Meet Matt Lhoumeau, CEO of Concord Worldwide Inc., which is based in San Francisco. He’s presented several times on the Stanford campus at CodeX meetings and events, and he was part of the CodeX delegation at February’s Legaltech New York. Concord was launched in 2014.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Social studies
Website: www.concordnow.com
Linkedin
Twitter: @concordnow

Citizenship: France (I’m considering asking for U.S. citizenship in two years.)

Education: Four masters degrees:  1) Entrepreneurship at HEC Paris (Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales de Paris). 2) Political Sciences, at Sciences Po Paris. 3) International Affairs and 4) Japanese: Langues’O Paris.

Prior Jobs that were not startups:
> Strategic Projects Manager, Office of the CEO, Iliad/Free and Groupe RATP.
> Policy Analyst and Speech Writer, Office of Nicolas Sarkozy, French Presidential Campaign.

Is Concord your first startup? No, it’s my third.
> From 1999-2001: I developed  “The 4^th Coming,” a website about video games in Europe. Sold after two years to Orange, one of the largest telecom companies in the world.
> From 2010-2013: Contract Live, a contract deadlines platform. The platform has been discontinued and redirects now to Concord.

 

What problem does Concord solve? It offers e-signatures and management tools for e-negotiation and e-contracts, for all stages.

What does it cost? Concord is free for 90 percent of its features. Advanced features start at $25/month/user for the package. Advanced features include workflow automation, salesforce integration, automated contract creation, subsidiary management.

Audience: Concord’s users include companies of all size, from small firm businesses to Fortune 1000 companies, as well as law firms.

What inspired you to pursue this startup? Five years ago, I was tasked by my former employer to renegotiate 500 contracts. After spending six months on this mission (one month looking for the contracts, one month reading them one by one, then four months sending thousands of Word documents back and forth), I realized that contract management was badly broken.

Do you have funding yet? $3.5M total raised. Investors include venture capital (Cota Capital and Alven Capital); law firms (Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe); Angel investors (Tien Tzuo, CEO of Zuora; Thibault Poutrel, board member of Ingenico; and others).

What is your biggest challenge re: the start-up? Getting Concord’s name out there, because the platform has been finalized and successfully adopted by hundreds of companies.

What do you need right now? In six months? In a year? Now: Building the right sales and marketing engines. Six months: Determine the right channels based on the previous months’ experimentations. In a year: Scaling.

What is next? A lot of new features to help companies do more with their contracts: analytics, mobile app.

What have you learned that you wish you had know five years ago?
To always go for simplicity. We sometimes tried to develop complex features or processes that were not needed.

 

Who are the two people who most influenced you?
1. Maxime Lombardini, CEO of Iliad (France’s second biggest internet and mobile provider—$5B of revenue in just 15 years). He mentored me during one year when I was working with him. He showed me what makes a great CEO: patience, vision and determination.

2. Emmanuelle Mignon (former Chief of Staff of French President Nicolas Sarkozy) with whom I worked for one year). She taught me everything when it comes to efficiency and thought processes.

What book changed your life? One Arm, from Yasunari Kawabata (1968 Nobel Prize) I read when I was 13. Probably one of the most beautiful short novels ever written. It made me decide to learn Japanese, which had a lot of impact on my life afterwards.

What advice do you have for other entrepreneurs? Hang on. Building a company takes time—usually three years minimum to have something take shape.

What are you afraid of? Not doing enough everyday to help Concord reach its full potential.

What are you the most proud of? Being here today, after I was thrown out of the house to live on the street when I was 17, while my younger sister was sent to a foster family. I literally had just time to pack one suitcase. I managed to get hostesd by friends, but sometimes slept outside. I dropped out of school and then managed to get a 100-square-foot studio and started working on my first company.

Where do you want to be in five years? 10 years? Next week?
Five: Being the leader in our industry.10: Move on to new projects in my life. Next week: At the same place, with more customers.

Favorite vacation destination: Backpacking in remote locations in foreign countries (Uzbekistan, India … ) to discover new places, new people. Without cellphone or internet.

 

Favorite musician or group: David Bowie. I started to listen to him when I was 11. He kept reinventing himself for 50 years.

Favorite quote: “Life is about choosing between having a big impact on small topics or having a small impact on big topics.” —Emmanuelle Mignon

What’s your mantra? “Don’t do like the others. That’s the only way to get different results.”

Who would you want sitting next to you if you got stuck for 3 hours on the tarmac in a 737? Dead: The painter Hans Hartung. One of my favorite artists who never gave up on his vision even when the Gestapo detained him during WWII.  Alive: Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. One the new persons shaping today’s politics.

Edited by Monica Bay, CodeX Fellow.