Jerry Ting and the case against busywork

At one in the morning, Jerry Ting was still searching contracts. He has described sitting in a New York law firm, pressing Ctrl-F, checking for something that might be wrong. The useful conversation would happen later, when someone needed to know whether buying a company was risky. First came the searching. A legal education had brought him to a keyboard shortcut.

There is a particular comedy to expensive expertise being deployed this way. The person has spent years learning to exercise judgment; the immediate assignment is to locate a phrase. Ting took the mismatch seriously enough to build a company around it. Evisort, which he co-founded in 2016, would apply artificial intelligence to contracts. Workday acquired it in 2024. His responsibilities there grew to include AI agents, and in September 2026 he joined Asana’s board.

That sequence can sound inevitable when compressed into a biography. It involved a change of profession, persistent selling and the discovery that building software to reduce work creates quite a lot of work for its founders. Ting’s route makes more sense when followed through the tasks that annoyed him, and the people he found to help.

The idea was called Evidence Sort

The first version began with paper. As an undergraduate intern at the U.S. Supreme Court in 2013, Ting noticed how much legal information still moved through physical documents. He came from the San Francisco Bay Area, where friends wrote code. The contrast caught his attention. Evisort’s name shortened “Evidence Sort,” a trace of his original interest in litigation.

After college, he worked in sales at Yelp. At Harvard Law School, where he would graduate in 2018, his attention shifted toward contracts. Corporate lawyers were spending time finding clauses and dates in documents their businesses already possessed. Ownership of information, it turned out, did not guarantee that anybody could conveniently use it.

Through the Harvard Law Entrepreneurship Project, Ting met MIT researcher Amine Anoun. Jake Sussman, a Harvard Law classmate, joined as a co-founder. Their combination put legal experience and technical research inside the same young business. Customer conversations followed. The promise was practical: help companies extract useful information from agreements, then make that information easier to find.

The ambition had an appealing economy. A contract already records promises between parties. A business should be able to ask when those promises expire, what they cost and which obligations require attention. Getting an answer should not require someone to rediscover the document each time. The signed agreement could become a working resource, rather than something filed away after the negotiation.

The sale before the scale

Having a plausible idea did not relieve Ting of the obligation to sell it. He later remembered sending 100 emails pitching Evisort to get one reply. That is a less photogenic startup milestone than a financing announcement, but a useful one. Every unanswered message tests whether the founder can explain why a busy person should care.

His Yelp experience belongs in this story alongside his law degree. Selling software to lawyers requires familiarity with their work and the ability to get a meeting. Investor Jennifer Lum, who became involved with Evisort through Village Global, singled out Ting’s sales ability and recruiting skills. Technical work needed a commercial counterpart.

The choice of customer also mattered. In a 2020 conversation, Ting explained why Evisort focused on corporate legal departments. Their incentives included helping deals close and removing obstacles for sales and procurement. A shorter process could serve the wider business. That gave the product a purpose a budget holder could understand.

By March 2021, Evisort had completed a $35 million Series B financing. Ting was already discussing a broader ambition for the product, extending beyond a repository toward the everyday operation of a legal department. The recurring question was what a company could do once its contracts became easier to understand together.

In May 2022, Evisort announced another $100 million in capital, including equity and venture debt, led by TCV. General Atlantic, Microsoft’s M12 and other existing investors participated. The financing brought resources for a larger business. It also made the challenge of running that business harder to fit inside one person’s working day.

Learning to stop doing everything

Ting’s account of becoming a CEO includes an unromantic inventory: securing meetings, pitching prospects, serving customers, managing product and engineering, raising money and looking after employees. Each responsibility had a reasonable claim on his time. Taken together, they required him to build a layer of leadership rather than keep collecting tasks.

Early colleagues became department leaders. Delegation required accepting that their approach would differ from his own. That admission gives the growth story some texture. A founder can be intensely invested in a company and still become the person through whom too many decisions must pass. Trust has an operational use.

He has described a leadership style based on clear goals, accountability and showing up to support the team. He admired the example of Workday’s then-CEO Carl Eschenbach joining customer calls. There is a modest test of culture in that example: what does a leader actually do when a colleague needs help? A printed value has a relatively undemanding job description.

The customer becomes the buyer

Workday already knew the product when it agreed to acquire Evisort. It had been a customer and partner. For Ting, joining meant access to a larger platform, resources and distribution. He wanted to continue building, including internationally and for more kinds of customers. An acquisition could give the original project a wider audience.

It also changed the setting. A founder’s ability to move a small team is different from an executive’s ability to coordinate work inside an established software company. Ting’s expanding AI role involved bringing platform, interface and data teams closer together. An agent that performs a business task depends on those pieces cooperating.

A year after joining, he shared a telling detail: a collage from the Evisort team’s Workday onboarding had remained his desktop background. He wrote about learning the power of distribution and scale. The detail is personal without being grand. The company had changed ownership; the group of people still mattered to him.

In May 2026, he became Vice President and General Manager of AI and Agents at Workday. The scope had widened considerably from finding information in contracts. The practical concern remained recognizable: moving from information toward work somebody needs completed.

The rules still need an author

Ting’s advice about enterprise AI often lands on a task companies may prefer to postpone. They need to decide which risks they accept and what their policies mean. A system cannot reliably follow a set of rules that has never been properly settled. Buying software leaves that responsibility with the buyer.

His legal training is useful here. Contracts force people to specify conditions, obligations and exceptions. Agents raise similar questions about permission and action. Who may approve this? When should it stop? What requires review? The machinery may be new; the need for someone to take responsibility is familiar.

“If I had had Evisort when I was a lawyer, I would still be a lawyer.”

Jerry Ting, 2025

The remark gives his professional detour a pleasing twist. He built an alternative career partly to improve the one he had intended to pursue. His enthusiasm for automation comes with a continuing interest in judgment: the discussion about risk, the advice to a client, the decision that follows the reading.

He has carried that interest back into education. At Harvard Law School, he taught “Start-up Entrepreneurship and Innovations in Legal Technology.” The classroom put him among people preparing to enter a profession whose tools were changing. It also required a founder to explain his decisions to students who might make different ones.

Room for the photographer

There is another version of Ting worth keeping in view. As an undergraduate at the University of Southern California, he photographed football professionally. He thinks of himself as an artist at heart. The detail resists the tidiness of an executive biography, which can make every early experience sound like preparation for the eventual title.

In September 2026, Asana appointed him to its board, alongside committee responsibilities in audit and corporate governance. His experience now enters discussions about how teams coordinate work beyond legal departments. He has also backed more than 25 early technology companies as an investor and advisor.

The photographer, seller, law student and executive need not be squeezed into a single origin myth. They offer different ways of paying attention. Ting’s business began by noticing the awkward distance between the training a person receives and the work that occupies their day. A decade later, it remains a question worth asking before opening another document and pressing Ctrl-F.