The Founder's Journey - with DocuSign founding CEO - Court Lorenzini

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Wright, Founder and CEO of RevOpSquared and host of the Metrics That Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of B2B SaaS industry thought leaders, executives, and people just like you to discuss what metrics, KPIs, and benchmarks they use to enable better data-driven metrics-informed decisions that accelerate revenue performance and increase enterprise value. Now, on to today's show.
Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics That Measure Up podcast. Today, we are joined by Court Lorenzini, multiple time company founder and CEO of software and SaaS companies, including DocuSign. Today, we'll be discussing three main areas. The journey of a multiple time company founder and CEO, Court's story of founding and then leaving DocuSign, and Court's advice for founders who are thinking it might be time to hand over the reins of the company to someone else. Court, please take a moment to give a brief background overview of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics that Measure Up podcast.

**Court Lorenzini** (1:14)
Hey, Ray, my pleasure. So great to hear from you again, and I guess my journey to your microphone started about five years ago, maybe more actually, probably when our mutual friend, Sam LoCente, got us together and we realized we had a lot in common. So I was pleased to get your invitation and I'm looking forward to talking about Founder's Journey.

**Ray Rike** (1:35)
Great. Well, tell us a little bit more about your professional journey and specifically what led to you co-founding DocuSign in 2003, I believe.

**Court Lorenzini** (1:45)
Yeah. So, oh my, what led to that? Okay. I'll go relatively smoothly through this. So I guess I started, I always knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur. And when people ask me about that, it goes to the fact that my family is a family of entrepreneurs. Both of my grandfathers were inventors, one in the food sciences industry, the other one in the oil and gas industry. My dad was a very famous founder and early investor in Silicon Valley. In fact, my father was the person that invented the process for growing single crystal silicon. So he's one of the eight people who is designated as, quote, founding Silicon Valley, literally. So I grew up, I really had it in my genes. So when I was 13 years old, I knew that was what I wanted to do. And I got my first job working in an upholstery store. And surprisingly, I did something at that point in my life that I've always told people was one of the big evolutionary things that I did, which is I started taking observational notes. And Ray, you might remember, do you recall the old college bound notebooks where they're about five by seven, small notebooks that you just used to take notes in college?

**Ray Rike** (2:51)
I hate to say it, but I'm writing one right now. So yes, I do remember that.

**Court Lorenzini** (2:55)
There you go. All right. So I have stacks and stacks and stacks of those. I used to carry those around with me from the time I was 13 years old, writing down observations of business situations that would come up, sometimes life situations. It wasn't a journal. It was really more my note-taking on seeing how other people handled situations. So if I was doing a job and my boss told me to do something and I handled it a certain way, and he or she handled it a certain way, I would write down my observations of that interaction and how it played out, and I would write down ideas of companies I might found or observations in the world, and every six months or so, I would go back and I would read my notebooks from start to finish, meaning all of them from the beginning of time when I started. So imagine now I started at 13 I was doing this all the way through high school, all the way through college. I didn't stop until I was in my 30s. So I have shelves of these binders, and I would literally read them all the way from start to finish at least once a year. And what that did for me is it gave me an incredible view line to development of concepts and ideas over time. And that was perhaps the most differentiated thing I think I did as a young person. But ultimately, my jobs were, you know, I was able to get a job early before I even graduated high school, working in an engineering department, spent my college years working for a different company as an engineer. And then only a couple of years post-graduate, when I graduated with a degree in engineering, I was given an opportunity to go over to Europe to start a venture over there, that where I was one of three people, I was in charge of running the operation for an American company in Switzerland. And I was paired up with a guy who was running manufacturing and another guy that was running sales. And we started a company that ultimately was churning out $100 million in business in a matter of a few years over in Nishatel, Switzerland.