just described about three hours of my morning today when I was last name, first name, because I was getting these reports from the opposing side. And of course, even though they were the same report, in some of the reports it was full name, in some of the reports it was last name, comma, first name, and then hyphenated names. So yeah, would have saved a lot of time if I could have gotten that, you know.
Patrick Waldo (28:32)
no.
Marlene Gebauer (28:32)
you
Patrick Waldo (28:54)
Mm-hmm.
Greg Lambert (28:55)
and organized in a way that makes sense.
Patrick Waldo (28:59)
yeah. There’s some great posts. It’s like things programmers forget about names or things programmers forget about addresses. So for example, you might think logically that there are no negative addresses, but there are in the world. Or for example, it’s very common in certain cultures to have two last names representing maternal and paternal lineages.
Marlene Gebauer (28:59)
It’s uniform,
Patrick Waldo (29:20)
colloquially, we refer to one of the last names versus the other. So when it comes to disputes and you see one name, it’s, well, who is this? Is this person the name on their driver’s license? Or who’s this person? And we saw this a lot, actually, when we were doing FDA analytics. When you’re going to a plant, it’s like, well, which plant did you go to? Which building? Which warehouse? What does this address mean?
Marlene Gebauer (29:29)
Right. Is that the right person?
Patrick Waldo (29:49)
and who did you talk to and what did you look at? things like that are, should be, it’s not something that most people think about as complex until you’re in the weeds of it and you’re like, wow, if I could just query this and organize all this data based on this name, because I know that this is the name, you know, that would save you a tremendous amount of time. But the AI is maybe good at summarizing information.
It’s not very good at technical terms or understanding that these technical terms are related. And that’s where, as Marlene was talking about, the ontology really needs to come in and be added to the AI. But who’s going to do that for things like names? That’s a huge effort. And we spent years with subject matter experts building our ontologies. Often, the dirty secret of AI is so much of the core
Infrastructure is manually done. you’ve got teams all around the world really manually processing and creating these ontologies even today.
Greg Lambert (30:50)
man, we could go on on that one. Patrick, I wanted to reach back on something that you had mentioned in our South by Southwest conversation. was being a part of Capital Factory. I know as a startup, you look at your funding and you had talked recently about what investors are focusing in on the metrics.
Patrick Waldo (30:52)
Yeah.
Marlene Gebauer (30:52)
On that one, yeah. It’s
been a long-term problem.
Greg Lambert (31:16)
you know, with startups and things like customer acquisition costs, there’s, you know, lifetime value and growth. So how, you know, being a startup, how has this kind of influenced your strategy there at Unicorn Forms and, you know, what specific steps are you taking to kind of build that sales pipe?
Patrick Waldo (31:37)
Yeah, so the Capital Factory has been wonderful and their mentor network, the advice that they provide. They also have a number of academies. So they have a fundraising academy, for example, that they do. The ION and the Canon also have a lot of great programs that I think everyone should take advantage of. And it’s really challenging because often founders
are really good at one thing or a couple things. But when you step into that CEO seat or that founder seat, you really have to do a lot of things that you’re maybe not so good at. So for me, I’m a technical product person. It’s very apparent even on this interview, I just kind of go dive in right in the technical part of things. It’s a bad habit. I’m really trying to be far more comprehensible so that people can really understand what
what we’re doing and why it’s important. But everyone comes to the founder seat with their, you know, how they’ve been shaped by their career, right? And what they’re good at. And when you talk about fundraising, there’s, you know, family and friend rounds, I think are far too often overlooked, or angel investing as well. Because that’s really how most startups get their start.
And it’s actually not about growth metrics at all. You’re too early for that. Someone has to believe in you as a founder. Someone has to believe in you and your track record, and they have to believe in the vision. And they need to have just enough data that this is going to be successful or that they believe you. But a lot of it is, hey, I’ve got this prototype. I’ve got these early adopters. I’ve got something here to show that there’s a business.
