Building a Team at AI Speed | Harvey’s Maggie Landers

a16z’s Katie Kirsch sits down with Harvey VP of Talent Maggie Landers to discuss what happens inside a company growing at AI speed, and how you preserve culture while adding more than 1,000 employees in a year. Maggie explains why Harvey prioritizes progress over perfection, how its values of simplicity, decisiveness, and “job’s not finished” shape the way people work, and why moving quickly requires giving employees significant trust and autonomy. For people accustomed to being the “A student,” that can mean learning to experiment, make mistakes, and course-correct quickly. They also get into how Harvey identifies people who can thrive in that environment, what changes when most of your company is relatively new, the role its founders play in maintaining culture, and why judgment becomes increasingly important when employees are given the freedom to move fast.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Transforming the legal industry is very different than trying to transform customer support, or build an AI harness, or create a model. You're going to do more in a month at Harvey than you would in a quarter somewhere else. There's a lot of experimentation. So you're going to fail more than you're necessarily going to get it right. And so I think the emphasis is on both failing fast and correcting to make something or build something that has never been built before.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  It's like, nothing inspires people more than actually seeing their impact in the world and knowing that even being part of a really large organization, they still feel like everything they're doing is working towards a much bigger vision.

• 0:40Speaker 00

  The right sort of mentality for Harvey is that passion to be part of creating it.

• 0:45Speaker 01

  What about the legal industry gets you so fired up?

• 0:48Speaker 00

  I think that-

• 0:50Erik Torenberg?

  What happens when you add more than 1,000 employees in a year, but still want to operate like a startup? A16Z's Katie Kirsch sits down with Harvey VP of Talent Maggie Landers to discuss how the company is approaching hiring and culture as it scales. Maggie explains Harvey's focus on progress over perfection, giving employees the autonomy to move quickly, make mistakes, and learn. They also discuss what Harvey looks for in new hires, and why succeeding in a fast-moving environment requires comfort with ambiguity and strong judgment.

• 1:23Speaker 01

  Welcome to the A16Z Podcast. Today, we're joined by Maggie Landers, who's the VP of Talent at Harvey.

• 1:30Speaker 00

  I'm so excited.

• 1:31Speaker 01

  Harvey's valuation has been skyrocketing in the past year, from $3 billion last February of 2025, to $5 billion in June, $8 billion in October, $11 billion this past March of 2026. And you've been at Harvey for, you just hit your one-year mark, is that right?

• 1:49Speaker 00

  Yes, I'm a little over one year. It's been insane, not just the valuation, but the company growth, the customer growth, or our growth, I think, our product growth. But I would say that we don't take any of it for granted. I don't think there's anyone internally who feels like we've fully made it or actualized our potential. It definitely still feels like a startup. We just celebrated our fourth birthday as a company.

• 2:17Speaker 01

  Congratulations. Happy birthday, Harvey.

• 2:19Speaker 00

  Yes, happy birthday, Harvey. But yeah, I don't think there's any part of us that feels that we are anywhere close to the company we aspire to build.

• 2:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. Are you celebrating wins in any way, or it's just hard work, pedals to the metal?

• 2:35Speaker 00

  I would say we definitely are. I think we celebrate in big ways. I think we celebrate in small ways. I think that whether it's sort of our global go-to-market company sort of wins channel, where folks are constantly sort of celebrating the accomplishments and sharing kudos, I think we come together as a company for celebrations like this. Anniversary, product launches, milestones. But we also have a jobs-not-finished culture. It's one of our core values. And so I would say the celebration is always an acknowledgement of the great work that we've done, but then also we're thinking about what we need to

• 3:19Speaker 00

  do next. And I think that's just a very kind of core, fundamental part of what Harvey is about. I do think the team likes to have fun, and there's a lot of humor in everything, kind of injected in everything that we do. But we're always thinking ahead.

• 3:38Speaker 01

  And I think you mentioned earlier, so are you employee number, is it 340?

• 3:44Speaker 00

  I'm somewhere in the 300s. I'm somewhere in the 300s. And yeah, we've added over 1,000 employees since I've joined, and will likely be about 2,000 employees before the end of this calendar year, which is insane. More than 70% of the company started after January 1st of this year.

