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Y'all Street Law Podcast is your home of everything Texas Business Law!
Speaker 0: Everybody wins if everybody reads more books.
Speaker 1: The Scale LLP Yall Street Law podcast is intended to be your go to podcast for legal and business developments in the state of Texas. This episode of Y'all Street Law podcast is brought to you by Scale LLP, the agile law firm built for modern clients and entrepreneurial attorneys. Learn more at scalefirm.com.
Speaker 2: Welcome back to Yall Street, everyone. I'm Chuck Krause, your cohost. Joining me is Brian Elliott. And today, we have a guest, a scale client bookmarked, represented by one of its founders and CEO, Steve Wandler. Welcome to Yall Street, Steve.
Speaker 0: Hey, thanks for having me, guys.
Speaker 2: Welcome, Steve. Great. Really looking forward to this conversation, this series, this client profile series we've titled Clients on the Rise. And we want to give an opportunity to have conversations with our clients, talk about the problems that they're trying to solve, the way they're solving them in innovative ways, and the way Scale is partnering with clients to do that. So Steve, let's get into it a little bit.
The name of the business is Bookmarked. Bookmarked helps schools maintain vibrant, safe, compliant libraries where students can explore ideas and grow while reducing administrative burden for school leaders. Tell us about Bookmarked in a summary fashion. Sure.
Speaker 0: We're really what we're doing is we're saving books, and books are under attack right now through censorship and, primarily in public schools right now. So we're we're saving books and trying to understand the ban and challenge book market and, and the bottlenecks and the challenges that come around that. So we're we're, essentially helping school districts, curate their ultimate book library collections, with AI.
Speaker 2: Now you're you're no stranger to to start ups. Give us a little bit of your history, and and what you've done previously, and then what it what inspired you to get involved with the with the bookmarked team.
Speaker 0: Yeah. So, I guess by a little bit history, I'll I'll go way back to, my school day, really quick. I I was an early entrepreneur, had my first, I guess, company. I don't know if I I don't think I had a cork, but I had a DJ company and sold other products for DJ equipment and stuff like that when I was in high school, and then I dropped out of high school. And I became an entrepreneur and started my first startup in 09/2001, and that was the largest competitor to Geek Squad at the time, and, and we ended up selling that to, support.com in 02/2008.
05/02/2008. What happened June 2008? The market tanked. So we were thirty days away from not doing that, so we were pretty fortunate.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Good timing.
Speaker 0: Yeah. It was timing. Yeah. Luck. And and then moving on, I'm I I moved from Canada to the Silicon Valley, moved back to Canada, started a startup called FreshGrade, which was an education software company that was focused around grades.
Because I was a high school dropout, grades did not serve me, and grades always told me I wasn't good enough. And I think grades do that to most of our kids, and so I was looking for a way to measure learning and growth without grades. We made some good traction there. Came to Texas and and tried to infiltrate Texas, and that was a pretty hard one and figured out right away that this was gonna be the the market wasn't ready and we were too early and but we made some good headway and I learned a lot from FreshGrade around education and how the system works, how to sell into it, know, where the real pain points were, and, and then we started Bookmarked.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So that's interesting. So now you're you're back. You're dealing, with, again, the, the school system, but but from a different from a different perspective. What would you say what what's broken in the existing paradigm that makes the bookmark solutions so attractive?
Speaker 0: That's a good question. Well, we're still learning a lot. What I thought was broken when we started and what I think is broken today. And so what we thought was broken when we started was, why can't we just give parents the right to, give access to books that their kids want and restrict those books? And that would just solve the problem around, you know, ban and challenge books.
We just thought everybody thought it was gonna be kind of that easy. It wasn't. Because we don't know what's in the book still. And, so I I think that's what we originally thought it was. But now I look at it very differently, And I think, literacy is declining in America.
We could agree on that. I I think I think the stats show that literacy is continually declining. Yes. And libraries aren't thriving. We're not opening up libraries.
We're not you know, when you go to a library, it's not full of people. It's full of books that are in the library when they should be in the people's hands. That's why libraries are there. So if if literacy is declining and libraries aren't thriving, what does that tell us? If libraries are the hub of literacy, it tells me the hub is broken, and I wanna fix that hub.
I want to get books in the library where people go in there and say, there's too many books for me to choose from that I would love to read versus what do I read, and where do I start, and how do I know? And and that's the evolution of where we from where we started to where we are today. And now we have to scaffold that up to how do we get the right book in the hands of a reader, whether you're 85 or five. And the wedge for us right now is the regulatory requirements that school districts are now facing because of these new laws that say, you know, we we need to reexamine what is in our libraries and ensure that they reflect our community values and needs.