And those early rounds are where the founder really needs to tap their network. And I think a lot of founders just need to be aware that that’s an important part of the fundraising journey is raising from family and friends and other angels. Angels are really hard to find. There’s a lot of great networks like the Houston Angel Network or CTAN, the Central Texas Angel Network, or in Dallas. I think it’s called the North Texas Angel Network, if I’m not mistaken.
And you’ll see them around at various events like South by or, you know, at the ION, have every month they have a software day where sometimes, you know, some of the founders or sorry, some of the angel networks will be present. But really it’s a journey of warm introductions. And that is really hard to do when you’ve got a business to run. Right. It’s like, am I doing marketing and sales or am I raising money?
And what we’ve really tried to focus on over the last six months is just marketing and sales. Because I know that we’re at a point where we’ve got our early traction. We’ve got customers who love the product. We’ve been around for a couple of years. And whenever I talk to VC, they want to see growth metrics. And so I know exactly what the seed series A, even a lot of the pre-seed VCs want.
And that’s where raising that early funds to build out that team is important. But at a certain point, especially now, funding is back to the 2014 levels. So it’s much harder to raise today than it ever was before. With the current economy, it just becomes harder and harder. Everyone says, oh, well, we’ll until this, that, and the other are better.
In 2023, most funds weren’t deploying a dollar, you know, or maybe they would do one deal. 2024, things opened up again. So you really have to understand when you’re raising funds, what VCs want to see. And this isn’t really an interview process. It’s not a, hey, let me just pitch and money is going to come. You know, I think there’s too many YouTube videos focusing on pitch practice. You got to understand.
and build a relationship with VCs and what each individual VC that you’re talking to, what they like to see, what their metrics are. And that becomes a homework assignment where you then go do it. And either you can execute on it and you can create those numbers or you can’t. And if you can’t, that’s your feedback to say, well, do I get out of the game and do something different, which is very, very hard for people to think about.
Or do I need to recruit people because you don’t have the skill set to do that? But if you as the founder are saying, well, I could meet these metrics if I raise money, now you’re in the chicken or the egg, or either you’re spending all your time raising money and networking and not working on the metrics, which you know will make raising money easier. So every founder has to solve that chicken or the egg sort of paradoxical situation. It is inherently
Paradoxical, that’s the name of the game. It is this impossible bar that everyone has to meet. And the reason why you have to meet that impossible bar is because even of, you know, pre-seed institutional backed startups, 90 % of them fail. So the bar is high because it needs to be high and not everyone is going to make it. So focusing on your business, whether you’re bootstrapped or you’ve got some funding is ultimately the best way to raise money.
and making your product exciting to customers is ultimately going to be exciting to VCs. And if you can hit those growth metrics so that you’re really cooking, well, maybe you don’t need to raise money at all. So you’ve got a lot of choices there depending on what happened as a founder.
Marlene Gebauer (37:06)
Yeah, it’s interesting because you’re talking about the relationships and we had Zach Posner on a couple weeks ago from the Legal Technology Fund and he basically was saying the same thing. It’s about having faith in the founders and seeing if they are flexible in terms of kind of the feedback that’s being given in terms of what they’re looking for and what they want. So you’re spot on with that too.
Patrick Waldo (37:17)
Mm-hmm.
Marlene Gebauer (37:30)
got
a shout to the Canon. I was there a couple weeks ago for a seminar and I had never been there before. didn’t know what it was. So you’re right. It’s actually a pretty cool space. if anybody wants to check that out, go ahead.
Patrick Waldo (37:35)
Hmm.
Yeah, and we’ve got an affiliate
relationship with the Canon. So if you’re a Canon member, you get a discount on our product. So we’re very happy to be part of the Canon. We love to go to the ION as well. We love to support the Houston ecosystem. But I have to, if there’s, yeah. Yeah.
Marlene Gebauer (37:55)
They’re both a different feel. They’re a different feel for both of them. So
that’s cool. So.
