20VC: 15 Term Sheets in 7 Days and Choosing Benchmark | Harvey vs Legora: Who Wins Legal and How to Play When You Have $600M Less Funding | Are AI Models Plateauing Today | Building a 9-9-6 Culture From Stockholm with Max Junestrand

Max Junestrand is the Co-Founder and CEO @ Legora, the collaborative AI powering the next generation of lawyers. Now this is an insane story for many reasons; first, Max turned down a multi-million dollar career in gaming to build Legora. Second, he has raised from the best of the best including Benchmark and IVP. Third, he has scaled the firm with 1/6th of the capital of his closest competitor, Harvey have raised a reported $800M while Legora have raised just $120M. Agenda: 00:03 – From Pro Gamer to AI Founder: How World of Warcraft Shaped Max’s Mindset 04:58 – The $5–10M Gaming Career He Walked Away From 07:55 – Are AI Models Plateauing… or Just Getting Started? 10:02 – Swarms of LLMs: The 100x Cost Bet That Could Change Legal Forever 12:00 – Partnering With the Lawyers You’re “Killing” 15:00 – How He Cracked Sweden’s Hardest-to-Enter Law Firm 21:45 – The $500K Coffee That Saved the Company at YC 30:00 – Closing 15 Term Sheets in 7 Days – Why Benchmark Won 36:00 – Beating a $5BN Rival With a Fraction of the Funding 53:50 – Building a Cult Culture: The 9-9-6 Mentality in Europe

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

• 0:00Harry Stebbings?

  This is 20VC with me, Harry Stebbings. Now, I can't wait for this show today. There is nothing I love more than a European giant being built. Max Dunesstrand is the co-founder and CEO of Legora, the collaborative AI powering the next generation of lawyers. Now, this is an insane story for many reasons. First, Max turned down a multimillion-dollar career in gaming to build Legora. Second, he's raised from the best in the business, including Benchmark and IVP, to name a few. Also, he's done it from Stockholm. And then, third, he's scaled the firm with one-sixth of the capital of his closest competitor, Harvey, who've raised a reported $800 million, while Legora has raised just $120 million. But before we dive into the show today, SecureFrame empowers businesses to build trust with customers

• 0:44Harry Stebbings?

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• 1:26Harry Stebbings?

  And speaking of incredible companies, let's talk about Brex, the ultimate financial stack for startups. So when Brex was founded, it wasn't just about creating another financial product, it was about solving the really gritty challenges that founders face daily. Let's be honest, building something from the ground up is hard enough without dealing with clunky, outdated banks that pile on fees and leave your cash idle. Brex is different. It's the financial stack that scales with you, no matter where you are in your journey. From corporate cards to maximizing your runway to earning yield on your cash. Brex was designed with founders in mind to make every dollar go further, so you can focus on building. And here's what really stands out to me. Brex combines the best of checking, treasury and FDIC insurance in one powerhouse account.

• 2:10Harry Stebbings?

  Send and receive money globally at lightning speed. Earn yield from day one and still access your funds whenever you need. Plus, with 20x the standard protection through programmed banks, your cash is not just working harder, it's working safer too. It's no surprise that one in three venture backed startups in the US, with companies like Anthropic, Coinbase and Robinhood. I mean, my god, these companies are incredible. Trust Brex to help them grow. If you want to join the smartest startups on the planet, head over to brex.com/startups and see what they can do for you. Now, let's talk about making your product do exactly what you want it to. Whether it's the software you build or the software you buy, your tech stack should be creating results, not creating roadblocks. Well, Pendo's no-code software experience management platform

• 2:55Harry Stebbings?

  makes your software better with tools to see where users get stuck, guide them with in-app messaging and constantly improving your UI. It's so easy that over 14,000 businesses use Pendo to increase revenue, lower costs and reduce risks. Businesses love the control, engineers love the freedom, everyone wins. Start for free today at pendo.io/20product. You have now arrived at your destination. Max, dude, listen, I, I actually remember messaging you when we were talking about Project Europe and I was in a car going to a football game and we were talking about work ethics and work culture. And I was just like, this guy's fucking awesome. I need to make a show happen. So I'm so glad that we made it happen with you in town.

• 3:38Speaker 01

  So am I, Harry. This is great. I'm really excited to be here.

• 3:41Harry Stebbings?

  Now, I would love to start there with a little bit of background because I heard from some of your investors that you were a pro gamer before. But then we were chatting before and you said there's actually a cool story before that that we should start with. And so I'm going to leave it to you in terms of how you want to start with those two options.

• 3:56Speaker 01

  When I was six, my dad bought me World of Warcraft. And that was actually how I learnt English.

• 4:03Harry Stebbings?

  It explains a lot.

• 4:05Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, so from an early age, you start playing this game. And I grew up in a really off city outside of Stockholm. So we were 10 people in my class. I was highly competitive and I think that space didn't give enough room for that competitiveness. And so you got into video games, started with World of Warcraft and then moved over to Warcraft III, which had this mod called Dota One. And Dota one was this amazing game where you jump in five players, you meet five other players and it was very complex. It was like playing 5D chess in real time. I got so into that that when it was time to pick between should I bet on a career in video games or should I go to university, I had to like make a call.

• 4:47Speaker 01

  My reasoning was something like, what's the best case scenario with playing this video game? Winning a huge tournament. And the money is good. You make five to 10 million dollars if you win the biggest tournament.

• 4:58Harry Stebbings?

  Were you that good?

• 4:59Speaker 01

  If I have made it my full-time thing, I could have gotten that good. Cause I was juggling school on the side and the people I was competing against were not. And then I thought, okay, what's the best case with going to university? Probably something like this. And I thought that was a much better outcome. I enrolled in computer science and I think I very quickly realized that that wasn't like a full-time job. So I got a full-time job on the side, which was esports betting. So I was building statistical models for Dota two and Counter-Strike based on server feeds. So we got all the data and then we built the odds that determined how you would bet on those games. And then COVID hit and computer science got so boring. Cause we were like 300 dudes in hoodies, not going to university

• 5:40Speaker 01

  anymore. So nothing happened. And in Swedish college, you can't pick your courses. You need to pick a program and then you stick to that program. So if you go to computer science, you can never pick any business courses. The business university is separate from the engineering university. So you never mix. And I wanted to do both. So I threw in an application to the computer science university, get enrolled. And then I did the same for the business university by kind of redacting the first application and then calling them and saying, hey, I fucked up. Can you please invite me back in? So then I got enrolled in both universities in parallel. So I could finish them both during COVID, which was really easy. Cause you'd have these exams that even if they ran across, you could just have two phones and film yourself doing one exam for one of the universities and

• 6:22Speaker 01

  doing another exam for the other university. I finished one of the degrees. So if my girlfriend's parents ask, I've finished my degree. And if investors asks, I'm a dropout, which I think is great. And then chat GPT came out and just everything changed.

• 6:36Harry Stebbings?

  I absolutely love that. Okay. Chat G P T comes on and everything changes. I do also just want to pick up on a moment though in the pandemic because you met your co-founders at a volleyball pandemic event.

• 6:48Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 6:48Harry Stebbings?

  This feels like a paradox, Max.

• 6:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we we we want to play volleyball and you meet people who have a similar interest in, you know, machine learning, coding, building things. I think this group in Stockholm is still quite small, so we hit it off and then nothing really came of it. But when G P T came, they gave me a phone call and said, hey, we want to apply to this business accelerator. But we need somebody who went to the business school to be on the paper in order for us to apply. And since I had done the double thing with the computer science university and the business university, you know, they thought of me. I get in, they put me on the paper and I asked them, why do you want to apply to this business accelerator and not Y C? And they're like, oh, what's Y C? Well, it's basically the business accelerator, but it's for real companies.

• 7:32Harry Stebbings?

  Did they have the idea for Legora or Layer at the time then?

• 7:35Speaker 01

  The idea for the business was not a product, it was a problem space. It was the fact that A I and legal is going to be a thing. And they had been playing around with early BERT models that came out from Google and also a a version of them called SWE BERT. They were so incredibly bad, frankly. I mean, you couldn't really solve anything back then. And so they had built their own document management system, they had built their own editor, they had built like a legal research platform, they had all this code. And when I came in, I sort of said, let's just delete all of it and let's build on G P T and let's like build a version of it that at the end of the day lawyers are benefiting from.

• 8:15Harry Stebbings?

  Okay, so that was twenty twenty one with that. That was four years ago.

• 8:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:18Harry Stebbings?

  Okay, and now you look at the models we have today. We're going to go back to the story and I want to finish that. But if that was four years ago, do you think we see the same continued progression rate in model development? Or do you think we start to plateau?

• 8:32Speaker 01

  The gap from the BERT models to G P T was the biggest gap ever. And I think the gaps since then have been much more incremental. I actually think the biggest things allowing for new products to be built is not the models themselves, but the frameworks around them. Take structured. Outputs, take tool calling, take MCP servers, like these are the frameworks now that are forming around the models that allow us to build massively awesome things. So I actually think that the product to model gap today is massive. Where the products are today, I don't think we've utilized ten, twenty percent of what the models can do. We have a huge sort of gap and way to go. And I think we could, just given more time, with the models we have today, given no incremental improvement in them,

• 9:17Speaker 01

  still have years and years to years to build on.

• 9:19Harry Stebbings?

  Wow, that's so interesting. So essentially, it's like the application layer doesn't fully utilize the model layer capacity.

• 9:24Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 9:25Harry Stebbings?

  What more could the application layer do to utilize that capacity, right?

• 9:28Speaker 01

  Well, that's what we're figuring out, right? That's why we're working so hard. But I mean, even if you take the O three models and right now, I think in many ways, we're still working with the models in a sort of single API call manner. We've started playing around with this idea of swarms of L L M's being thrown at a problem.

• 9:46Harry Stebbings?

