20VC: Inside Legora: $100M ARR in 18 Months | Jude Law Generated $50M in Sales Pipeline: The Economics Broken Down | Competing Against Harvey, the 800 Pound Gorilla | Why Legora is Undervalued at $5.5BN with Patrick Forquer, CRO @ Legora

Patrick Forquer is the Chief Revenue Officer at Legora, the fastest growing enterprise business to ever hit $100M in ARR and now on track to hit over $250M in ARR by the end of the year. They recently raised a $550 million Series D at a $5.55 billion valuation, led by Accel, note 20VC did participate and is an investor in the company. AGENDA: 0:00 – How Jude Law Generated $50 Million in Qualified Pipeline 4:00 – Why Implementation is Your Secret Weapon to Win in AI 5:50 – Why AI Enterprise Sales Require "Legal Engineers" 7:45 – The 6-Figure Rule: When Should Humans Control Sales 12:55 – Is Legora Vastly Overvalued at $5.5BN? 15:45 – How to do global expansion in a world of AI 18:00 – How to Win Supremely Competitive Markets 24:45 – Why Giving Your Product Away for Free is a Death Sentence 33:55 – Legora's Onboarding and Training Playbook for Sales Teams 38:25 – Spotting Red Flags: How to Know if a Sales Rep Will Fail in 45 Days 46:30 – How to Structure Sales Commissions in a World of AI 49:40 – How to do Revenue Forecasting in a World of AI 1:00:30 – Will companies vibe code solutions and no longer buy a SaaS products?

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

• 0:00Harry Stebbings?

  How much did the Jude Law cost?

• 0:01Speaker 01

  We generated over $50 million of qualified pipe. We had so many leads that we weren't able to follow up with them. When I started, we were at 40 people. Today, we're over 500. When we get into a deal, when we get into a pilot, we convert pilots 78% of the time into a closed one opportunity. Death match on every deal. It's super competitive. We've got to play defense and offense at the same time, and that's what makes it fun. Every two weeks, we have a new hire class. And at this point, it's between 40 and 50 people joining every two weeks. This market is being made right now. This is one of the hottest markets of all time. Our average attainment last year was 280%. It's more about time than money right now. When you have momentum and you have an advantage, press the advantage.

• 0:46Harry Stebbings?

  This is 20VC with me, Harry Stebbings, and joining me in the hot seat, we have Patrick Forquer, CRO at Legora, the fastest growing enterprise business ever to hit 100 million in ARR, and now on track to hit 250 million in ARR by the end of the year. Unparalleled growth, which led to a $550 million Series D at a $5.5 billion valuation led by Excel. Note, 20VC did participate in this round, and this conversation took many twists and turns, including how a Jude Law advert generated $50 million of pipeline for the company. Get your notebooks out. This is a masterclass in company scaling. But before we dive into the show today, you have the idea, but often with AI tools, you hit a wall.

• 1:31Harry Stebbings?

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• 2:10Harry Stebbings?

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• 2:50Harry Stebbings?

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• 3:36Harry Stebbings?

  Turing is the research accelerator focused on post-training reliability. They build realistic RL environments, next-generation data quality systems built from real-world operational traces, and coding data sets that stress models under conditions where failures matter, state changes, workflow branching, brittle tool calls, and the coding errors that break RL agents but never appear in benchmark reports. In reality, a model may demonstrate correct reasoning in your evaluation setup, yet still select the wrong parameter or mishandle a code update in a realistic interface. Turing makes that failure visible and gives teams the signal they need to fix it. For labs advancing agentic systems, Turing provides the structure required to understand why these failures occur.

• 4:20Harry Stebbings?

  To find out how, visit turing.com/20vc. That's T-U-R-I-N-G.com/20vc.

• 4:29Harry Stebbings?

  You have now arrived at your destination. Patrick, dude, I've heard so many good things. I was literally just chatting to Chathen and to Logan before this show. They gave me phenomenally helpful insight, especially Logan. So, thank you so much for joining me, dude.

• 4:43Speaker 01

  Oh, thanks so much for having me. It's awesome to be here.

• 4:45Harry Stebbings?

  So, you were at Braze for six years.

• 4:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:48Harry Stebbings?

  What was the single biggest sales lesson that you took with you from Braze to Logora?

• 4:54Speaker 01

  I think the biggest thing that we did really well at Braze that I've sort of taken over is implementation change management. So, Braze is really hard to implement. So, you know, you're on a legacy product, you're consolidating one, two, three, four, five different tools into one tool. Implementations take, you know, six to 12 months. It's a lot of effort. There's a lot of stakeholder management, technical work streams, all these different things. And for us at Legora, obviously, we have an amazing product, but at the end of the day, our focus and our obsession is around like helping our customers adopt those tools, like the Legora tools into their workflows, which is really hard. So, general change management strategies and take all the learnings I took from Braze and taking that Legora is probably the biggest thing.

• 5:34Harry Stebbings?

  So, I had Matt Fitzpatrick on the show, and this is why I don't normally send out the schedules because they're just gonna go by the wayside very, very quickly. But like Matt Fitzpatrick, who's like this CEO of Invisible, which is a data provider, and he was like, "Oh, you can't sell into enterprise without FDEs today." Is that true? And when you reflect back on what works in change management, what's the biggest advice?

• 5:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, so there's a couple of things that are still true, and I think some things that are different, like in an agentic world. So, the things that are still true is you still need a tremendous amount of executive sponsorship and support. The joke we used to make when I worked in consulting was the two things people hate the most are the way things are and change. So, you need, you know, top-down sponsorship, you need, you know, bottoms-up sort of champion building, all this sort of normal adoption frameworks that you would use in traditional change management. I think the biggest thing with agentic work and why FDEs are required, and we have both forward deploy engineers, but we also have forward deploy legal engineers, who are typically, you know, big law attorneys who understand how individual practice areas work within a law firm, as well as how corporate legal departments work within that sort of broader context. And with an agentic tool like Legora, you log in and you see the agent. It's like-

• 6:42Speaker 01

  The proverbial blank page. There's no sequential step of things that you click like in SaaS. In SaaS, it was like you used to do things this way. And now you do things this way. And this is why this is better. And this is all the sort of business impact. With an agent, it's like, what do you want it to do? And most people don't think about their work in terms of like systems thinking. In terms of what's the goal of what I'm doing? What are the steps I need to take to achieve the goal? And what are the tools, skills and resources I need at each step? And you know, who's in the loop at each decision making inflection point? You know, sort of progress this to achieving the goal. Most businesses don't write things down like that. They don't think like that. And so having these forward deploy folks, you can do two things. Integrate Legora into sort of the broader tech ecosystem. So we have access to all the various tools and resources that we need to accomplish the goal.

• 7:26Speaker 01

  But also leveraging these legal engineers to say, hey, we know how you know, X, Y, Z, M and A workflow works in practice. This is how you do it before agents. This is how you do it in Legora. That's the sort of hard yards and where we spend a lot of time.

• 7:39Harry Stebbings?

  What level of contract do we need to justify an FDE model? Which is more costly. It's human hours upfront. It's margin reduction. What level of ACV do you think is needed?

• 7:50Speaker 01

  Well, it's a great question. And people keep asking me why we raise so much money. And I'm like, lawyers are expensive, man. You know, it's like, you know, we can afford to take, you know, to take this sort of human, this very human centric approach right now. But we do it for, you know, pretty much anything in six figures and above. You've got to really lean in and make that, make it happen. Because otherwise what you do is you sell, you're in danger of selling software that doesn't get used. And are, we're very focused on, again, like I said, adoption frameworks and making sure that if we sell you 10 licenses, that you use all 10 and you get a lot of value out of it.

• 8:23Harry Stebbings?

  And we're going to go to like metrics that matter, adoption frameworks.

• 8:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:26Harry Stebbings?

  I do just want to ask, on the advice side, there's a lot of operators who are at traditional SaaS companies, traditional enterprise companies. And are contemplating, should I move to an AI company? There's so much hype, there's so much buzz around them. I don't want to be left behind. Braze is an incredible company, but it's a traditional company. What advice would you have for those operators who are thinking about moving to an AI first company and a next gen company?

• 8:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure. And I've become that person, that briz that people call when they're, you know, I'm thinking about leaving and how'd you think about it and da-da-da. So I've had this talk a lot with friends and colleagues. And well, the first thing is always, it's what do you want to do? Because I can tell you, working in this world is completely insane and unhinged, and it's all-consuming. So you've really got to want to do it. You've got to want to lean in. And it's very different than traditional SaaS. The pace of development, the pace of the market, in terms of the competitive market, competitive dynamics, and things like that. It's very different. And you've got to really want to come in and build and figure stuff out and do things differently. Get a little uncomfortable. If you're okay with that, I'm always encouraging people to make the leap.

• 9:33Harry Stebbings?

  What's insane and unhinged?

• 9:35Speaker 01

  If you think about the news that comes out every week, the competitive set, the model capabilities, who's buying what, there's so much sort of hype around, even in just our space. Every time we win a deal or lose a deal, there's a PR announcement about it. So the level of pressure, the level of development, and then the product development specifically, like the product from Legora a year ago, I thought was incredible. I quit my job and joined the company. I was so excited about it. But that versus what we have now is night and day. And so your ability to stay on top of it, to learn, and to have that level of deep product expertise is really tough. And you've got to, like I said, you've got to take it very seriously in terms of enablement and education.

• 10:15Harry Stebbings?

  I can't remember if it was Logan or Chatham, and so I'm going to give credit to both of them.

