Portrait No. 001
Cam Nguyen
Founder
Stanza
I'm an immigrant. When I was 13, my family got scammed out of a million dollars by an immigration attorney. And because we were not from the US, we trusted him and had no way of knowing better. I'm 21 now and still in the early stages of getting a green card. Eight years of my life spent navigating a system that was supposed to help us. That experience shaped everything. I saw firsthand what happens when legal help is inaccessible: people either pay what they can't afford, trust who they can't vet, or go without entirely. My family did everything right and still got burned. I started Stanza because I don't want anyone else to go through what we did. Access to quality legal help shouldn't depend on how much money you have or how lucky you get with your attorney.
In her words
“But I also know that an industry as old as legal doesn't change from the outside alone.”
Chapter I
The toughest challenges you've faced as a founder.
I graduated Stanford early, got into Harvard Law, and turned it down to build Stanza at 20 years old. People thought I was crazy. Even my parents thought I was crazy. The hardest part of this hasn't been building, it's been getting taken seriously. I'm young, I'm a woman, I'm Vietnamese, and I'm an immigrant still waiting on my own green card. I have no connections in the legal industry, and every conversation I've had, I've had to earn from scratch. But maybe that's the point. I'm not part of the system that's broken, which means I can see it clearly because I've been on the other side of it my whole life. 2.5 months in, 30 law firms wanted to work with us and we picked 15 as design partners. Our platform is being used 6-7 hours a day, we raised funding, and we're launching in January. I gave up the safe path because I believed this would do more to change how legal help works than any law degree could.
Chapter II
Your vision.
I want to fundamentally change how legal help is accessed and provided. Right now, most people can't afford a lawyer and, as a consequence, end up building their lives on really shaky foundations because the system prices them out. The traditional legal industry charges by the hour. Lawyers, for the most part, cannot afford to help more people because their hours are consumed by existing clients. And because lead generation takes time that doesn't itself make money, the incentive is to serve fewer people at higher rates. But if there's a way to substantially decrease the hours spent per client and increase lead generation at little extra cost, we can reverse that incentive structure entirely. If we can hone an attorney's hours into the critical points where judgment and experience matter most, and cut everything else, we can help them serve more people without sacrificing their lives or the quality of each case prepared and filed. Lawyers make more by helping more. The person who used to get turned away becomes a client worth taking. That's what we're building at Stanza.
Chapter III
The impact you want to leave behind — for your industry, your community, and the women who come next.
I want to create something that didn't exist before. A new category of consumer technology that puts real legal help in the hands of everyday people. But I also know that an industry as old as legal doesn't change from the outside alone. You have to work with the existing system to rebuild it. That's why we're starting with law firms, earning their trust, and then partnering with them to reach the people who've never had access. Thirty years from now, I want legal help to feel like something everyone can get, not something only some people can afford.