  So if swarms of L L M's are in a problem is when you take a Grok, Anthropic and OpenAI model?

• 9:51Speaker 01

  Well, and you throw, instead of doing one API call, you do a hundred or a thousand. And I mean, the quality of the output is drastically improved. So if you take something like writing a legal research memo, if you just use one model, one deeper research model or one reasoning model call, you get some outputs. But if you use a hundred calls and you let them rebuild and improve what you already have over and over and over again, it gets massively improved. But this takes hours to run and they're quite expensive.

• 10:18Harry Stebbings?

  What does that do to cost? It's just quite expensive. Is that double? Is that ten X?

• 10:22Speaker 01

  No, it's, I mean, a hundred X.

• 10:23Harry Stebbings?

  It literally is a hundred X. So the unit cost is the same for every increase?

• 10:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, basically.

• 10:28Harry Stebbings?

  Wow. Does that drastically change in an eighteen months time period?

• 10:31Speaker 01

  We will start to see products utilize the models in much more creative ways than what we're seeing today. Today, it's still quite basic. I think the biggest thing that we've done, for instance, is if you look at a task like due diligence, where you need to review hundreds of documents. Well, instead of throwing the entire document in and asking all the questions at the same time, you do everything in parallel. So you'll say, okay, I have a hundred questions I want to run across this file and I have a hundred files. Effectively, we run ten thousand parallel API calls. And of course, that scales the cost structure. But I think you could imagine a world where instead of throwing ten thousand API calls, you throw a hundred thousand because you run them all ten times as well.

• 11:10Speaker 01

  Because the cost of the models in comparison to the hourly billable rate of a great lawyer is still miles and miles apart.

• 11:20Harry Stebbings?

  Is the winner ultimately the compute provider? When you have a scale of API calls of a hundred X like that, does the model provider ultimately, not the model provider, sorry, the compute provider ultimately be the winner?

• 11:32Speaker 01

  I think you're right in that the model providers are not the winners because that's completely.

• 11:36Harry Stebbings?

  Commoditized.

• 11:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's more.

• 11:38Harry Stebbings?

  Is it commoditized today?

• 11:39Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 11:40Harry Stebbings?

  Who do you work with?

• 11:41Speaker 01

  All of them.

• 11:42Harry Stebbings?

  Really? And there's not a discernible difference?

• 11:44Speaker 01

  Not really. There's a discernible difference for some types of tasks. And we've realized, okay, Sonnet is better here. Gemini is better here. I think the Gemini deep research one is maybe a bit better than the OpenAI. But then they sort of continue battling that out. So yeah, I do think that the compute providers are for sure winners. But I also think that there's a huge piece of the cake in the application layer. And in particular, there's a cake in the application layer, which is not only on the software side, but on the service side. And here's where the legal market is interesting because legal software market is twenty billion. Legal service market is a trillion. The way you should think about it is not how do you play for the software market? It's how do you work with the best firms in the world to play for the service market?

• 12:28Harry Stebbings?

  Well, I think the biggest question with all AI software today is fundamentally, are you able to transition from technology budgets to human labor budgets? If so, my word, we have an exciting future ahead as founders and VCs.

• 12:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:39Harry Stebbings?

  If not, then it's not as exciting bluntly.

• 12:43Speaker 01

  No.

• 12:43Harry Stebbings?

  My question to you is, you are then partnering with the people you are going to kill.

• 12:47Speaker 01

  No, I don't think about it that way. I think we're partnering with them so that they can win and we can get a piece of the cake too. I want to show you an example here. I realize I just turned off my phone. But I have a couple of stats from a pilot we just ran with a AM Law two hundred firm. And they have some examples of tasks where they reduce the time required. To deliver the work from ten hours to fifteen minutes.

• 13:11Harry Stebbings?

  Do lawyers want that because they work on a billable hours basis? Do lawyers wanna reduce ten hours to fifteen minutes? Does that not cannibalize their business in terms of the timesheet nature of it?

• 13:22Speaker 01

  Of course it does.

• 13:23Harry Stebbings?

  And so they just then change it to project-based finance?

• 13:26Speaker 01

  Yes, and so you have a structure in the largest law firms in the world where they're moving from the billable hour to fixed pricing. And what you have in finance is you take a portion of the transaction value and we will start to see that happening too in transactional law.

• 13:41Harry Stebbings?

  That's fascinating. So my takeaway is buy more Nvidia. Okay, cool.

• 13:47Speaker 01

  And I think the other way to think about it is you also have the corporates who are trying to figure out how much work they can take in-house and how much they can pressure their firms to go AI-native. And this is rapidly happening today. If you're a large bank like HSBC, you are paying hundreds and hundreds of millions in legal fees. And you're thinking about how do I work with my law firm to get the most amount of value here? The opportunity for the law firms are massive, but they have to be forward-leaning and say, all right, in this new world where there's a new equilibrium and there's a new demand and supply function for our services, we need to get majority market share and we need to own the conversation.

• 14:31Speaker 01

  Because right now I'm finding that it's sometimes quite reactive.

• 14:35Harry Stebbings?

  What do you mean by that?

• 14:36Speaker 01

  If you are a big firm today, you make a lot of money, you have innovator's dilemma. Then you have companies like Crosby, UDA and others who are trying to play for the pure service part. Our play is quite different. I think that the law firms and the best attorneys in the world will go software-powered and we help them do that.

• 14:57Harry Stebbings?

  For me, it's like if you wanna build like a hundred billion dollar business, you have to be software-powered. If you wanna build the next generation of Cooley, which is an amazing business, by the way, doing hundreds and hundreds of minutes. But then you do the Crosby.

• 15:08Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 15:08Harry Stebbings?

  More certainty to a more capped upside, I would say, almost. Kind of interesting.

• 15:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:13Harry Stebbings?

  Okay, so going back to this story, so we meet these two other co-founders at the volleyball event. They've got the idea paradigm of, okay, AI law, we've got the right time. What happens next?

• 15:24Speaker 01

  We decide to start working on this full time in May of 2023. And we set up the initial structure, we raised some angel money, and we said, let's work on this over the summer. Three weeks into it, we see the CaseText acquisition for 650 million. And we all think to ourselves, wow, there seems to be some money in legal tech. You had this company that had, as some others also did, pre-access to GPT-4, which was an incredibly unfair advantage in some ways. But we started in a much smaller market. We started in the Nordics. And I quite quickly realized that nobody was going to take three software guys very seriously in this world of law.

• 16:06Speaker 01

  And so I basically went to the top three law firms in the Nordics. And we landed with the biggest, Mannheimers Fortling, and we moved in with their firm.

• 16:15Harry Stebbings?

  I often listen to podcasts and they say things like you just did there and I might, but how?

• 16:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 16:20Harry Stebbings?

  How did you go into the biggest law firm in Sweden?

• 16:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:23Harry Stebbings?

  And let them accept you and welcome you into their office to see how they work?

• 16:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, good question. And I think it required a bit of skill, but also a quite open mindset from them. So I managed to get a meeting with their managing partner, Jan Danestam. And when I was trying to get the meeting, somebody told me it's harder to break into his calendar than the Fort Knox. But, you know, somehow we managed to do it. I go to their offices, we sit down like this for 30 minutes. And I realize we're sort of a pre-seed company, we have no product, we have nothing to show for. So I need to make the impression that AI is going to be a very important part of their business and that I'm a guy that he's going to want to work with. I had done my research. This was pre-deep research from the LLM, so it was actually real journalistic research.

• 17:08Speaker 01

  And I had seen that he'd had some statements in the past effectively saying that AI is more artificial than intelligent.

• 17:16Harry Stebbings?

  Tough audience.

• 17:16Speaker 01

  Tough audience. And this This was back when the early promise of AI started to come into law and everybody completely burnt themselves. Because the expectations and the marketing was up here, but the delivery was down here. And you effectively had to sit and train the system yourself, which nobody had time for. So we get in and I think the essence of the conversation is something like, dude, I don't know law, you don't know AI. But this is gonna be a thing and we're gonna need each other. And they had an innovation lab, so they had actually put in a structure to welcome companies like this into their space. It wasn't that well structured, but the idea was there. And we get accepted in, I can show you a picture of the room a bit later. It's this really small conference room without any windows and we were five guys in there.

• 18:01Speaker 01

  The AC would turn off at 5pm and we would sit there until midnight for six months. It was really close to the Coca-Cola fridge though, so we had all the good benefits of being in a big law firm. I think I started getting almost like this rumor of bringing my laptop with me to the lunch canteen every day. And I'd sit next to somebody new and sort of bother them on the lunch and be like, hey, we're billing this demo. You know, do you wanna look at Leia? And they're like, oh Leia, oh yeah, you guys are the AI guys, right? And we're like, yeah, that's us. And I show them, I'd, you know, watch them play around with it, see what they tried to do. And I think very quickly you realized, okay, these are the sort of buckets of things that people want to do. And I think broadly you can say they wanted to do legal research, they wanted to review contracts and they wanted to draft things.

• 18:47Speaker 01

  But people would come in with this expectation of, I want the LLM to draft me a 300-page SPA with one prompt. And of course, it couldn't do that. So we had to build the staircase of the capabilities of the platform, but also educate the firm and educate the attorneys about what they could expect from a platform like this.

• 19:04Harry Stebbings?

  From doing this very close integration with your first kind of partner to build product, what are your biggest lessons or advice to founders on building product with customers? And when to listen and when not to?

• 19:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's the the heart of the question, right?

• 19:20Harry Stebbings?

  Because you don't just want to build a product that's in their paradigm of behaviour.