• 10:19Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 10:19Harry Stebbings?

  But they said that you've been phenomenal in terms of bluntly creating a new playbook for this era.

• 10:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:24Harry Stebbings?

  And I think what's challenging with what you said there with the transience of models, competition, you name it, is like, your playbook becomes relatively irrelevant.

• 10:33Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 10:34Harry Stebbings?

  What remains from traditional SaaS playbooks? And what's like, that is useless now, get rid?

• 10:40Speaker 01

  One area I still like to ground my team in is, we want to be customer-obsessed. And you want to have, there's a guy, Brian Walsh of Force Management, taught me this phrase, positive business intent. So if you're there, and you're showing up, and you're genuinely like, taking the point of view of, I'm here to help, I'm here to help transform your business and make a big impact, and help you win. I think people can feel that. Be prepared, be professional, you know, come with a point of view. Understand their business, do your homework, all the stuff that you would do from a preparatory perspective. Like you still have to do, you still have to prepare and and take the point of view of like, understanding their business deeply. So you can understand, you know, the impact that you can make sort of long term. That's still the same, but you know, braids, we never ran pilots in Legora. We just, we run pilots all the time as an example.

• 11:24Speaker 01

  So there's a tremendous amount of education you have to do. Because as we were talking before the show, I think AI literacy generally in the market, not just within the legal context, but AI literacy generally is very, very low. And even when we're working with firms who have put a ton of investment and enablement into it, the models are developing, the capabilities are developing and staying on top of it is like, is a big challenge. And we view part of our job as being that partner to help you stay up to speed with, you know, the cutting edge technology and everything you can do with it. So that part is quite different.

• 11:56Harry Stebbings?

  Does the traditional sales playbook work of old in a new AI world?

• 12:00Speaker 01

  I think it's a blend. There are certain things you have to throw out. So the traditional SaaS playbook is like, you don't want to demo. For example, the old school SaaS thing is like, the products weren't very good. You know, you want to hold the demo as long as possible, do discovery, build rapport, do all these things. And then you demo like the second or third meeting. That's what like the old school guys would would tell you. With Legora and with with the Gentik tools, you have to still do discovery and still come with a point of view. But you have to use the product to sort of show what the future looks like. And especially for us in the category creation moment, you're dealing with what they call traditionally unrealized pain. We're not typically, you know, replacing a tool. Okay, I mean, occasionally we will be, but more often than not, we're sort of the first tool of its kind, sort of coming into the organization.

• 12:45Speaker 01

  And so you have to be willing to be audible, ready to ask questions and then be able to pivot really quickly into building like an agentic workflow off the cuff as you're talking to someone. And that's quite, that's quite difficult.

• 12:56Harry Stebbings?

  Can we actually use that as a way of explaining the valuation? Because I think, you know, I think people question the multiple. As we said, it raised a lot of money and at a 5.5 billion, I think it was post, which is public. But people are like, wow, that's, that's all you have to assume a lot. And you gave me an answer before, which I'd love for you to share because I thought it was a good one. How do you think about that expansion from where we are to where we can be in terms of what Legora does?

• 13:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, so if you if you look at the legal tech sort of market, I think it's like forty billion was is the number that that I see sort of floating around, depends on who you talk to. But legal tech generally is a forty billion dollar market. So then if you look at us, you look at our competitive set valuation, like that sort of doesn't add up. But then if you look at sort of legal services more more broadly, that's a trillion dollar market. And and certainly, there's a bunch of work within that that's not work that's done by law firms, for example, but it's more sort of like rote, repeatable, document extraction type of type of work. And that's where we see ourselves really sort of playing in the long term is not just the legal tech market, but there's an element of the services market as well, where, you know, there's a high degree of application for Legora.

• 14:04Harry Stebbings?

  I want to go to the start of the funnel, so to speak, because, again, this was Chatham or Logan, I can't believe I'm forgetting it, age, my friend, it's a killer.

• 14:12Speaker 01

  I feel you.

• 14:14Harry Stebbings?

  You said it's insane and unhinged. It's the same for media, by the way.

• 14:17Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 14:18Harry Stebbings?

  I'm in venture and media, and so I'm like double fucked.

• 14:20Speaker 01

  I know.

• 14:23Speaker 01

  The busiest guy in venture and media right now.

• 14:25Harry Stebbings?

  Honestly, it's a savage world. I can't wait for them to create an AI Harry. If Legora can do that, I'll pay double. But if we start at the pipe, what's the biggest lesson in how to construct an effective pipe in an AI world and how that pipe plan building process is done?

• 14:40Speaker 01

  This has been a big point of evolution for us. So, for example, we just did a big brand campaign with Jude Law. But before you do something like that, you have to do a ton of work in terms of the plumbing, in terms of like, what's our inbound lead scoring? How do we do data enrichment? How do we do lead routing and lead scoring from a probably ballistic perspective? So there's a ton of infrastructure you have to put in place first before you can really sort of go big on, you know, from an inbound perspective. So on that basis, we've done a ton of work leading up to that campaign. But like even last year of like getting our systems in place, getting the territory assignments in place, like all the rules and sort of SLAs around if we get a lead, you have to respond in this amount of time. And even last year, you know, from an SMB perspective, we had

• 15:23Speaker 01

  so many leads that we weren't able to follow up with them as many as we as we wanted, you know, in a timely way. So the other thing was staffing. And we've had to hire a tremendous amount. When I started, we were at forty people. Today, we're over five hundred. And we still need more people and more systems to keep up with the with the demand.

• 15:38Harry Stebbings?

  How do you do lead scoring today? Is it simply a size of contract?

• 15:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, so right now you look at the size of the firm, you look at the number of attorneys and compliance workers internally, and then you look at where they're located and you route it to the right team.

• 15:51Harry Stebbings?

  Geo plays a role in that?

• 15:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we've got teams all over the place. So in Europe, we have pods looking after every major market. And for example, in Germany, we're doing so well that we just opened an office in Munich.

• 16:01Harry Stebbings?

  So you run a GM model. I'm seeing this more and more where you have like mini CEOs of each country. Eleven Labs has very much pivoted to that.

• 16:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. So we've got Leo who runs our European business, and then under Leo, we've got a number of folks with from a country perspective and a team behind them to go execute. So we have to be really cognizant of there's a lot of European data sovereignty, different sort of regulatory compliance things. So we have to have teams that are really specialized in that.

• 16:25Harry Stebbings?

  I know. You've got to get a permit to go to the bathroom. I'm sorry.

• 16:28Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. I gotta get my ETA on the way in.

• 16:32Harry Stebbings?

  Oh, you want to get up to go to the bathroom? You need a permit for that, too.

• 16:34Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah. I can't say the exact number, but I can tell you it was worth every penny.

• 16:39Harry Stebbings?

  Was it?

• 16:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:40Harry Stebbings?

  Because people are going to watch this and they're going to say, Harry's an investor and it's biased. I wasn't sure about it.

• 16:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:48Harry Stebbings?

  And so like, tell me it was worth it and I'm thrilled because I want it to be.

• 16:51Speaker 01

  So last month alone, we generated over $50 million of qualified pipe. And that's not just inbound leads, that's pipe on that we talked to, qualified and moved into like a sales conversation.

• 17:03Harry Stebbings?

  Can I be blunt, what was the month before to give us context on like, is that good or bad?

• 17:07Speaker 01

  That was a pretty big jump month over month. I don't know the exact number. I don't want to miss quote, but you know, from that perspective, we're seeing a ton of interest and demand. And look, when I started-

• 17:16Harry Stebbings?

  So lawyers give a shit about law?

• 17:19Speaker 01

  It honestly wasn't even necessarily for the folks, the lawyers in the big markets know about us. It's more for the folks that don't. And we just want that sort of brand awareness. Because I can tell you, when I started in the, I was our first US hire. The first office that we had in the US was my apartment in Brooklyn. And we, you know, as I was slowly building out the team over there, no one knew who we were outside of the people sort of in the know in the legal tech community. And so for us, you know, we were late to a lot of deals. And when we get into a deal, when we get into a pilot- We convert pilots 78% of the time into a closed one opportunity. But the biggest challenge that we had was just not being in the room. And so for us, brand awareness is everything and the strength of our brand is better than ever.

• 18:04Speaker 01

  And yeah, the Jude Lock campaign wasn't for everyone, but overall we got really positive feedback. And the biggest thing is just brand awareness for us.

• 18:12Harry Stebbings?

  Super interesting in terms of brand awareness. I had Nick from Raveloud on the show. And he said, one of the biggest lessons that he always had is he always thought brand awareness was fluffy bullshit. And actually it's one of the most powerful drivers of the business.

• 18:24Speaker 01

  And that's one thing that we report on to the board, like Stuart and our marketing team have created a framework for how we score our brand's efficacy in different markets. And we track that. We're making big progress and we have a lot more coming.

• 18:35Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask you, in terms of the pilots there, the undeniable truth is you are in a two-sided fight. Or however you want to say it, it's a war, it's you versus Harvey. How do you advise founders, I don't want to make this like Legora versus Harvey, how do you advise founders? Cause there are a lot of markets where it's Brax versus Ramp or Stripe versus Airwallex, whatever. How do you advise founders when it's one versus the other when you're in that sales process?

