Agile Businesses: Harish Daiya Of Lumenci On How Businesses Pivot and Stay Relevant In The Face of Disruptive Technologies

An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

Build momentum and show patience: Building a great company requires long-term thinking and short-term action. All experiments may not work out as imagined, or an experiment may take more time to materialize than expected — focusing on the action but being patient with the results is key.

As part of my series about the “How Businesses Pivot and Stay Relevant In The Face of Disruptive Technologies”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Harish Daiya, co-founder and CEO of Lumenci.

Harish shapes Lumenci’s mission, vision, and principles and is in charge of growth, strategy, culture, execution, partnerships, and launching new businesses. He is a serial entrepreneur, technology executive, and angel investor and has successfully built startups, technology, sales, board advisory groups, and product teams. Harish is an IIT Kharagpur (Comp Sci.) alumnus.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?

I come from a small town called Jodhpur in India and studied Computer Science & Engineering at IIT Kharagpur. I visited US for the first time in 2008, eventually moving to Austin, TX in 2010. I was very fortunate to work in a startup right out of college, which gave me tremendous opportunities to fail, learn, and grow as a professional. Most importantly, I learned how to think like an entrepreneur and have a beginner mindset. Since then, I have lived in many bustling places like Austin, Silicon Valley, and NY; where I built sales, operations, and product teams remotely.

While in Silicon Valley, I got the opportunity to meet amazing founders and invest in early-stage startups and protocols. In 2014, I was thinking of pursuing my MBA, but instead started investing my tuition money into early-stage startups & Web 3.0 protocols. Since then, I have invested in more than 50 early-stage startups & funds in Crypto/Defi, AI, Medical Devices, Space Exploration, Robotics, Software infrastructure, Metaverse and B2B SaaS space. I witnessed the power of innovation first-hand, seeing how free-flowing ideas & execution has the capacity to disrupt the incumbents.

The legal and IP services space has always fascinated me. It is a ~$350B industry in the US alone. What is interesting about this space is that while we see the latest technological advancements across many industries, the legal services space is still largely untouched by advanced technology. A lawyer’s job involves multiple skills: creativity, empathy, emotional intelligence, ability to think rationally in grey areas, and the ability to think on both sides of an argument. With the advancements in Web 3.0, AI, and Remote working, we are moving towards a world where creative work will have tremendous value, while repeatable tasks will get automated. We started Lumenci with the thesis that the legal & IP services industry will need tools and domain expertise to upgrade itself — and that is what we are building.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lessons or ‘take aways’ you learned from that?

Well, I have made many mistakes and witnessed many failures. The funniest one was when we were finalizing our first office space in India and trying to review, negotiate & execute lease agreements. I made the mistake of underestimating the extent of manual process needed to get simple legal paperwork executed. For a simple office lease, it took us 3 months to finish attorney reviews, negotiations, edits to the documents and physical signatures by different stakeholders. Keep in mind, no electronic signatures were allowed then, so we had to dispatch documents by courier). We still laugh about it, but at that time, it did not seem so funny!

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?

I am thankful to all my mentors, advisors, friends, family, and well-wishers who have helped me throughout my career. Most importantly, I am super grateful to all our customers and employees who showed faith in us when we started.

Extensive research suggests that “purpose driven businesses” are more successful in many areas. When your company started, what was its vision, what was its purpose?

We are on a mission to upgrade and enhance legal & IP services space and enable our customers to become efficient, innovative, insightful, and successful. As an innovation-first company, we keep the pulse on the latest technological breakthroughs, and how that will shape the future market leaders & their intellectual property moats (IP-Moats).

Thank you for all that. Let’s now turn to the main focus of our discussion. Can you tell our readers a bit about what your business does? How do you help people?

We help high-growth innovative companies build, leverage, and monetize their intellectual property moats (IP-Moats). Warren Buffet popularized the concept of building Moats for a business, which determines the competitive advantage and its durability in the long term. A high-growth innovative company not only competes for the market share, but also for the innovation share. Specially, when an innovative company is creating a market category, capturing innovation becomes even more critical. While there is abundant literature and coaching around how to capture market share depending on the type of business, technology, and market segment; there is limited awareness on how to build, leverage and monetize IP-Moats. We are on a mission to change that.

