This week, we’re welcoming Rich Liu as Everlaw’s first Chief Revenue Officer. Rich joins us from a long and varied career, including building global business organizations at TripActions, MuleSoft and Meta.
At Everlaw, Rich will lead the go-to-market organization, ensuring our sales, customer experience and business development teams are tightly aligned in building towards our mission of illuminating the truth in the practice of law. We recently sat down to talk about his approach to responsible hypergrowth, why Everlaw’s values resonate with him, and his career aspirations as a kid.
Let’s start at the beginning… As a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?
One of my earliest memories was wanting to be a garbage man. I loved watching the truck come by every Friday at 6 am and I was enamored with the mechanical workings of this machine. It was back-breaking work, and I had (and still have) so much respect for those folks. They did this grueling job every day and still took time to smile and wave to the kid in the window.
Later, I wanted to be a fighter pilot and a Formula One driver… Clearly, that didn’t happen!
Are there any parallels between being a Formula One driver and a CRO?
Absolutely! At a startup, our goal is to grow as quickly as possible—responsibly. We move faster than most companies and take more calculated risks. F1 drivers, compared to most drivers, do the same.
At a startup, we need to determine: Which calculated risks are we comfortable taking? How do we build the telemetry to capture data to have confidence that those are the right ones to take? Because when we are going faster, the more we can gather data and build great processes as we go, the better.
In the last decade, you’ve built global organizations, managed a large acquisition, and led growth for two IPOs. Where did you get your start?
I started my business career in financial services at Fisher Investments, making cold calls in a classical sales bullpen. As an engineer, I’ve always been curious about how to become more efficient because anything that drives success, without making another 100 calls, is pure gold.
For example, we studied call data to find out when we were most effective by area code, then restructured our shifts to maximize our effectiveness. That’s where I discovered my passion for designing and building go-to-market organizations.
How does your background as a biomedical engineer inform your approach as a business leader?
I am a first principles thinker. I don’t come into a new company and apply a set playbook, because every product, industry, and competitive landscape is different and macro trends are always changing. Instead, in each new role, I take a fresh look at how we can grow the business responsibly and achieve our mission, working with the team and the data to draw insights and build our strategy.
As an engineer, I ask questions like: What do and don’t we know? Where does the evidence point and what are our resulting hypotheses? What impacts might our actions have? Let’s try to decide the turns of the Rubik’s Cube we want to make. I’m excited to partner with AJ, the go-to-market leadership team, and all Everlawyers to find those answers together.
Read the full article here.