• 19:02Speaker 01

  At the end of the day, it comes under preparation and execution. And one of the companies I really admire and try to model after is Ramp, like you said. And we talk a lot about them internally in terms of how they've built the execution layer from a go-to-market perspective. If you've talked to anyone who's engaged with like a Ramp sales team, they're always prepared. They don't have to like take things back to get answers. There's a degree of professionalism and preparation that goes into every conversation. And also so often in go-to-market, people talk about using AI to automate different processes. Like, oh, I want to like, you know, update my opportunity notes or like draft this email. And of course we do all that stuff. But the other thing that people don't think enough about is like, how are you using AI to sort of deliver more like differentiated from a services and insights perspective?

• 19:46Speaker 01

  We have a lot of data from pilot participants. How can we give insights into that data that are going to help the firms and the companies that we work with make decisions around adoption frameworks, ROI and things like that?

• 19:58Harry Stebbings?

  So what is, if I'm a founder listening to this, what does that actually mean? So we use pilot data to then encourage net new customers. We say, hey, 84% of people that use this type of email actually convert better.

• 20:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. So, so within a law firm context, for example, we'll, we'll segment out by practice area. And so let's say that they've, a big firm's got, let's say, 10 practice areas and then you have, let's say, X number of people within each practice area. We can report out on consumption and usage by practice area. And also we track and create like frameworks and use case banks for like actual applications and workflows that we're building. So let's say within that example, we've got 10 practice areas, seven of them we see really high usage. We're creating and capturing new use cases. We're sharing that back with them on a regular basis, but maybe there's three where we're not. And you can start measuring things like, did the quality of your work increase? Did you decrease the amount of non-villable work that your associates were doing?

• 20:55Speaker 01

  Were you, were you able to attract more talent, you know, using a tool like Logorix? People get excited about using the latest and greatest in AI. And so if you, if you take that and you apply it to the three practice areas where maybe we're not doing as well, we can show them insights as to like who's really leaning in and who's not and where we need help from, you know, from a change management perspective.

• 21:12Harry Stebbings?

  Totally get that. And so one insight, execution and being prepared. Anything else on like how to navigate that, hey, we're looking at Brex versus Ramp, Harvey versus Legora. Like one of my biggest bits of advice to families is always be respectful. Knocking your competition is not in a sales process.

• 21:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:30Harry Stebbings?

  It just doesn't come across that well. Sell yourself, don't bash them.

• 21:33Speaker 01

  Exactly. And we try to, you know, stay in our lane and focus on ourselves. Now, obviously, as you, as you mentioned, we have one big competitor and they come up on every, it's, it's a, you know, death match on every deal. It's super competitive. We have a ton of respect for them. We, you know, it's not like anyone over at Legora is just like thinking that every deal we're going to is a cakewalk. It's the, it's the exact opposite. They're, they're very good. They're very, you know, they're very aggressive and we take them extremely seriously. And so we screen for intelligence, we screen for effort and we screen for competitiveness. Cause at the end of the day, you gotta really wanna win. You gotta go out, execute, not deliver and evolve your playbook. We run pilots very differently now than we did a quarter ago, the quarter before that.

• 22:11Harry Stebbings?

  That's interesting. How do you run them differently today than you used to?

• 22:15Speaker 01

  We have a lot more tools. We have a lot more reporting. We have a lot more specialty in terms of implementation change management. So going back to like the firm context as an example, you can't just have like a litigation attorney go talk to an M and A team. You've got to have an M and A attorney go talk to an M and A team. And so as we've scaled out from, you know, just me to, you know, a much bigger team in the U.S. right now, we've hired specialists who focus on different areas of the law, who can get, again, sort of go in bed with our clients and the folks and pilots and sort of build those bespoke workflows for them. And we're able to do that. We're able to get onsite. Getting onsite's super critical because people don't want to pay attention on Zoom. We all know that, right? And so

• 22:53Harry Stebbings?

  And so when you say getting onsite, what do you mean? You say in the sales process? It's like, hey, get into their office?

• 22:59Speaker 01

  Yes. I encourage every GTM and every legal engineer, if you're not in their office by the second or third meeting, something's wrong. Now, certainly, some companies, especially on the corporate side, maybe they're hybrid, maybe they're remote, you can't always do it. But in particular, for a deal of like really any size, because at the end of the day, for firms, this is sort of a bet the company type decision. Like this is an existential decision-making process. And so for, from that perspective, you're going to bet on the team just as much as you're betting on the product. And so at the end of the day, you're betting on a team that's going to meet you in the future with the solutions and sort of adoption frameworks that are going to help you get there.

• 23:34Harry Stebbings?

  It is a bet the decision because this is like their core investment in the AI technology field. If you look at it from the partnership perspective of the law firm. With that in mind, and with the stickiness that can come, how do we think about giving it away for free and margin reduction in order to have market share gain?

• 23:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, we don't give Legora away for free. So we try and have price integrity. We try and be very transparent around what our pricing model is and how we go after things. But in a competitive dynamic, we do face that from various competitors and

• 24:06Harry Stebbings?

  Do Harvey give it away for free?

• 24:08Speaker 01

  They have. And certainly, from our perspective, I always make the joke when I'm talking to folks in a competitive dynamic, when you're getting down to the decision-making process, you're focusing on the product score from the pilot, you're focusing on the commercial model, you're focusing on the roadmap. One thing we do is we have what we call like the eight-mile talk track. And you know, at the end of eight mile, where he just sort of says everything that's wrong with him about him and his family, we just sort of say like, this is exactly what's going to happen. If you pick us, like, this is what the counter is going to be, like, this is what, you know, they're going to go to this point. And we have a pretty good point of view on like, what will happen. And it usually does. And so from that perspective, we just try to stay ahead of it.

• 24:48Harry Stebbings?

  Do people churn when they're embedded in a product? If switching isn't frequent and it's supremely sticky, if I'm Matt and you're Patrick, easy one, I'd just say like, let's just give it away for free to everyone for the first year. Let's just get everyone for free on it and get them as embedded as usual. We'll tell all of our investors that our margin is going to suck. There's no revenue. It's going to suck. But next year, we're going to be at a billion five in revenue.

• 25:12Speaker 01

  Well, that's one way to look at it. But the way I think about it is, first of all, if a company's not spending any money on a product doesn't matter, then they're not going to put the resources and attention into it that they need to. And we really need our customers to lean in and want to change. Because at the end of the day, we can have the best team that we want, we can have the best team focused on all the right things. But if the customers aren't leaning in, then it's going to be tough. And so I think from going to zero is not helpful in that, in that sort of dynamic. But I see what you're saying. And we do try to be easy to work with. And so from that perspective, you know, we try and be as flexible as we can be.

• 25:46Harry Stebbings?

  There's a very interesting behavioral economics study, which is they give away yoga class for free in a park. And it had a 52% attendance rate. And then they charged $35 and it had a 92% attendance rate.

• 25:58Speaker 01

  Exactly. Yeah, exactly.

• 25:58Harry Stebbings?

  It's like, people commit to what they pay for.

• 26:01Speaker 01

  Exactly. And you have to have, it plays value on your partners. And we find that to be, to be true.

• 26:06Harry Stebbings?

  Well, you know, I interviewed Winston at Harvey, and I thought it was very smart, one of their GTM approaches, which is using P as this kind of expand funnel into the clients that they have in law. How do you think about that?

• 26:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's definitely an angle. And certainly, within the sort of legal services ecosystem more broadly, you look at the influence in decision making on tooling, for example. It's like if you're selling to a corporate, they're going to ask all their law firm panel, what tools are they using? If you're selling to a law firm, they're going to ask their big corporate clients the tools they're using. And certainly, private equity-

• 26:39Harry Stebbings?

  Who has the power? Does the PE firms have the power of the law firms? Or does the law firms have the power of the PE?

• 26:45Speaker 01

  I think it depends on the firm and depends on the PE company, for sure. But there's definitely a lot of interconnectivity. And one of the most fun things about selling into this market is that every deal is very different. Like selling to a law firm, there's a lot of personalities. Stakeholder management is very different from firm to firm. So there's innovation teams, there's knowledge management, but there's also partners. And the degree to which partners want to lean in and get involved. And then there's AI committees, and there's all these subcommittees and all these different things. So it's very intricate, the decision making processes. And one client of a firm might have an outsized voice at the table for or against you, as an example. You have to be very mindful of that. That sort of map is very complex.

• 27:25Harry Stebbings?

  There's many different clients, processes. Biggest lessons or advice on lead scoring, going back to that? Anything you see people doing way wrong, lessons?

• 27:35Speaker 01

  The one thing that remains true is that the longer you let a lead sit, the worse the conversion rate is, right? And so we just try to optimize for the highest intense signal with the fastest response time. And so we automated a lot of that, you know, from like sending out the calendar invite for the initial call on the right system with the right person. We just try and be as fast and as accurate as possible at that. I don't think we have any like-

• 27:58Harry Stebbings?

  Dude, it's exactly like a deal. Like when you're, oh, we'll see you in two weeks. It's like, ah, always kind of dies in the mind.

• 28:03Speaker 01

  And if you miss something or something gets dropped, and you know, this happens to everyone, then your chances of converting that go way down. And that's remains true. And I don't think, I don't think we have any big, you know, insights on that.

• 28:13Harry Stebbings?

  We have that cool. You're advising me, I'm an early-stage founder. Like, biggest advice on sales qualification? The hard questions to ask, what not to ask, the way to do it?

