$0 to $750M - From Starting Hotel Empire at 11 to Biggest Raise in Legal Tech - Dan Mishin

21:02Dan Mishin:What would be the price per ticket? It would be astronomical. So the idea behind Manifest, the original inspiration behind Manifest was what if we could separate the practice of law from everything that's non-legal in nature, paralegals, marketing, business development, technology, and what if you could then apply AI on top of it to actually streamline every single manual repetitive paper pushing work. So the core concept of Manifest is we sort of power law firms with full-stack solution. Every law firm follows the same guidelines, the same standards, the same SLAs. Every attorney uses exclusively Manifest software, and we build an entire software suite that replace their email, that replace their calendar, that replace their Google Meet, that replace It's their document drafting capabilities.

21:56Dan Mishin:It's an ecosystem of software that's fully AI native, where at every step of the way, we analyzed every single action that a lawyer takes, and we applied technology to streamline it. We didn't eliminate legal judgment. Legal judgment rests with the lawyer, and the strategy rests with the lawyer. But all this manual paperwork, there's no value add there. You can streamline a lot of it with technology, and you can make it so much, so much better. So that's the business that we've built. and we started with immigration because that's the industry that was near and dear to my heart I'm an immigrant I went through the process I hated it it was expensive time consuming I'm sure you did yeah yeah yeah it was really bad um and the idea behind immigration was that it's also extremely formulaic this industry is extremely antiquated in the sense that you know people that are going through the immigration process sponsored by their companies have no idea where their cases stand.

22:51Dan Mishin:They cannot track them. They don't get notifications. There is no proactive updates that come to them. They have to chase their lawyer over email. It's very broken. And people that manage immigration, I mean, you've had that function under you for many years, right? My career. Yeah. Your entire career, right? And if you look at people that actually manage immigration, on scale of 10 foreign nationals, probably manual is okay on scale of a hundred two hundred a thousand ten thousand it becomes unmanageable yeah because you have no reporting you cannot track where your cases stand um you have uh if you have if you're multi-jurisdictional multi-countries oftentimes you have different levels of service by country even if it's one law firm each law firm has a separate office that operates like its own kingdom yeah um and you you may have good experience in singapore and horrible experience in Australia.

23:44Dan Mishin:There's no unified reporting. It's basic stuff that wasn't fixed. So what Manifest does is we essentially provide one centralized unified platform for the entire global mobility industry. So we have in-house attorneys providing actual legal services, and all of attorneys around the world operate on the same system. They use the same software, they use the same reporting, all the data is centralized in the same way, and a global mobility manager can log in, go like stay high level and see all of their data. Like, hey, what's my foreign nationals population? What are the expiration dates? What's at risk of compliance?

24:22Dan Mishin:Get flags and notifications anytime there is a compliance risk that that could happen. They could stay high level, but they could drill down into a specific case and see, hey, why is my vice president of business development who is getting sponsored for a visa in Singapore? Why is their case delayed? And you can see exactly the activity log of exactly what the lawyer has completed? What are the next steps? And where does the case stand? Which I love. And you and I were talking about this when we first met. And I felt very passionately about this when I was running things at Netflix is that I wanted that experience for employees to be frictionless.

25:02I wanted it to be an advantage, not only in the recruiting process, but in retaining employees. Like I wanted, you know, I wanted them to have a beautiful experience. And it was very hard to create that because to your point, it is so antiquated, but also these law firms that they're antiquated as well, right? You know, they don't have great technology. They, they're trying to keep up with the caseload, you know, you have empathy for them too. But, but at the same time, they're not always getting back there, you know, and, and my thing with my team was like, I don't, it doesn't matter. We have to know, and we have to keep the employees informed at all times because this is such a sensitive thing and it's, it's nerve wracking, right?

25:55You know, like you're anxious about it. You, you know, and then there's all the things that are happening all the time with regulations changing, depending on who's in the administration and who's not. It's just very stressful. And if we can make it not stressful and just to your point, it's not that complicated, right? It's not. It's really you have to go step by step by step in the process. And there's things that you have to do for each step. And there may be things that, you know, get denied or you have to get back to or whatever. But but it is a process, right? And you just are going going through it.

26:29And if you could make going through that process a little bit easier, a little bit more elegant, like that's a big advantage for a company. Yeah.

26:38Dan Mishin:And like, uh, exactly. And like, also like if we take a step back and we're like, okay, what's the actual role of immigration? It's really two things. Like, how can I hire better people? And how can I retain better people? That's it. Like those are the two levers that this problem solves. Now, like the reality is like a lot of companies are spending all this like money on like, uh, like incredible benefits. And a lot of those benefits are like great. But if you ask a foreign national engineer in San Francisco, what is the benefit that's going to move the needle for them to join company A versus company B?

