Max Junestrand: You Need The Willingness To Learn Faster Than Anyone Else

Today, more than 3% of the world’s lawyers use Legora, and the company has grown from $1 million to $100 million in ARR since launching in October 2024. At Startup School 2026, Legora co-founder and CEO Max Junestrand shares how they built one of the fastest-growing enterprise software companies in the world, from cold emailing lawyers and moving into a customer’s office to freezing sales for six months to rebuild the product. He explains why building a company is ultimately about people, how to create a culture that wants to win, and why founders have to learn to love the hustle. Transcript: https://www.ycrootaccess.com/p/max-junestrand-you-need-the-willingness

• 0:07Speaker 00

  This is a much warmer welcome than what we had coming into Y Combinator the first time. Legora's YC journey started with a rejection, but more on that story later.

• 0:26Speaker 00

  In YC, they teach you something, and it's called the two-sentence description. It is: describe your company in two sentences. Legora is the agentic operating system for lawyers, and it handles complex legal work from start to finish, so lawyers can achieve more than ever before. And over 3% of all the world's lawyers are now active users of Legora. You will learn more about this when you get accepted into YC.

• 0:58Speaker 00

  When we started looking at the legal industry, it felt like one of the biggest opportunities to apply large language models to solve real problems. And the software that we were up against looked like it had built in the 90s. As software engineers, we have been incredibly spoiled with great software, because we love to build for each other and for ourselves. But in the legal industry, this is what the software used to look like and what we were up against when we started out. Now, Legora has grown into a global brand, putting celebrities like Jude Law at the New York Wall Street,

• 1:42Speaker 00

  and still, I feel like we are only getting started. My most favorite Slack channel in Legora is Customer Love. It is where our customers post things that they truly feel like they couldn't have achieved without our system. And we mine many of our sales calls for quotes like this. And I wanted to share just a couple with you, because I think at the end of the day, this is what it's all about. A parent asked me at one of the tournaments how I juggle work and all of the golf travel. One word: Legora.

• 2:18Speaker 00

  Never has the path between an idea and execute been so short. Never, man. If Legora went away tomorrow, I'd just go back to coaching high school basketball.

• 2:31Speaker 00

  When Legora went into YC, we were questioned about the idea of even selling and working in the legal industry. It is such a conservative business that had never been lenient to software before. But from the time that we went into GA of October 2024 until the last end of quarter, we've grown from 1 to 100 million in ARR. And starting from just three engineers in Sweden to a company of over 750 people all over the world, this is awesome. And the fact that we've gotten to do this, starting from Europe, I think just adds another flair in that hat.

• 3:15Speaker 00

  But the Legora story almost didn't happen. And it actually didn't start with me. In fact, it started almost like the great beginning of a joke. And so, a lawyer, a physicist, an engineer, and a psychologist, back in 2020, before GPT, before AI was cool, started a company called Judeilica. And what they observed was that law school students were going into their internships basically to summarize court cases. And with the early models from Google called BERT,

• 3:59Speaker 00

  they started to explore what this space could be and what was possible to build.

• 4:06Speaker 00

  My story started in the Swedish archipelago, at an island which looks something like this. And I met my two co-founders at a volleyball game.

• 4:19Speaker 00

  I think startup founder stories can come from many different places, and this definitely wasn't one, you know, high odds of a place to start.

• 4:30Speaker 00

  But when I met August and Sigur, they showed me a demo of the product they had built. And our group chat actually looked exactly like this. They gave me a demo of the project, and with GPT 3.5, they had built a very simple product that could explain what a stock option agreement really meant. And so, we started with that, and I said, "This is a super cool demo, a super cool project." And my co-founder Sigur said, "I'm glad you want to help out." And I ended up helping out a little bit more than just that.

• 5:09Speaker 00

  When GPT 3.5 came, that was the internet moment of our generation. I dropped out of college. I never finished my master thesis, because the opportunity cost of not building had become too large. But when we started out, it wasn't obvious that we were going to be a success. And so, to learn about what the legal industry was, what it meant, how lawyers actually worked, we came up with the ingenious plan of cold emailing lawyers on their emails that we could find on their websites and writing to them on LinkedIn, asking for a lunch,

• 5:52Speaker 00

  where we could learn more about their different practice areas. And we offered to pay their hourly fee to have lunch with us. And many of them took us up on that offer, but fortunately for us, many of them didn't make us pay for the hour, and many of them even paid for the lunch. And once we had gotten, you know, our feet under ourselves, we approached one of the largest law firms in the Nordics named Mannheimer Swartling. But just two years before that, their managing partner had gone on TV and said that AI, back when they were starting to use it, was really more artificial than intelligent.

• 6:34Speaker 00

  And so, we had to work really hard to change the perception of what both technology and what AI could be in the area of law. In law, you are not paid when things go right, you are punished when things go wrong. And many of the initial AI solutions in the space had required immense amount of training. You had to sort of bring a lot of use cases and examples just to get very, very little results. And when GPT 3.5 came, that really changed the story. And so, with Mannheimer and Swartling,

• 7:14Speaker 00

  we ended up moving into their offices and working really close with them.

• 7:22Speaker 00

  And as I said in the beginning, the warm welcome here was quite different from the first time we interacted with YC. We applied in May of 2023 with a promise of being able to query all legal documents using large language models. And when we came to our interview, one of the first questions that we got asked was, "What type of lawyers are you serving?" And, not very knowledgeable about the legal space yet, our response was, "What do you mean? Are there different types of lawyers?" And that did not land very well with the YC partners at the time.

