Inside Harvey AI: $11B, $300M ARR, 960 Employees, 12 Offices, 13 Trillion Tokens a Month

0:00Winston Weinberg:The purpose of Harvey, Harvey AI, Harvey AI, if you're reviewing a million documents, is how do you check that its work is accurate? So you were at 100 million in ARR last August, and now you're nearing 300 million. What's been driving that? It's 100 % product. Our token usage in January was$1 trillion, and this month it'll probably be like$12 or$13 trillion. Our DAU over MAU at the beginning of the year was around 36%. Right now it's like 51%, 52%. And then this year, most recently, the main switch we did is just went over to cloud agents. We switched our entire infrastructure to that. And once we did that, usage user just started doubling quarter to quarter.

0:46You asked about a sword. We could start with this.

0:49Winston Weinberg:We could start with this. So I actually, this is probably the best thing. I also personally have a replica of Frostmourne. uh but that's in my apartment i don't know what that is it's it's arthas's sword uh world warcraft got it yeah anyway of course my bad my bad it's an awesome sword but i've seen too many people do sword things and so i didn't end up doing it um but i do have it it's great you guys can okay well that works too you can come through this way it's totally fine um but yeah this thing's fantastic we've actually we had a really small one um there was a kind of like a running joke when we were all in an Airbnb that we had this like little tiny gavel and one of the biggest problems with the product was just like latency um and so whenever we tested like a new feature we would basically just like hammer the gavel and be like make it faster make it faster make it faster which I think annoyed that a lot of people but we've stopped doing that now oh my gosh wow okay that's a good place to start yeah yeah we got a bunch of books got some sculptures and you handpicked all of this stuff just for reference we're on a tour of Harvey right now This is Winston.

1:55And what are we going to see today?

1:57Winston Weinberg:We're going to see the floor that's been renovated. So we have three floors here in San Francisco. And then one, the one we're on now, has been like fully renovated. And then we're doing the sixth and the seventh. And the significance of this painting? Yeah, so there's no significance of this painting. But I mean, I think like one thing about this floor in general is we've tried, and we'll take you up to the speakeasy after, we've tried to do like a combination of kind of like tech plus also like classic um and so you'll see like a lot of sculptures we have a lot of uh like books related to law this is kind of funny because it's john grisham but it looks like it's like oh my god ancient text like hamarabi's code or something like that how did you find them um i actually don't know for these particular ones but in general we've kind of tried to do like a combination of um when we were actually doing our brand in the beginning we were basically like could we do a copy of like the best tech companies and then succession like the show yeah my point was like kind of a combination of like an ode to you know like classics like greek first orators things like that plus like hey we're a tech company um and we've definitely tried to do that a lot with our brand and we've tried to do that throughout the office too.

3:14Seems to be working. It looks amazing.

3:16Winston Weinberg:Thanks. Okay, so we're gonna cover a lot of different things today.

3:24For starters, on this tour I want to talk about the evolution of the company. So you've been around close to four years now. Yeah, it'll be four years in August. Congratulations. Well, not yet. Happy birthday. I don't know. You have nearly a thousand employees?

3:41Winston Weinberg:Yeah, close. It's like 960 something. And this office is one of how many? Twelve. Wow. So we opened up offices pretty quickly, but the office here and then New York are by far the largest. How many employees are at those? So in this one, I think it's around like 350. And then New York is around like 300. Oh my gosh. Yeah, and then the vast majority of EPD is here, but we are growing out the other offices too. That's a really cool vibe. Okay, so when you build out globally, you have 12. Yeah. How do you figure out which cities to go into first? Is it like you have your customers and then you build around them?

4:21Winston Weinberg:Yeah, so it's actually, yeah, so we did it first based off of just like reacting to like big customers. So like we'll sign like Deutsche Telekom and it's like, oh wow, we need an office in Germany, right? Things like that. There's actually something really interesting that we had a problem of in the beginning, which is because we process sensitive data, a lot of the countries we actually needed like an Azure instance in each one, right? So like in Australia, you can't process financial data outside of the country. And so we would set up these offices and then we'd set up like Azure instances too.

4:53Winston Weinberg:And it was almost like we set up an Azure instance and then that would be like a pretty good indicator that we'd have to set up an office pretty soon afterwards just because like customer demand yeah but another way to look at it is kind of like the legal TAM overall too and so we kind of base it off of like you know how many lawyers are there in each country etc and there's how many lawyers in this company yeah in this company we have over 200 yeah and so and then on a commercial side like actually I guess doing what a normal lawyer would do. There's only about like 25. Really? Yeah and then the rest, I mean obviously we use Harvey internally for a lot of stuff so we're trying to scale that up and then the rest of folks either they work on product or they like help with go to market and things like that too.

