Andrew Sieja and the $25 couch that stayed

Andrew Sieja paid $25 for a green couch when he started his software business in 2001. It was an economical answer to the question of office furniture. It also turned out to be a rather durable answer to the question of corporate memory. Years later, when the business had acquired hundreds of employees and outside investment, the couch was still around. A balance sheet can tell you how far a company has travelled. Occasionally, the furniture can tell you what the trip felt like.

The business was kCura, later renamed Relativity, which helps lawyers organize and examine electronic evidence. Sieja began as a programmer and became its chief executive. Today he is the founder and CEO of Chicago-based OnDean, a platform spanning investment, philanthropy, and motorcycle racing. Those pursuits look less disparate once you follow the work from its beginning: finding an interesting problem, getting close enough to understand it, and bringing other people into the effort.

The couch offers a good place to start. Corporate origin stories tend to improve with age. This one retained a purchase price low enough to make the accountant smile.

A programmer takes the available domain

Sieja grew up in Detroit, the son of Polish immigrants, and spent parts of his childhood in Poland. He saw relatives adapt and find opportunities in difficult circumstances. Computers became another early interest. He still remembers the smell of his Microsoft QuickBASIC manual, an unusually specific souvenir of learning to program. Software careers have become associated with screens; his recollection has paper, ink, and a nose in it.

Before starting his own business, he worked as a programmer at Siemens and Lante. In 2001, he and two friends pooled their resources to establish a software consultancy. Their original ambition was to build a boutique firm specializing in collaboration and knowledge management. The name combined a “k” for knowledge with “cura,” drawn from Latin. Sieja later supplied a practical explanation for choosing it: the domain was available.

Legal work gradually took up more of the consultancy’s attention. A project for Foley & Lardner in 2004 helped set the direction for what became Relativity. DLA Piper was among the early customers whose business helped make a dedicated software operation possible. There was a customer before there was a grand company narrative, and a problem to solve before there was a market position to defend.

In 2007, the team stopped consulting and concentrated on e-discovery. Electronic records were multiplying, and legal teams needed ways to handle them. For a small software business, choosing one product meant giving up other work. The opportunity had become substantial enough to warrant the choice.

The office keeps the couch

Sieja’s recollections of the early years are full of work done at awkward hours and selling done wherever he could find a customer. He described fixing clients’ problems through the night, struggling to cover payroll, and travelling to conferences where a customer might offer him a hotel-room floor. He gave laptop demonstrations in the bars where conference attendees gathered. Competitors could arrive with large booths and large teams; he arrived with software to show.

“The early days of the business were a lot of fun,” he recalled in 2012. That pleasure coexisted with the scramble. He also kept an ugly fake-fur coat discovered in the first office and occasionally wore it as a joke. Every growing business needs artifacts. Some are more suitable for reception than others.

As kCura expanded, the work of leading it changed. Maintaining close customer relationships remained part of the operation, with contact sometimes weekly or daily. A product company could keep learning from individual clients even while serving more of them. That habit helps explain why customer support appeared alongside product quality and employee experience in Sieja’s stated goals.

In 2015, ICONIQ Capital made a $125 million minority investment. By then, the business had spent years growing before accepting that outside capital. The old couch survived the change in financial circumstances. Keeping it was a small, visible way to preserve the connection between the organization people were joining and the cash-conscious outfit that had made it possible.

“Relativity is my life’s work.”

Andrew Sieja, on changing his role in 2019

A room full of people who use the software

Sieja’s company developed an audience that could answer back. Relativity became an open platform in 2009, allowing users to extend its capabilities. The first Relativity Fest followed in Chicago in 2010. A conference gave the people building the software and the people relying on it somewhere to meet, exchange practices, and compare what they needed next.

By the 2014 event, the programme included 173 sessions, six hands-on workshops, and labs that participants could continue using after leaving. Sieja encouraged attendees to flag down the team, discuss ideas, and say where the product could improve. It is an invitation worth taking literally: a user working through a difficult case may have a more useful observation than the most polished slide in the room.