27:09Dan Mishin:It's often immigration. Like if your company is willing to sponsor their green card on day one, that's a win. You can win a candidate just based on that. Even if you, even if, even if everything else is equal across the board. If you're taking a candidate and you're saying, hey, I will sponsor you for an if you want green card. And here's a vendor that can help you prepare for this petition. And they're going to spend six months working with you, helping you draft your case and helping you sort of obtain necessary evidence. Maybe you should be going to a conference this more. Maybe you should be going to do podcasts more.

27:41Dan Mishin:Maybe you should be, um, maybe you should, uh, um, have like a journalist write about you. Maybe you should write your own blog. That's what a strategic legal partner can provide like that coach. And if a company is willing to do this, this company can win candidates. And we're working today with some of the largest foundational models, some of the largest technology companies. And these guys are hiring the types of people that don't fit existing immigration boxes. Yeah. Well, tell us about, yeah, tell us about the business. How's it going? How's it scaling? So we started the company 20 months ago.

28:14Dan Mishin:We've raised$60 million in venture capital from incredible investors. Thank you. Kleiner Perkins, Menlo Ventures, Fresh Round Capital, really good investors, really good partners. We've right now, Manifesto S powers 100 attorneys. Right now, the core focus has been US and we've solved a lot of the sort of US immigration problems and just build a lot of technology on the back end that makes it smooth. And now we're expanding into 20 countries in the next two quarters. So everything from UK, Singapore, Australia, India, Poland, Ireland, entire European Union. And the idea is that we are essentially building this like unified software layer that makes lawyers more efficient so they can spend their time helping clients, provides visibility to HR managers and people officers to predict their spend, to have the reporting, to sort of track their foreign national cases with transparency.

29:09Dan Mishin:And it provides a much better foreign national experience because as an employee, I log in, I can see my entire case, I know exactly where it stands, I can message my lawyer, I know who the team is that's working on my legal case, I can schedule an appointment in one click with my attorney right there on the portal, I can see if I qualify for a green card at any point of time, for example, and how it aligns with my company's mobility policy. And then we build a strategy and advisory arm to the business that works with mobility leaders and HR leaders to actually take a step back and say, what should my immigration program look like in order to solve my business problems and achieve my business objectives?

29:50Dan Mishin:And we hired former government officials from the USA, SUS Immigration Agency, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Labor, Department of State. We brought them together. And this group works with companies to help them build up, build their sort of mobility programs. I love it. Well, listen, people, check it out because I think it's going to be a different, better experience than the one that you're getting. I'm not going to name any of the firm's names because I don't want to put down the people that I've worked with. And they are great. They're great at what they do, but they are antiquated.

30:26So I think, you know, you're really solving a very hard problem and a problem that is incredibly important to make the world better. You and I were talking about earlier, like running an AI native company. And so I want to talk about that a little bit because it's different, right? And so I want to know what you're learning, what you're doing, what you're seeing. because of course we have to talk about AI. We can't not talk about AI.

30:59Dan Mishin:Yeah, every conversation ends at AI, no matter what. No matter what. You know, it's interesting. And sort of thinking about people that are going to watch this, I'll just share some of my insights that might sort of sound cliche and sort of maybe for a lot of people this will be like, duh, but for me these are the things that we learned in the last few months. Well, the benefit of starting a company today was just the fact that we don't have legacy. We don't have legacy code. We don't have legacy organization. We don't have legacy bureaucracy. So we had it much easier than somebody who runs at a larger organization today.

31:37Dan Mishin:But what's interesting is that what AI has changed, I think, is a couple of things. The first thing is the value of actually good hires went from being very important to being mission critical. and we started sort of hiring the types of profiles that we've never hired before. Like what? Like what would be the difference? I think that this is the moment when generalists win over specialists. Let me give you an example. I just hired literally yesterday a product manager that is a product manager, a product designer, and an engineer three-in-one. Oh, wow. She's 25. uh she's she sort of like her professional career was at kind of like matured at the age of ai she's so ai native she's like all the way ai native yeah and when i was talking to her i was like how do you choose a company where you're gonna work she said i care about two things i care about like she was interviewing me of course as any great candidate would um and not the other way around and she said i'm optimizing for how ai native this company is how close to the cutting edge it is like are you guys like like and she's going through her mental check boxes do you have hardness do you have mcp do you have like this like five things um and and then the second thing was like um the quality of people right so like those are the two things that she was underwriting but like her profile is very out of the box like it's not a standard to have three in one no um on our go-to-market team instead of hiring hey we need a partnerships manager show me a profile of people that were partnerships managers.