5:44Winston Weinberg:We don't have this anymore but you used to, if you would have visited us like a year or two ago, you would have been able to tell who's a lawyer and who isn't because. Why? Because they would dress differently? Yeah so there's like a phase. Should we play a game right now? Yeah you won't be able to actually I don't think anyone on this floor actually. But basically like the first week they would wear a full suit and a tie and then about like maybe the next Monday the tie would come off and then like three days after that it's like the suit came off and then it would eventually be like hoodie and sweatpants.

6:20Yeah yeah naturally.

6:21Winston Weinberg:And you but you would be able to tell like basically like which lawyer had been here for which amount of time and you could always tell which is kind of funny so as we walk through this like how did you set up this new office like there's obviously a lot of conference spaces yeah desks this is a huge communal area do you guys host lots of yeah we we host a lot of hosts like customers and things like that we also i mean it's a little bit past lunch but we were talking about this earlier we have like an insanely loud lunch culture yeah we walked in at like 12 30 and i was like yeah this might be it's it's crazy loud like to the point where i don't schedule meetings during the lunch really like i or i don't do customer meetings during the lunch hour like it's literally like a band like from 12 to 1 30 i just will not do external meetings because it is so loud and you can't it's loud everywhere so people will eat lunch here but it's like loud throughout the whole thing um i think we just have always had that we started in Airbnb and then whenever we moved from office to office like we'd always eat lunch together and it's somehow like spread out to the you know hundreds almost a thousand employees and so we want to keep that I think forever I don't know I think like you need like a couple of those instances where like everyone gets together we've done a handful of these office tours so far and you might have the most employees in office really yeah don't tell them that I mean I think like it's something we care about a lot I think that if you have to try to force it you're probably in trouble right like it's not going to work that well um but I think like the thing that does it the most is stuff like this where it's just like you get to meet everybody from like if you go to here during lunch and again you wouldn't have been able to hear anything so maybe not as helpful but you want you can't be like oh that's the team that works on this that's the team that works on it's like everyone is all mixed together um and so i think people like coming into the office because we have a very like culture of everyone working together and people are really good friends that are like across functions so we have people like like you can come here on the weekend and there will be people in the weekend really yeah all the time yeah yeah and it's it's funny because no one works in offices and so people usually work in like a corner um and then you'll have like just a small group of people in a corner but like I notoriously lose like my card 24-7.

8:43Winston Weinberg:I think I have my living right now. But this is like my 19th. I just constantly go through them. And so I know that there's people on the weekend all the time because I'll come on the weekend and I'll post into SF General like, yo. Can someone let me in? Yeah, and there's no one too. Maybe they think that's a test. Exactly. And so every single time so far I've been able to get in. Yeah. Okay, so what's your favorite room? Oh yeah, good question. um okay favorite room is definitely a speakeasy and i'll show you that in a second i'd say my second favorite is i really like to work actually on the couch like on the couch when people come in and i think part of that is i i used to travel a lot i travel a little bit less now but last year i almost entirely didn't work out of an office i just worked on the couch and it's because i get here early and i like like saying hi to everyone for a couple hours and then i have meetings um But in terms of actual room, it's a speakeasy.

9:35Winston Weinberg:So I can show you that. It's up here, actually. Oh, cool. I'm surprised by being in office. I'll take that, though. It's, I mean, it was a good compliment. Yeah, no, no. I'm trying to think, like, the only other company that was Applied Intuition. Oh, yeah, yeah. They were packed. They're young, though. They're like 40 people, right? No. Oh, no, Applied Intuition, not Applied Compute. Not Applied Compute. I was like, applied computer. Gabe was just there like last week. Okay, so what's the biggest lore here? Biggest lore of this office? This office actually doesn't have, the Airbnbs have like way more.

10:13Winston Weinberg:Oh, I would imagine. Yeah. It was, I mean, so Airbnbs, we went through, I think, eight. So basically what we did is. At what point did you realize you needed to get? 20 people. Okay. So what happened is we basically kept getting a larger Airbnb each month when we just added more people. And then we got to a point where it was like, okay, this is definitely a problem at like 20-ish. What is the deal with people in SF, startups, getting townhouses and houses to build out of? I would like to say that there's like some beautiful reason for this or some smart thing. To be 100 % honest, it's just easier.

