# S01E09 · Transcript — Jia Ming Huang Full transcript of [The Useful Podcast](https://useful.ventures/podcast) Episode 9, a founder-to-founder conversation between host Gokul Bala and Jia Ming Huang, co-founder of [Lenavix](https://lenavix.com). Back to the [episode page](https://useful.ventures/podcast/jia-ming-huang-lenavix). This transcript has been lightly edited for readability. Filler words and false starts have been removed and the meaning has been preserved. Any errors are mine, not Jia Ming's. ## Calgary, and thinking of himself as global **Gokul** Before any of the tech stuff, you moved to Calgary as a kid in 2007. What was that like, and how do you think it shaped you? **Jia Ming** When I was really young we immigrated to Canada, to Vancouver first. Vancouver is a very immigrant-heavy city, so I didn't really have to learn English even though I was going to elementary school there. Then my dad got a job in Calgary, and after about six months he moved the whole family. Calgary traditionally had far fewer immigrants, so I had to pick up English really quickly. Believe it or not, English is my third language — I speak Mandarin and Cantonese, and I learned English when I was six or seven. That was a bit of a culture shock even though I'd already been in Canada for a while, and it was really the start of my journey as a Canadian. **Gokul** Do you view yourself as Canadian, or more global, given you're now traveling across six continents? **Jia Ming** At heart I'm still Canadian — people abroad always make fun of how I say "about." But my dreams are global. I have this app called Flighty that tracks every flight I take; I'll be over 300 flights by the end of this year. When you see things from a different perspective and come back, it changes how you view your home, how you do business, how you interact with people. I chose Australia for school, Germany and Hong Kong for exchanges, and the Middle East for my Antler cohort instead of Toronto, specifically because I'd never been there. It's always about learning from people I haven't met and getting as much perspective as possible. **Gokul** You've traveled to 48 countries across six continents, and you've said it's people that make the place. Where does that belief come from? **Jia Ming** From experience. Say you go to Cancun for vacation — you land, go to your resort, spend seven days there, and never really experience the culture. But when you travel for work, for meetups, to run events, it's different. This time in China I ran an event in Hangzhou — I landed at 3 a.m., went straight to the event, did the event, and went back to sleep. I didn't see the city at all. But I met so many people that I now want to go back, not for the city, but for the people. That's the difference. Without the people, the place doesn't really have meaning. **Gokul** You've talked about the "return flight theory." What do you mean by that? **Jia Ming** I wouldn't say I coined it — I saw it on an Instagram story. It's the idea that when you go abroad for an extended period and then come back home, everything seems different, because you've adapted to another culture and your perspective has shifted. You start seeing both the good and bad in your home that you couldn't see before, because you were too comfortable and used to it. It's not something you can turn on while staying in one place — you have to go out, explore somewhere else, and come back to feel that shift. It's life-changing, and I don't think you can really understand it until you experience it yourself. ## Building a community from one event **Gokul** Tell me about your first event, back in February, that really took off. **Jia Ming** I started running events in January. My first was in Calgary, just because it's home. It started when I was in Australia for school and met a guy named Joshua Crowley, who ran Cursor events in Sydney. I went to one and, for the first time, didn't turn around and leave — I used to show up to events, feel imposter syndrome, and go home. That event was inspiring enough that I realized: if the host is good, anybody can feel at home at an event. So I applied to be a Cursor ambassador, did my first event in Calgary with about 50 people, then went to Toronto, which hadn't had an event since November. I met Sukhpal, who'd just moved in from Ottawa, and we decided to bring events back to Toronto. We wanted it welcoming enough for first-time attendees who'd never been to an event before. We set a modest goal — maybe 50 to 100 people — and found a 250-person venue through my University of Toronto alumni connections, figuring it was fine even if only 50 showed up. Within a week of putting up the Luma page, 300 people had signed up. We accepted as many as we could, and over 250 people showed up. People loved it because it was low-lift and casual — no product pitch at the end, unlike most B2B events. It was just a meetup, and that's what made people fall in love with it and pushed us to run it monthly. ## Just Do Things, and curating the room **Gokul** How did that connect to Just Do Things? **Jia Ming** One of the principles behind our events is making sure anyone who attends feels compelled to go build something they can take home and show their friends and family. With AI, you don't