• 4:08Speaker 01

  Wow. What does that feel like on the inside? Is so many new faces? Are you all in person? Yeah, what's it like?

• 4:14Speaker 00

  A lot of new faces. Those onboarding classes just feel big.

• 4:19Speaker 01

  They're growing, yeah.

• 4:19Speaker 00

  They're growing, for sure. I would say it still feels like Harvey, and I can explain what that means. But I do think that we've done a good job of understanding kind of what makes somebody successful at Harvey, and looking for a lot of those sort of characteristics when we go to market and we bring new people on board. I also think that we have pretty good kind of self-selection, in that I think folks know that Harvey is a really ambitious company, and that we are looking to be generational in what we build.

• 5:03Speaker 00

  And I think that also attracts folks who are very sort of, for the most part, intrinsically motivated and want to do something super fulfilling. But at the same time, it creates a ton of unique challenges. When the majority of folks on board are relatively new, under one-year tenure, I think you have this unique dynamic where, especially on the recruiting side, I see situations where a recruiter and a hiring manager and the leader are all relatively new, and kind of actively working together to try to figure out how to run the process effectively, what the right fit for the role is going to be, and in many

• 5:45Speaker 00

  cases, leaving behind what worked at their old company, and in real time, trying to figure out what is going to work at Harvey. The beauty of working at a company like Harvey, both sort of AI-native, and frankly, a place that values kind of progress over perfection and wants to move quickly, is that it almost doesn't matter what you did three years ago or five years ago, or how you did it. I think it's more important that you're sort of like actively collaborating and working to figure out what is going to make sense in this new

• 6:24Speaker 00

  world. And at this moment in time, we're genuinely trying to transform how the legal industry works and operates, and do something unprecedented. And so everyone's experimenting and trying to figure it out for the first time, whether you're a tenured employee or not.

• 6:42Speaker 01

  It sounds like exciting, but also overwhelming, and that you've got completely new faces, now training other completely new faces. But you mentioned, I love what you said about Harvey still feels like it's Harvey.

• 6:55Speaker 00

  It does, yeah.

• 6:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, tell me more about that.

• 6:57Speaker 00

  I think that Harvey is unique in certain ways. I think our pace is pretty unique. We move very quickly. If you come from an environment that you thought moved quickly, you join Harvey and you're like, wow.

• 7:13Speaker 01

  Harvey moves fast.

• 7:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, you're going to do more in a month at Harvey than you would in a quarter somewhere else. Or do more in a year than you probably would over a few years elsewhere. So you actually have a lot of reps quickly, in terms of trying to figure things out and figure out what works. I think that most folks at Harvey have been successful in whatever it is that they were doing previously, whether they were practicing law in a more sort of traditional environment, if they worked at a tech company previously, if they came from school or an academic program. And I think that there's a bit of kind of ridding yourself

• 7:57Speaker 00

  of needing to be an A student when you join Harvey, where most people probably were A students and super successful at whatever it was that they were doing previously, because what we're trying to do is A, like, pretty brand new, and B, there's a lot of experimentation. So you're going to fail more than you're necessarily going to get it right. And so I think the emphasis is on both failing fast and correcting experimentation, and also kind of putting that ego aside for kind of the greater good of figuring out, okay, how do we all work together to make something or build something that has never been built before?

• 8:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, I like this piece around like progress over perfection, especially when you're talking about A-plus students who are used to distinguishing between right and wrong, and knowing what it takes to do something well. And they're being thrust into an environment that's growing so fast, they have to almost rewrite the rules as they go.

• 8:59Speaker 00

  For sure. I also think that what we have to offer is this opportunity to learn and to grow and do something really meaningful. A lot of people, before they join, whether they're working parents like I am, if they're sort of concerned about this, like, they've heard that it's an intense culture. I think folks have questions about sort of how Harvey might impact their lifestyle. What's it going to be like? Is it really cutthroat? Is it really intense? And the reality is, I have seen more sort of true collaboration and teamwork

• 9:41Speaker 00

  at Harvey than I would have ever imagined, probably more so anywhere that I've ever kind of worked. People are really looking to support their colleagues. There is a big emphasis on us sort of winning as a team. And I also believe that what we're doing and the impact each individual is able to have creates this sort of career fulfillment that makes the effort required to put in worth it. I think that there is nothing worse, I can't imagine there'd be anything worse than working really hard and knowing it doesn't matter if you show up or not, like, if that work doesn't actually matter, if it's not