That gathering grew alongside the product. By 2018, the ecosystem included more than 85 custom applications, including work from Chicago companies such as Heretik, Esquify, and Milyli. Other businesses could build on what Relativity had created. The founder’s job now included making room for ideas he and his own team had not originated.

When kCura took the Relativity name in 2017, the decision reflected a decade of concentration on its product. At that time, Sieja described ambitions for an extensible, connected platform and a community in which applications and practices could circulate. The name on the door caught up with what customers already knew the business for.

Chicago, with a return trip to Poland

Relativity’s expansion into Poland had a personal history behind it. Sieja had visited the country each summer as a child and wanted to establish an office there. The Kraków operation opened in 2015 with 20 employees. He and the team considered what would make it a worthwhile place to work, setting an ambition for an engineering co-headquarters with substantial technical projects.

By July 2025, Relativity reported just over 500 employees throughout Poland. Their work included engineering, applied science, and AI development. The distance from Chicago had become a connection between two centres of technical work, with a childhood attachment helping determine where a growing company would put down roots.

Giving was also part of the company’s development. Sieja started Relativity Gives, supporting education and technology initiatives. Relativity Academic, announced in 2015, extended software and training into education. These programmes brought the business into contact with people beyond its immediate customers, including students who might eventually work in the field.

In July 2019, Sieja became executive chairman and Mike Gamson became CEO. Gamson had already spent two years on the advisory board. Sieja described their shared aspirations for customers and employees, while expressing enthusiasm about getting closer to product and technology again. After nearly two decades leading the business, the programmer was making space in his working life for programming’s concerns.

The next project has wheels

OnDean gives Sieja’s current interests several places to operate. Its direct investment arm, OnDean Forward, concentrates on legal technology and adjacent regulated markets. The team includes people with experience at Relativity, among them Nick Robertson, Marcin Wojtczak, and Shawn Gaines. Their proposition is practical: founders can draw on people who have already faced product, hiring, sales, and leadership decisions in this market.

In August 2026, OnDean Forward led Newcode’s Series A round. The company builds AI infrastructure for law firms, with an emphasis on connecting their information and giving them control over their tools. Sieja highlighted the opportunity for firms to own their AI stack. His involvement keeps him close to the question that shaped Relativity: how software can help legal professionals work with the information they have.

OrangeCat Racing brings that interest in technology into the paddock. Sieja owns the Chicago-based motorcycle racing team and has raced himself. In 2024, Lightfighter co-founder Brian Wismann encountered him at Laguna Seca, where Sieja was competing in the AHRMA series. They shared an interest in rider Jayson Uribe, who was racing both Lightfighter’s electric motorcycle and OrangeCat’s BMW machinery.

Sieja examined the electric bike and watched Uribe compete. The encounter developed into a partnership, with the teams joining forces at Barber Motorsports Park and continuing to learn from one another. Wismann credited Sieja with helping develop the V3 motorcycle. A racing paddock makes a fairly direct testing ground: the machine has to work, and somebody is going to ride it.

Twenty years to put the money to work

Alta Futures, the philanthropic platform Jessica and Andrew built together, introduces another measure of time. When Andrew had an opportunity to sell part of his company in 2020, they decided to set aside resources for giving. They designed the platform to spend down those resources over 20 years. That decision put a horizon on the work from its beginning.

They named Alta Futures after their two children. Its focus spans climate, democracy, and community, using grants, investments, and gatherings to support people and projects. Jessica leads it as founder and principal; Andrew’s role includes deploying capital, making connections, and supporting the team. Their own account connects the undertaking to thoughts about the world the next generation will inherit.

The choice gives his second act a concrete shape. Investment asks what another founder might build. Racing asks what a team and a machine can do together. Philanthropy asks where resources can help now, within a deliberately finite period. Sieja has moved from writing software to supporting a wider collection of people at work. The old green couch belongs to the beginning of that story. The twenty-year clock points toward what comes next.