Patrick, you have described the name Unicorn Forms as a wink and a nod to the technology industry. that, you know, yes, it is, we get it. And that it reflects the company’s focus on enabling the user as the magic behind the solution. And can you discuss how that philosophy plays into your long-term vision for the company and how you see it impacting the legal technology space specifically?
Patrick Waldo (38:08)
Mm.
Yeah, so the name started out as a joke on April Fool’s Day. So we were originally called Legal Docs Pro. And so if you can imagine, it was like corporate blue. Because one of our early use cases was actually in estate planning. So I thought that this was going to be a total legal tech play to help particularly estate planners, because they’ve got a lot of templates, whether that’s a living wills are a little bit more, or sorry.
Marlene Gebauer (38:32)
you
Patrick Waldo (38:53)
Final estate plans are a little more complicated, but when you get to things like living wills, advanced directives, transfer on death needs, those are all pretty formulaic. Or setting up trusts is a pretty standard process of, need to use these forms to get this thing done. Which again is our primary focus. But people loved the name. I think my wife thought I was going through a midlife crisis when I was coming up with names, but
I was just like, I need something more fun that’s a little bit more me. I actually spent the early part of my career working with artists. So I’m a very creative, artsy person. I don’t look like your traditional tech founder. so Unicorn Forum seemed to have a ring to it. It kind of breaks all the rules around naming a startup, which would be like one syllable or two syllables. We’re going with… Yeah, right. Yeah.
Marlene Gebauer (39:35)
spelled correctly.
Patrick Waldo (39:39)
And then using unicorn, we’re all talking about unicorns as like, a billion dollar valued companies. And it’s just this term that’s used all the time. And as I was thinking about it, I was like, well, the first rule of unicorn forums is that there are no unicorns in the visual branding. So we worked with an artist out of New Orleans to do all of our work. And so it’s like, there are people with like party hats that look like
horns, but they’re not. just like little, but people see unicorns in our branding and people will actually come to our desk or a table just to hang out. And you know, cause they, they like, you know, our vibe, which is important from a visual brand perspective, we stand out. you know, when you look across the room and you see that pink logo, it’s just immediately recognizable. so I’m really glad that we ended up.
sticking with the joke and we try to make it fun. So we have like no corporate swag. My co-founder actually hates this. She’s always trying to get us to do t-shirts. There’s actually no study that shows that swag helps you with marketing. So it’s basically a waste of time and money. And so I decided early on all of our stuff is going to come from Party City.
And because, know, as I was talking, especially you see this with lawyers and conference goers, you know, they’re away from their families and, you know, they want something fun to bring back to their kids. Right. And so people will stop by the booth and they’ll see the toys that we have and they’ll be like, my God, my kid’s going to love this. This is great. I’m so glad I stopped by and then I can just have a conversation with them and see if they’re interested or they’re not. And so we want something to be like actually used.
Greg Lambert (40:56)
Thank
Patrick Waldo (41:22)
rather than contribute to the microplastic problem in the oceans, right? With all the swag that gets put out there. So we try to make it fun, engaging, immediately recognizable. And so far, that’s really worked. Some people don’t like the name, and that’s actually really good as well, because when you think about your message and your ideal customer, messaging has a way of bringing people in, as well as pushing people away.
And so if you’re like, no, I don’t want to work with a company whose brand color is pink, you’re probably not an early adopter, which means our conversation for me is going to be a complete waste of time. So if people are like, pink, boo, you know, we need more, you know, male energy in this space or whatever. It’s like, great. You’re not our customer anyways, because you’re probably looking for different things or you’re, you want a big enterprise, you know, something, and we’re just not set up for that.
the folks that come to us are like, oh yeah, this is cool, this is different, it’s new, I want to try something that’s new and different. And so as a startup, you got to attract those people to your table or to your message or to your marketing. And so we found that our visual branding really helps with that as well.
Greg Lambert (42:29)
Well, Patrick, we are at the point now where I’m going to ask you to pull out your crystal ball and peer into the future for us. looking into that crystal ball, what changes or challenges do you see on the horizon that either you or you think the industry is going to have to address here in the short term up to a couple of years from now?