• 8:08Speaker 00

  And so, I actually remember very painfully that Tom Blomfield started laughing in the interview when we gave that response, and we knew that we were cooked.

• 8:21Speaker 00

  But that also gave us the perseverance and the drive to continue. And so, with a lot of letdown, the day after, we did not work, but the day after that, we got back to building. And two months later, we got accepted, under a new name and with a different platform. We had done our homework, we had done the work, and from Sweden, the idea of getting accepted into Y Combinator felt like we were going to Mount Olympus. We were going to dine with the gods, and we were going to, you know, get to work with other startup founders

• 9:06Speaker 00

  who came from all of the great tech companies that we knew of. And once we got to Y Combinator, we realized that we actually knew a lot more than we thought we did. And this is one of my favorite pictures. And it is the screenshot I took after we did the video call after our second YC interview, when we knew that things had gone a lot better than the first time.

• 9:36Speaker 00

  So after we got accepted into Y Combinator, we moved into this law firm I mentioned earlier, Mannheimer Swartling. It was the biggest law firm in the Nordics, but they had very, sort of, no real clue about how to work with software and how to work with technology. And we ended up getting a conference room with no real windows, where the AC would turn off at about 5:00 PM, but it was really close to the Coke fridge. And so at about 6:00 PM every day, one of the engineers would go up, grab the door and start waving it back and forth to get more oxygen into the room.

• 10:20Speaker 00

  And those conference chairs still made an imprint on all of our backs, I think, three years later. And me in the car there with two more screens is when we make the move from the conference room of a law firm to our first real office. And I think one of the key takeaways from this entire experience is that first off, we quickly learned not to take no for an answer, but also the power of simply reaching out and asking for help. I think one big lesson from these first three years of building Legora has been that it is very powerful to be a person and to be a company

• 11:05Speaker 00

  that others want to succeed and that others want to help.

• 11:11Speaker 00

  And so we came to San Francisco. We got a room at an Airbnb up in Bernal Heights and we started building. And during YC, we grew from zero to a million dollars in ARR. And we also learned the hard way that working across San Francisco and Europe took a big toll on the team. I couldn't find a picture of this, but I bought an influencer ring light that I put on my laptop. And the reason I had that ring light was because I was doing sales calls between 1:00 AM in the morning to 10:00 AM in the morning,

• 11:56Speaker 00

  every single day in San Francisco to Europe, because that was where our initial customer base was. And after a rocket trajectory during YC, which now, two years later, is slow compared to what some of the companies are doing, we set off to fundraise. And this was my first time fundraising. I had no idea what to expect, but we had lined up 80 investor meetings in a week and a half. And we had European investors, American investors. And the main takeaway from that experience for me was that you need to become a really good storyteller

• 12:42Speaker 00

  in order to drive interest and to get people on your team. It was also a very different experience talking to some of the European investors versus some of the American investors. I feel like in the US, we think more about what can go right rather than what could possibly go wrong. And we ended up working with a venture firm called Benchmark. This is a picture of Chaythan, our partner, when we had signed the term sheet. And I remember negotiating that term sheet on that, on his desk with a computer opened, going on decimals in the Excel to determine the exact number of shares.

• 13:26Speaker 00

  And they ended up investing 9.51 million dollars. Now, following that investment, Redpoint pre-led our Series A just three weeks later. And we started to run into a challenge. We had about 35 million dollars on the bank. We were 10 people in the team. And there was actually a month following that that we made more money from interest rates on those 35 million than we did from customers. And that is not a very good sign when you have become a bank. And going into our first board meeting,

• 14:12Speaker 00

  we had Chaythan and we had Redpoint and it was me and my co-founders. And we made a very hard decision, which was to freeze our sales motion. Because when you work with lawyers, you only really get one chance to get it right. If you show up and the product doesn't work or if the, you know, sort of lag in the system is too high or if the system goes down when there's too much traffic on your Azure instance, you are toast. And after that six-month sales freeze was when we really started ripping. And that's where you see that curve

• 14:55Speaker 00

  from 1 million to 100 million really starting. And what happened at the start of that was, you know, turning from a small startup looking for PMF to really establishing what our business and what our product was going to be.

• 15:18Speaker 00

  In the very, very early days at Leia, so even pre-Legora, the way that we would decide what to build was by voting. We would make democratic votes in the entire team. And for anyone who has built software before, you know that if you have too many chefs in the kitchen, that typically does not make one very good dish. And that was exactly what was going on. We were working on too many features. We had to rebuild everything for the product launch that we were going to have after the summer, after the sales freeze. And we had to build a platform where it was adaptable to foundations that were constantly changing,

• 16:03Speaker 00

  both with the underlying models but also with the frameworks that we were using to build agentic workflows like Langchain, et cetera. And so in October of 2024, we wrote down what we would call the Leia Product Manifesto. This was basically gathering everything we had learned, putting it into one very simple document that we shared with the entire 25-strong-person team back then and that we would rally the troops around. At the time, we were doing about 1.3 million dollars in annual recurring revenue. And many of our competitors were doing 10 times that with products that only had one of these features.

• 16:49Speaker 00

  And I also think that's a function of having started in Sweden. The market is not big enough to house a real unicorn or a deckhorn or something even bigger than that. And so one of the earliest questions we got from YC was, when will you move to the United States? When will you make the jump? And it was off the back of this product refocus that we were able to not only compete out the competition on product, but build enough momentum to make the jump over to the US and start to compete for the biggest logos in our markets. And I think as engineers and as tech people, we often overemphasize the reliance on product

• 17:34Speaker 00

  and on the tech. But if there's anything I've learned in these past three years, it's that it's all about the people. And building product is one thing, but building a company is a very different thing. And we made many early mistakes around this.