• 10:26Speaker 00

  going to contribute, if it's not going to make a difference. And so what we have to offer is this opportunity to really come in, even as we're growing so quickly, and know that every single person we bring in is so kind of critical in our ability to get to the next level. And we give folks a lot of agency. So you're not going to be held back. You're going to be able to sort of run and do things, which I think makes it, kind of balances out that, yes, it's intense, and yes, it moves fast. But at the same time, you're going to get a lot of feedback, you know, both-

• 11:00Speaker 00

  Feedback in the traditional sense, but also just feedback from like an impact perspective

• 11:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:05Speaker 00

  In seeing whatever it is that you build, or that you launch, or that you market, or that you sell, kind of get out into the world. And those reps happen quickly.

• 11:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's amazing. It's like, nothing inspires people more than actually seeing their impact

• 11:19Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 11:19Speaker 01

  in the world and knowing that even being part of a really large organization, they still feel like everything they're doing is working towards a much bigger vision.

• 11:27Speaker 00

  There is nobody, I would be hard pressed to find anybody at Harvey who feels like they're part of a machine that could be running without them in the same way. I think everybody feels deeply connected to whatever it is that they're working on and knows that, you know, they have an opportunity to make a real impact on whatever, whatever that is.

• 11:53Speaker 01

  It's amazing. You know, I often think that the culture of a company comes from, I mean, initially, the founders. And obviously Harvey is so much bigger than just the founders today, but they're still a massive part of what Harvey is. And, you know, Winston and Gabriel only started Harvey in 2022, which was four years ago. And now we're talking about hiring 600 people by the end of this year. You know, I'm curious, when you think about their leadership style, you know, what, what does that look like? What kinds of leaders are they? And how do they show up in the company to help create that culture for everyone?

• 12:31Speaker 00

  I think they definitely set the tone. They're both incredibly brilliant and driven and motivated, which I think you expect from founders.

• 12:43Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 12:45Speaker 00

  What I would say is unique about Winston and Gabe is this quality to be both sort of very, like operate at a very high level, strategic, future-facing altitude, and then get super into the details and be able to do both. They are very involved in the day to day. Very. Harvey is not a place where in order to present something to the executive team or to the founders, you're submitting a deck and waiting to get on some calendar to present to the exec team

• 13:30Speaker 00

  eight weeks out and have it be sort of reviewed and buttoned up. You can Slack Winston or Gabe and get a response immediately.

• 13:39Speaker 01

  Amazing, yeah.

• 13:41Speaker 00

  That attitude, and I think the accessibility, and frankly, the fact that they are still so in the details, shapes, I think, the broader sort of executive team ethos. So as we've added to the executive team, and we have some incredible new leaders on the team, Rachel Hepworth is running marketing, Anik Drumright on the product side, Brooks Evans is our new CISO. We have brought in some incredible experienced leaders, Katie Burke, COO, my boss. Amazing. These folks

• 14:17Speaker 00

  all have that really, really unique combination of strategic vision, but real day-to-day involvement and execution. So, learning from folks who have both the vision and that sort of detailed understanding of how to run, you know, how to build a product, or how to market a product, or how to, you know, build world-class security into everything we do, is super unique. And I think people, a lot of people join to work for one of these leaders because it's essentially

• 15:00Speaker 00

  a masterclass in how to do some of these jobs, not just as figureheads, but as true collaborators.

• 15:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. I'm imagining like Winston and Gabe, you know, they're walking around the office, you know, looking over at people, you know, what are you working on? You know, that's like the kind of curious mentality I'm getting. Do I have the right vision? Yeah, like, help me.

• 15:20Speaker 00

  Totally. Sitting with new hires at lunch, introducing themselves. They also do founder AMAs, which I think is great. We actually have our interns host these, which is amazing, seeing them sort of up in front of the company, asking Gabe and Winston everybody's questions that they might be, might be too shy to ask in person.

