Ward Hendon
General Partner
Ward Hendon is an investor, teacher and entrepreneur. His career has ranged from practicing law, to starting and exiting a pioneering tech-enabled legal services firm, teaching MBA students, law students and incarcerated individuals, investing in promising new businesses, serving on boards and mentoring/advising a handful of entrepreneurs and CEOs.
Prior to Dangerous Ventures, Ward was a member of the founding team of Axiom Law. Axiom is the world’s largest and fastest growing non-traditional provider of tech-enabled legal services. With 6,900 lawyers, Axiom serves over half of the FTSE/Fortune 100 through 14 offices and 4 Centers of Excellence around the world. Axiom has been ranked #1 in Business of Law, #1 in Innovation in Corporate Strategy, and #1 in Innovation in Law Firm Efficiency by The Financial Times. The New York Times declared that Axiom is “rewriting the law firm business model,” and the Wall Street Journal reported that Axiom "aims to disrupt the way legal services are delivered to the country's largest companies." In 2019, Axiom was sold to Permira, a global private equity firm. Over the course of 15 years with Axiom, Ward sat on the executive management committee and held a variety of sales, operational and general management roles.
He is currently also a lecturer at the UCLA Anderson School of Management, where he teaches classes on entrepreneurship and impact investing; and at the UNC School of Law, where he teaches a class on lawyers and the entrepreneurial ecosystem.
Ward graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill and UNC-Chapel Hill Law School. He then clerked for the Hon. Wm. L. Osteen, Sr. (U.S. District Court for MDNC) before practicing corporate law for two years at King & Spalding LLP in Atlanta.
Ward is passionate about getting outdoors in a variety of ways that usually involve kids, a backpack, sticks, marshmallows, graham crackers and plenty of chocolate bars. He also manages a beehive that has resulted in precious little honey but plenty of bee stings and an incredible story involving a neighbor’s dog. He lives in Santa Fe, NM with his wife and three children.
Listen to Ward on the Dadages podcast with Chad Hagle