• 19:23Speaker 01

  No, and we didn't. They were in many ways asking for a faster horse and we wanted to build a car. What I realised was that we needed the brand and we needed to be coupled with a firm that had a very serious position in the market. They they are innovative, they are pushing the agenda and you had our our competitor getting close with A and O. And so we needed kind of the same and we were based in the Nordics. So so Manheim was the firm that we went to. I think when you talk with your customers and you want to understand what are they trying to solve and how are we going to solve for it, you need to realise that there's a huge information gap between they fundamentally, most of them at least ninety nine percent, don't fundamentally understand the technology at all.

• 20:06Speaker 01

  You're just looking at the behaviour of what are they trying to do, given the tools that you've provided them. And then you almost need to come in with this process mindset. I love lawyers, I love attorneys, but they're not that process nerdy, right? And I spent like eight weeks at McKinsey, not not enough to be sort of indoctrinated, but good enough to be dangerous in PowerPoint. And you come in and and you look at a process like, say, a due diligence or writing a submission and and you say, okay, this seems to be the core steps. What can AI do today? What can it not do today? And how are we going to engineer the platform in a way so that we can do everything here? I think there's this quote from the guy who built Gmail, that's like, your your product can have three features that should be good.

• 20:48Speaker 01

  And that's kind of what we had for a very long time. Three things, we were very good at them. And then you get people to understand what they can actually achieve with them.

• 20:56Harry Stebbings?

  Okay, so we partnered with this firm, we're internal, we're in this kind of soulless dark room, you're drinking too much coke but staying up till midnight with sugar. Brilliant, brilliant, health. When do we decide to go to Y C and why does that decision come about?

• 21:11Speaker 01

  We're locked in with this firm from August of twenty twenty three until February of twenty twenty four.

• 21:19Harry Stebbings?

  Wow.

• 21:20Speaker 01

  But we get early accepted into YC. So we got accepted for the winter batch that happens between January and March in 2024, all the way back in August. And I actually had a term sheet from a Swedish VC, which I got the same day as we had our YC interview. And this was our second YC interview because we had totally botched the first one.

• 21:41Harry Stebbings?

  Why? What happened?

• 21:42Speaker 01

  I think in essence, we came in with a very limited understanding of our problem space. And we needed the sort of two to three months of grinding and doing the foundational work to be ready to explain what we wanted to build. Because we just said, oh, legal and LLM seems like a good area. Let's go build here. And I think the YC partners were quite unimpressed by that. And I frankly think that they've also burnt themselves in the legal tech space many, many times.

• 22:13Harry Stebbings?

  That's true.

• 22:13Speaker 01

  So Gustav, our partner from YC, even after our final interview, he called me and he was like, Max, are you really sure you're going to sell into law firms? And I was just like, yes. It might be contrarian at this point, but it's going to be obvious.

• 22:27Harry Stebbings?

  And so on the second interview, it goes well and you get in?

• 22:29Speaker 01

  Goes way better, yeah. And we get in, we realize, okay, we need to flip our Swedish company into a Delaware. We had only raised like 50,000 bucks in initial angel money.

• 22:41Harry Stebbings?

  Uncapped or like?

• 22:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, and then we were going to run out of money, basically. But so that's why we had the term sheet from the Swedish VC. So we had an out, but when we got accepted into YC, we realized, okay, this space is going to move quickly. And so we need to scale. And I think I realized quicker than others that, okay, we had Harvey, we had CaseText, we had a few other companies who thought that legal tech was going to be a big thing. And so if you want to play here, you got to go fast. And that meant that instead of waiting the three months to kind of flip our Swedish company into a Delaware, I just went out and I raised a loan against the investment that was going to come in from Y Combinator. So we raised a loan against the collateral that the money was going to come in.

• 23:26Speaker 01

  Immediately hired four more guys who strapped in and started coding.

• 23:31Harry Stebbings?

  Whoa, wait a minute. So Jeanette told me about this from G C and she said, she said the, that you raised this. So you went out to like a loan provider?

• 23:38Speaker 01

  No, we got it from some family in France.

• 23:40Harry Stebbings?

  Okay. So you went to family and friends and said, hey, I've got 200 K coming in from Y C.

• 23:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, and we need a loan today. And I'm not sure if I said this publicly, but we were also going to run out of money during the Y C batch. Because we were running so aggressively. You know, a lot of the early pilots and client relationships were like, oh, you know, test the product for free. So we didn't get paid for in the beginning. And then Yuri Sagalov, who's now the, I think, head of early stage at, at G C. He did a 500 K safe on us in February or January. The same day I landed in S F. And I think this is an important difference between Europe and the States. Cause I landed in S F completely jet lagged. I text Yuri and I'm like, hey, are you around? And he's like, yeah, let's go grab a coffee. So we go for a coffee, we chat for 30 minutes.

• 24:30Speaker 01

  I tried to raise on like a 50 million safe. And he was like, dude, you have 20 K M R R. I'm not investing on like a 50 million valuation. And I said, okay, will you do 25? And I think that's what he did. So we got the money and he wired it the same day. That would not have happened in Europe, I think.

• 24:46Harry Stebbings?

  What the speed of his decision?

• 24:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I talked with a couple of European funds slash angels about taking that 500 K. And they passed on it. And then, you know, when they wanted to be part of the seed round, you know, they were just too slow.

• 25:00Harry Stebbings?

  Oh, that pains me so much. I actually wrote the other day on social that venture capital in Europe is running at 2.0 on the treadmill. If you know, treadmill is 2.0, it's like fucking pathetic.

• 25:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, 20 is the most.

• 25:14Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah, that's Mo Farah speed. But I had two companies that basically for six months had not been able to raise in Europe.

• 25:19Speaker 01

  Right.

• 25:20Harry Stebbings?

  And then in the U S, they got a 30 million pound term, she didn't, a 12 million pound term, she within 72 hours of landing.

• 25:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:26Harry Stebbings?

  Okay, so we land there, we get the 500K safe. Thank God we're not gonna run out.

• 25:30Speaker 01

  We're not gonna run out of money.

• 25:31Harry Stebbings?

  Okay, and so now we're in Y C?

• 25:34Speaker 01

  We're in Y C. I think we had one of the more unique Y C experiences.

• 25:38Harry Stebbings?

  I heard there were loads of great Y C stories.

• 25:40Speaker 01

  So we got accepted back in August and Y C for us at this point is like this mythical creature, like this Mount of Olympus that you only get to go to if you're like the creme de la creme. And we got so excited, we booked this like really nice Airbnb, which turned out to be not as nice in person, but it looked really nice on the pictures. It had this little campfire and we said, oh, we're gonna like go to Y C and we're gonna ship and we're gonna like sit around the fire and like have a beer and go to all these nice sessions and we're gonna meet Sam Altman, you know, we're gonna do all these things. And we get to Y C and I'm just completely locked in on sales and growing the business because we had started getting the initial traction from all the big firms in the Nordics. And so me and our founding A E, Tu hin,

• 26:26Speaker 01

  we effectively buy these ring lights to put on our laptops. It's like the influencer, like almost like these lights, like the influencer things you can put on your laptop. So it doesn't look like it's in the middle of the night when we sit through sales calls between 1 A M and 10 A M every night. And I think we closed our biggest deal at that point. It was like 500K in the middle of the night at 4 A M. And we managed to do that, or I managed to do it for about a week. And then I just said, guys, I'm out. Like, I'm going back to Stockholm. I'm locking myself in the law firm again because we couldn't afford office space back then. So I locked myself in the firm, just did all these conversations. I was running around the city with my little briefcase, then Tu hin came back at some point too.

• 27:06Harry Stebbings?

  So for the actual program, you weren't in Silicon Valley?

• 27:10Speaker 01

  I was not there.

• 27:10Harry Stebbings?

  Did you miss out by not being there?

• 27:13Speaker 01

  Yes, of course. Everybody else made a lot of good friends. I missed out on that. But I think, I thought, like, my reasoning was.

• 27:19Harry Stebbings?

  Got to close deals?

• 27:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:20Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah, I get that.

• 27:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, and maybe that comes back to the whole, you know.

• 27:23Harry Stebbings?

  Do you think it was worth it doing Y C then?

• 27:26Speaker 01

  Yes, it was. I mean, we were a Swedish company by nobodies and Y C put us in the global spotlight. And I think we took every opportunity that that provided for us. We served that wave so incredibly well.

• 27:43Harry Stebbings?

  When you think to that, sorry, I love that. I think in clips, challenge of being in my brain is every conversation you have, you think in social media clips.

• 27:54Speaker 01

  Right.

• 27:54Harry Stebbings?

  Imagine going on a date with me, it's shit. You're like clip, clip, clip. But my question to you there is, you said you really took advantage of that global spotlight that Y C brought. What did you do, for example, to take advantage of it? I'm thinking of Vassens.

• 28:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, now there's a lot of Swedish Y C companies. Back then, I think there were maybe five. Like, there hadn't been a Swedish Y C company for a really long time. And I used to work at Depict for a week. I worked there for a week. But between them and us, there were nobody else, I think.

• 28:25Harry Stebbings?

  I'm going to start a fund called Just Depict Ventures, and anyone that comes out of it just gets an automatic term sheet.

• 28:30Speaker 01

  That's not a bad idea. We'll do the same with Legora at some point.

• 28:32Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah, please, I'll fund it.

• 28:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I think we realized that if we want to play in the global space, we need to be known in the U S. And Y C put us on the map. And so by being in Y C, we raised money from Benchmark, who we would have not been introduced to if we weren't in Y C.

• 28:49Harry Stebbings?

  Okay, so take me to that. So we go through the batch, we close deals in Sweden, and then it comes to demo day.

• 28:56Speaker 01

  I mean, the Y C advice is you raise sometime four or five weeks before demo day because it's become so competitive. That's when we make the switch. I'm in Stockholm, my team is in S F, and then we switch. So I tell them, you need to come home and you need to take care of the customers because I'm going to go and fundraise. I go to S F, I lock myself in this nice Airbnb that we've had. And I think it went something like, I arrive on a Tuesday. On the Wednesday, I sit down with Gustav and he tells me, Max, I think you guys should go and raise like a bigger round. You guys are doing really well.