need to be a computer science student spending 24 hours coding nonstop anymore — you can take an idea and turn it into something you can play with in thirty minutes. A lot of people don't know that's possible. We've had kids come to our events with ideas for things like a car that flies backward, and they can tell an AI what they want and watch it get built. The only thing stopping people is themselves, telling themselves it's too hard or it might fail. So what if it fails? It only cost you thirty minutes. Just Do Things is a newsletter meant to inspire people to just go do it, because you'll be surprised how far you get once you stop holding yourself back. **Gokul** How do you curate the room for these build sessions? **Jia Ming** We want a mix of technical and non-technical people. A technical person accelerates an idea because of their field experience, but non-technical people often have even better ideas because they're more creative — they don't know the constraints, so they think outside the box, while a technical person might already be thinking "that won't work" or "that's a security risk." Put both in a room together and they complement each other: the non-technical person expands the range of ideas, the technical person hones in and builds. In just thirty minutes, people come up with genuinely beautiful things. **Gokul** Where did the idea for a newsletter specifically come from? **Jia Ming** About a year ago, when I was thinking about what business to start, the newsletter idea came up while brainstorming with ChatGPT and got parked. I've always loved writing and reading other people's writing, especially when it's inspirational — when something resonates with you, you can project that to your audience. I read about the return flight theory on an Instagram story and turned it into a post right away because I knew others would resonate with it too. Sukhpal wanted to do content as well, so we teamed up — it splits the time commitment and reaches a wider audience. Analysis paralysis is the number one blocker for most people: they have great ideas and never act on them because they talk themselves out of it. There's a theory I might have actually coined myself: if you don't push on the wall, it never pushes back. When you go and do something and fail, at least you know where not to push. That's more valuable than leaving the wall untouched. You'd rather have scars from pushing than a wall that looks pristine but never broke. ## Eleven days, three events, 550 people **Gokul** You went to six cities in eleven days recently. Why that pace? **Jia Ming** I'm quite restless — if I'm in a city for a week it feels too long. Even in university, on breaks I'd just go for a drive somewhere new because I needed a change in scenery. I love that in modern society you can be somewhere far away in a short amount of time, a privilege we wouldn't have had 200 years ago. I think humans are obsessed with speed, and I just let that instinct take over and enjoy it. **Gokul** What did that trip to China actually involve? **Jia Ming** I ran three back-to-back events called Cafe Cursors, each with around 150 people. That kind of event doesn't happen often in China, so people were really engaged, and I met a lot of people who were genuinely skilled with Cursor and building their own AI tools — products I'd love to see in North America too. After the events I took people to after-parties: one to a restaurant for dinner, one to a rooftop bar for cocktails. People open up more in casual settings like that than at the event itself, and that's where I found the most meaningful connections, with the people who actually wanted to make them. After that I went to Inner Mongolia, where a friend took me around — when you're a guest there, you just follow along with whatever they're doing. I learned to ride a horse with zero safety gear, which is honestly the fastest way to learn. I helped fill in a well pipe they'd installed, ate a lot of good food by a beautiful river, and got to experience a culture in the north of China quite different from the south. Then I went to a rural, agricultural area before heading back. In eleven days I met around 550 people, which is why I'm going back at the end of October for three more weeks. ## From Antler to Lenavix **Gokul** What led you to Lenavix? I know Michael was working on it before you joined. **Jia Ming** Michael had been working on Lenavix for close to a year before I joined. We were both in the Antler program — he was in the Toronto cohort, I was in Dubai. While I was in Dubai doing user research for my previous startup, I called Michael several times for user discovery, so he knew what I was going through, including the breakup with my co-founder at Antler, which meant my odds of getting investment for that venture were already low. He saw the opportunity and pitched me on joining Lenavix. When he explained the idea, it seemed so obviously needed that I couldn't say no — and it was a chance to join in a leadership role, which I'd always wanted, since I've always wanted to craft my own path forward. Seven percent of revenue across all companies gets spent on regulatory fines, and Lenavix's goal is to reduce that. Companies end up paying fines because they can't afford to hire lawyers