Episode 81

What Every GC Should Know About Working With Founders with Sarah Irwin

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Episode 81

What Every GC Should Know About Working With Founders with Sarah Irwin

Cover of SpotDraft guide titled Building Smarter In-House Teams with photos and names of four professionals: Adam Becker, Akshay Verma, Tommie Tavares-Ferreira, and Kevin Cohn.
Here’s how Adam Becker at Cockroach Labs turned AI from experiment into daily legal ops power.

Summary

Key Insights


1. Community Solves the Real General Counsel Problem — Isolation

When Sarah joined Tynes, she expected legal challenges. Instead, she found loneliness.

She couldn’t ask outside counsel questions like “How do you get founders to listen?” or “What should I prioritize this quarter?”

So she built the space she needed — and hundreds of lawyers showed up overnight.

The lesson: legal leadership is easier — and smarter — when shared.

2. Founders Trust Lawyers Who Speak Their Language

Sarah didn’t build credibility by citing case law — she earned it by helping close funding rounds faster, supporting board strategy, and aligning legal work to commercial goals.

Her mental model: founders aren’t anti-risk — they’re anti-slow.

GCs must adapt to business cadence, not the other way around.

3. Modern GCs Must Become Operators, Not Issue Spotters

The biggest hurdle she sees when coaching?

Lawyers cling to certainty, structure, and process in environments defined by chaos.

High-growth companies require improvisation, collaboration, and comfort with the gray — traits traditional legal training discourages.

The shift is cultural, not technical.

4. Personal Brand Is Now a Strategic Asset for Lawyers

Sarah didn’t plan to build an audience — she just wrote about what she was learning.

LinkedIn became her distribution engine, her credibility builder, and later, her business funnel.

Her takeaway: visibility accelerates impact, opportunity, and optionality.

5. Entrepreneurship Isn’t Glamorous — It’s Emotional

Sarah openly documents the highs, lows, and fears — publicly.

That transparency resonates more than polished expertise because most professionals quietly feel the same way.

Building in public isn’t marketing — it’s connection.

6. Closing Insight

Modern GCs don’t wait for influence — they build it.

Your founder is already looking for a strategic partner.

Show them you’re one.

In this podcast, we cover

0:00 Introduction
2:19 What inspired Sarah to be a lawyer
8:02 Assessing Dublin’s start-up landscape
10:05 Working with founders at Tines
12:44 Founding the Irish Tech GC community
15:51 Seeing yourself as a founder
19:19 Deciding to go all-in on your own company
20:55 Operating a start-up and legal consulting practice
22:53 Common mistakes that GCs make when working with founders
27:55 Documenting the ups and downs of your founder journey on LinkedIn
30:29 The best and most challenging parts of being a founder
34:37 The future of Irish Tech GC
36:10 Getting in touch with Sarah
36:55 Rapid-fire questions

View AI generated transcript

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