33:11Dan Mishin:No. Today, you're hiring a strategy and operations generalist that comes from consulting background that basically can think in a much broader fashion and bring something else to the table. So hiring generalists has been a big thing for us. The second big thing for us was just the level of autonomy that happens. Like my team spends 80 % of their time building AI agents and automating themselves out of their day-to-day jobs. And it's incredible like i walk around the office and i look at like people's screens and it's like claude n8n um um cursor that's those are the only things that i see on their screens that's crazy we had three support agents when the company was um 10 times smaller we had three support agents today we have three support agents when the company is 10 times larger wow and i'm asking myself a question and every metric is up to the right yeah response time is faster satisfaction is fast is is higher um every single metric is like way better than it was yet the number of people stayed flat um and the reason is most of the time our support agents are using ai to basically streamline the sort of every manual repetitive workflow that they have yeah that's really interesting yeah um so i guess and the last thing that i found to be quite interesting is the psychological safety that people would have around automating themselves out of the job.

34:39Dan Mishin:So initially I was like, hey, why is this person not adopting AI as fast as others? And I was looking at like this one specific individual and they did not become AI native. They sort of like were kind of anti-AI insight manifest. And I was talking to them and I took them out for dinner And I was like, look, everyone is doing this. Why are you not doing this? After going 10 layers deeper, I realized that the core reason is this person actually has a fear of like losing the job. So I was like, that's interesting. You realize that that's actually the opposite of what's going to happen. If you automate yourself out of this job, I'll give you 15 other opportunities inside the company.

35:20Dan Mishin:But it's still human nature. So the way we solved this is we said any person that loses their job because of AI would pay a one-year severance. That's nice. And we introduced that. And reality is like that changed a lot of sort of psychological dynamics. Because I have security. I'm not going to lose my job. I'll still have a year to find something. Yeah, that's great. And kind of takes the fear off the table. Correct. And I think maybe it should be even three years or five years. Like, how do you like create a level of psychological safety for people to actually go and sort of think as business owners around automating themselves?

36:04Yeah.

36:04Dan Mishin:I would love to see more of that. Yeah. And we're making first baby steps there. I love that. What's your advice? Because you did have sort of this advantage of not having legacy things, whether it's tech debt or other things in the company. You got to start fresh. You got to do this from the beginning. What's your advice to companies who don't have that? I mean, change management is generally really hard, but I would kind of double... I would optimize for autonomy as much as possible. like there's this constant debate in different rooms where i'm in with other ceos of like hey so how do you actually adopt ai do you have one engineer per team do you have a centralized sort of like project management office that then changes organizations yeah um or do you sort of enable everyone to do it um i always lean towards maximum levels of autonomy and ownership even if it feels duplicated so for example the way we set it up at manifest is every team has a dedicated applied AI engineer assigned to them who understands all the business context.

37:13Dan Mishin:If it's marketing team, I want that applied AI engineer to be really deep into marketing team, understand exactly what they think about 24-7. And that person works full-time just on marketing team. I like creating a lot of autonomy because I think that's what's necessary and important at HVIA. And so is this engineer, are they building the agents for the marketing team because they're getting to know their work, their task, the flow of things? And so then they can train the agent, build the agent to maybe make their lives not just a little bit, but a lot better. Is that the goal of that engineer?

37:59Dan Mishin:I think in today's environment, training models is not necessary most of the times. You could just orchestrate existing models that exist on the market and achieve better results because the velocity at which these models are evolving is so fast that there's no point in pre-training anymore. I don't see, it's very rare where there is an actual use case where you should do this. Like open evidence, maybe, because it's healthcare. Healthcare is like very unique. But like 99 % of the time, you don't have to do this. So the supplied AI engineer is a person who is a Swiss Army knife. They can do five different things, five different jobs.

38:36Dan Mishin:They are a single person shop. Like they have a fully autonomous unit deployed into a specific part of the company. And that person can sort of run change within that company, within that department, within that organization, on their own, without any dependencies from the rest of the organization. That's kind of the mandate. And we're doing this, and then we rotate these people sometimes. Because, like, somebody who was running Applied AI for marketing team gets bored after two months because this person is 24, they're hungry, they want to learn, and they get bored very easily. It's also TikTok generation.

39:13Dan Mishin:our attention span is this much like that's it um uh and then be that good or bad i'm not sure i don't know um i i find it hard to read long documents myself um so well me too i i don't you know it's it's you know shorter is better shorter is better uh give me like three three words four words five words whatever um but yeah um i think for larger organizations autonomy autonomy, independence of each unit, sort of maybe hire more generalists as a framework. They're harder to get, but I find them to sort of be better adjusted to this age. And one thing is, you know, there are going to be some people who are not going to adopt a change.

40:06Dan Mishin:it will happen especially people that were successful in the past a lot of my CEO friends are talking about their CTOs not adjusting to this reality all the time and a CTO with 25-30 years of experience who has achieved some level of success who has a playbook that worked for 25 years that person may not change because they're just used to doing things a certain way yeah um and uh i would be honest uh with uh this person and i would be honest with myself about whether or not this person is changing um enough yeah in this yeah yeah no it's great advice and i think i you know i i hear the same things too um and so i think you know the other thing to to the people who are holding on a little bit to to your point maybe organizations should give more of that psychological safety to let people really truly jump in.

