Kiwi Camara's childhood was always in motion. He was born in Manila in the Philippines, and a couple years later his family moved to Cleveland, where his parents worked at Cleveland Clinic, before later moving to Hawaii.
Camara later worked in Albuquerque, Palo Alto, Chicago and Houston before he landed in Austin several years ago to grow his legal tech startup, CS Disco Inc.
Now the 37-year-old is making big moves again, but they have less to do with new time zones and more to do with leading Disco through its recent IPO, which raised hundreds of millions of dollars and boosted Disco's market cap to more than $2.5 billion.
While the Harvard educated lawyer was an exceptional student, he left grade school before high school and never received a high school diploma. He's been a competition ballroom dancer, and he's fallen off a horse more than once.
Camara said he got into horse jumping while growing up, and he remembers one particularly brutal crash as he and his horse approached a jump.
The horse basically stopped, but Camara was ready to jump.
"So the horse is turning, and I flew up and then I kind of flipped in the air and cut my back open on the pole — like the side of the jump," he recalled. "So I think it was more scary for the onlookers, actually."
When he was even younger, maybe 6 years old, he was in Ohio on a horse with someone leading the horse on a rope around the arena as Camara learned different riding techniques. But it was an inexperienced horse, and it took off in a full sprint. Coming into a corner, Camara flew off the horse, skidding across a table and slamming headfirst into a wall.
"And so you have to imagine ... my parents were there, the trainers were there. The trainer people must have been absolutely horrified. It's like this little kid going — bam — headfirst into the wall," he said, laughing. "I had a helmet on ... but some people think that's why I'm the way I am."
What was the first job you had? My first job was my college job. So, by age, it would have been my high school job. I was a runner at a law firm. Back in the day the way you would get the documents across town is that every law firm would have a staff of runners, and the job is exactly what it sounds like like. You take the document and you go run it across town to get a signature.
Later, I was studying computer science so they they promoted me to IT, so I was a law firm IT guy toward the end of my time there.
What are your hobbies outside of work? Well, they've changed over the years. When I was in school a girlfriend got me into ballroom dancing, believe it or not, and so I got really into that for a while. And then I wasn't actually competing for Harvard so I was on the team, which was like a thing in the Northeast, and so that was a big hobby of mine for a while and then sort of when I graduated I stopped competing. But I was a judge for a while.
I was into riding horses growing up and still do that from time to time. And then I'm big into kind of the common ones. I like reading and travel and food and wine, and I'm a hopeless cigar addict. Oh, I've taken up the trail recently so I do five miles and I live downtown, right by the Town Lake Trail. It's actually one of my favorite Austin perks.
What are you currently reading? I think the title is "God's Shadow," but it's basically a history of the Ottoman Empire, right around the time of Christopher Columbus. So it's about the Ottoman Empire's development and its interactions with Europe. But more broadly, actually I like science fiction and fantasy. That's my number one genre. Then I like biography, I like history. I actually read pretty widely. I like a lot of genres. But those are my go-tos.
How about movies and TV shows? My favorite show of all time is "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," which I think may be the pinnacle of all cinema, great writing, as well. I'm a sucker for good writing. And so Joss Whedon shows. I'm a big fan. I love "Game of Thrones." I watched "Dexter." I watched "True Blood" I think until the last few seasons. "The West Wing" is one of my all-time favorites. A recent show I love, they just released season two, is "Ted Lasso."
For movies, I have pretty diverse and also probably pretty generic tastes like "Shawshank Redemption," things like that.
Where is your favorite place to eat in Austin? My favorite place is a pandemic casualty, and so I'm hopeful that it comes back ... La Traviata, which was a little Italian restaurant on Congress and Third — best chicken parm. That is my go-to.
So you've traveled a lot for business. What's the last trip you took for fun? I went to Mexico, actually. I went for the first time, believe it or not. I've lived in Texas for so long, but I just recently went to Puerto Vallarta. And then I went to San Miguel de Allende. And on the way I stopped at those pyramids by Mexico City, Teotihuacán. It was amazing. It was just a great trip.
What's your morning routine? Despite living here for so long, I have not adjusted to the Texas heat. So, for me to do the trail requires me to go like at the crack of dawn. So I hit the trail around 6:15 or 6:30 a.m. That usually takes me an hour and a half or so, including my coffee stop, and then I get back. I'm still old fashioned; I get the real paper (as he holds up a copy of The New York Times), I get my two eggs and two slices of bacon, and that is that.
Title: CEO and founder, CS Disco
Age: 37
Hometown: Manila, Philippines
Education: J.D. from Harvard Law School; Ph.D. from Stanford University; Bachelor of Science from Hawaii Pacific University
Email: camara@csdisco.com