• 29:28Harry Stebbings?

  What revenues are you at now?

• 29:30Speaker 01

  We're like one million ARR.

• 29:31Harry Stebbings?

  Wow.

• 29:32Speaker 01

  So we went from two hundred K M R R to almost a million of ARR.

• 29:37Harry Stebbings?

  So two hundred K to a million?

• 29:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, basically.

• 29:40Harry Stebbings?

  Got you. Okay, fuck, that's amazing.

• 29:43Speaker 01

  And then you talk to all these funds, you get to know them.

• 29:46Harry Stebbings?

  Do Y C introduce you to all of them?

• 29:47Speaker 01

  No, they introduced it to a lot of them, but I think it was also a combination of a lot of inbound. Cause I think as soon as you announced that you've been accepted into Y C, you get 500 inbound VC emails that you need to deal with.

• 30:01Harry Stebbings?

  That's amazing.

• 30:02Speaker 01

  I think I set up this filter that would like auto reply, hey, I'm heads down. I'll see you in like end of March.

• 30:09Harry Stebbings?

  I get those responses and I'm like, dude, I'm a podcaster. All good.

• 30:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:12Harry Stebbings?

  I hate VCs too. That's always my comeback. Like, no worries. I'm not a VC.

• 30:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I think it's, it's like, because if you're gonna have all those conversations too early, it's too much context switching. And so it's just nicer to bundle it because then you're in the zone.

• 30:26Harry Stebbings?

  So you bundled the fundraise into like a 10 day process?

• 30:28Speaker 01

  And I thought it was going to be a six week process because that's what Y C recommend or thought. And then it ended up being like a seven day process.

• 30:35Harry Stebbings?

  Okay. Who initiated Chayton?

• 30:37Speaker 01

  Yuri Sagalov, who made our, who, who made the ticket that saved us from not running out of money during Y C. And they didn't know this, but they're apparently like neighbors.

• 30:46Harry Stebbings?

  Wow. I did not know this. Chayton literally just responded to our tweet. And so it was a 10 and a half million around there.

• 30:53Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 30:54Harry Stebbings?

  And Chayton led that.

• 30:55Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 30:55Harry Stebbings?

  And then like your Jack Altman's came in that time too.

• 30:57Speaker 01

  No, Jack Altman came in the round after.

• 31:00Harry Stebbings?

  Ah, I got you. Okay. So we raised 10 and a half then. Dude, that's a lot of money then.

• 31:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was a lot of money.

• 31:04Harry Stebbings?

  What was the price?

• 31:05Speaker 01

  I think we did it at 50 something.

• 31:07Harry Stebbings?

  It's like chunky. When you reflect on that, how do you advise founders on the right amount to raise? And also the right price to raise at?

• 31:16Speaker 01

  I think you think about it in terms of how much money do you need to get to the next stage? And then you optimize for dilution. Like I wanted to dilute less than 20%. That was my goal. You might say, okay, our threshold is 25% or it's something else. And then you say, okay, how much money do I need to get to the next point or to turn profitable? That's how much money you should raise. And when you do it preemptively, I think you could almost think about it in a way where the valuations are, are high when you preempt your round, right? But you think about it within 18 or 12 months, we'll get to a, a revenue stage which times 20 or times 25 or something validates that valuation. Things should take the preemptive money.

• 31:51Harry Stebbings?

  When you look at Y C companies now. Raising with 10% dilution in rounds. Do you wish you had done that? I know it sounds obvious.

• 31:58Speaker 01

  No, because I don't think I would have gotten Benchmark at a 10% dilution. And I think the VC that you get in the beginning, at least as a first time founder, is quite important. Because you don't want to get people in your corner who are going to get you off track.

• 32:14Harry Stebbings?

  The world of YC opens up a huge amount to you. Does the world of Benchmark open up? How much does their brand play a role in validating you?

• 32:22Speaker 01

  I think there's some stats that like 99% of benchmark companies end up raising a Series B. That's the only stat you need to hear.

• 32:30Harry Stebbings?

  Okay, I totally agree with you and you're absolutely right. They also had the highest hit rate of $5 billion companies.

• 32:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:36Harry Stebbings?

  Incredible stat that Cole Rotman did this analysis. Okay, and so we raised that money. How many term sheets did we have?

• 32:43Speaker 01

  Like 15, I think.

• 32:45Harry Stebbings?

  Was it an easy decision?

• 32:46Speaker 01

  It was an easy decision based on the partner. And the reason for it is you're going to do this for a really long time. That's always how I thought about it. I want to make the decisions now that I'm going to be happy with a decade from now. If I'm still in my shoes, I think then you got to pick on who do I have chemistry with? Who do I think is going to be in this for the long run together with me? And who, when you call unintroduced references, say in thick or thin, this guy had my back. And would in an instant fly to whatever country or help me close this deal. Or when we didn't hit this quarter, they put in even more money because they said we're going to double down.

• 33:30Speaker 01

  You can only date so many funds and partners, I guess.

• 33:34Harry Stebbings?

  Okay, so we raised the 10 and a half from Benchmark. Chayton does it. Fantastic. What happens then? Now YC's over. We've got the 10 and a half. The whole team's back in Stockholm.

• 33:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I go back the same day. Me and Chayton negotiated the term sheet like this in person. And then the same day after we sign, he's like, oh, so when are you going back to Stockholm? And I'm like, oh, I guess tonight. And he's like, yeah, sounds good. So go back to Stockholm and we lock in, we have the money, we start scaling, then we preempt our A round. So we were chased by a couple of the funds who were interested in our seed round. And they said, hey, we keep hearing that you guys are doing really well. We'd love to lead your next round. And then I joined a firm for standard catch-up call. And they're like, we want to do your A round. Name your price. And I just go, well, you know what, like I have enough money. I don't need anymore right now. And they say, well, we'll do your next round now.

• 34:29Speaker 01

  And I said, okay, well, give me a price. And they say, all right, we'll do it at 150 or something, which was a 3X from the seed round. And I thought, okay, so it's pretty good. Send me a term sheet. And then we go through some dancing or partner pitches, yada, yada.

• 34:47Harry Stebbings?

  Was Chathen happy about this?

• 34:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think he was pretty happy about it.

• 34:50Harry Stebbings?

  But like, I would not have been happy if I was on your cap table all right. If I was Chathen, I would not have been happy. Because I think for you to suddenly ingest 25 million dollars when you just raised 10 and a half, which is a lot for a seed round, respectfully as a first-time founder, and you come across much older, you're 23, 24 at this point.

• 35:05Speaker 01

  25, oh, yeah, 24 back then, yeah.

• 35:07Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah, it is really hard to not get distracted, to remain focused and be laser, laser focused on the right things when suddenly you now have 35 million dollars.

• 35:18Speaker 01

  I agree. So I'll tell you what happened in our first board meeting. I turned to Redpoint and to Benchmark and I said, we're not going to sell for the next four months. Because if we sell and we start onboarding all these great attorneys, they're not going to have the best experience. And they're going to think that the product can't solve for the sort of standard things that we talked about in the beginning. Redpoint kind of looked at me and went, dude, we just gave you like 25 million. Are you not going to sell? Like, no, we're not going to sell. We're going to wait the summer out. We're going to work really fucking hard. And we're going to onboard, you know, the firms and the people we want to work with in September, October. And I think that required a lot of ice in the stomach.

• 35:58Harry Stebbings?

  How do you think about that in terms of if you don't gobble up those firms and someone else will, but if you gobble them up and give them a bad experience, it's very difficult to get back?

• 36:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, one shot. And if you mess it up, they're churning.

• 36:14Harry Stebbings?

  But you don't want to let someone else get them first?

• 36:17Speaker 01

  Well, even if somebody else got to them first, at this time, almost everybody would churn because the products were so chat GPT-esque and they required so much sophistication from the attorney or the lawyer to get value out of. And that's the gap that we had to close. You're serving somebody who's quite untechnical and they're really short for time. So they're going to come in and they're going to expect brilliant results. And if they don't get that the first time, they're never opening up your product again.

• 36:47Harry Stebbings?

  What were the advantages and disadvantages of being second in timing to Harvey?

• 36:53Speaker 01

  I think they made a lot of fundamental errors around, for instance, fine tuning and spending time on the wrong things. Whereas because we came afterwards, we had to catch up on product. And so we were only thinking about the application layer. There were frankly, a lot of firms who had piloted them back then, who had an awful experience and who thought GPT four was better. And so that's kind of the point that I'm talking about because if you're coming in with a product and you're charging 10x the price of chat GPT four and the partner tries the prompt in the two systems and thinks the GPT four is better, you're churning and you burn your one shot. Now, I think both them and us have gotten to the brand level where you might get a second shot and you can come back and you can say, well, you know, our product has

• 37:38Speaker 01

  improved by so much and we have all these new features that you need to try it again. But we only had one shot really. And so I took that very seriously.

• 37:45Harry Stebbings?

  What strategic mistakes did they make that you learnt from?

• 37:48Speaker 01

  I think they've done a lot of things great, but I think they came in and set the expectations really high and they weren't able to deliver on that in terms of product back then. And this allowed us to come in and say, well, we're maybe somewhere in between here and here's what we can do today. Here's what we think we can do tomorrow and I promise you, we're going to deliver. Deliver on this. And then we onboarded. At some point, we had almost like a two to one in terms of our C S and post-sales team in comparison to our new sales team, which was, you know, a very unstandardized thing for a SaaS company like this. But we had almost lawyers who were forward deployed, working with our customers on getting them from, we have no idea what A I can do for us,

• 38:30Speaker 01

  to, holy shit, we just delivered this project with a twice as fast turnaround at the same quality, because we managed to, you know, work with A I in a smart way.