41:09But there's also people, even if that psychological safety is there, they're just not going to do it. They're too set in their ways.

41:17Dan Mishin:That's right. They love the playbook. They want the playbook to work. And for those people to like try, try to throw out the playbook. Just try, you know, because you, you really do have to learn this stuff. If, if you're going to be part of this evolution, you gotta dive in and i i mean i love it i you know i don't know i'm starting to learn how to code on cursor and like reading about it i haven't like done it but i want to like i want to build some stuff you know isn't it intellectually so stimulating and so interesting and like i don't know i find it like every free minute that i have i just want to learn more i just want to get like i'm so curious about this technology just trying things and building things it's it's absolutely unbelievable.

42:03Yeah. And, you know, not, not to make me sound like a weirdo, but like, I probably use chat. I don't know how many times a day. Like it's, you know, and like, it knows me so well now it's a little awkward. I'm like, how do you know that? You know, it's like, I know you like to stay at really nice hotels. So like, why you should book this one, not that one. You know, I'm like, oh god well anyways um we're getting off track we are running and we're running out of time which is unfortunate um so i'm gonna ask two things of you and the the first thing is is um you've been

42:43Dan Mishin:a serial founder um aka addictive founder that's what they call it now yeah well you know i think it's great. Keep doing it. Don't, you know, you took that 90 days off, but that, you know, keep, keep doing it. But what's your advice to, to founders? Like now that you've done this, what now four times is your fourth, correct? What's your advice to founders? I don't, I don't know how to give general, general advice. It's, it's, it's hyper specific, but what I would advise myself, every time I reflected on this question over the years, I ultimately landed to the same conclusion for myself. And my conclusion was always to take more risk.

43:34Dan Mishin:Because most of the risk is very perceived. Most of the risk is not real. Most of it is in our heads. And especially to the types of people that, I mean, you see, I see so many incredible people perfect cv perfect school perfect job career they did they made every right decision every step along the way and they're paralyzed by being over thinkers and they're paralyzed by not taking enough risk um and i think that's the unlock unlock is to just get comfortable with the change and get comfortable with the fact that um like you're gonna take more risk like you have to be responsible i'm not talking about bad things i'm talking about just sort of you know allowing yourself to fail, allowing yourself to experiment.

44:18To get punched in the face.

44:21Dan Mishin:Yeah, and then you get used to it. Yeah, that was not that hard of a punch. Come on, like a fan wars. Exactly. I love that advice. Okay. And then the last thing I'm going to ask you to do is we always ask our guests to leave our listeners with a little bit of inspiration. So what would you like to leave the listeners with today? Like as a thought? Like an inspirational thought? Yeah, like some inspiration.

44:51Dan Mishin:There's never been a more interesting time, in my opinion, to be doing what we do today. There's never been a more interesting time. Any time of change is the most exciting, fascinating time. And if you embrace that change, and if you accept that change, and you just acknowledge the fact that nothing is constant in life, and life is constantly transforming and you just like enjoy it and you really find joy in that certainty, you can win in so many ways. You can have so much fun doing it. You could build generational businesses. You could change your organization in so many meaningful ways. If you just embrace that change and go sort of with the flow a little bit and ride that wave a little bit and just like have fun doing it, it is so much fun to be doing what we do today.

45:40Dan Mishin:Like I wouldn't want to be anywhere else at any other place at any other time than today. Being especially in the tech industry, it's just fascinating. Like I'm drinking from the Kool-Aid. Sorry, I'm drinking from the fire hose all the time right now because it's just so much fun. Well, I'm drinking the Kool-Aid. I'm drinking from the fire hose. So I get it. So I'm just drinking. Yeah, I'm just drinking. And yeah, but I mean, it's true. I mean, it's so exciting and it's so fun. And it's, you know, it's a little bit terrifying all at the same time. But that's what makes it so interesting. Right.

46:16That's right. And I'm just I feel privileged to be able to be on a journey and also on a journey with with many different companies that are doing this. It's just fascinating. But I you know what? I also am just very grateful that you you and I got introduced. you are so impressive and I'm just really excited to see what's gonna happen in the next five years with your company and just with you in general and I hope I hope we are now friends I hope so

46:52Dan Mishin:too and honestly I've been such a huge fan of like truth works and I've been I've been I've been following you for a while and it's a true honor and pleasure to be here and like I appreciate what you do for your community. It is truly meaningful. Oh, well, thank you. I hope so. And I know our listeners are going to love this. And now, you know, you're stuck with me, Dan. I love that. I'm in. All right. Good. All right. Well, thank you again. Thanks for listening to TruthWorks.