Speaker 2: And how is how is what Bookmark is providing, addressing, you know, both sides of that of that issue? When you when you hear about books generally or books in school districts, it's a big controversy. And I think the news articles ask you to take one side or the other. So how do you navigate that as a company, getting pigeonholed into you know, you're on you're on one side or the other? How do
Speaker 0: you Yeah. We we learned that the hard way. You know? Like, I and I'm a technology guy in a in a dropout. Right?
Like, I don't have a degree in this stuff. I don't understand it, but I'm just kinda using common sense in some in a lot of ways and and going, like, I don't have an opinion one way or the other. What we need to do is allow people to make informed choice, And how we do that is by understanding the content of the book with context. And in order to do that, you have to read the book. And so if we can just give them the content and context around what's in the book, then we allow them to make those decisions for who they're buying the book for or who is deciding to read the book.
So that's how we stay out of the, you know, the choose sides piece is we're just giving you the information. You make the choice, and as people start making more choices about that book and in different regions and different communities and stuff, then we start to understand maybe that book is more suitable in a high school than a middle school. Maybe maybe some communities, it's okay for every class. It it's not we're not making that choice. All we're doing is we're giving good valuable data to be able to help make better choices of curation of of your entire library collection, because libraries are I call them a black box of information.
You know, you got this like, need to be sharing that data not just amongst, you know, the school districts, but what books are kids reading across the state of Texas? And what are they loving and why? And and what did you find over there that somebody else loved? Like, we're relying on one single person in a library to make all those choices for 500 kids and 20,000 books. Impossible mission.
Speaker 2: Well, this is this is interesting, and I think very timely if we were if we were all in Austin, like Brian is today, I think there's a debate going on the Senate floor today, perhaps with a bill Senate Bill 13, I think it is. Maybe you can talk a little bit about that bill, the other bill, House Bill HB 900? Yeah. HB 900, and just what, you know, what those bills are attempting to accomplish and then how how Bookmark's technology solution can really facilitate, you know, better solutions.
Speaker 0: Yeah. Yeah. And and, like, unfortunately, we're doing this. Right? Like, we shouldn't have to be doing this, but we we need to now because these laws are are there.
So you mentioned h b 900, which came into effect, I guess, last year or the year before, and, that had to do with, parental choice of giving parents the right to know what's what their child is coming home with or not and being able to restrict individual books. And then there was another side of that bill which turned to law, which was the publishers be being required to, essentially filter the books to ensure that explicit material does not show up in Texas. That passed, and the publishers took the state to court, and they won in Fifth Circuit Court against their First Amendment, and they won. And so now the state of Texas has no accountability per you know, somebody to keep accountable to, so they're they went back, and they brought it eight s b 13, which includes now that it requires the school district to be responsible, the superintendent to be responsible for what books are in the library and ensuring that explicit material doesn't get through.
Speaker 3: Mhmm.
Speaker 0: So and there's a whole bunch of other, you know, things inside that bill that make it difficult and creates bureaucracy on how we order a book. And just ordering one book in that in in this new world if you're a high school librarian and you have to order 300 new books this year let's say and they're brand new and their novels in the average book is 200 pages, and you you have to read it because you you you can't just get reviews. You need to know if there's words in that book that could potentially cause a flag of some sort. You just need to know and they have to read the book. How many books can you read?
200 page books can you read in a year?
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 0: It it's just it there's the bottleneck.
Speaker 3: Steve, can you walk us through an example of of how your application addresses this? Like, take us through what does Bookmark do?
Speaker 0: Yeah. So that's that's that's good, Brian, because so there's two piece there's two parts of what we do, and there's one, what we do today, and the other side is what we're what we've built and what we're building is the infrastructure for books. So we are a book intelligence company. We are not a library management system. So what we do so I'll start with maybe what we're building because that's the piece that that's the big, that's the big opportunity here, and that is, we are building a content context engine that protects the IP of a book and reads the book objectively for content that could be deemed as inappropriate.
And we don't tell you what's inappropriate or not. We just show you that these could be deemed inappropriate, and we read that book for you, show you where those excerpts are, and help you make a decision on that book much quicker to get approval. Because look, 90% of the books that we're gonna read are fine. It's that you have to read 90 to get to the 10, and you don't know where they are. So how do you figure that out at scale?