to do proper due diligence when onboarding vendors — they send client data through a third-party tool, it leaks, and they're on the hook, when better due diligence could have avoided it. Lawyers are expensive and slow, so Lenavix helps legal teams do that work faster and at a lower rate. That gives companies more incentive to actually do the due diligence, reduces their risk, and lets legal teams onboard more clients at a lower price with more market penetration. It works for both sides, which is what made it feel obvious to me. **Gokul** Is your customer a legal team inside a company, or a separate law firm? **Jia Ming** Both. It can be an in-house legal team at a larger enterprise, or a law firm servicing smaller clients, like a startup that wants a one-time due diligence engagement. We target the legal side broadly, and they use our tools to deliver a better service to their own clients. ## Refusing to sell fear **Gokul** How do you think your product affects pricing for lawyers, especially with AI in the mix? **Jia Ming** I think it can go two ways. Either lawyers keep charging by the hour, but charge more per hour while finishing the work in fewer hours — a supercharger, since clients get faster delivery and lawyers make more. Or firms shift to charging per case and try to close cases as fast as possible, using Lenavix to turn a month of work into a day, and onboard as many clients as they can. Either way, lawyers end up happy, because it makes their time worth more. From the start we understood we don't want to replace lawyers — imagine trying to sell a legal team a tool and telling them their job is going away. Good luck selling that. Our dev team is deeply AI-native, but I'd call it anti-AI-slop, not anti-AI. ## What's next: China and a lawyer-versus-engineer debate **Gokul** Where is Lenavix headed over the next few months? **Jia Ming** In August we're running our first ticketed event: a panel of top engineers in the city in front of an audience of lawyers, who know about AI in theory but haven't used it the way engineers do. I want to make it as provocative as possible, almost a debate between lawyers and engineers, as a go-to-market experiment. The other thread is what I found in China — huge demand from companies wanting to expand abroad. Chinese companies face a lot of restrictions operating in North America but still want to do business here, so they spin up wholly owned subsidiaries and run into regulatory issues they're not used to. They hire legal teams that specialize in moving companies abroad, but a lot of that work is manual because those teams are based in China and face friction accessing tools abroad. I think Lenavix can accelerate those legal teams, and it's a huge untapped market — and because I speak Chinese fluently, at a level where people can't tell I'm from abroad, I think I can build meaningful connections there. I might go back for three weeks around the end of October to build on it. ## Betting on yourself **Gokul** What made you take the jump from a job to your first startup? **Jia Ming** It's genuinely hard to find a job, and hard to keep one — companies are competitive internally now in a way they weren't ten years ago; if you're not pushing 110%, someone's waiting to take your role. There's also the founder's vision to consider: even if it's not a bad vision, it might not be the one you'd choose, and it's really hard to work on something you don't fully believe in. I realized I could never work for somebody and be happy about it, so I wanted to start a company. **Gokul** What would have to be true for you to look back and say it was worth it? **Jia Ming** I take risks without overthinking them. I believe an exceptional person succeeds in whatever environment they're put in — not because they're innately better, but because they know how to take a situation and maximize it, and even when maximizing it still means failure, they fail lighter than someone who doesn't care. I'm good at taking action quickly and pivoting without being emotionally attached, which is what holds most people back — it's why they take longer to quit, longer to start, longer to decide. I don't think I'd ever regret a decision I make, because I can always find a way to maximize what comes out of it given my strengths. What I would regret is not taking the step at all, and wondering years later what would have happened if I had. **Gokul** At the end of your career, what do you want to be known for? **Jia Ming** Ever since I was a kid I've wanted to be a politician, to influence policy in a way that aligns with what people actually need — though every politician thinks that way going in, and then things change. I believe in outcomes more than process. I don't think you can influence policy meaningfully without influence in society first, and that influence can come from community building, running a company, or writing. Right now I want to be known as someone who drives outcomes for others — the person you think of first when you need help doing something, the person who can help you take the next step. I feel really good when I'm able to help someone. --- Back to the [episode page](https://useful.ventures/podcast/jia-ming-huang-lenavix) · [Lenavix](https://lenavix.com) · [[podcast|All episodes]]