• 17:56Speaker 00

  One of the hiring patterns that we had to unlearn was looking for fancy logos on resumes or what we like to call why intercept. If you think about somebody's skill curve, it might start out really high, but if they don't have a good trajectory upwards, they are going to have a really hard time working in a company that is scaling exponentially. And so instead, we started to look for people like us, who wanted to work insanely hard with a very high growth potential. And we doubled down on that talent over and over again.

• 18:37Speaker 00

  Our top seller today is 23 years old. And he's sold over more than 10 million dollars worth of Legora. And he had no sales background. He jumped out of university. And by continuously doubling down on that type of talent, I think we have built a very unique culture at Legora. And one of those things has been about bringing and building cultural fit.

• 19:07Speaker 00

  Up until the point where we were around 500 people, I interviewed every single candidate outside of engineering. Now I interview every director and upwards. But what we have done is we have set the cultural foundation in the business where it self-selects for itself.

• 19:29Speaker 00

  We have three values at Legora: Lean in, fight for excellence, and grow together. And together they make LFG. Let's fucking go.

• 19:41Speaker 00

  That also sends a signal to leaders and others who join the company who are coming from more perhaps established backgrounds, where joining a company where the values includes profanity quickly sort of...

• 20:00Speaker 00

  Tell them what this is about.

• 20:04Speaker 00

  Another very complex cultural thing, starting a company in Scandinavia, is something called Jantelagen or the Law of Janté. This is very foreign to our American friends, but in Swedish culture, this basically means that you should not think that you are somebody or you are not more important than anybody else. And your ideas are not better than anybody else's.

• 20:39Speaker 00

  And I think a part of this humility is good and it supports a culture where the best ideas win and where people earlier in their careers feel empowered to speak up.

• 21:00Speaker 00

  But it's very hard to build one of the fastest-growing enterprise companies in the world if you think that you aren't somebody or if you don't think that you are better than anybody else. And so we have had to really create a nice cocktail of US, European and Asian culture all in one to create a global company that is Legora today. And so I really think that building a strong company culture is the best guarantee to attract and keep the best people.

• 21:40Speaker 00

  Another way that company culture gets expressed at Legora is through articles like this one that ended up in SIFDED.

• 21:51Speaker 00

  For us, there is only winning. Everything else is losing in a winner-takes-all market or winner-takes-most market. And the company has to run like there is no place for number two.

• 22:11Speaker 00

  I think it actually would be fair to say that when Legora was founded, it really had no reason to exist. We were one of many legal AI companies. But because of this mentality and because of not feeling like we're safe, even though we have achieved extraordinary numbers by any normal measures, we continue acting like professional swimmers who are looking down in our lane while the competition is looking sideways at what we're doing. And at Legora, we have had to build a culture to really support that ambition.

• 22:51Speaker 00

  So, starting, you know, years behind some of our biggest competition and having to build this intensity in a country where most people want to go for Fika at 3:00 PM, which means having a cinnamon bun and a coffee, or, you know, go home at 5:00. And one of the ways that that has been done is to create cultural values and cultural moments that really distinguish us from many others. And so in Swedish, there is a saying, you can wake up with the taste of blood because you're so excited about something.

• 23:34Speaker 00

  And I was doing an article in Swedish and I used that saying. And I didn't know that the interviewer was going to release that article in English. And so when this came out, it got lots of fun reactions. And one of them was, is Legora made up of vampires? The second one was, you guys need to floss better. Many good ideas, but this has now turned into the word bloodsmack internally, which means that, and we just keep going at it. And I think part of having our HQ in Stockholm has worked to help us keep this.

• 24:13Speaker 00

  Everybody globally from the company makes their onboarding in Stockholm, which is a lot nicer in summer than in the winter. But that has created the same vibe in any Legora office, regardless of where you walk in all over the world. And I think one great example of this was, we had a very big law firm in the US that our competition was working with. But that law firm had a specific problem around being able to draft certain types of documents based on incoming term sheets. And our competition had promised that they were going to solve that problem for them. And they hadn't.

• 24:59Speaker 00

  And so one of our US-based engineers, legal engineers, lawyers, learned about this use case, got on a flight to Stockholm, spent a week with our engineers, solved the problem in Sweden, and then went back to the US and delivered it to the customer. And I think that Swedish base has become one of Legora's real superpowers.

• 25:26Speaker 00

  And so to round things off before we jump into the Q and A, I'm sharing this stage this weekend with people who have built things at a scale that I haven't yet gotten close to. And so I will leave many of the big lessons for them. But what I can tell you is that three years in,

• 25:50Speaker 00

  it's a little bit smaller than that. Most of what actually mattered in the company and in Legora so far did not revolve around signing a big client or closing a new round of financing or opening a new big office in Manhattan. It happened in, you know, a windowless room without much oxygen or on a call on our way to the airport, a Slack channel at 2:00 AM, trying to fix a bug before a big presentation on Monday. And nobody puts that in a pitch deck, but that is what makes the company. And you shouldn't wait around for those big moments. You have to love the hustle.