• 28:23Speaker 01

  For us, it's a couple of things. Going back to the pilot example, one thing that we've learned is, you know, we've had some firms who, you know, say, oh, we have this really onerous infosec process. So we want to do a pilot, but we don't want to go through infosec. So we're just going to do it on like test documents, you know, or like publicly available things. That's a recipe for, again, low engagement, low excitement, and just generally doesn't work out well. You've got to have a little bit of give get, like there is a little bit of pain on the front end of like, identifying the use cases that you want to test, identifying the stakeholders that you want to be involved in the pilot. To go through, yeah, some pretty, as you can imagine, working with Deloitte and these big law firms and EY.

• 29:05Speaker 01

  The infosec process is non-trivial. So if you can get buy-in on identifying the success criteria for the pilot, who's going to be involved, what use cases we're going to test, what metrics are involved, and you can go through that initial sort of painful period, then you know you've got something there.

• 29:21Harry Stebbings?

  How do you bring in people with true buying power? I imagine they're not always on the first calls. How do you make that transition of like, I'm so pleased, Patrick, that you're excited about Legora. Can we please try and get your boss in now because I want to progress this?

• 29:35Speaker 01

  I have to say, one of the things about Legora that's like floored me, at Braze, we had this problem. So Braze, the executive buyer was the CMO. And getting access to a CMO was so hard and we would get it done, you know, very, very rarely. And we always was sort of bent over backwards to get this done. With Legora, because there's so much chatter in the market about AI and the firms and corporates both want to understand what others are doing, we actually get access to power pretty easily. And people want to learn because on the law firm side, they're getting asked by their clients, how are you using AI and what tools are you using and like, what are the use cases? And where are we going to see this value in our bill, for example? And on the corporate side, they're getting a ton of pressure from the board and the CEO of like,

• 30:19Speaker 01

  hey, go figure this shit out, like, you know, we need to optimize like XYZ process and AI everything. And so we get access to senior stakeholders who want to like lean in and learn from us. But I think typically, if you don't have that access early to your To your question, what we try to do is we try to focus on the highest value use cases and highest value impact as quickly as possible. So you want to grab attention really fast and lucky for us, the Laguard products, awesome. So coming in with the perspective on the company and the role based on the ICP that you're talking to, talking about some of the high value use cases that we have, learning about what's most important to them and then showing them how we'd solve that quickly. They're like, wow, I want to show this to my boss and that's generally a framework that's been successful.

• 31:03Harry Stebbings?

  I come from an industry that is traditionally called sheep-like in terms of following others. I don't understand why anyone would attribute that to us. To what extent is legal a sheep-like industry where it's like, oh, Clifford Chance, Slaughter in May, you name it, use X. To what extent do they follow others?

• 31:22Speaker 01

  There's certainly an aspect of a flight to safety during these sort of category creation moments because this is all new. The sort of general understanding of how agents work and how AI works and how to think about use case design is still being developed. And the executive buyers at the firms and at the companies generally aren't as up to speed on that. Some of them are, but broadly probably not. And so there is this flight to safety and I think generally people want to feel like you never got fired for hiring IBM. And at the end of the day, there's an aspect, there is definitely an element of that.

• 31:56Harry Stebbings?

  Do you not feel both you and Harvey at IBM at this stage?

• 31:59Speaker 01

  I was going to say, last year, we were the new entrant, we were trying to make our name and we were.

• 32:05Harry Stebbings?

  You were not IBM.

• 32:05Speaker 01

  We were definitely not last year. I think at this point, working with the firms that we work with, having Deva Boys and Linklaters and other big firms advocating for us really goes a long way. And I think we have that stamp now, but that's been a, that's been a journey that we've been on.

• 32:21Harry Stebbings?

  You've got 20 of the 100 AMLO and Harvey have got 40 or 60?

• 32:26Speaker 01

  I don't know their numbers.

• 32:27Harry Stebbings?

  I think they said 50 of AMLO.

• 32:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, 50.

• 32:30Harry Stebbings?

  Does that mean we're fighting over the next 30 or does that mean we're fighting for each other's candidacy?

• 32:36Speaker 01

  Both, for sure. I mean, they know who we work with, we know who they work with, we're both trying to get in. We're very aware that they know who our customers are. We know who theirs are. We're both going aggressively after it and also scaling up quickly to go after the next 50 or whatever the number is. So we've got to play defense and offense at the same time, and that's what makes it fun.

• 32:54Harry Stebbings?

  God, the old Saswold feels quite nice.

• 32:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It's like 30% growth a year.

• 33:00Harry Stebbings?

  Do you pay attention to social? Because like for VCs, no, but you saw it last week, VCs, like Paul Graham tweets and then, you know, Matt Miller tweets back and I'm not saying anything about either individual. I like them both immensely, but like, does it impact team?

• 33:16Speaker 01

  I don't know how much it impacts the team. We definitely hear about it. When PG tweeted that, my phone blew up. Shout out to him, by the way. That was awesome.

• 33:24Harry Stebbings?

  What a hero. Dude wears shorts everywhere. He's a guy off to my own heart.

• 33:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, even in Scandinavia. But I try not to think about it too much. And obviously we've got, you know, Chayton and others really advocating for us in the, in the public sphere. We really, you know, appreciate that. And but I leave that stuff to them. I'm not on Twitter.

• 33:41Harry Stebbings?

  Do you bring VCs in to help you win deals?

• 33:44Speaker 01

  Definitely.

• 33:45Harry Stebbings?

  That's interesting.

• 33:46Speaker 01

  A hundred percent. I mean, the cool thing about the, the space that we're occupying is because the VCs themselves, like if you think about Iconic, General Catalyst, Bessemer, they have huge legal networks themselves. They're big spenders on legal services more, more broadly. And so they definitely have big networks and are advocating for us whenever they, whenever they have the opportunity. And certainly, you know, our competition do the same thing. And that's, that's definitely an element of, of these sort of opportunities.

• 34:13Harry Stebbings?

  I always tell founders that I work with, use your cap table as a weapon.

• 34:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:16Harry Stebbings?

  Like absolutely.

• 34:18Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 34:19Harry Stebbings?

  What do Harvey do better than you today?

• 34:21Speaker 01

  That's a hard one and I don't want to give, I don't, I don't know if I want to, you know, give an inch at all. But I mean, certainly the, the strength of their brand is something that is, is hard to deny. They've, they've done a great job. They were the first entrant and they've, they've sort of built this amazing brand and, you know, kudos to them.

• 34:36Harry Stebbings?

  When we said earlier about kind of the playbooks, again, going back to something that Chayton said, he said, you know, training in particular is something where we've done incredibly well.

• 34:45Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 34:46Harry Stebbings?

  And ramping people. What's the biggest lesson on how to do training well? Because it's not easy, actually.

• 34:52Speaker 01

  Well, and this is another thing from a, as a leader, that's very different than in the SaaS environment.

• 34:56Harry Stebbings?

  How so? Because I thought like talent development would maybe be the same.

• 34:59Speaker 01

  Well, yes, but in the SaaS world, it's much more predictable and on this like very sort of clear, slow operating model. So you had to quarterly releases with some monthly sort of shipping in between. Ahead of the quarterly release, you've got all this documentation, you do a big certification, like you go through all these programs. With Legora, we do big, huge product things like every week. And the team has to stay on top of that. And there's no way you could do, you know, a global certification program for every big feature we launch in real time, all the time. And so we have to do a lot at a team level, regional level, and we do a lot async with video content. You know, we use Notion really heavily.

• 35:39Speaker 01

  The product teams really embed with the individual sales and legal engineering teams and engagement folks to make sure that, you know, we're all up to speed. But you can't do it all centrally. You have to really distribute through both async video and Notion content as well as like team level enablement. So we activate on our product guys in that way.

• 35:57Harry Stebbings?

  Can I, don't worry about being too specific. How does that look then for like sales training then? Like first week, what do I get? I get like a Notion link and like a load of video libraries?

• 36:08Speaker 01

  No, so this is actually something we've really elevated and something I'm really proud of. So when I first joined, Bill got told me to go to Best Buy and buy an Apple computer. And then I went and had a couple of videos of Max doing a demo. Now, every two weeks, we have a new hire class. And at this point, it's between 40 and 50 people joining every, every two weeks. We, we send everyone to Stockholm doing immersive five days. And this is not like something where you're just going to go do a couple of video things and then go like walk around Stockholm. Like this is intense, immersive. We expect GTMs and LEs to come out of that week to be, you know, ready to go. You know, from a ramp perspective, it's, it's a straight lineup. Like we expect people, we expect to drop people in and see them be very productive very quickly.

• 36:52Harry Stebbings?

  When you say ready to go, you mean they are ready to sit on calls on their own with clients?

• 36:57Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 36:58Harry Stebbings?

  It's quick.

• 36:59Speaker 01

  It's very quick. Yeah, I had a guy do in his second week do a demo with one of the biggest companies in the world and he killed it. I mean, obviously I joined because, you know, the nature of who the company was.

• 37:11Harry Stebbings?

  Now Patrick decided to sit that way.

• 37:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, so I, I was sort of there for, for guidance, but we expect productivity to happen very quickly. So we do an immersive first week.

• 37:21Harry Stebbings?

  What does that, what does that mean in immersive first week? I'm sorry to be specific, but there's so many founders that listen literally with notes.

• 37:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:28Harry Stebbings?

  What does an immersive first week mean?

• 37:30Speaker 01

  So we have a cross-functional sort of education program focused on everything from, you know, this is our sales stages. This is our opportunity cycle. This is the entry and exit criteria. We do a full day of demo work. We have a huge library, yes, of like Gong and sort of video content from, from a demo perspective. But we also do a lot of role plays. We do, and we do a lot of education on the market generally. We're sort of, we hire a lot of lawyers. We also hire a lot of technologists. So the lawyers, you have to sort of train up on like how the tech stuff sort of works. And then the technologies you have to train up on the sort of subject matter, subject matter expertise from a legal services perspective. So we have a ton of content on industry, education, product education, competitive landscape. The competitive landscape, as mentioned, changes every week.

