In search for the new simple.

Failed dates.

When I was a young bachelor, I had a habit of falling asleep on my dates. This was London in the early- to mid-noughties, and I was living the fast-paced cognitive dissonance of a City lawyer. A date meant meeting up for £18 cocktails in a fancy bar, then dinner in a fancy restaurant (traditional French or modern Japanese), then to another bar for cocktails, sometimes a club if things were going well. I usually got second wind at about midnight, but I needed that mid-dinner nap, usually just before dessert. I had dinners with some hot (and interesting!) girls, but I’d still fall asleep more often than not.

You might look for explanations. Were my dates below my attention threshold? Being a commitment-phobe, was that my subconscious way of avoiding commitments? Was it a post-traumatic defense mechanism connected with an earlier break-up? The answer, discovered a few years down the line, was unexpected and simple: a slight intolerance to red wine. It just made me sleepy. More so on top of pre-dinner drinks and foie gras.

I’m lucky to be married to an amazing woman. I fell asleep during most of our dinner dates in the early days. She persevered regardless.

David Bowie.

Some have asked why “majoto” and what does it mean? It stands for “multi-dimensional agile automation”. If you believe that you’ll believe anything.

Actually, the product is agile and multi-dimensional and it’s automation, but that was an afterthought. The real background to the name is much simpler. Majoto is a portmanteau of Major Tom. The lyrics came to me unexpectedly as I was thinking about the branding (having discarded 30 prior alternatives):  

“And I'm floating in a most peculiar way

And the stars look very different today.

For here

Am I sitting in a tin can

Far above the world

Planet Earth is blue

And there's nothing I can do.” 

Difficult sci-fi.

I love sci-fi. I grew up on it. Especially the serious social stuff from the 60s and 70s.   

Recently my brother lent me his copy of John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar. It was like wading through the treacly For Whom the Bell Tolls after the light frolics of The Sun Also Rises, or fighting The Glass Bead Game (I lost) after the simple joys of Siddhartha. Mein gott, it was a tough read. Stand on Zanzibar got interesting after 600 pages, except by that time there were only 20 left. I forgave John Brunner, however, for that quip by Chad C. Mulligan, his fictional iconoclastic social commentator: “I just haven’t been conditioned into thinking that the right answer can’t be a simple one”. Like many other things said in that brilliant and frustrating book, it’s a spot-on comment about one of our modern afflictions, 60 years on. 

Majoto: new simple.

Hopefully you’ve clocked what my failed dates, Major Tom, Stand on Zanzibar have to do with contract automation. The image I chose to represent my contract automation product Majoto (majoto.io) is a paper airplane - simple do-it-yourself magic with some fascinating innovation and physics behind it. Not unlike the “tin can” that takes us to the stars and lets us marvel at the beautiful blue earth.

Majoto is born from a desire to find the right answer - but the right answer that is also simple. Majoto is built with simplicity as a primary objective.   

Majoto is being built to do one important thing very well: enabling self-serve, which means getting business engaged with contracts, freeing up lawyers to do more value-add, and reducing legal spend. Businesses and in-house lawyers have told us that they want something that non-legal users can understand and easily work with, is easy for lawyers to maintain, enables clear and transparent compliance, gives useful actionable data, and reduces internal and external friction.  

With its unique technical and design foundation, Majoto can deliver against these needs in really simple ways. We can help customers structure their contracts so that they are easier to use - the product helps us to do that. Content, playbooks, histories, libraries and lifecycle actions are presented visually with at-a-glance navigation and no rigid workflows. There is an easy compliance/risk tool that makes it clear to users when they’ve overstepped boundaries - and helps them to self-heal. Contracts in Majoto are structured from the get go, so customers can run analytics and post-signature actions - zero-code and potentially with far less effort than building “objects” or “smart clauses”. Majoto reduces friction by focussing on collaboration rather than to-fro workflow and adversarial redlining. 

We work hard to keep it simple, even as we build the product’s capabilities.

If you’d like to learn more about how Majoto solves pain points in a simple way - drop me a line.

We’re just starting and I’m really excited about what Majoto is, and can become. For now, David Bowie sums it up for me:

“Though I'm past one hundred thousand miles

I'm feeling very still

And I think my spaceship knows which way to go

Tell my wife I love her very much she knows.”