As a technology company mature and go past Series A/B, they need to capture and capitalize the innovation within the company, stay abreast of the technological disruptions and create a long-term strategic and durable competitive advantage using its intellectual property (IP). Creating IP-Moats (Intellectual Property Moats) becomes a critical business strategy tool for a technology-driven business and helps in three different areas:

Defensibility: Capture and safeguard innovation by converting them into strategic patent portfolios.

Enforceability: Generate leverage w.r.t competitors.

Opportunity: Create long- term compounding effect of continued return on investment in innovation by monetizing IP-Moats.

Which technological innovation has encroached or disrupted your industry? Can you explain why this has been disruptive?

Technological innovations continue to enhance, rather than disrupt, the legal industry. Post-COVID, there has been a shift in how the legal industry views technology adoption and is more amenable to make the legal processes much more efficient. With the push towards work from home, combined with technical innovations like machine learning, web 3.0, workflow automation, data analytics, action-oriented dashboards, the legal industry is now adopting and embracing cutting-edge technology.

What did you do to pivot as a result of this disruption?

We started the company under the premise that the legal and IP services industry will need tools and domain expertise to evolve. We were already building the right infrastructure to seamlessly move through the disruptive period caused by COVID. Not only did we seamlessly move to remote working, but we also double downed on our commitments toward building Enterprise products that help legal and IP teams become more efficient, productive and improve workflow automation. Since then, we have been building, iterating, and launching our products.

Was there a specific “Aha moment” that gave you the idea to start this new path? If yes, we’d love to hear the story.

Since day 1, we have wanted to be an automation and innovation-oriented company. We have internalized the concept of automation and constantly try to find or build tools which make our business more efficient & our customers more successful. The more we talked to our customers about the strategies we are adopting or tools we are adopting or building, the more they were interested in getting access to the right tools and products.

So, how are things going with this new direction?

Things are going great. Credit goes to all Luminaries (Lumenci employees), who readily adapted to the changed way of working, put in extra effort to keep constant communication across teams, maintained compliances, and, at the same time, delivered outstanding results for our customers. During this time, we realized that we are an antifragile culture — we become better during challenging and disruptive periods. During COVID, we have grown our team size by 50%, and we continue to double down on our product and workflow automation initiatives.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started this pivot?

Since we started to adopt new tools and technologies in our day-to-day working, our efficiency has grown. At the same time, the quality of our work has also improved.

What would you say is the most critical role of a leader during a disruptive period?

One of the key roles of effective leaders, especially during a disruptive period, is to stay calm, bring the team together, infuse enthusiasm within the team, and steer the team in the right direction with focused plan of action. One key strategy which I have found to be useful is to assess how a disruption can be turned into an opportunity. Then, create a plan of action on the aspects which will gain from said disruption. Sense of urgency and timing also become critical, so the teams need to executive quickly and efficiently.

When the future seems so uncertain, what is the best way to boost morale? What can a leader do to inspire, motivate and engage their team?

Nothing is permanent, and the future is not the same as the past. When the horizon of the ambitions is long-term, smaller speed bumps are just a part of the journey. Leaders of an organization must revert to the founding values of the organization and focus on why they got started in the first place. And use those values to guide their team through the future, however uncertain that might look. At Lumenci, one of our key culture codes is thinking long-term — and when we have an ambitious mission, the short-term uncertain future does not seem that uncertain.

Is there a “number one principle” that can help guide a company through the ups and downs of turbulent times?

The key is to figure out how to turn a challenging situation into an advantageous one and execute based on the opportunity hidden in the challenge. We as a company realized that during COVID, we became even more efficient, and the quality went up — which speaks volumes about the antifragile culture which we have built. There is always an opportunity hidden in a crisis — playing on the front foot and turning an adverse situation into an opportunity is the key principle to follow during turbulent times.

Can you share 3 or 4 of the most common mistakes you have seen other businesses make when faced with disruptive technology? What should one keep in mind to avoid that?

