“Anything that does not add value to building the company should be taken off your plate.”
— Raoul Bouchrit, co-founder and CEO, Zeno
Below is a conversation with Raoul Bouchrit, co-founder and CEO of Zeno, from the CIC Rotterdam Impact Report 10-Year Anniversary Edition.
The hardest part of Raoul Bouchrit’s job isn’t deciding where his company goes next. It’s deciding what should no longer demand his team’s attention. Bouchrit is co-founder and CEO of Zeno, a legal-AI company he is building from CIC Rotterdam.
Zeno is about two years old. None of its founders came from law. The opening was there because AI was text-based, and legal work was too. As the technology improved, Zeno grew into a platform supporting the core of a lawyer’s day: research, review and drafting.
But that rapid progress introduced a strategic tension. Law firms still run largely on billable hours. AI cuts the time those tasks take. So the better Zeno works, the more its own customers have to work out how to replace the hours it saves. For Raoul, the technology and the business model can’t be pulled apart. That makes it all the more important to invest in people who can do the core of the work with excellence.
That same focus on meaningful work is what brought Zeno to CIC. Their previous workspace was pleasant enough, but the company needed to become certified quickly and a secure, professional environment to bring clients to, the kind of environment that supported the ISO certification Zeno earned within three months of starting up.
A friend already based at CIC suggested they take a look. Within weeks, the three-person team had toured the space and moved in. Five people filled that first office, and soon the team grew to need several rooms. Today, Zeno has around 30 employees, all based at CIC Rotterdam.
What kept them there was how frictionless the space felt in day-to-day use. A new tech setup, a new fan, a whiteboard: each was handled quickly by CIC staff. “I send an email, stop thinking about it, and it gets fixed,” Raoul says. He spent months trying to arrange a contract for a larger office elsewhere, then chose to stay: CIC gave a fast-expanding company the flexibility and support it needed. It gave him something else, too. He often talks with the other founders here about hiring, ideas and investors, learning from their experience. Some of them are now Zeno customers. A shared address makes it easy to lean over and ask, “Oh, you’re also at CIC. Can we talk?”
Zeno is now expanding into Germany. But Raoul has no plans to leave Rotterdam. In many ways, CIC mirrors Zeno’s own values. AI reduces the busywork of the legal profession, CIC takes care of the office management; and in both cases, experts’ time is freed to focus on high-quality work.