• 15:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:42Speaker 00

  They have a great dynamic. I think co-founders tend to have a bit of a yin and yang. And I would describe them as kind of having sort of a yin and yang vibe, but they speak so openly about how they see the company evolving, how they see the space evolving. People feel very close to them because I think they understand what their thought process is because they share it. When something's happening in the market, it's not unusual for Winston to put a memo together quickly with all of his thoughts and put it in the company general channel. And

• 16:26Speaker 00

  everyone can just read what he thinks is going to happen, why he thinks it's going to happen, what his take on something is. After every quarter, he'll put together a quarterly memo for the whole team on what he thinks worked and didn't, et cetera. And so I think sharing that as broadly as we do, it's pretty open. I mean, the company is very open in terms of what the leaders share. We post board decks for the whole company to review after board meetings, so they can see what's been shared in those board meetings, and host AMAs in Slack, so that people can ask questions or get clarification. I do think that keeps folks very connected to the leaders. As we scale globally, as we add so many folks, it gives

• 17:10Speaker 00

  you a chance to kind of get inside their brains a little bit.

• 17:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. Love that. What's a, what's a recent story or a fun fact, or something that the founders recently shared that people were amused by, or that stands out for you?

• 17:25Speaker 00

  I don't know if there's a, like, a single anecdote. I think that it's

• 17:32Speaker 00

  pretty normal to hear them speak about mistakes that they've made, things that they look back on, that they think we should have done completely differently, times maybe where, as a company, we got lucky, but it was not on purpose, or times where, you know, we made the wrong call. There's a lot of, I guess, vulnerability, for lack of a better word, transparency in terms of how they think things are going to. There's no mystery. And I think that all the leaders sort of share that mentality. There's no mystery in terms of where we think we are

• 18:13Speaker 00

  nailing it, where we need to put in more work or more reps, what we haven't figured out yet. And there's a lot of just kind of openness at the company level. And I don't think that people could be as impactful if there wasn't. People know what we're all kind of working toward.

• 18:38Speaker 01

  It sounds like Harvey's, you know, Harvey's culture is, is open and transparent and vulnerable and supportive and low ego. And it's got all these like amazing qualities. And, you know, obviously, not every company is right for everyone. You know, it's clear why people would want to join Harvey. I'm curious, you know, why would people leave? Or why do you tend to see people not be as good of a fit for Harvey?

• 19:03Speaker 00

  Harvey is entering teenage years. I would describe it as such because we are not this teeny tiny startup that hasn't found product-market fit. And we're also not this fully actualized sort of

• 19:26Speaker 00

  old, longstanding, mega, public company. And I think that there are a lot of people who

• 19:35Speaker 00

  either prefer this sort of structure and stability and pace of one of those massive companies. And I also think that there are people who want to be at really, really early startups where maybe they haven't found product-market fit, maybe the role is undefined, maybe you're kind of figuring out what to work on, working across everything. We're just not at that phase anymore. So I think that, given that we're that in-between, which frankly, I love, and I know a lot of people love, where you've got this vision and strategy

• 20:19Speaker 00

  and leadership team that folks can learn a ton from, but you also aren't this big sort of behemoth that's working as a machine. That's, that's not for everybody. Some people want more structure, some people want less structure, and I think that's okay. Our goal, especially on my team, as a recruiting team, is to make sure the resort matches the brochure. We want people to basically get as close to life within Harvey during that interview process as possible, for them to be able to make the call. Does this feel right? Does this feel exciting? Does

• 21:01Speaker 00

  this feel like, you know, this is the kind of work I want to do? This is the work that gets me excited?

• 21:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:06Speaker 00

  And if not, I think that's, we're doing our job also by showcasing, I think, what the role entails, what the company is about, and knowing that people are going to self-select in, they're going to self-select out.

• 21:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:24Speaker 00

  But yeah, I think that this, the industry and the stage and the size and the way of working is, is not for everyone.

• 21:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, like you described, it's kind of, you're in this in-between period. And so you're looking for other, for people who are down for that ride of taking

• 21:48Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 21:49Speaker 01

  a company from its teenage years all the way into adulthood, and, you know, who have kind of passed the point where everything is scrappy and undefined, but not yet at the point where there's systems for everything. And so, you need people who are willing to and excited about, you know, creating those more scalable systems.

