Hear the One About the Lawyer Who Started a Company?

Josh Warrum, ADstruc

A drummer, Josh played gigs nearly every night in college at Kent State and toured for a year after graduation. He then headed for law school and worked in music and licensing law at Warner Brothers and the Beanstalk Group. Josh leveraged the hustle required to be a musician and the contract and negotiation chops he picked up in law to start ADstruc, the outdoor advertising platform.

ADstruc  was a TechStars ‘10 grad and is a growing team of 9 in Soho.

Michael Horn, Craft Coffee

“The company’s new, but I’ve been working on the idea for ten years,” Mike told us, referring toCraft Coffee, his subscription based artisan coffee startup. He realized he wanted to build things more than be a lawyer. So he left Cahill, Gordon, & Reindel and taught himself to code, learning Ruby on Rails in a six week self-imposed lock-up.

Law taught him professionalism he says, “you learn the discipline. You return every email, and check every document.”

David Greenberg, Updater

David founded Updater  after leaving Cravath, Swaine, & Moore. As a lawyer, he worked on transactions that regularly made the Wall Street Journal. Working with companies at that level made him more comfortable building large partnerships with Updater, which is the largest change of address utility on the web and just took up new space in Flatiron.

Got a startup idea yourself? Start here for a weekend emersion or here if you dig the learn-to-code route.