11:01Really?

11:01Winston Weinberg:It's just like I can go personally book an Airbnb. Okay. And then you just don't think about it because you're doing so many other things. Is that legal? What? Yes, it is legal to do that. Yeah. And then you basically just like personally book a new Airbnb each time and it's like then you don't have to worry about that overhead. What's the most illegal thing that you've done? I'm not going to say that. I don't care. Nothing. We're a bunch of lawyers. Are you kidding me? Okay, cool. Sorcery is brought to you by Brex, the financial stack trusted by more than 30 ,000 companies, including one in three venture-backed startups in the U.S.

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12:54Winston Weinberg:Visit turing.com slash S-O-U-R-C-E-R-Y. We just did a little walking tour of the office. Now we're gonna go deep into the business. Are you ready? Yeah, let's do it. Okay, so where is Harvey at today? Give me the full stats. Yeah, so we're about four years old, August. That'll be the birthday. I think it is birthday. What's the day? August 4th. It's a Leo. Holy crap. Wow, actually I didn't think about it that way. Yeah. Wow, that puts everything into perspective for me. I gotta take 20 minutes to have deep thoughts on that. I'm a Capricorn, so I don't know if that works. Oh no. Is that a problem?

13:30Winston Weinberg:I have no idea. I don't either. Leo's like a lion, right? Yeah, fire sign. Fire sign. Jesus Christ. So yeah, about four years old. And we're around 900 folks, 950 people, 960, something like that. We're at around 2 ,000 customers, somewhere around 300 million ARR. So we're growing really fast. I think it's mostly just a crazy experience, how much the product has grown. I think that in the beginning, we had this product roadmap. And our product roadmap has actually really been pretty consistent. The main thing that's collapsed is just like how long it takes to build these things. And so I think the thing that's actually moved the fastest is how much we are starting to basically build a platform for all of these different pieces of the product.

14:20So you were at 100 million in ARR last August, and now you're nearing 300 million. What's been driving that?

14:27Winston Weinberg:It's 100 % product. I'll give you some metrics. Our token usage in January was$1 trillion, like for the month of January. And this month it'll probably be like$12 or$13 trillion. Oh my god! Yeah, so the usage is getting pretty insane. Our DAU over MAU at the beginning of the year was around like 36%. Right now it's like 51, 52%. Our queries per user have basically been doubling up quarter over quarter. Hours spent is doubling quarter over quarter. I think that's better than queries. The problem with queries is as you build a more complex product, you're going to have these outputs that are like crazy long.

15:04Winston Weinberg:And so you might have people like using this like querying less, but the output is like a hundred page document. And so they're like in your system reviewing it and collaborating on it. But like everything is just product improvements. I think like last year, last year we had some moments where we just kind of had to like rebuild a lot of our product. And then this year, most recently, the main switch we did is just went over to cloud agents. We switched our entire infrastructure to that. And once we did that, usage literally just started doubling quarter over quarter. And you've raised over a billion dollars now.

15:39So have you used most of that capital? Are you using it on tokens? Yeah, now we're using it on tokens.

15:47Winston Weinberg:No, we actually haven't used a lot of that money. I think the interesting thing that we always wanted to do was actually do a lot of post-training on the models. And there's a couple problems in legal that makes this really hard. One is the data isn't available. So if you went online and you were like, I want to go find a bunch of documents that are related to a random fund formation by Blackstone. They don't exist. You'd have to go to Blackstone for those documents. right? But the thing that happened with like the last generation of coding models is you can actually take sets of documents and create synthetic docs that are so good that the lawyers can't tell the difference between whether they're created, you know, by an actual lawyer or they're created by their coding models.

16:32Winston Weinberg:And so with that, we've now actually created basically like a pipeline for creating synthetic data sets across like every single legal use case. And because we have that now, now you can start actually plus training models and that's how it's expensive. Wow. And so what are the main categories of your customers now? I think you said it's 42 % is in-house corporates? Yeah, 42 % is in-house corporates. It's growing faster than the law firms technically because I think we're at like almost 70 % of the - Is it easier for them to adopt? Is that why? No, they're just slower to adopt. Yeah, so the corporates adopted like they started like a year after the law firms.

17:09Winston Weinberg:And so, and then our fastest growing of like the, of the verticals in general is financial services is number one for sure. So like banks, private equity, asset management, and then pharma is actually growing pretty fast too. And what we're starting to do is actually like, we're going to verticalize our product too, where we have to actually like have different parts of Harvey that are different for each vertical, right? Because like the compliance and legal needs of a bank are very, very different than even private equity. So I want to go into deeper building the company out today. Like, what does it take to build an AI forward company?