• 38:39Harry Stebbings?

  I spoke to someone before the show and I said, yeah, Legora are taking loads of clients from Harvey, huh? And they said, yeah, but dude, they are price cutting the shit out of Harvey. And I was like,

• 38:50Speaker 01

  That's not true.

• 38:51Harry Stebbings?

  Not true?

• 38:52Speaker 01

  No. But the other thing is happening.

• 38:53Harry Stebbings?

  Huh?

• 38:54Speaker 01

  It's the other way around.

• 38:55Harry Stebbings?

  What do you do when that happens? Like, they have so much money, they can afford to give it away for free.

• 39:00Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 39:01Harry Stebbings?

  They have, dude, they have a six hundred and ninety-three million delta.

• 39:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:06Harry Stebbings?

  Between you guys, they could buy a small country.

• 39:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:11Harry Stebbings?

  What do you do when your competitor has so much more money?

• 39:13Speaker 01

  Well, it's like the Uber and Lyft situation a little bit, right? If you just pour money into it in that world, but that's when you have a very low differentiated product. Now, I'm building Legora in a way where even if Harvey's free, a firm will choose to work with us, because that's how much better I want to be in terms of our product and our service offering and where we take our clients and the work we do for them. And so then it doesn't matter how much money you raise.

• 39:37Harry Stebbings?

  How far do you think you are away from that?

• 39:39Speaker 01

  Quite a bit.

• 39:40Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah.

• 39:41Speaker 01

  But every day we get closer to it.

• 39:43Harry Stebbings?

  Do you worry about the brand that they've built from being first and also just raising so much? They have a lot of brand through fundraise.

• 39:51Speaker 01

  Not really. I think we're in all the conversations now. I think it's a two-horse race to some extent, for sure. And I think they've done some things incredibly well. I think we've done some stuff really well as well. And I think the most impressive part is probably how we've more than caught up with a fraction of the funding and just being super focused on that.

• 40:12Harry Stebbings?

  Totally agree. As I said, the delta between you and funding is like enormous. Going back to that, so the board meeting, every board member's going, fuck. We just gave this Swedish guy a huge amount of money and he's now not gonna sell. So then it's September, October, I guess. Summer's gone through.

• 40:29Speaker 01

  And we're onboarding everyone. And I think we're at this point where I tell the product team and the engineering team, we need to be in a spot where we could onboard a thousand lawyers a day on the platform. And nothing can break. And we do it. And since then, well, it's been an exponential journey upwards.

• 40:46Harry Stebbings?

  Okay, so September, though, we're really starting to sell.

• 40:48Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 40:49Harry Stebbings?

  And I spoke to Logan Bartlett before the show. And he said, Max became one of the best enterprise sellers that I've worked with. Ask him how. How did you become so good at enterprise sales? And what would you advise founders who are maybe more engineering and product slanted on becoming good at enterprise sales?

• 41:06Speaker 01

  Well, I'm an engineer.

• 41:07Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah.

• 41:08Speaker 01

  So I'll start with that. I didn't go through the sales school.

• 41:10Harry Stebbings?

  Oh dude, you're a peak nerd. Yeah.

• 41:12Speaker 01

  Yes, I'm a peak nerd.

• 41:12Harry Stebbings?

  Pro gamer engineer. Yeah.

• 41:14Speaker 01

  And I think there's one interesting dynamic in the legal world, which is these firms are not spending the company's money. They're spending their own money because every year the firms split the profit. And so they're asking themselves, should we invest now at this level to reap X rewards? And is that better than, you know, buying a nice summer house or something like this? Like, you know, a bit exaggerated, but that's the thinking. And so I think immediately I came in with this idea that you will not bluff these people. They're super smart, they're super hard workers and they get their business.

• 41:57Speaker 01

  And so I came in with very open cards and said, here's where the tech is. Here's what I think we've done well. Here's what we're going to do. Here's what I think that would lead to for your firm if we partner. And I think that's a very compelling story and a very compelling pitch. And I think we've more than followed through on that. But I mean, the many of the early firms, this is a bet. It's a bet to say, okay, we think these guys are going to figure it out. And so we want to be part of that. And now we've been able to pay them back with, I think, a lot of very promising and excellent results.

• 42:30Harry Stebbings?

  You said earlier about allowing people to test product for free and also the challenging situation it puts you in financially. For other founders who are aware that they need customer feedback, they need usage to understand more. Do you recommend product usage for free? Or does it make it more challenging?

• 42:45Speaker 01

  Of course, it makes it more challenging. The market dynamics for us is that firms are piloting different softwares and they're stacking it against each other. I mean, one way you can view this is every firm that we work with have selected us out of a portion of different products or a bundle of different products because they get to test everything. Of course, ideally, I mean, you have this idea and I think Y C said it first, like, you know, you got to go sell and then you build it and you sort of, you know, iterate quickly and so on. One thing I did, and this is maybe like on a tangent, I reached out to like a hundred attorneys when we started out and I said, could I pay you your hourly rate for a lunch with me? Of course, they wouldn't take my money because they were so nice. And they'd say, oh, no way. You don't have to pay me 500 bucks to have lunch

• 43:30Speaker 01

  with me. But then I just asked them all these things. And I think by doing that, like, you got to be in this learning mindset of, okay, you want to soak up as much information and as much things as possible.

• 43:40Harry Stebbings?

  I love that.

• 43:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was a smart move. I'm happy I did it.

• 43:43Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah.

• 43:44Speaker 01

  And because I think if you open with that and you say, hey, I'm going to respect your time so much that I'm willing to pay for it. And, you know, 90% of them also paid for the lunch because, you know, they had money and I didn't. So, but I think if you come in with that level of enthusiasm, nobody in our space had met somebody who was as enthusiastic about selling legal tech as me. And they just thought that was infectious.

• 44:08Harry Stebbings?

  Do you think we do cold emailing badly? Say, I think like outbound is done so badly. People always ask me, dude, how did you get the guests that you get on the show?

• 44:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:17Harry Stebbings?

  I'm like, honestly, in a world, especially now where you have deep research, you can find incredible bits of information that are so personal.

• 44:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:24Harry Stebbings?

  If you got a note from a young 18 year old engineer that said, oh my God, I heard you on 20 VC, I love Dota 2, it was my start, and really was insightful about the way that they positioned it in a short, you would respond?

• 44:38Speaker 01

  Of course I would.

• 44:39Harry Stebbings?

  So you agree that it's just done badly?

• 44:41Speaker 01

  I agree that it's typically done badly. And I also think that there's other venues of reaching out. The good thing about attorneys is that they all have their phone numbers on their websites.

• 44:51Harry Stebbings?

  So you would call them?

• 44:52Speaker 01

  No, I would text them.

• 44:53Harry Stebbings?

  Huh. What would you say?

• 44:54Speaker 01

  But that's more personal. I would say in Swedish, hey, my name's Max. I am working on this legal plus AI project. You wouldn't say company, say project, because that's more interesting. And I'd say, I'm trying to learn more about the space. I went to these universities, because they would know them. I would love to sort of pick your brain on X area that I saw that they were an expert in. And would you be willing to grab lunch with me? I would even pay you your hourly rate, because I'm so interested in what you do. And 90% response of says, hey, Max, that sounds wonderful. I'm really busy, but how about we do it in three weeks at this place? And they'd also take you to somewhere nice. Lawyers wanna go and have a nice lunch.

• 45:38Speaker 01

  And so you get a good lunch and you get to learn more about the industry.

• 45:42Harry Stebbings?

  I love that. That is fucking amazing.

• 45:43Speaker 01

  And I think their core skill that, I'm not sure if something I developed or had was this. I think I'm easy to help. I'm very coachable.

• 45:54Harry Stebbings?

  What do you think you do that makes you coachable, that makes people want to help you? I think I'm the same, but I have a strategic way of doing it.

• 46:02Speaker 01

  Okay, I'm not sure if I've thought about it that deeply. I'm very appreciative. I think I'm quite loosely held in a lot of my opinions, which makes possible to switch my framework quickly. And then people see that they have an effect. And then I think you try to pay it back, and then that creates a very good loop.

• 46:18Harry Stebbings?

  So I found that, Bunny, if someone is giving help, they need to feel like you're the subordinate, like you are in some ways beneath them. So I will always start with this position of almost vulnerability. It helps in creating that subordination role. And then I will be incredibly effusive in terms of, one, compliments.

• 46:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:36Harry Stebbings?

  It makes them, again, elevated.

• 46:37Speaker 01

  Great.

• 46:38Harry Stebbings?

  And then, two, like, help me understand. Teach me why.

• 46:43Speaker 01

  Exactly. And I think that's a good summary of.

• 46:45Harry Stebbings?

  Super, super. I love that.

• 46:47Speaker 01

  And even in sales, you can do it.

• 46:49Harry Stebbings?

  A hundred percent.

• 46:49Speaker 01

  To maybe tie it back to some comparison between us at Harvey or Winston. Like, I came in with the attitude of legal NAI is standing in front of the most exciting time that it's ever been in. There's the most amount of opportunities. We don't know exactly where it's gonna land, but together, you and I, Harry, can figure it out. And I think that positioning is very compelling. And it's not this way of coming in and saying, hey. It's my way or the highway. Pay us a million bucks or we're going to the next firm.

• 47:23Harry Stebbings?

  You said there about kind of the exciting time with the conjunction of legal and AI. You also said about messaging the lawyers and saying about a specific segment of the market where they work, which you want to talk some about. When I did our show recently with Jason and Rory, I don't know if you heard it, we spent quite a lot of time on the legal space.

• 47:39Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 47:39Harry Stebbings?

  And we said actually that the biggest mistakes I've made in investing is when you think that the market's much bigger than it is. And you kind of, it slowly gets more and more carved up. And suddenly, you know, we're in solve, which has patents. You then have other players attacking different verticals and slowly the market fragments away.