• 38:13Speaker 01

  So we have to update all the product information, the new product information. So we have, we just have a, basically a university style four day program. Where every department comes and enables the new hires on that particular program and how we operate. We have all that available for them and the new hire sort of notion. And then all the reps have their own personalized ramp page where we track all the metrics that we're looking at from a ramp perspective.

• 38:37Harry Stebbings?

  Of the forty to fifty, how many do you think make it?

• 38:40Speaker 01

  That's a good question. When we move on from sales folks, we do it typically within the first quarter. And we actually have really high retention rates relative to, to the market.

• 38:48Harry Stebbings?

  What are the signs that someone's not going to make it?

• 38:50Speaker 01

  We score demo quality using AI. We use Gong. And then you can create like a scoring mechanism for how the, the call went. How was the discovery framework? What was the demo flow, et cetera? And then when we get a red flag on that, our team goes in and like our enablement team goes in and sort of looks at the call and does like a. Play back with that person. So if you look at call quality, scoring plus opportunity development from a pipeline perspective, you can see pretty quickly who's tracking. We know what good looks like and we know what good doesn't look like. And you can see pretty quickly within about 45 days.

• 39:24Harry Stebbings?

  So is it bullshit then, the traditional notion that, oh, well, you know, enterprise is really difficult to understand whether someone's a good sales rep because the sales cycles are long.

• 39:33Speaker 01

  From a traditional SaaS perspective, that might still be true with us. Even our enterprise folks, when they come in, they're going to be buried in deals within 60 days. Like our best people are closing deals typically within 90 days, even on an enterprise team. So from that perspective, because we're very hot right now, this market is being made right now. And so from an opportunity point of view, it's not like you have to go take your territory list, get your BDR, go do some account based marketing, get the initial meetings. That's like sort of traditional. You know, I've ramped cold territories before. I've managed teams that have done that in a SaaS perspective. This isn't that. This is one of the hottest markets of all time. When we dropped GTMs into their book, they're into typically something like five pilots within their first quarter.

• 40:18Speaker 01

  And so we're asking people to get very productive very quickly because this is not something where we can go like do a bunch of handholding for a long period of time. And we have so much inbound and so much interest that you know quickly because the volume of opportunities that they're working is much higher than it would be in a traditional SaaS environment.

• 40:36Harry Stebbings?

  Would you rather hire someone who has experience selling to law firms? Or someone who has experience selling this size of deal?

• 40:44Speaker 01

  I would rather have someone who has this size of deal.

• 40:47Harry Stebbings?

  Really?

• 40:48Speaker 01

  Because legal tech traditionally, like we're selling much bigger deals than traditional legal tech companies.

• 40:53Harry Stebbings?

  RACV is like 250, 500?

• 40:56Speaker 01

  Around that. It depends on the, on the, on the segment, but yeah, roughly. But we're doing a lot of, you know, seven, big, high seven figure deals. And a lot of legal tech companies were like more niche. And so the ACVs and ARRs were, you know, not what, what ours are. We have hired some folks from legal tech and, and some have done really well, but they're not used to sending, you know, like a million dollar proposal across the line. And I'd much rather have someone who is really strong in understanding sort of organizational dynamics and change management and was really confident in sending, you know, large proposals and like being able to work that sort of angle.

• 41:31Harry Stebbings?

  What was the hardest deal to win? And why do you think you won it when you reflect on it? Like a win postmortem?

• 41:38Speaker 01

  So I'm thinking about, I don't know if I want to say the name, but it was a big, big global law firm that we won.

• 41:45Harry Stebbings?

  How big was it?

• 41:46Speaker 01

  It sort of medium seven-figure deal. For us, it was hyper, hyper competitive. It was global. So we were using the full force of our global team in the US, Europe and the UK and Australia. So we had all four regions activated, working this in a, from a pilot perspective. It was very close. There was influence on both sides.

• 42:06Harry Stebbings?

  Do you know when it's close?

• 42:07Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 42:08Harry Stebbings?

  How?

• 42:09Speaker 01

  And it came down to, it came down to, this is how we knew how close it was. It came down to executive presentation of our CEO and their CEO in front of their executive panel. And that's how they ended up making the decision and we won.

• 42:24Harry Stebbings?

  Oh, I would be nervous if I was back.

• 42:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:26Harry Stebbings?

  You were just like, you want to be on form. You know, you sleep well the night before.

• 42:31Speaker 01

  Honestly, the biggest thing we have going for us is that we have Max and no one else does. And so we feel, he inspires a lot of confidence.

• 42:37Harry Stebbings?

  Is that very rare to have CEO to CEO bake off?

• 42:41Speaker 01

  It is, I mean, in my, in my career, yes. But in terms of the Legora experience, no. Because again, these are such important decisions.

• 42:48Harry Stebbings?

  If you're a top law firm, I don't think it feels unreasonable.

• 42:51Speaker 01

  No, you want to know who you're, who you're betting on. And you want to have a deep level of understanding of who they are, what the vision for the company is. Does that align with your vision? Does it align with your values? You know, the product strategy and execution. People really want to get in and get into the nitty gritty and understand not just Max, myself, the team more broadly, the chops of the folks who are going to be delivering the services. Like they look at all of that. It's very, it's a, it's a really fine-tooth comb that they go through the stuff with.

• 43:15Harry Stebbings?

  Okay, dude, everyone has a flip side. Take me to a deal you lost. When you look back on it, what's the postmortem? Like what more could we have done?

• 43:23Speaker 01

  I'm thinking about one right now and as always with enterprise, it goes back to multi-threading and who you get to and who you don't. And so within a law firm context, in particular, the decision-making is sometimes opaque. And there's oftentimes there's these panels and sometimes, let's say there's five people on a panel. Sometimes you get to meet all five people. Sometimes you meet four to five. Sometimes you meet one. In terms of like one-to-one engagement and relationship. And there was one key member of the panel that we never got time with and weren't able to build a relationship with. And they did. And oftentimes with panel making decisions, sort of the loudest voice gets what they want. And we weren't able to get that. So that was really painful.

• 44:05Harry Stebbings?

  Is the days of steak buying dinners over or actually not?

• 44:10Speaker 01

  It's not like it used to be. I mean, you know, back in the early days when I was first, you know, I graduated college in 2008. And that was still in the era where steak lunch, steak dinner, a lot of entertainment and sales. I mean, it's definitely, it's definitely evolved. I think more so these days, people want to do like activities. You know, get out and maybe not go to a steak dinner or do something a little more fun.

• 44:29Harry Stebbings?

  Oh God, it reminds me of like mini golf dates.

• 44:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Well, not quite like that, but I mean, relationships are still really important. And certainly for us, it's actually conferences. There's so many conferences and so many events. And any chance we have to sort of show up and show up.

• 44:43Harry Stebbings?

  And that was because in like traditional tech, I think there's been a realization that, and it's helpful for our business. That actually being a brand logo on viral podcast clips is the new gold.

• 44:54Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 44:54Harry Stebbings?

  And like having a banner in a conference that no one really wants to go to, not so much. In traditional tech, is that not the case in legal?

• 45:02Speaker 01

  Legal tech right now is having this like renaissance. There's so many new players. There's so much money coming in. But going back to the conference point, you can waste money on conferences and you can make money on conferences and it sort of depends. And so we've got a pretty good playbook for, for that.

• 45:16Harry Stebbings?

  What did you spend money on that was an absolute banger and you learned something from that that I should know?

• 45:22Speaker 01

  When they go really well, these sort of fireside chat type executive dinners. So we hosted one, some of our investors, their office is at Zero Bond in New York. And like everyone was, one thing is true is like, everyone still wants to go to like a fancy restaurant and hear someone smart speak. And so we still find that these sort of thought leadership, AI thought leadership dinners are super effective. And they cost a lot of money and you have to, you know, get some talent in the room from a thought leader point of view. And to have them do like a fireside chat with Max, that's highly, highly effective and something that we, we do very often and really well.

• 45:58Harry Stebbings?

  What have you spent money on? And you're like, guys, I can't believe we fucking spent money on this.

• 46:03Speaker 01

  Going back to the conference thing, I think we averaged a conference a week last year. We showed up at every conference you could think of. And some of them we repeated this year and some of them we're like, we're never doing that again.

• 46:18Harry Stebbings?

  I loved that. Speaking of, we said that, would you rather have like someone who's first in law or someone who's first in deal size? When we think about incentivizing teams, I think sales comp packages are really hard to get my head around.

• 46:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:30Harry Stebbings?

  Traditional SaaS, going back to this traditional versus new world, four XOT, good. Then I have Becca from Clay, who's like six to seven X. And then I have my dear friend, Carlos from 11 Labs, who went very viral saying 20 X.

• 46:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:44Harry Stebbings?

  And I'm like, oh my God, I feel like such an insignificant human being.

• 46:49Speaker 01

  I heard that 20 X number. I got so many, I mean, I obviously I follow so many.

• 46:52Harry Stebbings?

  So many pings.

• 46:53Speaker 01

  I got so many pings.

• 46:54Harry Stebbings?

  Every CRO got so many pings.

• 46:55Speaker 01

  All my friends who are in this business were like, wait, what's your, what's your multiple? Did you hear this guy?

