Mike Gamson, Relativity CEO (left) and Andrew Sieja, Relativity founder and executive chairman (Courtesy photo)

In 2001, at 24 years old, Andrew Sieja started his own consultancy. In 2007, that consultancy turned into a software company, then known as kCura, that developed the now-ubiquitous Relativity e-discovery platform. And now for the first time, one rebrand and massive growth later, Sieja will be turning over the company's CEO role to someone else.

Relativity announced on June 26 that LinkedIn veteran Mike Gamson has been named Relativity's new chief executive officer, effective July 1. Gamson comes to the CEO role after 11 years at the social media giant, most recently as LinkedIn's senior vice president of global solutions for the past eight years. Gamson also has been a member of Relativity's advisory board for the past two years.

That is not to say that Sieja is going away, however. He will now be the executive chairman of the company's board of directors, taking on a role where he said, “I can continue to help and be involved in a variety of different ways.” He added he will be working “more deeply with our product and technical teams, where my expertise is the deepest.”

The move is two years in the making, according to Gamson and Sieja, following a long walk and discussion in their mutual home base of Chicago in June 2017. Seeing that they were aligned in both business and personal philosophy, Gamson said Sieja began discussions the next day about him potentially taking over a CEO role. However, due to professional and personal commitments he couldn't immediately make the jump, instead opting to join the advisory board for two years to learn more about the business.

What he learned there excited him. Following 20 years in the software-as-a-service (SaaS) and consumer internet space, Gamson told a conference call with reporters that he had “a great data set of great companies against which to compare it.” And in those comparisons, the company culture and people “felt like it was something really special.”

“It felt like under every rock that I looked, there was another exciting answer of not only where Relativity is today but where it can go,” Gamson added.

Within the first 100 days, Gamson and Sieja plan to meet with a number of the company's stakeholders including all employees and as many customers as they can. During that time, Gamson said he hopes to dive deep into the product and processes the company uses, “just to understand what's really in front of us and what are some of the easy wins.” He also wants to determine what investments to double down on and which ones deprioritize.

Long term, he added, the goal is to help Relativity “manifest the fullness of our potential.”

And there could certainly be a lot of potential, given the growing size of the e-discovery marketplace and Relativity's role in it. A ComplexDiscovery analysis of the e-discovery software and services market estimated it to be $10.1 billion in 2018, with an estimated growth rate at 13%. The potential of the industry was certainly not lost on Gamson, who noted the growth when analyzing the job and compared its possibilities to the preboom financial technology market.

“Now is such an incredible moment in the company, because the market is so healthy. … It's growing, and the problems are so complex. For problem-solvers like Relativity, that's such an opportunity,” he explained.

What those opportunities will specifically entail remains to be seen. Gamson noted that the company does not view an initial public offering as a goal, and the main focus in product development will be “not ideation but rather prioritization.” He explained that “the real work is going to be making the very hard decision of what not to pursue.”

Gamson is sure to take cues from other technology companies, particularly with his SaaS background and time developing products such as LinkedIn's Recruiter. Relativity, after all, has been heavily focused on its own SaaS product RelativityOne since its introduction in 2016. But neither Gamson nor Sieja are worried about Gamson's lack of legal tech-specific experience being an impediment. Especially given Sieja's product-focused role, Gamson said he views the new executive paradigm as “an 'and,' not an 'or.' Relativity is not losing any legal tech experience or awareness of the industry. We are gaining another set of skills.”

Sieja agreed, adding that for his part, he sees Relativity beginning to transition into its next phase of growth. The company has grown exponentially under his leadership, and he said that “even though we've been at it for 17, 18 years, it feels like it's just getting going.”

And with Gamson's addition, he added, “I felt like I owed it to the business and the customers. Part of my job is to bring great talent into the organization, and here we had someone right in our backyard.”