• 47:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:56Harry Stebbings?

  And what seemed like a fifty billion dollar market or whatever it is, suddenly is a lot smaller because of the fragmentation. I worry about that here. I don't understand Harvey being a five billion dollar company and seeing the upside to twenty, given that fragmentation.

• 48:11Speaker 01

  The other way of looking at it is these models will continue to improve. You might not need to build as much to verticalize them. So I, I had the benefit of spending time with restructuring lawyers and with patent lawyers and with competition lawyers and data protection lawyers and litigators. And yes, everything looks quite differently and especially in-house, right? Like that's the other side of this coin. But there might be enough in common to build a single platform that assists the attorney in doing a lot of that work. And the other thing that I think is quite interesting is as these frameworks around the agents are improving, you'll effectively have agents going out and running other pieces of software. So take an example like translations.

• 48:52Speaker 01

  You have translation companies like Deepel and others who are brilliant companies, but they're a very, very narrow use case. And then you might have something like redlining or you might have something like comparing documents. All these things are very different things. And what you can do is you can put an agent on top of it that can run structured tool calling. So you just go to Legora and say, hey, please help me translate this document. And it will throw the document to the correct API and retrieve back the results. And so what you effectively get is you get like this universal interface to a lot more functionality, which if you're a senior partner at. Ex-firm in the States, you might use three apps on your phone.

• 49:32Speaker 01

  And so in your work, you're using Microsoft Word, you're using Outlook and you use your document management system. If you want to add a fourth product to that bucket or to that list, I think it has to be able to do a lot of things because you're not going to go and learn 20 different tools.

• 49:47Harry Stebbings?

  Do you agree that everything has a price?

• 49:49Speaker 01

  No, because if you told me, Max, I'd give you $10 billion, but you'll die in 24 hours, I wouldn't take it. So it doesn't, it doesn't have a price, it's priceless.

• 50:00Harry Stebbings?

  Can I buy Legora for $5 billion today?

• 50:03Speaker 01

  No.

• 50:03Harry Stebbings?

  10?

• 50:04Speaker 01

  I'm having too much fun. It doesn't have a price. Now it's part of my life and I think that's priceless.

• 50:09Harry Stebbings?

  It's, it's hard when a company becomes such an intrinsic part of your identity.

• 50:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is. It's like a relationship.

• 50:16Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah, almost harder.

• 50:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:18Harry Stebbings?

  I can shed a relationship easier. Okay, so I want to get back to this. We've become this fucking amazing enterprise seller that we are. And the company progresses, hiring progresses. Actually, as an issue on the hiring side, what are your biggest lessons on hiring? Again, you're a first time founder. On what it took to hire such a crack team, what worked and what didn't?

• 50:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's easy to repeat what, you know, I've heard other people say in the past, but you hadn't internalized it until you went into the traps yourself.

• 50:49Harry Stebbings?

  What traps did you go into?

• 50:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, so you know, you hire, you try and hire for Y Intercept and not Slope. And I burned myself there a couple of times. I think when it comes to building a culture that ships or sells or builds and, you know, markets, you want people that you almost need to go to them and be like, dude, you need to go home, you need to sleep and you need to come back tomorrow and we'll continue. I think we managed to do that, but it's difficult when you need to scale headcount so quickly. Because we very quickly became a global company. We have operations in the States, in London, in Stockholm, but we also have sort of hubs in Finland, Germany, Spain, France, with people who are working on the ground with our clients. And now we've just opened up in Australia as well.

• 51:35Speaker 01

  What happens is when you're not there, how are people treating the work? Like, that's the thing you need to optimize for. And I think I made the mistake of bringing in some execs with the idea of, oh, just repeat what you did in your old company. And that's not going to work because none of them have worked in an AI company that is going 10x year over year.

• 51:58Harry Stebbings?

  Did you move fast enough to change it?

• 52:00Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 52:01Harry Stebbings?

  You did?

• 52:02Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 52:02Harry Stebbings?

  That's hard.

• 52:03Speaker 01

  Super hard. Some of the hardest conversations in, you know, I've ever had.

• 52:07Harry Stebbings?

  So knowing what you know now, you would not have hired for the blue blazer wearing, you would have hired for slope. Anything else?

• 52:14Speaker 01

  The curiosity combined with ambition is like the two values that I've over time converged towards, especially in engineering and in product. Because there's so many product directors at Klarna or at Spotify or these companies that have made it that they're not incentivized to be curious in a way. They're kind of incentivized to keep the company on the track it is. Whereas in this native AI world, you need to be ultra curious. You need to have every L L M on your phone and you need to work with voice mode and you need to test daily everything that's coming out. Because our iteration cycles are not quarters, they're weeks or days. I think you can test for that.

• 52:59Speaker 01

  And I think we've started testing for it more and more and more.

• 53:01Harry Stebbings?

  How do you test for it?

• 53:02Speaker 01

  Well, you just ask them, you know, pull up your phone and show me, you know, all the things that you're currently curious about. And then I ask them, what was the last time you nerded into something and tell me about that? And sometimes people go, oh, I'm going to tell you about this book I'm reading about X, Y, Z. And you just see it in their eyes. They're like intellectually and emotionally engaged. And then what happens is as they come into the company and you sort of form them in the onboarding, they get the same spark in their eyes about Legora and about what we're building and about the next feature and about solving that problem for that client. When you build a team like that, you come in and it doesn't feel like work to people. It feels like we're on this mission. It's a little bit like a cult.

• 53:45Speaker 01

  But I think you need to build a cultish culture when you're scaling this fast.

• 53:50Harry Stebbings?

  How do you build a cultish culture? You know, I I got killed and I think we actually messaged about it. But I got killed for saying about if you want to be a top one percent founder, you need to work seven days a week. And the valley has turned up the intensity on work ethic. And everyone killed me for it. But I find life very funny. Everyone always recommends the book, The Courage to be Disliked. And then when you actually gain that courage, they will shoot you. So my question to you is, do you agree with nine nine six mentality? And how would you reflect on what I just said?

• 54:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, the short answer is yes, because we did it for a while and we we did it with large team buy in. If you tie it back to our space, our view of it is there's clearly going to be a couple of very valuable businesses in our area. And if we're playing to be number one, we're gonna need to outwork, out deliver, out care our competitors. And you can do that through different ways than just pure hours. But I think it's part of that function, of course. Like if you work 10 hours a day and I work eight, I mean, at some point you're gonna have achieved a lot more. Unless I'm very productive in my hours and I need time to reset. And I think there are people can be quite different. I think it's different if you're building high complexity

• 55:08Speaker 01

  systems where you need to think deeply about directionally where you're going. Or if you're sitting and answering emails. So there's different work for different places.

• 55:17Harry Stebbings?

  Do you worry that Europe had such a viscerally negative response to the nine nine six vibe?

• 55:23Speaker 01

  But it's like, yeah, like people are are vocally against it. But then you still have people in my team who are, I need to tell them on a Saturday at 10 P M. to go home.

• 55:33Harry Stebbings?

  Do you?

• 55:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:35Harry Stebbings?

  Do you do anything to inspire that?

• 55:37Speaker 01

  Of course I do. When I think about leadership, especially as a young founder, although I think I I did a lot in the years that I've had. I'm young in age and I think the only way to do that is like through like leading by example. And here my co-founder, Sigge, our our CTO, I mean, he sets the pace for the team. When I'm out Travelling, he's in the office, he's coding, he's building and sets the pace. You have the the best people of our of our growth team that when you look in the CRM, you see who's doing what and that sets the pace. And if you hire for people who want to be winners and who want to grow and who want to be part of building something very generational, I think they all understand that that comes with some level of sacrifice.

• 56:21Harry Stebbings?

  The pace to win, it's hard to win in the US, period.

• 56:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:25Harry Stebbings?

  It's hard to win in the US even more so if you're a European company. What do you think you did so effectively to gain ground in the US where so many European companies before have not?

• 56:35Speaker 01

  So we had this idea that, okay, we need to be able to serve a couple of very large clients and partners in the States from Europe. And if we can do that, and if we prove that we win in these A B tests, then we have enough proof points to go and set up a business. And then we started recruiting the team on the ground. What we've done is we've sent, I mean, the some of the best people in the team. When we opened the London office, they went here, they moved here. And we're doing the same for the States now. What you do is you send a very clear signal that like, hey, if you're the top performing team member and you want to go from Stockholm to New York, there's a path here. And that creates a culture again in that part of the office or that part of the part of the world

• 57:16Speaker 01

  that again, like they're an an extension of the core team and they're there to win and they have their own mission. I think what we also managed to do was we sort of got the word out in a good way. And I think it was Redpoint who helped us get the NASDAQ thing. And that sends a pretty clear signal that like, oh, these guys are here to play. They're not here to be the European winner.

• 57:36Harry Stebbings?

  So what would you advise then founders, I mean, so many founders who are pre-seed seed in Europe? And they're like, everyone's telling me that I have to be in the US. What do you say to them?

• 57:45Speaker 01

  Well, I don't think you have to be in the States. I'm not in the States yet. I'm, well, I'm on a plane maybe mostly, but you gotta figure out like where you're strong. And where we were strong was we got the buy-in from a couple of very influential clients in the States who said, we've had a taste of the things around the table. Prefer the taste of Legora and we're gonna double down on them as a partner. And then we said, okay, with this amount of traction, we're going to invest in also building up an office. And so what I've done from an enterprise perspective is you go for like a top ten logo. And if you get them and you say, okay, let's build an office here, like let's invest more. And we've had a very top down motion.

• 58:29Speaker 01

  Our first partner was the biggest firm in the Nordics. And then we've done that in every new country, basically.

• 58:34Harry Stebbings?

  Totally get you and I like that. Can I ask, what did you do that you wish you hadn't done?