• 26:33Speaker 00

  And I think if I can leave you with anything, it's that even though we started in a small law firm in Sweden, I was born in the Swedish archipelago with a class of 10 other people. I had, I thought I had a big plan for my life and I was going to go to McKinsey after school. But when GPT-3.5 dropped in our knees, we truly made that into our thing and we captured what I believe to be our generation's internet moment. And so you can just do things. And Legora and myself is living proof of that.

• 27:14Speaker 00

  So with that, we're going to jump to Q and A and I want to invite a very good friend, our partner from Y Combinator, Gustav Omstromer.

• 27:34Speaker 00

  Gustav, we're really becoming professionals at this now.

• 27:37Speaker 01

  This is not the first time we're doing this.

• 27:38Speaker 00

  No, it's great. It's good to see you.

• 27:44Speaker 01

  Thanks for the talk. That was awesome. Really good.

• 27:47Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 27:47Speaker 01

  And always thank you for coming back and speaking to YC and to founders here at Startup School.

• 27:53Speaker 00

  Of course.

• 27:55Speaker 01

  I want to ask the first question, which is one that I've gotten from a lot of founders who ask about you, which is, you guys are three founders or were three founders who were not lawyers.

• 28:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 28:05Speaker 01

  And you started the best legal AI company in the world. Does domain expertise not matter that much anymore?

• 28:12Speaker 00

  So there's actually a story of a Swedish VC who was very bullish on doing the pre-seed of Leia.

• 28:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:20Speaker 00

  But they ended up not doing it because we did not have any lawyers in the team. And I met them at the airport, I met one of the partners from there at the airport quite recently, and they were very, very bitter. And Leia or Legora turned out to be the lesson for them that perhaps domain expertise is not what you need to succeed. I think that you need a willingness to learn

• 28:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:44Speaker 00

  about the market, which we did very, very early by, you know, exposing ourselves and spending lots of time with lawyers, like as much as we possibly could.

• 28:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:55Speaker 00

  But I don't think you need domain expertise. Probably, you know, dependent on the market that you're going after. Maybe if you're building in quantum computing or in fusion, that's a good idea. But legal was easy enough for us to pick up as we went along.

• 29:14Speaker 01

  I spoke to some founders yesterday and we spoke about sort of like the next categories where the L L M's are not sufficiently good yet, but they will be. And it made me think of what you just said when you were playing around with Bard in the early days.

• 29:29Speaker 01

  What would you, what gave you the confidence to build a legal AI product on a model that wasn't, it wasn't good enough? It was a good, but not good enough. And there's many other founders probably in this audience who are thinking about the same problem, but in a different domain, maybe like, I don't know, mechanical design or some, some, some other part of, some way of the models are just not good enough.

• 29:50Speaker 00

  So I, I think the sort of tribal knowledge when we got started was that you have to fine tune the model, right? In twenty twenty-three, twenty twenty-two, that was really like the name of the game. I even remember, I think it was Bloomberg who spent, you know, millions and millions and millions of dollars building like a Bloomberg Law model. Our view was partly because we didn't have enough money and partly because we truly believe that to be right.

• 30:18Speaker 00

  You know, the models will keep improving, right? Like, I'm sure Sam is going to come up on stage and say that later today.

• 30:24Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 30:24Speaker 00

  And so by just betting that the models will keep improving. And what you should be focused on is how can you deliver that, the value that the models generate to your market? That was the crux for us.

• 30:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:39Speaker 00

  Even with the first generation of, of Chat G P T, that was unusable in law. Partly because the model wasn't good enough, but partly because it actually didn't support, you know, private conversations, European data hosting. I remember the first sales I ever did, we basically said, we are like Chat G P T, but we are compliant in Europe. Like, that was the pitch. That was not a very strong pitch and, you know, clearly Chat G P T would figure out how to do that later on. But at the time it was good enough. And so I think we recognized that you don't have to build for the world over here. Like, you need to build for the world today and maybe like one step ahead.

• 31:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:23Speaker 00

  And it's kind of like this ladder where you should maximize the opportunity now. Make sure that you get really good relationships with your customers and so that you can also have that conversation with them. Because if everybody's betting on this, you know, exponential uplift in model capability, the Legora platform will continue delivering more and more value. I think that we have built one percent of all the software that we will build over the company's history. And probably the, the product will look very different from what it, what it does today a few years down the line.

• 32:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. A lot of news on models this week or last two weeks.

• 32:05Speaker 00

  It's gonna be like a great episode for whoever makes the documentary.

• 32:08Speaker 01

  I'm, I'm hoping that someone is making a documentary right now about everything that's going on. I'm not sure if someone is, but I hope they are.

• 32:16Speaker 01

  Open weights mall is very much the topic right now. And when we spoke on stage a couple of months ago, you talked about that. You're not attached to one specific model, you can work with many different models. Have, have you updated your view based on this week? Like, how do you think about, sort of like, I'm sure there was a moment like a year and a half ago when it seemed like it was just one or two models that were really sufficient to do, to power Legora, and now there seems like a lot more.

• 32:46Speaker 00

  Yes, which I think will be great.

• 32:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:48Speaker 00

  And, and I mean, you know, clearly there will be applications of different models in different use cases. And so if you take customer support, you're optimizing for, you know, speed of turnaround, you know, latency to the customer and cost on, you know, solving a particular ticket. I think Finn used to charge like one dollar per, you know, solved customer ticket. In law, you actually want the, you know, most amount of intelligence quite often. Because the fraction of a token spend or software spend compared to like, you know, human expertise applied to the problem is really tiny.