17:43So I reached out to Pat Grady and he said the one thing that he emphasized was that you've been able to reinvent the company over and over again. So what was it like from the beginning to now? And what do you think was like, what are the key unlocks along the way that you think are critical?

17:58Winston Weinberg:Yeah. I mean, the key unlock is hiring for sure. Like that is it. And when I say hiring, I don't just mean hiring new people. I mean, like also development, right? And like promoting people, putting them into different roles, things like that. Or honestly, in some instances, they get outscaled and like figuring out a better role for them. But every six months, I'd say I start to get like this weird feeling of like things are just breaking. Right. And I feel it's like a pressure that like builds up. And then usually so far what has happened is every time that has happened there's been like three big changes that I need to make and I realize I need to make them and then I make them and then like the pressure like flows off.

18:42Winston Weinberg:And that happens like literally every six months I'd say. Maybe three to six months, something like that. And it feels like if you do not constantly change, you are just going to get so behind that you die as a company right now. And I think a lot of that is actually, like, who do you decide to promote? Who do you decide to hire? That is more important than anything else because a lot of people can't do that. Like, it is really hard for every six months for someone to, like, massively change how they operate. It's even simple stuff. Like, when I see somebody, like, mass starting to really break, the first thing I do is I'll go and we'll do, like, a calendar audit of just, like...

19:25Really?

19:25Winston Weinberg:Yeah, seriously, that's like the first thing. I know it's so stupid and it's so simple, but you go in and you do a calendar audit and you come up with like really good ways to be like, do you have to do any of these things? But tell me what is the main prior this week? Are any of these related to that prior? And you will start seeing people, and I do it myself, like you just come up with so many excuses for why you're doing stuff. And at the end of the day, it's like, no, that's not relevant. That's not relevant. That's not relevant. And I think that like finding people that are really good at doing that themselves.

19:53Winston Weinberg:And I think there's a decent amount of people at this company now that have learned how to do that, that's how you scale. That is how you scale at this crazy rapid pace that normally companies need to reinvent themselves maybe every five years, ten years, something like that. I think you have to do it every six months. So what's your framework for prioritization? How do you determine if you can't do something or not? Yeah. So, I mean, for me, I have a bunch of different rules. One of the really simple rules is my chief of staff, whenever she sends me something, I have to write a paragraph for why I would do it.

20:27Winston Weinberg:Not kidding. And you don't use an AI for this? No. It's really important because if you start for the stuff that is really, really, really important and again this is outside of ordinary. I don't do this for product reviews that we do weekly. If you sit down and you can write an entire paragraph about why you're going to do something, you definitely are going to do it. If what happens is you go, it's so annoying that I have to write this down. I'm like, why would I ever need to do that? You probably don't need to do it. It's not that important, right? And then what I've found is the stuff that is really important, I could write like 100 pages about what I'm doing, right?

21:03Winston Weinberg:And I know it's like kind of a small, silly thing, but it helps a lot to get a massive unlock for just blocking things. So you have a quarter of your company as previous lawyers, former lawyers. How did you convince them to come to a tech company that's completely different than a traditional career path? It was really, really hard in the beginning and now it's like I think quite easy. You show them equity? What works? Oh my god, it was difficult to explain equity in some instances, right? Like what is the value of equity and things like that. I think really like we hired in the beginning, we hired a lot of people who I think really wanted to like, they loved law.

21:44Winston Weinberg:Like they loved the practice of law, but they didn't love working in big law. And so they wanted to do something adjacent. and I think that was really really attractive and then over time like we have so many lawyers that are now just full-time PMs like literally they just like transferred in other PMs we have so many different like career opportunities that I think that now it's a really attractive place to be because you could have a legal background and then you end up doing something else right like you don't actually have to be practicing law or anything like that here what's the biggest complaint of people leaving law firms?

22:18Winston Weinberg:Oh, I'll tell you, by far, like the biggest thing that they need to get used to here is, and maybe that's your question, if it isn't, I'm gonna answer that one anyway. Because I think this is actually super interesting. Law firms very rarely fire people, very rarely. Okay. And so actually, I think one of the most interesting things to get used to is that like tech is very fast moving and I try to make it a meritocracy. And so if you aren't doing well, we're gonna have to let you go. And I think that's really hard for some people that have been in a situation where you get promoted every single year and that's how it works in BigWaft.