• 47:01Harry Stebbings?

  Everyone got that. I feel a little bit bad for the rest of the TRs. Like, how do you think about effective sales comp setting today?

• 47:10Speaker 01

  So, well, just to, to start it off the top, ours right now, it depends on the segment and the, in the region. But ours right now are between sort of eight and 12 X is where, is where we sort of landed. But we don't just take a multiple and apply that to the sort of competitive market OT. You've got to really take like a bottoms up approach to it and look at all of the metrics we were just talking about before. So look at. Ramp time, productivity per head, ARR per head, pipe evolution within certain territories. We did a bottoms up approach of that last year and we got to those sort of range. But we also had a year last year where we absolutely blew out every metric that we put in front of the team. So, you know, I don't know how effectively we're doing that, but that's, that's, that's how we're doing it right now.

• 47:54Harry Stebbings?

  But you think eight to 12x today is where you sit, which is good.

• 47:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:58Harry Stebbings?

  What percent of people should hit that?

• 48:00Speaker 01

  Our average attainment last year was 280%.

• 48:04Harry Stebbings?

  Wow.

• 48:05Speaker 01

  So.

• 48:05Harry Stebbings?

  Is that an effective attainment setting?

• 48:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was a bad job by me.

• 48:10Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah, no offense.

• 48:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I mean, when I started, again, just going back for context, like we were three and a half million. And Chetan and the Red Point guys were like, can we do 25? And that fell, I remember giving, we had, we raised our series B and I remember giving a big like rah rah. We had everyone to Stockholm, we did a big rollout.

• 48:29Harry Stebbings?

  When Logan did it?

• 48:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:30Harry Stebbings?

  I give, you know, I, I'm a VC, so I give credit to other VCs for a living. But I give credit to Logan on that one, which is like, he paid up in advance for something that wasn't that obvious respectfully. And like credit to him.

• 48:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, he got me, that's how I got connected with, with Max was, was through, was through Logan. And he plugged, he actually introduced me to Bres as well. So I'm always a big fan of the, of the Red Point team.

• 48:54Harry Stebbings?

  But sorry, you joined and it was like three million.

• 48:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, but three and a half, but so then we're like, can we do 25? And I remember we were at like seven, we raised a series B. We had everyone to Stockholm and I'm giving a big, you know, rah rah speech to the global team at that point, which fit in the kitchen of our Stockholm office, basically. So we hit 25 in Q3 and then we went nuts in Q4 and like blew through every, you know, we ended the year at, at 70. And then obviously crossed 100 earlier this year. So the projections are very hard from our side. So from a forecast perspective, at the beginning of the year, I only gave guidance to the board based on a six month, rolling six month basis. So at this point, based on the data that we have and the sort of pipe analysis that we have, we feel pretty good about our, our ability to forecast this sort of top line business.

• 49:39Speaker 01

  The individual productivity stuff can be a little all over the place because obviously there's. Like bluebird deals that that happen and things like that. And we also have a ton of inner quarter open and close. And so being able to forecast that is a little bit of a pin the tail on the donkey challenge, but we're getting better at that piece of it.

• 49:54Harry Stebbings?

  What's your biggest advice to other CROs when you look at the CROs ping you on the 20x that we discuss? What's your biggest advice to CROs on how the fuck to do forecasting effectively in this very dynamic landscape?

• 50:07Speaker 01

  It's really hard. And the first thing I say is you have to have a little grace with yourself and set expectations appropriately. Because in this market, it's been relatively elastic so far. And that won't continue forever. But right now, that's sort of the experience that we're having. So I do two things. I do like a rep and manager commit roll up like bet your life, rep, roll up, first line manager, second line manager.

• 50:29Harry Stebbings?

  So what does that actually mean? I'm sorry for being, what do you rep roll up?

• 50:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, so you have as a, if you're a sales director at Legora, and let's say you have a team of eight people. You go all eight people, like bet your life, how much AR are you going to close this quarter? That level of seriousness. And then that manager has to take the rep roll up and then they have to commit whatever number based on that sort of input from the reps. The directors take that to the VPs. The VPs take their director roll ups and then they commit like a regional number. And right now we have, you know, including India, we have five, five regions. So APJ, India, EU, the UK and the US. I take the VP roll up and then I compare that to like the weighted forecasts. So then we've got the, we've got this amazing woman, our rev ops team, Lulu,

• 51:14Speaker 01

  who I worked with to sort of create this sort of weighted version of what like a weekly, monthly, quarterly forecast would look like based on the opportunity stages. So with that, you have to have really, really tight rigor around opportunity management. So the stages and the amounts on the opportunities have to be really dialed and updated in real time. In last quarter, the rep regional roll up and what we call Lulu cast, which is the weighted, sort of what I call, you know, the math version of the forecast were the same and we were pretty accurate on both.

• 51:43Harry Stebbings?

  Where do stages go most wrong?

• 51:46Speaker 01

  If you don't have really good entry and exit criteria, as you could explain to your grandma.

• 51:50Harry Stebbings?

  What does entry and exit criteria mean?

• 51:52Speaker 01

  And our, let's say in our sale, if you think about a sales process, there's sort of the two-sided like buyer journey, right? There's the funnel on the way in to close one, and then there's the funnel on the way out as you look for like advocacy and adoption. On the way in, you know, let's say we have five sales stages. For example, I mentioned the pipeline that we generated off Jude Law. To get into qualified pipe, like you have to go through a discovery call where we ask questions around like the buying process, what they're looking for, interested in, things like that. And then to progress that to the next stage, certain things that they say have to be true. Meaning like they have to be in a buying cycle, have to have budget, like thinking about Bant frameworks, like budget, authority, need time. And then as you move into the qualification criteria, it's like, okay, the next stage is the pilot. What do we need to do to get into the pilot?

• 52:35Speaker 01

  I sort of alluded to executive buy-in, InfoSec, you know, budget allocation, things like that. If you get that right and you have consistency across like the global teams, then typically the forecasting is right. And if you get the right weighting based on your sort of funnel progression historically, then you can get to a weighted forecast that's like directionally accurate.

• 52:54Harry Stebbings?

  You said there about the different regions that you have. If you were advising CROs, CEOs today, do you have to be everywhere all at once today?

• 53:02Speaker 01

  Yes, it's different. And the speed at which we're doing it is, is very different. Going back to the braids experience, New York Tech, you know, we had a London office. That was like sort of the next move, but it took us a really long time, for example, to expand into Germany, which, which we eventually did. Expanding into Japan and other places, whereas, you know, all of those, we just opened in Germany, we just opened in Spain. We've opened five offices, maybe six in the US, Sydney, Bangalore, like we, we've been, we've been all over the place.

• 53:29Harry Stebbings?

  India feels like a strange one. It's just such a different universe. What was the thing you buy in India and how's India going?

• 53:36Speaker 01

  We typically follow the ball in terms of pipeline. From that perspective, we had a ton of initial interest. We have great interest in the Middle East, we have great interest in India. So there was, it was a ton of inbound sort of signal.

• 53:46Harry Stebbings?

  Where's the hardest? Again, Carla spoke about Japan and South Korea. I'm friends with Daniel from UI Path who always says about kind of that being a difficult region. Where's the hardest?

• 53:55Speaker 01

  That region is very hard and we've, we've been consulting a lot of our investors, a lot of advisors on how best to enter those, those markets, but. Yeah, I would say APAC is probably the most complex. And certainly, each region has its own nuance with respect to like data hosting requirements, processing requirements, like you can't process stuff in Europe or the US. You have to process certain things in region. Some of the model providers don't provide, you know, for example, if you're selling into China, certain model providers don't provide access to the models in China and other places. So there's definitely some architectural work that goes into it. And there's a ton of work we're also doing. We announced today a big project we've done with McKinsey, you know, focusing on European public sector work. And there's, you know, if you think about the Fed ramp in the US, there's all kinds of things that are really hard from a technology perspective that you have to keep in mind.

• 54:40Harry Stebbings?

  With the greatest of respects, I'm probably going to show sovereignty is kind of an interesting word that's thrown around. But to what extent do you see Americans choose Americans and Europeans choose European? Is that a thing?

• 54:52Speaker 01

  It's definitely a thing. And certainly, we have the perception when we come into a deal that I think everyone, people think I'm from Sweden, for example.

• 55:00Harry Stebbings?

  You look Swedish. Seriously, you could change your name to Svan and just don't talk.

• 55:07Speaker 01

  That's like the guy from Frozen.

• 55:08Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah. Sorry, he's mute.

• 55:11Speaker 01

  But, but yeah, there's definitely that perception that we, that we deal with. So, you know, the LLMs, I always joke, the LLMs we use are all, are all American. But, uh, but yeah, that's definitely a thing. In particular, in Europe, obviously with a lot of the geopolitical stuff going on. In the US, people really care about understanding of like jurisdictional context and things like that. So it's a big, it's a big thing.

• 55:33Harry Stebbings?

  We spoke earlier about the hardest challenge and you said it was like just the speed and the velocity of scaling.

• 55:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:39Harry Stebbings?

  What breaks that people don't see and what are the lessons from that?

• 55:43Speaker 01

  Things like the plumbing and rev ops of like how you do billing and your billing systems and like change, if you want to change anything in your pricing model, if you want to change anything in your billing system and you're adding as many customers as we are every month, it gets very hard to do things like some of the billing systems, you know, reporting and all that stuff. And a lot of it gets done manually at times because if you're changing from one system that worked for you at 10 million that doesn't work for you at 100 million and you have to make those changes. We migrated. CRM, so we migrated to Salesforce, which is awesome. But anytime you do a CRM migration, it's a huge pain in the ass. And

• 56:20Harry Stebbings?