• 33:33Speaker 00

  If you're solving, you know, complex litigation, you're gonna wanna throw the most brain that you can on that problem. And so we have really sort of two different camps. Like, one group of our users are asking for the ability to loop really complex models, just to work on problems for a long period of time, like racking up big L L M costs. And another group of our users are saying, you know, can we get access to open source? You know, that is gonna be cheaper on our consumption. And I think the, the answer is like somewhere in between.

• 34:09Speaker 00

  I think ultimately, one of the core IPs and muscles that I encourage as many of you as possible to build is the ability to eval new models and to eval new use cases. Because that is the superpower that then allows you to route things effectively. We did a lot of that early on because we hired a lot of lawyers into Legora. And we made part of their job customer facing, but part of their job was also to build out use cases that we would throw our evals on. And the, the frontier of like, you know, cost intelligence and where that sort of frontier lies, you know, yet to be seen.

• 34:52Speaker 00

  I think there's also compute problem where when we lock in big contracts with the, with the labs and with our compute providers, that is actually a huge thing. We cannot have our system go down.

• 35:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:05Speaker 00

  When, you know, a, a, a number of percentage points of all the lawyers in the world are working with it and their clients rely on it.

• 35:13Speaker 01

  And, and are there specific benchmarks you look at for how, I'm sure you are.

• 35:18Speaker 00

  Well, we, we look at the Legora bench. So we actually announced and released that on Friday last week. And it has been, that has been worked for, for the past three years. And we've kept that internal up until Friday. And the reason for that was, it was basically OpenAI or, or, or the Anthropic models. And so it wasn't like that interesting to publish benchmarks on. And we would only make those two models available in our system and the user could pick. Now, the smorgasbord of available options is a lot larger. And actually, we found, to our surprise, that SpaceX and Grok was one of the best performance models, especially given the cost on our benchmarks.

• 36:01Speaker 00

  And we don't even have a, have them on our data processing agreement. And so we actually can't yet offer them to our customers, but now we will start to.

• 36:11Speaker 01

  And do you see your customers having, having, having strong opinions about which models they wanna use? Or is it sort of like, they just want the best, whatever is the best?

• 36:18Speaker 00

  Some of them have a, they have a strong, especially like banks, you know, big law firms have a, they don't want Chinese models.

• 36:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, makes sense. So I wanna go back to just a little bit earlier, like when you decided you wanna build a startup. A lot of people in the audience here, I, I've had two dinners in the last two days with, with attendees at Startup School. We talked about when should you start a startup? People are working at DeepMind, people are working at internships or jobs right now, often you're one or two years into it. What would you say was the trigger for you to say, I'm just gonna do this and not do McKinsey or the other options that you had?

• 36:57Speaker 00

  So my, my dad had two companies during the dot com boom, both of which went to zero after raising too much venture capital.

• 37:10Speaker 00

  So maybe some good.

• 37:11Speaker 01

  Has he been a good mentor for you?

• 37:13Speaker 00

  Yes, absolutely. And.

• 37:17Speaker 01

  How often do you speak about?

• 37:18Speaker 00

  Oh, we speak probably every day or every other day.

• 37:20Speaker 01

  About Legora?

• 37:21Speaker 00

  It's great, yeah, about lots of stuff. I used to, now I'm like too tired to walk home often, so I would like take the train or like take a cab. But I used to walk home and I would call him and that would be a lot of fun. And sometimes we call him senior advisor. We have actually, one of our biggest customer pitches, we, we were stretched for resources. So he came in and did the PowerPoint for, for that client.

• 37:49Speaker 01

  He knew everything at this point?

• 37:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, he knows most of, most of it.

• 37:54Speaker 00

  So he had two companies in the dot com, both went to zero. And then he had a boat business in Archipelago when I grew up. And so I've always been surrounded by entrepreneurship. And I, I always felt like I wanted to prove myself in that arena. I'm very competitive, I used to play video games, I used to play Dota two, like more than I went to school. And then I think building a company is like the optimal, like it's the, it's the biggest arena that you can enter. And you'll either leave victorious or you'll leave defeated or, you know, you'll be okay. And I was very decided in that.

• 38:38Speaker 00

  I want, I, I should probably learn more about the world, which I thought McKinsey was gonna be a great place to start at, which I still think it is.

• 38:46Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 38:47Speaker 00

  I think it really teaches you like how to work, you learn work ethic there. But I did an internship and so I think I, I like got a bit of that even during my studies. And then we had this like pivotal moment with G P T. And so we were talking about this, like you weren't as, as excited about investing a few years back, like pre L L M's, because there wasn't a lot of.

• 39:09Speaker 01

  There wasn't a lot of going on, like, like, I think that the last year or two before COVID, there was not a lot of new ideas.

• 39:16Speaker 00

  Right, and I remember sitting down pre G P T, like here are all the startup ideas I can think of. Most of them were pretty boring. I, I don't think most of them would have worked out.

• 39:24Speaker 01

  Yep, yep.

• 39:25Speaker 00

  And then like small companies got a really big advantage versus big companies. And I mean, I think you saw this in, in just like the way that Microsoft would build Copilot. It, it didn't work for a really long time.

• 39:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:39Speaker 00

  And I remember when that came out and we were like, oh my God, like we're so screwed. You know, every lawyer already works in Word and Outlook and now they're just gonna use Copilot, but turns out like it didn't work. And the, you know, ability for us then to still build a lot of value was huge.

• 39:57Speaker 00

  I think now reflecting back on that, you learn so much by having to figure it out. And I really think that the amount of things you learn is a function of the amount of discomfort that you are willing to endure.