And if you're only gonna read 300 books, so you're limiting yourself to 300 books of knowledge when there was 4,000,000 printed last year? Like, how are you gonna choose this 300? So that's what we're solving the big picture. We have that built. What we need to do now is bring the infrastructure together.
We need publishers to give us their books, and we need to have a mechanism to do that, and we need a mechanism to have school districts understand what's in the book and how to determine what's okay and what's not okay, and then we need parents and readers to understand like, what are we okay or not okay with, and so you have an entire ecosystem of stakeholders, and you have state law that you have to adhere to. So it's a very complex problem. So that's what we're working towards right now. What we do today? Think of it like antivirus for libraries.
And so we have ban and challenge book lists out there. Pan America is, you know, the leader. They've taken the reins, and and basically taking information from, you know, people and systems where they say, this book was banned in this school district. This was banned in this school district. The problem is it's highly manual, and it doesn't tell the whole story of the book because, yes, books are removed from the shelves, but what it doesn't always tell you is what they did with the book.
Did they actually remove it and take it out of the school district, or did they move it out of an elementary school and move it to a high school? And there's where it just goes into the vapor, and we need to we need to be transparent about that. So we know exactly what's happening with the book, so we know what is being censored and what is not being censored and just being reasonably, you know, responsible. And the reason those books were in the elementary school and not in the high school isn't because some librarian decided to put that nasty book that a sixth grader shouldn't read, it's because they don't know. They actually don't know.
100% of the libraries that we scan, 100%. We find books that shouldn't be in those libraries. Not because they're trying to be, you know, malice, I guess. Is that the way like, they're not trying to be that. They just don't know.
Speaker 2: And I guess one one of the benefits of of the program as you're describing it is you can be that hub rather than a bunch of silos, superintendents, or librarians making isolated decisions. The benefit of your review in one district or in one jurisdiction can be leveraged to the benefit of additional districts. Right?
Speaker 0: Yeah. Yeah. You know, like, so so if Penn America is looking at a book in I don't know. I I don't even wanna name a school district, because I don't wanna point anyone out. But in Acne ISD.
There's probably an Acne ISD in Texas, so sorry Acne if there is, but they're collecting evidence on that book. That's public education, Public taxpayer money that's collecting evidence on the book, they should be sharing that with other school districts so that they don't have to collect the same evidence because they are. They're duplicating work, and this is a great example of where technology and AI can really transform an industry. We're not trying to get rid of jobs here. We're trying to get people to read more books.
Everybody wins if everybody reads more books. This
Speaker 1: podcast is brought to you by Scale LLP, a distributed national law firm that's been called the wave of the future by Reuters. Scale is a revolutionary distributed law firm that offers a fresh alternative to traditional practices. By leveraging cutting edge technology and a flexible structure, Scale empowers attorneys with a more satisfying and lucrative career and delivers efficient, connected legal solutions for clients. To keep up with how Scale LLP supports clients with its tech driven approach, check out the website linked in our podcast bio.
Speaker 3: You you've been through the startup journey a few times. Right? Are there any, this is a a regulated industry. Right? And you have experience in in education.
Can you tell me did you have a particular legal strategy when you started out the gate?
Speaker 0: Did I have a you know? No. I I I don't think I walked in I walk in with any of my startups. In the startups that I that I also mentor and I and I sit on boards with, like, helped a lot of startups in the past, and don't know if I have a legal strategy. I just have a, like, this is what I do, and I think, yes, that's become a strategy.
But definitely, there's some scaffolding things that we need to be thinking about. Right? And first is, you know, what is the corporate structure of this thing, and and what does that look like? And that's that's probably where I spend with, you know, legal a a lot most of my time because raising money and and fast growth. But then, of course, there's there's all the legalities around ensuring our customers are protected and their data and infrastructure is protected, and and we have a multi sided marketplace to do this, so it's extremely complex.
But as far as the strategy goes, market experts, of course, and done it before where I've gotten involved with legal firms, you have way too many cooks in the kitchen, and it can drive costs up. So it's like, how do you find someone that is scrappy and understands startup life? I mean, I guess if I had a strategy that would be one is, like, you gotta get you gotta understand that. And Yeah. A lot of people just go to their lawyer.
Speaker 3: Well, speaking speaking of going to lawyers, Steve, how did you come to work with Scale?
Speaker 0: Well, that and that comes down to another piece, like, it's relationships. And so I I moved from Canada to Texas to build this company. My last startup, we did well, but I wanna be exactly where the problem is, and I wanna be in the belly of the beast, and Texas is that that belly. So moving here, I know a lot of lawyers in Silicon Valley, and I know a lot of lawyers in, you know, where I lived in Canada, but this is Texas. And we know how Texas is Texas, and I learned that from my previous startup.