• 58:40Speaker 01

  I'm actually quite happy with a lot of the results that I have in my hand of how we've done things. And most of the things that I regret would have been very hard to know beforehand. But I think one of the things that I'm that I wish I hadn't had done is I wish I did a better job of juggling the intensity of the work and everything outside of it. You're so in it to win it in terms of how you build the business. And on a personal level, that requires a lot of sacrifice. And I probably have like fifty unresponded texts on my phone from friends and people who I used to be very close with that I like haven't had the capacity to pick up.

• 59:23Speaker 01

  And they understand, but I wish I did a better job, especially as we started out like juggling those two things.

• 59:29Harry Stebbings?

  Do you think it would have been possible?

• 59:30Speaker 01

  I'm not sure.

• 59:31Harry Stebbings?

  That's my point.

• 59:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:32Harry Stebbings?

  That's hard. I completely get you. Okay. And so, sorry, going back, we have, you said Red Point there, building, you know, doing, helping you with the billboard. Sales is ripping, company in US now as well. And then it comes to another round and it comes.

• 59:46Speaker 01

  Well, so now we're in twenty twenty five.

• 59:47Harry Stebbings?

  Now in twenty twenty five.

• 59:49Speaker 01

  And I think we're around one hundred and twenty people.

• 59:52Harry Stebbings?

  I remember messaging you before the round came out and you were like, yeah, we've got loads of cash and everything's good. And I was like, oh, would you do, would you do something now? And you're like, no, we've got loads of cash.

• 1:00:01Speaker 01

  I didn't. Yeah, I hadn't planned to do it. It kind of happened.

• 1:00:04Harry Stebbings?

  That's on me then. That's bad of me because I kind of just took you for it. I was like, okay.

• 1:00:08Speaker 01

  Well.

• 1:00:09Harry Stebbings?

  And so what happens then? Because you're seven million of error at the time.

• 1:00:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, something like that. And we're obviously scaling really fast. We don't necessarily need the money, but to your point about being seen as large. You you wanna be big enough to be in all of the rooms and you wanna be considered in every possible deal. And you want to have all the exposure that you can get, especially if it's on on good terms. Again, like the thing that I always try and optimize for is, of course, the sort of structure of the round. But also, who am I now getting as a close ally of the company? That will help me win and achieve the mission that we're on. I think both Iconic and G C have some very core strengths.

• 1:00:50Harry Stebbings?

  So they just say, approach you.

• 1:00:52Speaker 01

  Well, I think I had some catch ups and then, again, very similar to to how the preempted A round happened. Somebody threw a term sheet and then it's like, oh, I guess we're doing this.

• 1:01:04Harry Stebbings?

  Who threw the term sheet?

• 1:01:05Speaker 01

  I think it was G C who threw the first one.

• 1:01:08Harry Stebbings?

  Love it. Well done, Jeanette.

• 1:01:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:09Harry Stebbings?

  Okay, so she throws a term sheet.

• 1:01:11Speaker 01

  It was funny timing as well with with Yuri going on G C full time.

• 1:01:15Harry Stebbings?

  Oh, yeah. Did you negotiate price?

• 1:01:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, we did.

• 1:01:18Harry Stebbings?

  And so then you raise, I think it was eighty million.

• 1:01:21Speaker 01

  We raised eighty million on six seventy five.

• 1:01:23Harry Stebbings?

  Eighty million on six seventy five. That is not much dilution. And so my question is, if I'm them, I'm getting like six and a half percent each.

• 1:01:31Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:01:32Harry Stebbings?

  It's not a huge amount.

• 1:01:33Speaker 01

  Well, I've always said, and this is how I talk to people who are joining the company. You'd much rather own a small portion of something that becomes very, very, very large than the opposite, right? And I think when I look at it, this space again, when you think about the software market versus the service market.

• 1:01:48Harry Stebbings?

  Did they want to work together? Because if I'm them, respectfully, both Iconic and G C can ride an eighty million dollar check. I'd just say you don't need the other one. Get them out. I'll take the full twelve and a half percent, whatever it is.

• 1:02:00Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, everybody who participated in the round wanted more, which I think is a very positive thing. And if everybody leaves the table a little bit unhappy, including me, then we've landed in a good space. When I think about fundraising, it's how can we spend as little time fundraising as possible? And as much time as possible, building the business. There is only in the last month in my world, a lot of things are happening. There is definitely something true to the fact that you need a war chest to compete.

• 1:02:30Harry Stebbings?

  Do you need a lot more money?

• 1:02:32Speaker 01

  Because now?

• 1:02:33Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:33Speaker 01

  No. I mean, out of the thirty five that we raised, I think we had only spent five or six.

• 1:02:39Harry Stebbings?

  So now you're sitting on a hundred and ten million.

• 1:02:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, basically.

• 1:02:41Harry Stebbings?

  So there's nothing that you would do with more money?

• 1:02:44Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:02:45Harry Stebbings?

  So I'm sorry, what are Harvey doing then with so much more money?

• 1:02:48Speaker 01

  Great question. Maybe it's expensive. I have no idea.

• 1:02:52Harry Stebbings?

  That's extraordinary.

• 1:02:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, I also think it's like, how do you build a very cash efficient business? I think here definitely helps to be a European company. I mean, you have access to raise money in the States and you get to build a business here. And I think we also built it in a very sound way with good margins and a way to scale it from here. There's going to come a time when Harvey and us have a little bit, like put a lid on the horizontal legal tech play, if you will. If you think about the earlier talk track about how do you go very deep on certain verticals? It's good to have cash. And I also think that there's something around. You start running a little bit on the treadmill and you need to keep the public perception. Although I don't necessarily care for it, the market cares for it.

• 1:03:38Speaker 01

  And so funding announcements are a way to boost things. And I mean, just to give you an example, like, yeah, since we did the round like a month and a half ago, we've doubled revenue, more than doubled revenue. And I think last month, like we added more than a million of ARR a week.

• 1:03:53Harry Stebbings?

  Why is that? Is that because of the visibility? Is that because of the confidence that they're running around imbusing?

• 1:03:57Speaker 01

  Well, I think it's look, again, like these partners who are running these law firms, they're amazing business people. They think about who do I want to work with, who's going to put me in the best position to become an AI native or an AI first legal service provider. And you want to bet on the horse who you think is going to be your best long term partner. There's nothing as impactful as being able to say, hey, we just went out and raised all this new money. And now we have runway for years and years and years. So we're going to be around. You can tell them, yeah, we have a lot of cash, da, da, da, da, da. But, you know, the external signaling of it also helps.

• 1:04:34Harry Stebbings?

  When you think about lawyers as customers, I always have this perception that they're incredibly sticky. You need to get them first because they don't change software very often.

• 1:04:44Speaker 01

  I don't agree at all. And I've found that their level of knowledge for these systems is increasing probably faster than we can build. So they've gone from, oh, AI seems to be this thing and we just need to check the box and then we'll kind of forget about it. To, okay, I think my industry is headed in a way where software is going to be an integral part of our entire service offering. Now, we need to fundamentally rethink our processes, some of our pricing, and how we, to give you a Swedish sort of hockey reference, skate to where the puck is going. In that world, they are looking at software and as their partners in that world very critically.

• 1:05:30Speaker 01

  And I frankly think that so far, none of the products are super sticky. They're quite easy to interchange, which has been very effective for us because we've done a lot of rip and replace.

• 1:05:41Harry Stebbings?

  We mentioned ambition before. I actually remember an old Swedish girlfriend of mine, which can get me in trouble, telling me about a Swedish word, which basically means you don't want to be different from anyone else. It's good to be like.

• 1:05:55Speaker 01

  Oh, Jan, Jan te lagen.

• 1:05:56Harry Stebbings?

  Yes.

• 1:05:57Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:05:57Harry Stebbings?

  This. And I was like very perturbed by it. It seemed damaging to me that we should all try and be in this middle ground.

• 1:06:04Speaker 01

  Well, it effectively means you shouldn't think that you are something.

• 1:06:08Harry Stebbings?

  Do you agree with me in thinking that's terrible and we should change that in Europe?

• 1:06:12Speaker 01

  Well, I think it would have been impossible to build Legora if I did not have a strike of overconfidence.

• 1:06:20Harry Stebbings?

  Did you ever have a time when you were too confident?

• 1:06:22Speaker 01

  Oh, I mean, there's been loads of times. I can give you some, some fun examples. I mean, I mean. I went to circus class when I was a kid. I thought I was really, really great. And so I would try to, you know, climb up the largest piece of cloth and try to do like a big spin going down. And I would just like completely fall and, and, you know, hurt myself. And in school, I would, instead of studying, go to the class or to the test. And basically think like, oh, I'm so good. I'm just gonna nail it. And you do that a couple of times and then you learn, okay, like I need to, I need to study for.

• 1:06:54Harry Stebbings?

  Have you done it with Legora?

• 1:06:55Speaker 01

  No, I don't think so. I think we've followed through on almost every single promise that we've done.

• 1:07:02Harry Stebbings?

  What really upsets you with the team? What I mean by that is like, I don't like sloppiness. I can take lots of.