• 40:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:15Speaker 00

  When we started Legora, I was like super introverted. I, you know, really didn't feel comfortable talking to customers. And I wanted to code as much as possible. You know, when you have to go separate ways with an employee for the first time, like all of this is so hard. But you realize that startups is one of the places where you can learn the most in a short amount of time. I think, you know, if I were to build a company again or join a company, I still feel like I learned a lot working at other startups. I actually worked at YC startups.

• 40:56Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 40:57Speaker 00

  Before starting my own. And then I would say you should think really deeply about who you started with and the problem space. And I think we picked a space more than we picked a problem, which I think is like two different ways of going about it. It was completely obvious that legal and AI was going to be a thing.

• 41:22Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 41:23Speaker 00

  How it was going to be a thing was like very uncertain. And so we just said, let's march in this general direction and then we'll figure it out. That's one way of doing it. I guess the other way of doing it is like you find a specific problem, you solve that very clearly, you generate ROI, and then you expand from that.

• 41:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. You mentioned earlier, well, I know that you are extremely competitive. How is that expressed inside Legora? Like, how does a Legora employee know that Max is a very competitive CEO?

• 41:53Speaker 00

  No, I think everybody at Legora is like that. I think it's self select.

• 41:56Speaker 01

  How is it expressed? Is it like a Friday meeting, here's our goals and like?

• 42:00Speaker 00

  Well, yes, so we do, everybody knows every monthly goal.

• 42:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:05Speaker 00

  I think setting quarterly goals is like a little bit tricky.

• 42:09Speaker 01

  Is that how it was from the very beginning, with just the three of you guys?

• 42:11Speaker 00

  No, then it was no goals. Then it was just like every day you like try to maximize the outcome.

• 42:17Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 42:18Speaker 00

  And then we got, you know, when you're 750 people, you need to plan a little bit better.

• 42:23Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 42:23Speaker 00

  And like have some better internal communication. Actually, communication is like the thing that really breaks when you scale.

• 42:30Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 42:32Speaker 00

  I think a lot of people have talked about that already.

• 42:35Speaker 00

  But no, we, you really feel this like drive from engineering that they want to build the best product and the best feature. And if you compare, you know, our tabular review versus, you know, the other alternatives in the market, like it's really sort of you stack rank it.

• 42:56Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 42:56Speaker 00

  And we have lots of people on vacation now in Stockholm because it's July. And most of them have, most of the engineers who are on vacation are like more productive than they have ever been because they're like taking a bit of time off. But then they also get to code now on problems that they like wanna beat and they wanna win. And it's a team sport. And I think you can be competitive, but be it in a team way. And so you really need to solidify this like winning or losing together strategy, I think. And when we get a big win, like that is really celebrated. And when we have a loss, we really like mourn it together.

• 43:39Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 43:40Speaker 00

  And then we immediately make a plan of like, how can we flip it? Or like, how can we make a land and like turn it around? And I feel like people are in solution mode rather than like blame mode. And I think that has been a big, you know, momentum driver for us. But also we've been in like chasing, right? Like there were other legal AI companies that were bigger than us when we started. And so we always felt, at least in the beginning, like we were chasing. Now we are much bigger and.

• 44:17Speaker 01

  Let's say you're the biggest one at some point very soon.

• 44:19Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 44:20Speaker 01

  Is that gonna impact your motivation or your competitiveness?

• 44:23Speaker 00

  I think at that time, so that's interesting. I thought a lot about like what happens at that moment.

• 44:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:28Speaker 00

  I think we need to either pick out another enemy and go like, okay, we have to be bigger than them now. Or we have to like really find this way of being better than ourselves yesterday. And I think that having competitors is a good thing. You should not be overly focused on what they're doing, but it's definitely like a carrot, I think. And it's a, it's an easy thing to like rally around. Because what you don't want is you don't want a lot of side questing.

• 45:00Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 45:01Speaker 00

  You want everybody focused on the same thing.

• 45:04Speaker 01

  So one question I got from the audience is how do you become more ambitious? And when I asked this question, I'm thinking of a company I'm working with right now. It was like, oh, we wanna do this country in Europe and then we're gonna do this other country in Europe. And then maybe next year we'll do US. You guys did a lot of countries in Europe just during the batch and then like?

• 45:22Speaker 00

  And now we're like 50 countries.

• 45:23Speaker 01

  And now you're everywhere and you scale up really quickly.

• 45:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 45:25Speaker 01

  And is that ambition or is that the product was working or is?

• 45:28Speaker 00

  No, it's definitely ambition.

• 45:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:30Speaker 00

  And I think it's like.

• 45:31Speaker 01

  How does someone learn that? Or how does someone become more ambitious? Is that possible?

• 45:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think it's possible. I actually think the best way to become more ambitious is to have a peer group of other very ambitious people. So in, in like my final years of, of like high school, I was pretty lazy. I was playing a lot of video games. I was, you know, I had a pretty easy time in school and I didn't work that hard. And I, I didn't know how big the world was like outside of my sphere. And the first two years in college was the same.

• 46:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:19Speaker 00

  And then I made like a new friend group of very ambitious people. And that made it click for me. I went from doing like zero internships to doing eight jobs in one year. And I actually think that's like one of the best parts about YC. And you think P G talked about that in one of the essays, which is like, you come here and then you just realize that like, wow, every peer, like everybody's really ambitious. And so you become more ambitious together.

• 46:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:54Speaker 00

  And I think now we are like that inside of Legora.

