Timothy Baxter is the CEO and founder of Baxter Research, a wholesale criminal research firm he built from the ground up in San Francisco in the mid-1990s and has since grown into what many in the industry consider the gold standard for court-based criminal research. He is currently rolling out a fully rebuilt AI-based system after four years of development, and splits his time between Florida, Reno, and West Virginia.
Pro Conversation You Don’t Want to Miss!
- How Tim went from calling in criminal court results from a phone booth to building an AI-based research system, and why he scrapped four years of work and started over to do it right
- The grandfather story that shaped Tim’s entire worldview: a Depression-era decision made in a cornfield that ended with retirement at 50 and a quarter million dollars
- What Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance taught him about not sacrificing your life for the rice, and why that stuck with him since he was 20
- Tim’s landmark Massachusetts work: why the fractional search misses 326% more felony convictions than a countywide search, and how Baxter Research was the first to deliver volume countywide searches in that state
- The superbike school at Laguna Seca, the motorcycle trip through Iceland to the filming location of Oblivion, and what it looks like when you spend decades actually doing the things you said you would
I’ve been in this industry a long time, and Tim Baxter was the very first person I ever met in it. So this one was personal for me, and I have to say, even after all these years, I learned things about this man I never knew.Tim’s path to founding Baxter Research is one of the great origin stories in this industry: a pager, a phone booth, a trifold mailer with a Sherlock Holmes logo, and a trip to the library to find phone books from Fort Lauderdale and Texas. Before any of that, though, he spent his teens and early twenties traveling to more than 70 countries with just a backpack, a tie, and a jacket — courtesy of his mom’s airline benefits. The same curiosity and grit that took him around the world is what built Baxter Research into a household name, and this conversation covers all of it.
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