• 1:07:10Speaker 01

  Yes, that's a good example. So when people start, I, I give them the same advice that I was given at McKinsey, which is like, take five to fifteen minutes and look through the work before you send it out. Because if I find errors, I'm going to need to look through all of it. And I had this happen to myself when I was in VC. So I used to work at Norgeen VC. I had spent like six days building this monster Excel model. And there was one number wrong on the first page, which was just like a super sloppy, dumb mistake. And I sent it out to the partner and they find the mistake. And then they spent 12 hours going through the entire thing. Everything else was correct. But yeah, that's something that I think if you tell people upfront about it,

• 1:07:53Speaker 01

  you should think about this because, you know, we don't want to be in this situation. That really helps. I think to give you an example of something that I maybe don't necessarily agree with, it's probably the idea that I need to remind the team often of how big the opportunity is. And I think that maybe comes a little bit from the Jantelagen thing, but like, yes, there are big comparable companies close to us, Klarna, Spotify, King, many others. But sometimes people underestimate how big this actually is. And you just need to be like, here are the numbers. Like, can you imagine how big this is and the impact that we're having? We now have tens of thousands of lawyers logging into the platform every single day. And if something is wrong on the login screen,

• 1:08:37Speaker 01

  all of them are gonna sort of suffer from it. So the stuff we do now needs to be at a completely different level from what it was a year ago. And we're at this very exponential growth journey, which also means that you need to be on this exponential growth journey. Because you don't want to be in a situation where the company is going like this and you grow linearly. Because at some point there, there's going to be a very big delta and it's going to be very hard to motivate. You get a lot of early talent in and you've got to be pretty upfront with them and say, hey, this is the company's track, I'm betting on you to like grow this quickly with me. And that's maybe something that I've been surprised about personally. If I look back a year ago, I wouldn't say I'm a different person,

• 1:09:16Speaker 01

  but the amount of personal growth you've had to endure as a consequence of the company's growth is insane.

• 1:09:23Harry Stebbings?

  What was the hardest bit to grow into?

• 1:09:25Speaker 01

  I think the hardest thing for me has been to move from like an IC to a manager.

• 1:09:31Harry Stebbings?

  Why?

• 1:09:31Speaker 01

  Because you are used to having to do a lot of things yourself, even in in school. If you're in a group project, if the group members are not that great, it's more effective to do the work yourself than trying to inspire them and trying to delegate to them to do great work. Because you're working under a very short transactional period where the group project is just going to be around for two months. And the difference with the company is it's going to be around for years or decades. You need to flip your mindset because if you do the work today, like, yeah, you might save 15 minutes, but you actually need to make the team grow to handle this stuff.

• 1:10:11Harry Stebbings?

  Before we move into a quick fire, when you speak to anyone related to Harvey, they say Harvey's just much bigger. And Harvey's at 90 to 100 million and you're whatever 16, 17. And that's a big difference. It's 20, 20% of the size. How do you respond, think about that in a world that's moving so fast and all about being the biggest and the fastest?

• 1:10:33Speaker 01

  I actually don't think like a company here is our biggest competitor. I think about it as the biggest competitor is like non-adoption and like moving the conversation forward. I think there's going to be built multiple massive businesses in this space. Again, like the amount of penetration in the market is still in the low single percentiles versus what it can become. I actually view it mostly as like a blue ocean scenario. Now, do I absolutely wanna, you know, beat the other companies to become the biggest? For sure. That's what we're playing for. That's why we're working so hard. But I don't necessarily think about it in that way. And when I get to talk with people who are associated with that business, we're very conscious of the fact that this is what we do well.

• 1:11:17Speaker 01

  This is why we're winning A B tests or things like this. And so we're just gonna keep doubling down on our strengths. I frankly feel like we're crushing it and the velocity is, has never been higher. Yes, I look a little bit at what they're doing, but I'm not like looking like this, like I'm cheating on a test. I care much more about doing our things well than trying to copy what they're doing.

• 1:11:39Harry Stebbings?

  I always say the most important thing in life is to row your own race because you can always make yourself feel shit or amazing by looking at someone else.

• 1:11:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:11:46Harry Stebbings?

  Listen, I wanna do a quick fire round, my friend. So I say a short statement. What's the most underrated skill for founders in 2025?

• 1:11:53Speaker 01

  I think that it is the ability to correctly prioritize when the opportunity set is so massive. Because right now, and especially with L L M's, you could go and build almost anything. You need to be very careful about what you pick. And the ability to differentiate between what is a good opportunity and what is a good feature or what is a good thing to go after versus this is what everybody else seems to be doing. I think that's frankly the biggest strength.

• 1:12:20Harry Stebbings?

  How would you advise then a young engineering minded founder today wanting to do a company on a good versus a bad pick?

• 1:12:29Speaker 01

  It's too easy now to like try and sell something before you've built it. So what I did was I went deep on my industry because I didn't know enough about it. And I think it's the same thing again, like you gotta go super, super deep on the problem space that you want to work in. And then I think now the cost of building software has gone down so incredibly quick that you can prototype something pretty quickly and get to a stage where you actually have an M V P. That's mostly what we use the sort of L L M's for internally. When you just think about the software side, it's not about building the super scalable infrastructure. It's about how do we prototype this thing pretty quickly? Get it out to a couple of clients and then iterate from there.

• 1:13:09Harry Stebbings?

  With such ease of prototyping, will we skip the design stage?

• 1:13:12Speaker 01

  No, I think you need to think about how you design an entire experience that makes sense. Because otherwise, what you'll end up with is like a Frankenstein monster where yes, every individual page kind of looks all right and like makes sense. But then nobody has thought about the entire experience because the entire experience requires an eye of design. There's a huge difference in Legora's UX and UI since our head of design Bert joined from V7. And I mean, he came in and just immediately sort of took responsibility for the end to end product and combined that with the brand. Remember, we went through a rebranding from Leia to Legora. You want to design the product in a way that takes those things into consideration as well.

• 1:13:58Speaker 01

  And that I think requires much more than just prototyping something in an LLM builder.

• 1:14:02Harry Stebbings?

  In 10 years' time, what job will sound as strange as Fats operated does today?

• 1:14:06Speaker 01

  Young corporate lawyer sitting in the data room pressing Ctrl F to find clauses.

• 1:14:14Harry Stebbings?

  Do you not need that training to create a pipeline of future partners?

• 1:14:18Speaker 01

  I don't think you need the training of doing those specific work tasks. I think you need the training on the process and the value you're delivering to the end client and how every piece fits together. But I don't think you need to do the work of learning exactly how everything is phrased. Because I think here we're going to rely on AI systems to help us. And I mean, it's a similar parallel to engineering. Like, I don't think you need to understand exactly how every piece of row works if you understand how the system works. Because I don't think they're going to pay for it. I think in that future, you need to bundle in that no firm is going to pay for somebody to run, go through that education.

• 1:15:03Harry Stebbings?

  What have you changed your mind on in the last 24 months? So I actually disagree with something that you said earlier.

• 1:15:08Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:15:08Harry Stebbings?

  I do think there's immense value in the model layer and I think specifically in OpenAI.

• 1:15:14Speaker 01

  But OpenAI is not a model company, they're a platform company, they're a software company.

• 1:15:19Harry Stebbings?

  How would you differentiate between a model company and a platform company then?

• 1:15:23Speaker 01

  Well, so somebody who just does the model, take Llama or Meta, they're doing the model, right? And they're kind of distributing it. And you have Anthropic, Gemini and OpenAI all playing for the horizontal platform of the AI-powered workspace for general productivity. And I mean, they're much more about providing good software than good models.

• 1:15:44Harry Stebbings?

  Would you rather invest in OpenAI at three hundred or Anthropic at sixty?

• 1:15:49Speaker 01

  I think I'd invest in OpenAI. Well, actually, we use mostly solid models, so maybe I'd say Anthropic. But ChatGPT has much better distribution than Claude, although I think that some of the Anthropic models are more interesting, especially on like the Claude code. I think it's different for different things. Now, I think the majority bucket here is in the general productivity for the general consumer. And I think OpenAI is going to win that game.

• 1:16:14Harry Stebbings?

  And the question is, how big is that game?

• 1:16:16Speaker 01

  Yes, but so an interesting part of being like an application builder is the floor is always ChatGPT. And so ChatGPT is improving quite quickly, like the platform ChatGPT and the product ChatGPT is coming better, which requires us to be even better than that.

• 1:16:32Harry Stebbings?

  How do you analyze Zuck's talent grab?

• 1:16:34Speaker 01

  Seems expensive.

• 1:16:37Speaker 01

  But hey, look, I recognize the things that I know and what I don't know. What I'm extremely nerdy about is how you bring the best application layer based on these models for legal work. And what I don't necessarily understand is how you build the best foundational models and win that game. Because there's a lot of, you know, well-paid people working on it.

• 1:16:57Harry Stebbings?

  What's the final one? What's the single best piece of advice you've been given in the journey that you think about most often?

• 1:17:03Speaker 01

  I think about the fact that if you want to be a leader that inspires people, you need to do so by doing. And I think at the beginning, I did that by carrying the highest quota myself. And then I did it by working hardest on identifying where the product is working and where it isn't working. And on pushing our marketing things to be even better. And it's like when you're so deep in the founder mode of like everything that's going on, people see that. And if they see that you care, they care.

• 1:17:35Harry Stebbings?

  Listen, Max, I so enjoyed getting to know you before this. I've so enjoyed doing this with you. It's why I have such a great job, I think. But you've been fantastic. So thank you so much for joining me, man.

• 1:17:45Speaker 01

  Thank you, Harry. This was awesome.

• 1:17:48Harry Stebbings?

  Now, I want these shows to be the best shows they can be for you. So let me know what you think. You can let me know on Twitter at Harry Stebbings, or you can email me [email protected]. Likewise, it makes such a difference if you left a review or left a comment. Really does help. But before we leave you today, SecureFrame empowers businesses to build trust with customers by simplifying information security and compliance through AI and automation. Thousands of fast-growing businesses, including NASDAQ, Angel List, Doodle and Coda, trust SecureFrame to expedite their compliance journey for global security and privacy standards such as SOC 2 and ISO 27001, CMMC, MIST standards and more. Backed by top-tier investors and corporations like Google and Kleiner Perkins,

• 1:18:31Harry Stebbings?

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• 1:19:15Harry Stebbings?

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• 1:20:00Harry Stebbings?

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• 1:20:41Speaker 01

  As always, I so appreciate all your support and stay tuned for an incredible episode coming on Monday with Anton at Loveable.