• 22:05Speaker 00

  Totally. That's absolutely right. And I also think that

• 22:12Speaker 00

  AI application layer companies in general

• 22:17Speaker 00

  are trying to transform industries. I think that

• 22:25Speaker 00

  we attract folks who have a certain customer centricity and an interest and a desire to sort of genuinely sort of reshape

• 22:41Speaker 00

  something like the legal industry. It is very tangible. We are very close to our customers. We start up every all hands with sort of a customer testimonial. It doesn't matter what team you're on. You're very, very connected to what our customers are trying to do. And we have so many lawyers or folks who are no longer practicing law, but once were within Harvey in all sorts of roles. Of course, we have an internal legal team, but we also have applied legal researchers who sit in product. We have legal innovation partners who sort of liaise with various,

• 23:25Speaker 00

  you know, CIOs and the innovation community. We have our legal engineers and legal engineering product specialists who sit on the, the sales team. And so there's this like deep admiration and respect for the legal industry, for, you know, these law firms, for these in-house legal teams, what they're trying to do. And the folks at Harvey are genuinely looking to be part of transforming all of it. And I think that there are a lot of companies that, whether they're focused more on sort of the other layers of the stack, maybe purely, you know, building models themselves or, you know,

• 24:08Speaker 00

  infrastructure companies, et cetera, that have very cool technology, but don't necessarily touch the customer in the same way.

• 24:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:16Speaker 00

  I think it takes a certain person to be, I think certain folks are motivated to work on these customer problems. And that might look different at, at different places.

• 24:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. Is that what in part inspired you to join Harvey? Or actually tell me about the story of you first hearing about Harvey and deciding to join.

• 24:36Speaker 00

  I had been at my previous company for almost a decade and I had gotten a call from a recruiter. He kind of laughed and basically said, I have the perfect role for you for two reasons. One being Katie, my boss, being probably one of the most sort of inspiring leaders in the people space. She's now taken on the COO role at Harvey, but I knew that her scope was very big and she was working across many different priorities and that I could learn a ton from her. Not just in the recruiting or HR space, but just about business in general. And the other piece was

• 25:19Speaker 00

  what Harvey was doing in the legal industry, but also in AI. I felt like it was a massive, a massive opportunity. And frankly, we have a very upmarket motion. And we are super customer centric and AI transformation is more than just building a great product, but we have essentially this like heavy people motion where for all of our customers, we have essentially an army of, of go to market resources for them, both pre-sale and post-sale. And we had plans to get to 16 markets in a year. So the growth that was going to be required to sort of actualize

• 26:05Speaker 00

  our potential and essentially give our customers the attention they needed, created a very unique recruiting challenge.

• 26:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:17Speaker 00

  In terms of how quickly we were going to have to hyperscale across so many different markets and do it with a level of quality and care while maintaining a really high bar.

• 26:33Speaker 00

  So the opportunity for impact in my role in particular was pretty unique. I knew what the growth plans were. The growth plans expanded quickly after I started. And

• 26:53Speaker 00

  I definitely wasn't sure it was possible. I wasn't sure we could pull it off. And I think that that's sort of the, the story of Harvey. You join and you're being asked to do something that you don't actually know is maybe whether or not it's like maybe possible or possible in that amount of time or possible at the level or quality and execution that you think you should be able to, to operate, but then you just

• 27:24Speaker 00

  do it.

• 27:24Speaker 01

  You just do it. We have a funny saying on our, the new media team at A16Z. We always say, you can just do things. And you just, you just gotta do it. Someone's gotta do it. And you just had to get, get in there, roll up your sleeves and figure it out. It sounds like that's what the role was, you know? Like Maggie, we think you can do it.

• 27:42Speaker 00

  For sure. And also we're going to help you do it. So that was a big part of it too. I think that in a head of recruiting role or a head of talent role, it's important how the leaders look at the function. It's important that they actually believe that it matters to go out to market and hire some of the best, you know, people in the industry. It's important that they believe that part of their job is doing that. It's not another team's job to just go out and bring folks in. And also they were willing to resource it and staff it. I mean, that

• 28:27Speaker 00

  is a very important component of, I think,

• 28:32Speaker 00

  asking people to push themselves is to give them the resources and the support. And we, we do that across the board. So my team went from, I want to say about 16 to 80 folks in a year in order to support that growth.

• 28:54Speaker 01

  That's incredible.

• 28:56Speaker 00

  If you look across other teams, whether it's engineering teams or product teams or marketing teams, I think that they would all agree that they're being given, you know, all the tools that they need in order to do what they need to do and build something great for our customers.