  So you migrated to Salesforce?

• 56:21Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 56:22Harry Stebbings?

  From what?

• 56:23Speaker 01

  Well, I don't want to say, but

• 56:26Speaker 01

  but I don't want to, you know,

• 56:28Harry Stebbings?

  I didn't mean that.

• 56:29Speaker 01

  Speak ill, but it wasn't working for us. And so, you know, I did a full survey of the market. We picked Salesforce. And anytime you go through a systems change like that, yeah, there's change management, but there's also opportunity management and different things of like ways of working that are really hard to roll out and you have to get it right. But people grumble.

• 56:46Harry Stebbings?

  Do you think Salesforce faces the threat of being a database which agents crawl on top of and you have no interaction slash engagement with?

• 56:54Speaker 01

  I think all the traditional SaaS companies are definitely under threat right now. But I have to say, I've been so impressed with Salesforce. If you look at, they sort of did a hard break glass in case of emergency pivot last year. And at their scale, they went full agentic and sort of the go to market framework and positioning. And, you know, credit for them for being, you know, they're very early on that ahead of every other big tech company. And I don't know how it's going to shake out, but I know we did a survey of all the other sort of hyperscaling AI companies and most of them are using Salesforce.

• 57:26Harry Stebbings?

  If there's one CEO you would bet on for a title shift change in landscapes, it would be Benioff.

• 57:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, 100%. I've been, like I said, anytime the words Benioff and Davos came up in a deal review, you knew you were pretty fucked.

• 57:43Speaker 01

  So, yeah, he's a, he's

• 57:45Harry Stebbings?

  But what I love about Benioff, which I actually see in Max, is Max will get on every fricking plane

• 57:51Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 57:51Harry Stebbings?

  to close the deal.

• 57:52Speaker 01

  100%. And you have to have that right now. And Max basically lives on a plane. I mean, as do I candidly. So that's one, you see, you see guys like him leaning in and yeah.

• 58:02Harry Stebbings?

  I think Max is one of the, my, well, pretty great CEOs and very lucky. What does no one see about Max that you think makes him special?

• 58:10Speaker 01

  I think he leads from the front. So he's always up early, online, you know, pushing the ball, setting the tone for the team. So as a leader, he's someone who, he's gonna get on the flight, he's gonna take the call, he's gonna jump on an escalation, he's gonna call into a deal, he's gonna do whatever it takes. And I think that that permeates throughout the organization. But also, he's very kind and, you know, he cares deeply about the business and he cares deeply about building the business in the right way. He wants to build a business that's remembered with a culture that like made a big impact on the people that work there. And he's very focused, not just on Legora being successful, but all the people at Legora, you know, developing their career and taking that next step.

• 58:52Speaker 01

  And he takes that stuff really seriously and we, we work on that as a leadership team.

• 58:57Harry Stebbings?

  Any lessons on culture with scale?

• 58:59Speaker 01

  It's, that's one of the hardest things. When people ask me what's hard, maintaining the culture that we have as we add the number of people that we're adding is very difficult.

• 59:08Harry Stebbings?

  Don't off, I have this now where like I don't have time to say hello to everyone internally. I used to come in and there was like under 20.

• 59:14Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 59:15Harry Stebbings?

  And I could literally go around and say good morning to everyone, which was nice. And now I can't and I find that really weird, which is pathetic, given how tiny it is compared to you. But that's a weird one for me. Anything that you learn, know, do?

• 59:27Speaker 01

  So our cultural values are LFG. Lean in, grow together and fight for excellence. So from a cultural perspective, I think it goes back to just being intentional. You have to repeat what your values are, you have to highlight what good looks like, and you have to constantly reinforce your expectations around cultural ways of workings. And so one of the things I always say is like, we're big on no assholes. The biggest way to get on my shit list is to be disrespectful to, you know, to someone internally or, you know, heaven forbid, someone externally. And so, living our standards and constantly reinforcing what those are is something that we spend a lot of time on and making sure that we're building company the right way.

• 1:00:05Harry Stebbings?

  And that's why Matt's never hired me.

• 1:00:10Harry Stebbings?

  Kind of a weird one, but it's like everyone's talking about like token maxing now. For you as CRO, you're the man holding the budget. How do you think about like encouraging AI usage internally? Token maxing, token budgeting, anything that CROs of the future will need to contemplate? Consider that they're not today?

• 1:00:27Speaker 01

  We're pushing our teams to use AI in every aspect of the deal as much as possible. And thankfully for us, like budget isn't a huge concern at the moment. So we're really focused on automating the sort of.

• 1:00:41Harry Stebbings?

  Is that difficult? And what I mean by that is actually as the man with the budget, I don't want people to know that I have a lot of budget.

• 1:00:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, it's more around my expectations. It's less around the budgetary questions and more around we have access to a bunch of different AI tools. And we've created playbooks for things like account planning as an example, where we've created an agent that can do a one click account plan and help you do like meeting prep for use case development and things like that. So it's more around being really specific of we expect you to be using these tools. Here's the stuff that we've built like from a central team perspective, but I also expect our teams to be going out and building their own stuff and elevating the game. Because again, we can't do things the same way that we did things last year and expect to be successful moving forward. And I want them to share that stuff broadly and we highlight what good looks like on our all of our sort of global team calls.

• 1:01:33Harry Stebbings?

  Are you seeing non eng people building their own tools?

• 1:01:37Speaker 01

  A hundred percent.

• 1:01:38Harry Stebbings?

  Really?

• 1:01:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, a hundred percent.

• 1:01:39Harry Stebbings?

  Oh, in like what way?

• 1:01:41Speaker 01

  I mean, we, we have legal engineers, for example, who have, will have a product idea around something that we should build in Legora, maybe for a specific industry. Like we have a funds attorney who works with us, who's excellent named Felix. And, you know, he had a perspective on some things we could build for our private equity clients that'd be highly impactful. And he was having a hard time sort of describing the, the requirements to our product team and just spent a weekend vibe coded up, you know, a version of what he, what he thought would be, would be impactful and showed it to the team, showed it to me. And it was like highly, highly helpful in just understanding is sort of what the, the vision of the product could be. So that's an example.

• 1:02:19Harry Stebbings?

  Final one before we do a quickfire, which is I know budget's not necessarily a constraint, but it always is slightly.

• 1:02:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:26Harry Stebbings?

  You have to keep it in mind.

• 1:02:27Speaker 01

  For sure.

• 1:02:27Harry Stebbings?

  What would you do if you had unlimited money that you're not doing today?

• 1:02:31Speaker 01

  That's a great question. It's it's less about money and more about time. And the hardest thing that we have right now is taking the time to sort of pause and think about ways of working and like our operating model. And I'd love to, for example, do a two day bootcamp where we bring in some AI experts and we go through every part of every process of every go to market team and every motion and build more automation and more agents to do more things to take sort of that rote work off of my team's plate so they can focus on those things that have the highest and biggest impact. The money is more about time than than money right now. And and how taking that time to think strategically and get everyone together in person is so there's so much value.

• 1:03:15Speaker 01

  We did our sales kickoff at the beginning of the year in Stockholm. There was so much learning. There was so much relationship building that happened. I wish we could do that stuff all the time. And just the the speed of development of our business, we don't have time to get together in that way. And that's something I wish we were able to do a lot more of.

• 1:03:32Harry Stebbings?

  Did you ever doubt whether you were able to make the jump to next gen CRO?

• 1:03:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, definitely.

• 1:03:38Harry Stebbings?

  How did you? How do you get comfortable with that? I think everyone, I face it every day as an investor, where like what was good is is no longer good. Legora's growth is unparalleled. Before it was one to five.

• 1:03:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:03:50Harry Stebbings?

  We're forced to think through like, shit, maybe we need to be energy investors. Maybe we need to be infrastructure investors. And you are struck with this, am I good enough to make the jump? How do you reflect on that?

• 1:04:00Speaker 01

  For me, it's more about being super intentional about what I want and my vision for myself. And honestly, people ask me, what do you want to do next? Like, I'm doing it. Like, this is what I've always wanted to do. Like, the job I'm doing right now is the job I've wanted to do for a really long time. But more often than not, in this world, it's more around like, did you bet on the right horse? So I took a, you know, I took a bet after leaving Braze and went to another company and it didn't it didn't work out. I was working really hard. I was doing all kinds of things that I thought. We're smart and we just weren't seeing the results. And then, you know, come to Legora, right place, right time, right market. And so much of our success has to do with the company, the team and the market that we go into. It's like, you know, it's like sports. You put the wrong person on the wrong team in the wrong system.

• 1:04:45Speaker 01

  Like they're not going to be as successful as they would have been otherwise. And I just feel very fortunate.

• 1:04:49Harry Stebbings?

  The truth is true product market fit is so unwavering.

• 1:04:53Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:04:53Harry Stebbings?

  To any question of like, oh, do I have it or not? If you have it, you fucking know.

• 1:04:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. And when you have it, when you have momentum and you have an advantage, press the advantage. If anything is working, disseminate that to the team. Press, press, press. In terms of playbooks and things that work competitively, when we find something that works, we document, share and press on that immediately. That changes all the time and people react and things change. But that's the kind of stuff that gets me out of bed in the morning.

• 1:05:22Harry Stebbings?