I'm not a Texan, and I know when you're not a Texan, you're not a Texan, and I'm okay with that. Yes. But I need I need people to support me, and I was looking for a firm or someone that understood Texas. And through a friend, I got introduced to Chuck, and he took me to our Edmonton Oilers game, and we and everything was great from there. So and I'm really thankful for our relationship because you guys are Texas, and but you're not as well.
And I get the Texas part, and I also get the other side of, you know, immigration and all those things that I have access to that that are helpful. So relationships.
Speaker 3: We had talked, Chuck, about your client acquisition strategy. Taking everybody to hockey games doesn't seem like maybe the most productive way to handle it. But Steve, talk to us about how your relationship with scale, how has scale helped you deliver on the mission that you're on right now?
Speaker 0: Oh, man. Well, I mean, so many different ways, and it's hard to articulate that because it's a when you know you know type of thing, and especially when you know you're in Texas, how important that is. And knowing that you know that, you keep me in check. We don't do that around here, or this if you wanna get that done, this is how we get it done. So understanding how to navigate those waters into we're working with school districts across the country, but Texas is our mainstay, and just you guys have been so helpful in navigating those waters and working with our our channel partners, education service centers.
That was like, all of those things are so important to the business. I just didn't realize how lucky I was to that well, I couldn't have done those things with a Silicon Valley firm because they don't understand the culture and the ecosystem. And and that's what scale firm brings, but you also bring Silicon Valley mindset and startup mindset to this. So you you guys are you guys are unique, and and it it's cool. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Well, let's pay it a little bit forward to other founders in the audience. What what's some advice you might give to a founder starting out?
Speaker 0: Don't do it. It's hard. You guys, it's so hard. It's it's hard. And and, you know, so clearly, I get emotional, but when you're doing something that you truly believe it, like, I'm not quitting, but it's so freaking hard because you're dealing with problems every day, and you're doing something that's nobody like, we're doing something that's never been done.
So and people tell you you can't do it every day or give you reasons why. That's wearing and you need people around you. Like the advice would be put people around you that can help and support you truly and tell you where you're going wrong and tell you where you're, you know, to and fuel you where you're going right and not just always say yes because, like, I will hit we we we can't afford to to hit a landmine here. This is important, and so I take that really seriously, and I think as a founder, if you don't you're not gonna go to the mat, like, you might want to rethink about doing it because it's harder than you think it is. The fun times are awesome.
We're on a high right now, and it's pretty cool. But I'll tell you, there's some days that it wasn't good.
Speaker 2: Yep. I've had a
Speaker 0: Chuck, you guys know, like, we couldn't meet payroll a few times. That's not a good feeling.
Speaker 2: We've had really good conversations about making sure the board was strategic, and we you you have a very strategic board. It's been fantastic, built on purpose for the stage that the company's at. We've talked a lot about the strategic capital raises that have been done and making sure that the capital you have is highly supportive, which it is, and believes in the and believes in the story and understands the the milestones and the roadblocks that we're gonna face along the way. You know, none of that was easy.
Speaker 0: And the mishits we've had. Right? Like, we thought this and then that happened, and it didn't turn out the way we thought. And now we have to restructure a bunch of stuff.
Speaker 2: Well, and one of the interesting things about the the the revenue model, of course, is it's it's very chunky. Right? These purchases from school districts don't happen on a daily basis. They happen a couple of times a year. And you miss the window, you're kind of locked out for at least six months.
And so we had a lot of conversations about making sure that the company was resilient enough to withstand some of those things. And you're pointing out the challenges you faced along the way. But, you know, I think you've been through it enough times, and and we advising, you know, similar similar companies who face these things, we're able to, give you some advice about what might be around the corner and ways gone wrong in other circumstances. And then you can't fully insulate from these things, but at least being prepared that there's a potential downside scenario, but there's a bunch of things we can do to prepare for it and mitigate the damage. So, you know, congrats on on navigating through those things.
Speaker 0: Well, it's not it's but yeah. So congrats is it like, I I fundamentally believe it's teamwork. Right? Like, you need partners, so it's not it's like, yeah, we did it. Because I I can't do that on my own, like and so founders need to find those trusted sources that you can really lean into, or you're like, you'll just you'll go crazy and you'll make big mistakes and I think that's what like it's not as easy as just getting a contract signed.
We've spent a lot of time together, Chuck. You know, like just talking about the bigger problem and what and then you're like, oh, we need to be thinking about this. Like, well, we can't afford that right now. What? Okay.