• 29:15Speaker 01

  And you're hiring hundreds of people right now.

• 29:18Speaker 00

  We are.

• 29:19Speaker 01

  What? How does that work? What teams were you hiring for? What roles? I want to hear about the interview process.

• 29:28Speaker 00

  Yeah. We have over 400 jobs open right now, so I won't go into the specific roles, but we are hiring across every team. We are hiring pretty much across every region. We have added many new regions. We will continue to add some new regions. I won't, I won't share any today.

• 29:49Speaker 01

  But stay tuned.

• 29:50Speaker 00

  Stay tuned.

• 29:52Speaker 00

  The interview process definitely differs by team. The engineering loop looks very different than the SDR loop, as you would expect. I would say that the commonalities across the processes and, and different regions. We have a values interview for all candidates when they come on site.

• 30:20Speaker 00

  The values interview is structured around our three values. So simplicity, decisiveness, and jobs not finished. It's an opportunity both to understand how people have worked in the past, but also

• 30:33Speaker 00

  give candidates the chance to like dig in and dive into our values and ask questions about what they mean and how they show up. And frankly, as we, we talked before about self, self-selection, think about, is this the kind of environment where I want to work? And how they might approach, how they might approach scenarios that, that come up with those values in mind.

• 30:55Speaker 01

  Can you give me like a quick one liner on each of these values and, and what you look for?

• 31:01Speaker 00

  Absolutely. So for decisiveness, Winston loves to say, we don't take the square root of the weather.

• 31:08Speaker 01

  What does that mean?

• 31:09Speaker 00

  What it basically means is we want to move fast. We'd rather make mistakes and learn than overanalyze and spend all this time pontificating on how is this going to go? Or what do you think of this thing or that thing? It's almost about just being willing to

• 31:28Speaker 00

  build and put things out into the world and then react really quickly. And so that is, I think, sort of the underlying value or mentality that drives our pace. You can't operate at the pace we do and be, you know, completely afraid to make a mistake. You can't move at our pace and get, you know, 300 people to weigh in on every decision that you want to make. It's not a consensus driven place. It's really about people being able to take ownership and, and leverage and, and make those decisions and move forward and be able to own when they were the wrong decisions.

• 32:12Speaker 00

  But also understand that if we don't act, we're never going to move things forward. Simplicity, again, I think is

• 32:23Speaker 00

  one of the reasons why we are able to, to move fast, right? It goes hand in hand with the decisiveness, but let's not overbuild. Let's put something out into the world. Let's get feedback. Let's go from there. Let's make this simple. I think that those two

• 32:43Speaker 00

  in conjunction with this sort of jobs not finished mentality, which is really about the fact that kind of, not just the work is, is never done, but that we have a sense of humility and openness to the ways that it could be done better or could have been done better. I think those three things hand in hand

• 33:09Speaker 00

  create that environment I was describing to you about sort of this straight A student giving up some of the perfectionist tendencies. Ultimately, for the satisfaction of being able to have this massive impact on the industry and frankly, drive their career forward incredibly quickly.

• 33:30Speaker 00

  It also creates

• 33:34Speaker 00

  A real

• 33:37Speaker 00

  culture of discourse. I think that hmm.

• 33:42Speaker 00

  The ability to speak openly about mistakes, the ability to put things out in front of people before they're completely perfect, um, the ability to make a decision without all the necessary information, just doing the best that you can is this sort of like

• 34:04Speaker 00

  hotbed for growth and learning. It's not a place about sort of posturing and

• 34:12Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 34:13Speaker 00

  sharing, you know, all the things that you've done right. So yeah, I think for folks who genuinely want to kind of go through this crash course of essentially like learning and growing and getting all this feedback and building a bunch of stuff and seeing what works and seeing what doesn't work and doing it with other people who are also just like kind of in the same boat.

• 34:41Speaker 00

  It's, it's pretty amazing.

• 34:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. Sounds like a very like iterative, let's experiment, let's just see how it goes. You know, there's only, it goes back to what you said about you can't take the square root of weather. You just need to run with it, break it down, make decisions, learn by doing.