• 46:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:58Speaker 00

  Because I, I don't feel like I'm the like boss. I feel like I'm a peer in the team that is running the company. And, you know, our CFO sometimes, you know, challenges our marketing team to be more ambitious. And, you know, like a CFO maybe typically wouldn't care about that.

• 47:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:19Speaker 00

  But we're all just like so forward leaning and it's just so fun. And then you really get to assemble this like group across the entire company. It's not just at the top, right? It's like everywhere.

• 47:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:30Speaker 00

  And, and then you get to watch your creation like spiral and become more and more and more and more ambitious. And that is really fun. I also think you need to have like big idols and big companies ahead of you. I mean, in the beginning.

• 47:44Speaker 01

  Who was, who was your idol?

• 47:46Speaker 00

  Also, we would look at Spotify and Klarna.

• 47:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:48Speaker 00

  As these are the biggest success tech stories from Stockholm that have, you know, ever happened. And then we realized, wow, we have a bigger market happening for now. And that was like kind of a weird moment.

• 48:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 48:03Speaker 00

  Because we feel like we have done zero to one.

• 48:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:09Speaker 00

  And one to 10 and then 10 to 100 still remains. It's in front of us. And so, yeah.

• 48:18Speaker 01

  Would you say, so people in the audience here are wondering, what skills are either more valuable to have now as you're in school or you're graduating from school versus not that more valuable? Like basically, is, is the skills that you need to start a company, your skills that you need to get into like, like basically your career, are they changing in a very short amount of time now?

• 48:41Speaker 00

  I, I think storytelling is, at least for the CEO.

• 48:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:51Speaker 00

  I had completely underappreciated how important and how good of a skill that would be. Because what ends up happening is you need to sell the company to yourself.

• 49:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:03Speaker 00

  Like working this hard, if you don't believe in your own story, is really hard. You need to sell employees. Like now we are hiring people, you know, we are competing with the labs for talent. And, you know, we need to sell the story of how working Legora, at Legora is gonna be better than working at Anthropic. You need to sell the story to investors. You need to sell the story to customers. And I think that in college or in high school or wherever that is, like spending time to learn that is useful. I don't know how to learn it.

• 49:44Speaker 00

  I actually don't know how I learned it unless I just had a lot of exposure.

• 49:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:50Speaker 00

  I always like, liked stories. I like video games. I like, I enjoy a good story. But I think that is like the most important. And then maybe the other really important.

• 49:58Speaker 01

  What about technical skills?

• 50:00Speaker 00

  Okay. Well, I'll, I'll say one more before we go to technical skills. I used to be a really bad teammate and a really bad collaborator. So I played volleyball for a long time growing up. And I would be the type of person on the team who, when my teammate missed the serve, I would yell at them and go, you fucking suck, like how could you miss that serve? And that was very, that doesn't get you invited to play the next game.

• 50:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:31Speaker 00

  And.

• 50:32Speaker 01

  Makes sense.

• 50:33Speaker 00

  You know, it, it, it doesn't, it doesn't invite a followership and it doesn't invite like a good vibe. So in high school, I like really understood that.

• 50:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:46Speaker 00

  And had to pivot that way of working. I think technical skills. I think that.

• 50:57Speaker 00

  The velocity and your ability to iterate on customer feedback still is probably the most important skill to get started.

• 51:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:05Speaker 00

  Even now, when we're bigger, very often, we will hear about a particular type of problem a customer is having in a customer call. I will dump that in the product channel. And I'll go, how quickly can we turn this around and delight the customer?

• 51:21Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 51:22Speaker 00

  And that's like a bit strange to do at a, you know, thousand-person company scale.

• 51:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:26Speaker 00

  Still how we do it. And you need to make sure that you don't overly zigzag and that you continue building towards like the right vision. But I still think that the, your ability as a smaller company to be fast versus your incumbent competition is the superpower. And when you have a superpower, you need to lean into that. And that's still true for me. Like, I should be doing the things that I'm uniquely good at.

• 51:53Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 51:53Speaker 00

  And other people in the company do the things that they're uniquely good at.

• 51:56Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 51:57Speaker 00

  I think also technical skills.

• 52:04Speaker 01

  Maybe they're different these days, because it means something else.

• 52:06Speaker 00

  Yes, but it still means, you know, being able to build systems at scale. Right? Like, just because you can produce a lot of code with AI.

• 52:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:15Speaker 00

  It's not a excuse for not being a very good software engineer.

• 52:21Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 52:22Speaker 00

  And I still think we need many good software engineers. We are hiring a hundred of them at Legora.

• 52:28Speaker 01

  What's the most interesting problems that people get to work on when they join Legora?

• 52:34Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 52:37Speaker 00

  One of the most interesting problems right now is this transition from reactive agents to proactive agents. So.

• 52:47Speaker 01

  What's an example?

• 52:48Speaker 00

  So for the last three years of working with the product, you know, you will give Legora a prompt or a set of instructions, and it's going to go off and do that thing. Now, we are basically connecting Legora to different pieces of context. And when it gets a trigger, it will start to do something. That means that if the sales team gets a contract, it will get routed to a Legora agent. The Legora agent will start working on it in parallel. You know, if it needs to escalate to a lawyer, it will. Otherwise, it might just execute the contract. Or you connect the entire data room to a Legora agent, and the agent automatically starts organizing that data room and produce the due diligence report. Right? Like, it's having the agent do things without you telling it what it should do.

• 53:32Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 53:33Speaker 00

  And that for us is the unlock of, how does one lawyer produce the outcomes of a team of 10 lawyers with the help of Legora?