  Final, final one, but there are a lot of people who maybe are questioning whether they took the right step or did the right decision. You mentioned the interim move that you did and all respect to company, some decisions don't work out, don't want to begrudge anything like that. But any lessons or advice to someone who's thinking, ah, I don't know if I made that right step. I don't know if it was the right decision. Any advice?

• 1:05:43Speaker 01

  Mostly when people come to me and ask, and ask that question, I say, are you hitting your numbers? Like, are you, you know, are you, are you doing well in your role? Do you like your boss? Are you learning? Are you getting better? And is this serving you in the way where you're making an impact on the company and the company is making an impact on you to help you level up and get better? And if the answer to all three of those things is yes, then typically I think you're in a good spot. If you've got two out of three or one out of three, you know, maybe it's time to think about what's next.

• 1:06:12Harry Stebbings?

  You know, I walk every weekend with my mother a marathon.

• 1:06:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:06:15Harry Stebbings?

  And I had to always talk about big decisions with her. And she gave me the best advice this weekend. I was talking about something specifically with your All Star Funds. And she said, you know, move fast, but don't be in a hurry.

• 1:06:26Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:06:26Harry Stebbings?

  I thought it was brilliant. I think it's the same advice.

• 1:06:28Speaker 01

  That's a great line.

• 1:06:29Harry Stebbings?

  She was like, you don't want to sit and rot in a company.

• 1:06:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:32Harry Stebbings?

  But you also don't want to jump too fast and too hastily.

• 1:06:36Speaker 01

  Exactly. You have to be, you have to be really thoughtful around it. And like I said, it's so much of it's around picking the right market and the right company. I think people over index on title and under index on growth. I'd rather take a role, you know, maybe below the level you're at, at a high-growth company.

• 1:06:51Harry Stebbings?

  You did. You took like VP of GTM, I think, or whatever, as the sole owner of your kitchen.

• 1:06:57Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. My, my kitchen was the hottest tech company in Brooklyn. But yeah, you know, bet on yourself, have confidence in yourself and bet on growth. Because if you're going to come in and operate at a really high level within a high-growth environment, that's the best thing for your career. As opposed to like having some ego around like, oh, I'm a, you know, I'm X title. I want to stay that. I'd rather go somewhere where you can make a big impact in a growth, in a growth framework.

• 1:07:21Harry Stebbings?

  Final, final one, I promise. Someone's great. They want a bigger salary than the rest of the people in that role. They're great. You and Mike know they're great. You just suck it up and pay more, but what about what that does to everyone else who now wants that same?

• 1:07:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, you can't really do that. And we have bands and we have to have like parity and fairness for a reason. And that's like, that's one way to create, you know, sort of a toxic culture is if people figure that stuff out, then that leads to sort of bad things in the long, in the long run. Even though in the short term, it might feel good because you get this, get this, this person, like you've got to go about it the right way, I think. It's tough. Yeah.

• 1:07:57Harry Stebbings?

  Right, my friend. You ready to rock and roll?

• 1:07:58Speaker 01

  Let's do it.

• 1:07:59Harry Stebbings?

  Quick fire. What do you know now that you go back to yourself on day one and say, you know, you should know this?

• 1:08:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, the, the degree to which the broader sort of investor influence on our deals and sort of the syndicate of influence around sort of the opportunity, not just the opportunity itself. I wish I had known a few things on that sooner.

• 1:08:21Harry Stebbings?

  It's interesting. It's almost like a land grab on investors as well.

• 1:08:24Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. Like if you look at our last fundraise, our CFO, David, described it as the investment syndicate. Sort of reminds me of the Mission Impossible.

• 1:08:32Harry Stebbings?

  One of my friends is a GP at Adtree in Australia.

• 1:08:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:08:35Harry Stebbings?

  And he pinged me about Legora because they joined the round.

• 1:08:38Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:08:39Harry Stebbings?

  And it's like land grab on Australia.

• 1:08:41Speaker 01

  Exactly. We want people that are leaning in and going to really help.

• 1:08:44Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah, no, I totally get that. We mentioned Jude Law. What personality individual brand would you most like to be in the next Legora ad?

• 1:08:53Speaker 01

  Well, we have one coming up with Aaron Judge. That's gonna be awesome.

• 1:08:58Harry Stebbings?

  That's pretty cool.

• 1:08:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, very cool. I can tell you with, I have a first grader in Brooklyn, and you go to drop off at his elementary school, and the number of Aaron Judge jerseys is astronomical. So, very cool for him from a, from a New York and US perspective. We're really excited.

• 1:09:13Harry Stebbings?

  What one tool could you not live without?

• 1:09:16Speaker 01

  I use Gemini all the time.

• 1:09:17Harry Stebbings?

  Wow, I wasn't expecting that.

• 1:09:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:19Harry Stebbings?

  What's it best for? I find it actually best for like transcript analysis.

• 1:09:23Speaker 01

  It's really good at that, but it also has access to all the systems of work that we use. So, we use Gmail, Calendar, and Google Drive. So, from an agentic perspective, it has all the context and it has all of my stuff. And so, it helps me with like meeting prep. It helps me with managing my calendar. A lot, a lot of the sort of simple productivity stuff, it's, it's very good at, and not to mention, you know, making funny pictures.

• 1:09:45Harry Stebbings?

  I have to say, I love Whisperfly.

• 1:09:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, Whisperfly is awesome, definitely. That's one of those viral products that everyone in Silicon Valley is, is talking about. It's great, it's really good.

• 1:09:55Harry Stebbings?

  The only shit thing is in offices.

• 1:09:57Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:09:58Harry Stebbings?

  I stand in the middle of the office and I just like talk to my computer and I'm just weird.

• 1:10:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Well, I actually think that that's gonna be one of the ways of working.

• 1:10:06Harry Stebbings?

  Our team hired headsets, so they now look like customer support.

• 1:10:09Speaker 01

  I was gonna say, we've got a lot of headsets and a lot of AirPods, you know, going around.

• 1:10:13Harry Stebbings?

  What was the best advice you've ever been given?

• 1:10:16Speaker 01

  I had a mentor tell me, if you wanna be a CRO, you need to be really well-rounded. I think mostly, at the beginning of my career, I'd been really successful in a more like transactional mid-market sort of role, and then I moved into leadership very early in my twenties and was like running a big team. And, you know, I thought I was killing it, right? But I couldn't get like a real VP job because I didn't have like big enterprise experience. But if you wanna be a CRO, it's not just sales, it's customer success, it's partnerships, you know, it's implementation, onboarding. It's all these different things. And me taking a step back and doing different roles to give myself a broader set of experiences, I think has been really, really beneficial.

• 1:10:55Harry Stebbings?

  Dude, I've absolutely loved this. Thank you so much for being so open, for putting up with my meandering. I got described the other day as the Louis Theroux. Adventure, which I didn't know whether to say it's like a compliment or not, but you've been amazing.

• 1:11:09Speaker 01

  No, thanks so much, Harry. I really enjoyed it. Thanks for having me.

• 1:11:13Harry Stebbings?

  But before we leave you today, you have the idea but often with AI tools you hit a wall. Well, Base44 is where that friction disappears, turning how you talk into how you build. Full-stack web and mobile apps, sites, autonomous superagents, all built in minutes, not weekends spent on damn configuration. Base44 ships it all out of the box: the backend, the database, the authentication, and the hosting. It handles the heavy lifting, so you can just stay in the flow. It doesn't just replace the busy work, it multiplies you. It makes you so much more capable, an effective version of yourself. In this market, being fast is the baseline, but to win, you've got to be first. And Base44 is that edge. It's the move that lets you skip the troubleshooting and get straight

• 1:11:56Harry Stebbings?

  to the breakthrough. Launch your next big thing at base44.com. That's base44.com. After Base44 helps you launch, Corgi helps you cover what comes next. My word, what an arresting first line. Get your arse covered with Corgi Insurance, and I'll tell you why. If you're running a business right now, you already know this pain all too well. Getting insurance, it's really slow, it's confusing, and my word, it's full of paperwork. Well, that's exactly why Corgi is here to change the game. Corgi is the first and only insurance carrier, designed specifically for tech companies, allowing you to get covered in minutes instead of days. Corgi provides essential coverages for all growth stages,

• 1:12:37Harry Stebbings?

  such as DNO, eando-liability, cyber, commercial, general liability, and more. Get your arse covered, I love the way we say "arse", with Corgi Insurance alongside thousands of other startups at corgi.com/20vc today. That's corgi.com/20vc. You won't regret it. While Corgi handles the coverage, Turing handles the talent. Frontier Labs keep facing the same limitation. Models perform well on benchmarks, but they fall short once they enter real coding tasks, real tools and real workflows. That disconnect between synthetic evaluation and actual system behavior is now a core block off for agentic models. That's why Nvidia, Anthropic, Salesforce Gemini, and other leading lab partners partner with Turing.

• 1:13:22Harry Stebbings?

  Turing is the research accelerator focused on post-training reliability. They build realistic RL environments, next-generation data quality systems built from real-world operational traces, and coding data sets that stress models under conditions where failures matter: state changes, workflow branching, brittle tool calls, and the coding errors that break RL agents but never appear in benchmark reports. In reality, a model may demonstrate correct reasoning in your evaluation setup, yet still select the wrong parameter or mishandle a code update in a realistic interface. Turing makes that failure visible and gives teams the signal they need to fix it. For labs advancing agentic systems, Turing provides the structure required to understand why these failures occur.

• 1:14:06Harry Stebbings?

  To find out how, visit turing.com/20vc. That's T-U-R-I-N-G dot com forward slash two zero V C.