For a long time, I assumed startups belonged to other people. The dominant startup narrative has always centred on youth. Founders are expected to be twenty-something disruptors, often technical, often male, often celebrated precisely because they are inexperienced enough to “move fast and break things.”
My path looked nothing like that. I built my technology company after three decades in law, following a career as a solicitor, barrister and writer. Increasingly, I have come to believe that the very things that once seemed like disadvantages became the foundation for building something meaningful.
Early in my career at the bar, I struggled to secure speaking opportunities. At the time, there were not many young Asian women in advocacy roles, particularly in construction law. Speaking roles instead went to the white male barristers and I found myself repeatedly overlooked.
So I adapted. If I could not easily build my advocacy skills through speaking roles, I would build them by accepting every speaking engagement I was offered. Each speaking engagement required mastery of the subject, which required deep research.
That decision changed the trajectory of my life.
What began as a practical response to limited opportunities slowly became a deep intellectual obsession with legal research and legal reasoning itself. I started publishing in peer-reviewed journals. Then came textbook writing. Over time, my work was adopted onto university syllabuses across Australia.
More importantly, I developed something that only comes through years of immersion: pattern recognition.
Deep understanding led me to find a problem to solve
Over three decades in the law, I read well over 100,000 cases. I worked across litigation, appeals, complex disputes and academic publishing. I spent years thinking about legal reasoning, how judgments are formed, and where legal systems begin to break under the pressure of scale and complexity.
Eventually, one insight became impossible to ignore. The law had grown beyond human cognitive capacity.
Lawyers are still expected to know everything, verify everything and miss nothing, despite operating within a body of law too vast for any individual to realistically hold in mind. The problem was not intelligence; it was scale.
That insight ultimately became the foundation for MiAI Law, the legal AI company I founded.
Ironically, I do not think I could have built it earlier in my career. At twenty-five, I simply did not yet understand the law deeply enough. If pressed, I would have struggled to find a problem to solve. I certainly would not have addressed the underlying structural problem of how legal reasoning itself is constructed and tested.
Experience gave me the ability to see the real bottleneck and the expertise to solve it. When lawyers go through our demo, they immediately understand the problem that we have solved. Generalists typically do not. That gap is the whole point.
Experience brings resilience
Experience has also shaped my resilience.
Almost three years ago, after a number of unsuccessful applications for senior counsel, the then president of the Bar Association gave me difficult advice. She suggested I take a year off before applying one final time. At the time, it was confronting and frustrating not to be recognised.
Like many professionals, I had spent years attaching achievement to progression, recognition and external markers of success. However, I accepted the advice and on New Years Eve 2023, two-and-a-half months into the “break”, I decided I wanted to use AI to build a perfect memory for myself. I began to explore whether AI could fundamentally change legal research and reasoning. What started as frustration evolved into a much larger vision about access to justice, human judgement and the future of professional expertise.
Interestingly, I think age became an advantage rather than a limitation. One of the benefits of founding later is that you are more resilient. You are less swayed by trends and more interested in performance and substance. You build to solve real problems that you have personally experienced. You become calmer under pressure because you have already experienced failure, reinvention and uncertainty many times before.
You also have the confidence not to chase trends.
I think we are entering a period where deep domain expertise and legal verification will become more valuable, not less. AI can automate many forms of mechanical work, but judgment, ethics, contextual understanding and strategic reasoning remain profoundly human skills.
The founders best positioned to build meaningful companies are often those who have lived inside the industries they are trying to transform.
The startup world can often treat experience as baggage. I see it differently. Experience is compression. It is decades of failure, pattern recognition, discipline and accumulated judgment condensed into insight. In a world increasingly flooded with noise, speed and superficial disruption, judgment may be the most valuable advantage of all.
Sometimes setbacks redirect you toward the work you are actually meant to do.
Please see the original article: Here