• 53:43Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 53:43Speaker 00

  I think that's very interesting. We also have some very interesting problems just from like a scale perspective, right? Like, we're spending millions and millions and millions of dollars on OCR and like, you know, document parsing. And these are like real engineering problems to go solve at a bigger scale.

• 54:00Speaker 01

  Got it.

• 54:02Speaker 01

  And you grew from zero to 100 million ARR in 18 months in April. Keep growing at a crazy rate.

• 54:09Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 54:10Speaker 01

  Your job has changed quite a lot in 18 months.

• 54:13Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 54:14Speaker 01

  We talked earlier about you now interviewing like exec teams, like sort of like, we had this talk from the founder of Dropbox at YC. Like, a couple of years ago, we talked about the mini-games you play. You've done a lot of mini-games in 18 months. And now you're at the mini-game of like billing out or hiring people to run your team. What's? That sounds hard. And is that, this is not something you've done before? Like, how?

• 54:36Speaker 00

  Well, it's definitely not something I've done before.

• 54:38Speaker 01

  How do you learn something like that? That it seems extremely important to hire the right executive?

• 54:44Speaker 00

  In a way, I think

• 54:48Speaker 00

  most of the work up until that point makes you qualified for that thing.

• 54:54Speaker 01

  Right.

• 54:55Speaker 00

  If you've.

• 54:56Speaker 01

  You get the next mini-game by basically seeing the last one.

• 54:58Speaker 00

  Yes, but you need to make sure that you learn. Because a part of every mini-game, and I think you really need to put the company first.

• 55:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:10Speaker 00

  Way ahead of your own ego, in a way. And, you know, I tell this to the executive team. I need to re-qualify for the job as CEO of Legora. Every quarter, right? It's a new company, new challenges, as do they. Right? Like, running a sales team when you are 1 million ARR is very different from 150 million ARR. And I think for myself, if you, like, if you are, if you enjoy that, if you enjoy learning new things, if you enjoy being challenged, if you accept the fact that now my most important job is building out the executive team, and I'm going to go do that, you will succeed at it.

• 55:54Speaker 00

  And then, I think as always, you try to build a good network of people who have done it before.

• 56:01Speaker 00

  The tough thing is, there's very few people who have done the company this quickly, as we are. And, you know, even a lot of the executives that we are now bringing on, they come from sauce. And they come from this, you know, world of triple, triple, double, double. If you grow 40% year-on-year, you are doing fantastic. You're, you know, you're sort of on track. And.

• 56:24Speaker 01

  That's not enough anymore.

• 56:25Speaker 00

  It's not enough. Like, we, you know, David, our CFO, joined from Banta, another YC company. Very, they've been very successful.

• 56:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:33Speaker 00

  But they've grown from, you know, 30 million to 300 million in something like four years. And now we're doing it in like one year. And so, from 200 people to 1300 people. And we're doing, over four years, and we're doing it in one year. And so you need to just compress timelines. I think you need to be brutal at saying no to things. And you need to understand yourself where you have the most competitive edge. Or you can do the most.

• 56:58Speaker 01

  When I landed in Stockholm in end of April, all of the ads were basically Legora ads with Jude Law.

• 57:08Speaker 01

  And I'm curious how you get Jude Law to be the face of the company. And if you haven't watched, seen the ads, I recommend you go into YouTube and watch the Legora Jude Law ads.

• 57:20Speaker 00

  Did you, did you fall in love with Law again?

• 57:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, I did.

• 57:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's good.

• 57:25Speaker 01

  What happened? How did you score that?

• 57:27Speaker 00

  Okay, so the inside baseball is we had a meeting with one of our marketing agencies. And one of their pitches was, why don't we redo like very famous legal scenes? Like, you can't handle the truth.

• 57:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:47Speaker 00

  Like, why don't we redo like famous legal scenes with lawyers, but like with Legora?

• 57:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:52Speaker 00

  And, or, no, the pitch was this, it was actually pretty funny. All of these movies about lawyers, like, what if they just had Legora? And, you know, the movie would be over in like a minute. And so we got to this idea of like working with actors. And then somebody went, well, Legora is like AI-powered law. What if we got Jude Law to be like AI-powered? And that got us down the track of like, huh, maybe we could get Jude Law.

• 58:18Speaker 00

  And what's funny in Hollywood right now is it's like pretty anti-AI with, you know, writing scripts, you know, using AI in movies, et cetera. And he thought we were completely unserious when we reached out the first time. Like, some Swedish AI company wants to work with Jude Law to make billboards and a campaign. But then, we were so persistent. And I think one underappreciated form of negotiation is nagging. It's one of the things my dad taught me. And we nagged and nagged and nagged, and he said yes. On one condition, he got to pick his own scriptwriter and cinematographer. And who would have known?

• 58:59Speaker 00

  He brings an SNL script director and the cinematographer from Oppenheimer to, to like light the scene and like do the whole cinematography. And they basically go into the set. And nobody from Legora is allowed in. And, you know, a few hours later, like these magical productions come out.

• 59:20Speaker 01

  It's really good.

• 59:20Speaker 00

  It's so funny.

• 59:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:22Speaker 00

  And what I think it did for us was it put us in another light where like even people outside of law now know about Legora.

• 59:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:31Speaker 00

  And that has been really exciting.

• 59:33Speaker 01

  Awesome. Thank you so much for coming to Scribe School. This is awesome.

• 59:36Speaker 00

  Thank you, Gustav. Appreciate having me.

• 59:37Speaker 01

  Thanks, everyone.