• 34:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, most companies move out of that phase really quickly and they're very afraid to make mistakes and they slow things down and create a bunch of friction so that people can't move so fast. And I would say that we don't operate out of fear. Winston said recently in one of our co-founder AMAs that the thing that he wants to hold on to most as we grow is trust. And the trust that we have for our employees and frankly, the agency that we give folks to

• 35:38Speaker 00

  just run and execute without a lot of the policing and without a lot of the friction is what continues to allow us to hire the amazing folks that we do and move as quickly as we do and experiment the way that we do. And so

• 35:56Speaker 00

  people forget that we're only four years old, but we still have held on to

• 36:05Speaker 00

  that trust. We still allow folks to have that level of agency and autonomy and the values enable it. They allow you to move quickly. They allow you to make mistakes. And without that, you know, I think that we would not be seeing the success that we, we have.

• 36:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. I love that it all comes down to trust. I have maybe one or two last questions.

• 36:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 36:30Speaker 01

  So one, you, you mentioned the team is opening up new locations. I won't pry.

• 36:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 36:35Speaker 01

  We'll have to wait to get the reveal on where you're opening up, but you already have offices here in San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Dallas, London, Dublin, Paris, Madrid, Milan, and many more.

• 36:47Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 36:49Speaker 01

  Which is crazy.

• 36:50Speaker 00

  Sydney, Singapore. Yep.

• 36:52Speaker 01

  I missed a few. Sydney, Singapore. It's wild.

• 36:55Speaker 00

  I probably missed a few too, but yes.

• 36:56Speaker 01

  Are all the offices different? Have you been to all of them? You're based in San Francisco. What is that? You know, give me a sense of just the different locations and what that's looked like for your team.

• 37:07Speaker 00

  I have not been to all of the offices. I plan to get to a few more this fall, but I've spent a lot of time, I'm based in our San Francisco office. I've spent a lot of time in our New York office as well. I've been out to our London office. I would say that we do a great job of having sort of a core Harvey brand and vibe, but also each office feels distinct for that market and not every office has a like the same mix of functions.

• 37:44Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 37:45Speaker 00

  So EPD, which is our engineering product and design team, went from one location just in San Francisco about 18 months ago to four locations. So San Francisco, Toronto, New York and Bangalore, India are sort of the home of our four EPD hubs. And those offices have that mix of EPD and go to market.

• 38:13Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 38:14Speaker 00

  A lot of the other global offices start out with our legal engineering function, some of our go to market function. And because lawyers practice law differently in different parts of the world and speak different languages. And as I mentioned, we do so much to sort of help our customers, not just you know, implement Harvey, but truly transform their organizations.

• 38:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:41Speaker 00

  We want to make sure that the folks that are on the ground in those regions understand how law is practiced there. Just, you know, they have experience working within that jurisdiction and speak the language, et cetera. And so a lot of our growth has been around providing our customers with this amazing experience and they take that knowledge and sort of the, the local nuances. And that definitely shapes sort of the differences in how the offices feel. But

• 39:19Speaker 00

  we have a great, we have a great workplace team. We have a great real estate team and we tend to find the right spots. We tend to find great locations. We have beautiful spaces and it's also important, I think, for our customers to know that, you know, they can come visit us and spend time with employees in like a beautiful space, typically near where a lot of law firms work. But there's more that we're going to continue to do and build out so that our customers can access us wherever they, they need to.

• 39:57Speaker 01

  And are there certain locations where you're hiring more aggressively than others? Or is it pretty spread across the board?

• 40:04Speaker 00

  It's spread across the board. We tend to swarm new markets and do events and kind of go that extra mile early on when we're entering a new place to sort of deep dive with the talent there and sort of understand the landscape. But the founding teams are super important. I think we put these strong founding teams in place and then through referrals and great sort of leaders there, they tend to have this sort of flywheel effect in bringing a lot of, a lot of great folks in.

• 40:39Speaker 01

  And you're based in the San Francisco office.

• 40:42Speaker 00

  Right.

• 40:42Speaker 01

  Tell me about the San Francisco office. What is it like? Do you work in, then they're like five days a week? Is the team pretty hybrid?

• 40:48Speaker 00

  We have a hybrid, we have a hybrid, um, three day a week policy, but I would say people are in typically more than that. It is very much tarot versus stick when it comes to that, that hybrid in office policy. We are not a place that has to do policing in terms of how many days a week have you come in? We have a, an energy and I can speak for, for the San Francisco office. There is a buzz for sure in the office. People are there, they're collaborating.