Patrick Waldo (42:37)
Ha ha.
well, I don’t think I have any answers. There’s a great quote from Vaclav Havel, the former president of the Czech Republic. And he said, find people who seek the truth and run from those who found it. Something like that. whoever’s promising the truth probably doesn’t have it.
I think there’s a tremendous opportunity with the AI products that are in the market. Personally, I feel that we’re in the very, very early days. mean, think about when search was hugely competitive at the end of the 90s. I was actually just thinking about this when I was at South By. Google didn’t become Google until the dot com crash, right? They weren’t the dominant player. They didn’t have
product market fit. They didn’t have their business model when you think about those earlier days. So I think that what’s going to happen with the current bubble is at a certain point it’s going to pop and we’ll see who the winners and the losers are. And the company, you see this with Airbnb, you know, at the end of 2008 financial or the 2008 recession, you know, you get companies that become the biggest players.
during the hard time. So I think we’re seeing a lot of competitive movement, and it’s very, very exciting. But we don’t really know who’s going to win this game just yet. I still think, personally, that there’s a lot to be done with machine learning, what we used to call machine learning. Decision trees are super powerful. They’re also super accurate. They’re easy to build.
Marlene Gebauer (44:24)
Mm-hmm.
Patrick Waldo (44:29)
And the data engineering is often the hardest part of any AI projects. Why should you trust me? I have two patents in natural language processing for my former work in regulatory compliance. I’ve parsed a lot of documents. I’ve been using all the AI tools. I’ve built my own AI tools back in the day. I’ve used BERT before all the LLM stuff came into play. There’s a lot of exciting things, but if you don’t get the data engineering right,
the AI is simply inaccurate. And depending on your use case, either you need accuracy and you need reliability. You need to have the same answer every single time. It’s a cog in a wheel. Or you can handle some sort of vagary or ambiguity or inconsistency there. So what I see in our markets, I mean, it’s sort of crazy for us to go after the eSign world since there’s all these incumbent players, but there are so many sectors
that are actually not using eSign at all. And so I see that there’s a big need still for traditional SaaS companies that need to use AI to help them better target their market. Because at the end of the day, what’s happening is it’s easier and easier to build a product today leveraging AI tools, but it’s harder and harder to market it, to get beyond the noise of the hype of,
all the content that’s now easier to create. So what that means is people could say, I can put this together and go to market, but they need to stand out. And those are the fundamentals of any time period. And I think that leveraging AI to help you in that journey is really going to be the thing that makes a difference, especially in B2B SaaS, that many of the AI features that you see on the market
may or may not be helpful, but the things that help them get over the hump are what will help them execute in terms of marketing or sales funnel. So I see that as the most interesting part of the game.
Greg Lambert (46:26)
Well, Patrick Waldo from Unicorn Forms in Party City swagged at the booths. So thank you very much for coming in and talking with us today on the Geek in Review. It’s been fun.
Patrick Waldo (46:33)
Yeah.
Yeah, thank you so much.
Marlene Gebauer (46:42)
And thanks to all of you, our listeners, for taking the time to listen to the Geek in Review podcast. If you enjoy the show, share it with a colleague. We’d love to hear from you on LinkedIn and Blue Sky.
Greg Lambert (46:52)
And Patrick, we’ll make sure that we put links on the show notes, but what’s the best way for listeners to reach out and learn more about unicorn forms or to reach out to you?
Patrick Waldo (47:03)
Yeah, find me on LinkedIn, so Patrick Waldo. You can also go to our website, unicornforms.com, all one word. We’ve got an intake form. And if you want to email me, it’s patrick at unicornforms.com. Again, all one word.
Marlene Gebauer (47:18)
And as always, the music you hear is from Jerry David DeCicca Thank you, Jerry.
Greg Lambert (47:24)
All right, thanks, Jerry. Talk to you later, Marlene.
Marlene Gebauer (47:26)
Okay, bye.