Every business is a technology-driven business, so disruption is to be embraced to stay ahead. Here are some aspects which need to be avoided:

• Lack of intelligent risk-taking — Risk is a good thing — no risk means no reward. With no risk, companies are less likely to fail, but also less likely to innovate. Embracing a beginner mindset helps in taking intelligent risks to stay ahead of the innovation curve and ahead of the competition; and have building blocks in place for possible pivot in case of a disruptive technology comes along.
• Lack of preparation — It is a critical aspect of company leadership to look around the corners and predict the risks which the business would face. Start with the biggest risks to be solved first. Companies often think about capital allocation as Time v. Money allocated; but it is more important to think about it as money spent v. risks removed — assessing what are the biggest risks for the business and preparing ahead to solve the biggest risks first either via solving it or pivoting at the right time.
• Hiring strategy: Team building is critical for a company at any stage. Team building needs to be thought of as a talent pool engineering exercise, because at the end of the day, a company’s product or service is built by its employees. Building the talent gene pool of the company for the risks the business wants to take helps prepare and pivot during disruption. The right gene pool in the company needs to have a balance mix of explorers and executors. Executors execute based on the current boundaries of a business and explorers explore & develop new ideas. If a company can be designed to be disrupted by itself, it becomes immune to outside disruptions, in fact, does better in the event of any disruption.

Ok. Thank you. Here is the primary question of our discussion. Based on your experience and success, what are the five most important things a business leader should do to pivot and stay relevant in the face of disruptive technologies? Please share a story or an example for each.

The leaders of an organization need to have the right preparation and building blocks in their company to pivot in the face of any disruption.

1. Take intelligent risk: Building the right culture in the organization by shifting the mindset from avoiding risks to proactively taking intelligent risks is a great way to hedge against the disruption in the market. Taking asymmetric risks and investment in exploratory ideas is important.
2. Engineer talent gene pool — Business leaders need to proactively take intelligent risks and hire for mitigating those risks. A great team needs both great executors and great explorers. Executors are great at doubling down and executing on the things which are known to be working, explorers wander around and figure out the next zero to one idea which can potentially change the trajectory of the initial idea on which the company was formed. This is especially true for startups, as they seldom become successful based on the original idea. Hence a balanced mix of talent most suited for the proactive risks which the business leaders take is critical.
3. Invest in Innovation — Once the right team is built and the culture has been set, the business leaders need to continuously invest in innovation. Investing in innovation helps solve for the problems the leaders don’t know of yet but acts as critical foundation when faced with disruption.
4. Build IP-Moats: Any high growth innovative company not only competes for the market share but also for the innovation share. Building IP-Moats in a critical long-term business strategy for capturing Innovation Share. IP-Moats acts as insurance against technological disruption and supplies the executive team with much needed breathing room to pivot during technological disruption. Additionally, the CSuite can consider having a Chief IP-Moat officer who oversees, strengthens, and leverages the company’s IP-Moat across different technology areas and market segments.
5. Build momentum and show patience: Building a great company requires long-term thinking and short-term action. All experiments may not work out as imagined, or an experiment may take more time to materialize than expected — focusing on the action but being patient with the results is key.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

There are so many quotes, lessons and learnings which have helped shape my mental models. “Innovation disrupts status quo to establish another status quo, rinse & repeat”, is one such quote. This quote is important as it signifies the very nature of High-Tech industry and reminds us that nothing is permanent, and everything is prone to disruption.

Another quote which particularly resonates with me is from a book called Sapiens by Yuval Harari: “A meaningful life can be extremely satisfying even in the midst of hardship, whereas a meaningless life is a terrible ordeal no matter how comfortable it is”. If we do not seek our struggles, our struggle will seek us. This life lesson has been useful for me to embrace and enforce beginner mindset, and to pursue & pivot ideas which are meaningful & necessary — however hard that might be.

Any meaningful work requires long-term thinking and collaboration with long-term people. I really like this quote from Naval Ravikant — “Play long term games with long term people” because all returns in life come from compound interest in long-term games.

We have imbibed these principles in our culture code, and we try to live up to these principles.

How can our readers further follow your work?

We provide thought leadership on how cutting-edge technologies are changing the market leaders, your readers can read about it here: https://www.lumenci.com/insights and also follow us on: https://www.linkedin.com/company/lumenci/.

Your readers can also follow our Legal Tech and Automation initiatives at — https://www.linkedin.com/company/inkpaper.

Additionally, your readers can follow me at https://www.linkedin.com/in/harishdaiya/ and https://twitter.com/harishd12.

Thank you so much for sharing these important insights. We wish you continued success and good health!

Thanks a lot.