Well, you guys are thinking about that and you guys bring that to the table for us when we're ready and you know we find ways to work things out because it's not just show up at the lawyer's office and start a corp and issue, you know, equity, and I'll see you when I raise. Like, it just doesn't work that way.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So it's been a partnership the whole way through.
Speaker 0: It has been a partnership. Yeah.
Speaker 2: That's good. So what do you think? If we sit down, this time next year, what what do you think we'll be talking about at that point? What's next on the on the horizon for Bookmark?
Speaker 0: Well, if I could tell you what I thought three months ago and where it was today, like, I mean, it it's just like, I can't even predict it anymore, but I'll tell you what I what I believe can happen. Like, I don't I don't know where we're at this time next year, but I fundamentally believe that technology and AI are gonna exponentially increase our capacities to do amazing things. And that I I I believe that we can start the foundation of finding ways to reinvent libraries in how we buy books and how publishers sell books and how publishers sell a lot more books than they're selling right now. And that we won't have that fully baked out next year, but we will we will have a a fully working model where we'll have hundreds of publishers on the platform and school districts will be able to go through our platform and look and say, I can buy that book. I can buy that book.
I can buy because they have no foul language in them. They have like, it's just easy. That's 90% of books, guys. Like like, we're we're talking about a small number of books. You just like I said, you gotta get through the books to do it, and you don't have the capacity to do it, and that's what AI can do, and we will do that next year.
We can do that today. We can. It's just we need infrastructure to be able to get all the parties involved. It's like it's trying to organize a, you know, I don't know, a herd of cats. And then you have regulatory issues around this that that are very vague in some ways, and we have to bring clarity to that, and so we take I'm taking responsibility for bringing clarity to school districts and bringing clarity to to publishers so that we can build a platform that protects books and protects freedom and protects the foundation of this country.
Like, that's what we're doing. This is high stakes. We'll get there. Nobody else is thinking about it this way, and if they are great, we need that, but we need this. So we will be there next year.
Now at scale, don't know. With scale, of course. Oh, I like that. You like that? No.
That's good. I I think
Speaker 2: I
Speaker 0: think I didn't plan that word,
Speaker 2: by the way. So So yeah, the technical term for the collaboration is goat rodeo, not herding cats, which reminded me of one of our favorite questions in our lightning round, which is, what's what's one of your favorite spots to grab a bite a bite to eat? I'm in Fort Worth, so rodeo goats just down the road. What, what's been your your your favorite Texas spot to grab a grab a bite
Speaker 0: to Well, I will tell you, you know it. It's my by far my favorite. I go there every Sunday, and it's called Shane and Jennifer Warwa.
Speaker 2: Yes. So I go
Speaker 0: to Shane and Jennifer's who are my good friends here in Texas who have taken me in as family and who I I met Chuck through Jennifer. And so every Sunday, I go to Shannon Jen's, and we have dinner together, and that's my favorite place in Texas. We're in Frisco to have dinner. We're
Speaker 2: That's great. Favorite, favorite app you've discovered recently?
Speaker 0: Guys. Game changer. Gamma. Gamma app. Change your life.
It takes your presentations in PowerPoint to a whole new level. You don't have to worry about design anymore. It's rad. It's the best. Love it.
Gamma app.
Speaker 3: We'll try it out.
Speaker 2: We'll check it out. And, and lastly, where can, where can the audience learn more about Bookmarked?
Speaker 0: Yeah. I mean, we're drinking from a fire hose right now, so, like, our website is probably the most up to date place to go check it out. Hopefully yeah. I mean, the website's always a good place. We're not super active on social media right now.
Just, you know, we need to be sensitive about that, and, it can be a strange place sometimes when you're dealing with stuff like this.
Speaker 2: Got it. Got it. Head down, delivering the solution. Well, Thanks, Steve. Thanks, everyone, for listening to Yall Street Law.
You can learn more about Bookmarked at bookmarked.com. And if you're building something bold, Scale's here. We're ready to help. Subscribe for more founder stories and legal strategies from Scale. Thanks, Steve.
Speaker 0: Thanks, guys.
Speaker 3: Thanks for joining us.
Speaker 1: Thanks for tuning in to the Scale LLP Yall Street Law podcast. We hope you enjoyed today's episode and found it valuable. If you like what you heard, don't forget to subscribe and leave us a review. For more insights and updates, visit www.scalefirm.com or follow us on LinkedIn. Until next time, we'll see y'all later.