• 41:31Speaker 00

  It's a beautiful space to work in. There's always something going on. You're running into somebody in the hall, you're asking a question, somebody's like, oh, I forgot to tell you this thing or that thing. You get a lot done.

• 41:44Speaker 00

  I think you learn from your team members. As I mentioned, so many people are new and most people are frankly onboarding or ramping in some way. And so being able to sit next to somebody who's maybe six months ahead of you or four weeks ahead of you and ask questions is so important. I actually see people who tend to come in sort of more than those three days because they'd rather be in the office than, than working from home.

• 42:11Speaker 01

  Anything you want candidates to know?

• 42:13Speaker 00

  If you actually take a step back, transforming the legal industry is very different than trying to transform customer support or build an AI harness or create a model, even though we're now building some of our own models, but.

• 42:37Speaker 00

  Understanding what we are truly trying to achieve and how that is going to make your job different than working at Anthropic, or at OpenAI, or at Eleven Labs, or at Sierra, I think is super important because it will be different. And so I think taking the time to actually think about that, what is unique about this industry, what is unique about the way law is practiced, how long it's been practiced for, the security requirements, you know, when we think about the fact that law is essentially like the basis of civilization as we, as we know it, and our aspirations

• 43:18Speaker 00

  to essentially transform this whole space, taking the time to think about it does, I believe, help folks start to differentiate some of these opportunities.

• 43:30Speaker 01

  So what I feel like I'm hearing is the thing you love to hear most from candidates is what about the legal industry gets you so fired up?

• 43:41Speaker 00

  I think that's a big part of it. I also think that people are attracted to growth companies, and they should be because it opens up a lot of opportunities. When a company is growing, there you just get more at bats than if a company is, is shrinking or, or remaining flat. I think that what people should understand is that we are still a startup as well. And so what you're getting sort of, while you're getting all these up, like, while you're going to have all these at bats, I think that, you know, people sometimes ask for processes that don't exist yet. And the right sort of mentality, I think for

• 44:25Speaker 00

  Harvey is that passion to like be part of creating it and the ability to work through some of the, what might be seen as noise and, and, and not get frustrated, but frankly, get like energized by it. You can call it chaos, you can call it, you know, opportunities. I think that thinking about the kind of environment that you'd be, you know, excited to be a part of is super important. I think that there has to be a little bit of this

• 45:04Speaker 00

  sort of adventurous kind of maverick attitude. I think that like, sort of managing the ambiguity is so, so kind of key and critical to being successful at Harvey.

• 45:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, you want, it sounds like you're looking for people you can pull into the trenches with you and who are excited to find their way through and that have a lot of resources and a lot of momentum behind them, but there's still these big questions that your company is asking and that you're looking for people who are eager to roll their sleeves to help you answer them.

• 45:40Speaker 00

  Absolutely. Judgment's an important one as well, and it's hard because it's hard to assess and it's hard to measure. But I also think that when you're given agency and autonomy and opportunity for impact, and you're going to get a lot of at bats because we do move relatively quickly, you have to have

• 46:08Speaker 00

  that sort of spidey sense, right? You have to have good judgment. You have to have that like voice in the back of your head that's saying, hey, before I like press send on this thing, is there somebody who I should have like run through this with? Or, and it's not 10 people, right? It's like that perfect balance of I'm not going to go out and ask for 20 people's feedback on this. But like, who is the right person who should have seen this before I press send? Or is there like one spot check I want to do here before pushing this live? Or I think, again, hard to assess and hard to put your finger on it. But having that judgment in an environment that does move really quickly, where there

• 46:53Speaker 00

  is a lot of agency and autonomy is kind of a critical part of success and also being able to maintain that trust.

• 47:05Erik Torenberg?

  Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z Podcast. If you liked this episode, be sure to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or review, and share it with your friends and family. For more episodes, go to YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. Follow us on X at A16Z and subscribe to our Substack at A16Z.substack.com. Thanks again for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode.

• 47:31Erik Torenberg?

  As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. Please note that A16Z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the companies discussed in this podcast. For more details, including a link to our investments, please see A16Z.com/disclosures.