In January 2010, I joined Grab’s innovation team — iLab — as a founding board member, working alongside Tan Hooi Ling and the rest of the founding team out of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Grab wasn’t the company it is today. It was a handful of people trying to answer technology, business, legal and strategic questions at the same time, because there was no one else to hand any of those questions to.

That’s not a startup story. It’s the first time I saw the pattern I’ve now watched three times: a company’s product can scale in weeks. The infrastructure that has to exist around it — the paperwork, the process, the judgment calls that used to fit in one person’s head — takes years to catch up, if it ever does.

The same wall, three times

Three years later I was Uber’s senior regulatory counsel, from 2013 to 2016, during the stretch when the company was opening new markets faster than most legal teams could read the local rules for the last one. I wasn’t writing memos in a vacuum — I was partnering with senior leadership on real operational and regulatory decisions, at the speed the business was actually moving. The gap between how fast the product grew and how fast the legal function could keep up with it wasn’t a footnote. It was the job.

Then eight years at Stripe, from 2017 to 2025, inside the legal organization as the company scaled globally. By then I’d stopped thinking about this as a legal problem and started thinking about it as an infrastructure problem. My job wasn’t “do more legal work.” It was building the systems, processes and operational infrastructure a legal team needs to support a company that’s adding complexity faster than it’s adding people — automation, scalable process design, and doing it without compromising security over increasingly complex data.

Three companies. Three completely different products — ride-hailing, payments, whatever Grab was becoming in 2010. The same wall, every time: the business scales the part people can see, and quietly outgrows the part that keeps it safe.

The industry that never got its infrastructure built

Somewhere in those fifteen years I noticed something that had nothing to do with any of those three companies: the legal industry runs on exactly the failure mode I kept getting hired to fix, and nobody had built it the fix.

A law firm’s caseload grows every year. The volume of filings, evidence and case history a lawyer is expected to hold in their head — or in a case file — grows with it. And unlike Grab, Uber or Stripe, most of that industry is still handling the paperwork side by hand, against a body of material that keeps arriving as scanned, crooked, handwritten paper, not clean digital text. We’ve written about what that actually costs — and about what happens when the volume wins, one weekend, 38,477 filings at a time.

That’s not a story about lawyers being behind. It’s the same story I’d already lived three times, in an industry that had never had anyone build the operational layer other industries take for granted.

Why this market, first

Starting a legal infrastructure company from Chile, and expanding into Brazil, Peru and Argentina before North America or Europe, isn’t the obvious sequencing if you’re optimizing for the easiest market. It’s the right one if you’re optimizing for the hardest case file. The judiciaries we build for today process paper-heavy, backlog-heavy caseloads at a volume and complexity that would break a system built for a cleaner market — which means what we build here has to actually work before we take it anywhere else. North America and Europe are next. They’re not first, on purpose.

What pin is

Pin takes the massive, messy body of information lawyers work with every day — documents, evidence, filings, handwritten records, case histories — and turns it into structured, searchable, actionable intelligence. That sentence describes a product. It also describes, almost word for word, the job I had at three different companies before this one — just built as software this time, instead of rebuilt from scratch inside every legal department that needs it.

Today that’s a 22-person team, a $400K pre-seed round, and legal organizations across four countries using something we built from the ground up in the last year. It’s early. I’m not going to pretend otherwise on the same blog where we’ve spent six posts telling lawyers not to trust confident-sounding claims that don’t hold up.

But I’ve watched this specific wall get solved before, and I’ve watched what happens when it doesn’t. This is the fix, aimed at the one industry that’s been waiting longest for someone to build it.