Twice a year, Y Combinator, a startup accelerator based in Mountain View, California, holds what it calls a Demo Day, which is a showcase of the latest batch of new companies it has nurtured. In the past, those have included Dropbox, Airbnb, and Reddit (as well as a number of companies no one remembers). Last week, at the most recent Demo Day, Eva Shang took to the stage to talk about her startup, Legalist.
Dressed in jeans and a black T-shirt emblazoned with Legalist’s logo, Shang, who dropped out of Harvard to focus on her startup with a classmate, spent her allotted two and a half minutes telling the Demo Day audience about Legalist’s business model. Using an algorithm to calculate the likelihood that a lawsuit will succeed, the company then invests in cases it deems promising. If a plaintiff it has funded prevails, Legalist takes a percentage of the winnings—usually between twenty-five and thirty per cent. The algorithm considers, among other things, the size of the presiding judge’s caseload, which is an indicator of how long a trial will take, and the judge’s past decisions, which is an indicator of how he or she might rule.
Read the full article on The New Yorker.