How to win as an AI wrapper with Harvey's Winston Weinberg

21:14Winston Weinberg:And so I'd say the worst and the best advice that I've gotten from all VCs is when to hire the person for scale, which a lot of the time I've got wrong and I should have hired someone that's really good at scaling. And sometimes I've been right when I think you should bet on a junior person. So it just depends. But I think that's been the best advice and stuff I've gotten wrong and the worst advice too. That was a much better answer than I expected for my question.

21:37Ellis:Thank you, Winston. We're going to like and subscribe to your channel, too. All right, great. So tell us about Harvey. For those who aren't familiar, the listeners out there around the world, what is it?

21:50Winston Weinberg:Yeah, so we're a legal AI platform. And we started basically building a productivity suite for lawyers at law firms. And what we've started now doing is selling that same productivity suite and tweaking it for large enterprises, too. So for like Global 2000. and now we're making everything multiplayer. So what we're trying to do long-term is basically transform the way that legal services and probably professional services, as in like adjacencies to legal, like tax, compliance, et cetera, are actually delivered, right? And we think that that's a combination of a platform that is in between how the professional services providers are using the platform and the global 2000 or large enterprises or startups as well.

22:32Ellis:So how do the lawyer clients feel when you tell them that they're about to go multiplayer. I know that's a term we use in tech, but you have a different clientele, right? And are you wearing a suit when you're doing this?

22:43Winston Weinberg:Yeah, yeah, so I definitely say collaboration. They're more excited about it than I think like anyone else. I mean, the law firms are incredibly excited about this because I think that this is another opportunity for them to basically show their differentiation, right? Like there is a massive difference between how some law firms are adopting AI and others. And so when you say, hey, this platform is going to be collaborative, it really allows law firms to think about how are we going to change how we practice law and how are we going to use that to get more business, right? Get more business, A, or B, like strengthen the relationships between them and their current clients.

23:22Winston Weinberg:One way to actually think about this is really what law firms have been doing for a long time is just doing RL on client relationships. So in other words, teaching junior associates, how do you actually do fund formation for a certain type of private equity fund, right? And then you have that junior associate grow up to be a partner, right? And now they know how to do it, right? And so if there are ways to do that tech enabled faster, you're gonna get clients that wanna work with you more and for longer, it becomes pretty sticky. Also those jobs go away? So, yeah, this is where I think those tasks go away.

24:00Winston Weinberg:I don't think the job goes away. So one way I think about this is we are now actually a pretty large consumer of legal services, right, ourselves. We try to use Harvey for everything. Is it because you're getting sued or what? No, not yet, at least. Knock on wood. You could be the first to sue yourself if you want. Oh, yeah, that might be kind of hard. There's some problems with that. But as a user or a consumer of legal services, one thing that I struggle with is the delta between how much it costs for a junior associate to do a task that you could have done when you were in college versus the best M &A partner in the pharmaceutical industry or whatever industry on earth, right?

24:38Winston Weinberg:And usually that junior associate bills like 1 ,000 an hour, and that partner who is the best in the world at what they do is 2 ,500 an hour or 3 ,000 an hour. We need a new job. We need a new job. But that doesn't actually make sense to me, right? And so my gut in what ends up happening is the work that AI can't do, which there is a lot of work in legal that I don't think AI is going to be able to do, or at least anytime soon, access the data and a bunch of other things, client relationships, that work is going to be more valuable, and you can charge more for that. And then all of this other stuff is going to get automated and put into basically like fixed fee pricing.

25:13Ellis:Yes, you wrote something interesting in your Series D raise, just a quaint little 300 million. You wrote that centuries-old firms are experimenting with new business models. That is like ancient history in tech terms. Like this is a little different than bringing Slack to the CTO of your company or something like that. What is it like working with those types of customers and reaching them?

25:35Winston Weinberg:Yeah, I mean...

25:36Ellis:You told us behind the scenes they're not exactly on Twitter to be reached with.

25:39Winston Weinberg:Yeah, sometimes they're not. Sometimes they actually very much are. It really depends. It very much also differs from who the firm leadership is, basically. And so there are firms that I think are looking at this as this is going to happen, this is going to transform our business, we should start thinking about two things. And these are the ones that I think are the most sophisticated. We should start thinking about how does our business model change? Do we do fixed fee for certain things so we can get efficiency at scale? And then billable hour on top? Do we create SaaS products? I mean, even as extreme as that.

26:13Winston Weinberg:The second thing that I think is much more interesting is how do we focus on teaching people how to be really good partners? And I think the best thing that could happen to the industry is the industry is forced to 100 % focus on how do you, like time to partner, basically, and reducing time to partner as quickly as possible. And right now, the industry doesn't focus on that enough. I'm not by no means a legal expert, but my understanding is that document review is where a lot of these law firms get the most billboard hours. It generates a lot of their revenue. I could imagine, even if you come to them and say, hey, I've got this thing.

26:49It's going to save you a bunch of time. That's actually kind of destroying their margins in the near term. Do you have that problem where you're pitching and then they're like, well, this is great, but I also love billing for all these hours?

26:59Winston Weinberg:Yeah, I think we had that problem in the beginning. So that was very, very difficult in like early 2023, probably difficult throughout early 2024. And then it got to the point where they just felt that this was inevitable. Right. In other words, like AI is going to get adopted by either our competitors. Right. And so that's really important. And so this is just something that we need to do in order to compete. and then more importantly I think oh it's getting adopted by our clients like our clients are just going to use these things ourselves right themselves and so I think that point the firms are now actually taking this very seriously and thinking about how they can transform around that reality like it has become a reality it wasn't in 2023 and I think for a vast amount of 2024 it wasn't either yeah I guess it's you're in a good position as the arms dealer you're like well I'll just go to the law firm next door.

27:46They'll buy it.

27:48Winston Weinberg:I mean, I think, like, they are all, it's highly competitive, right? But this has already been happening where you're starting, like, this was happening way before Gen.AI, where you had these, like, Rainmaker partners that were basically, you know, they were, like, NBA players, like that level of salary, right? And so you already had kind of this pyramid system starting to go like this, right? And the top partners being able to grab as much business and market share as possible.

28:16Ellis:So correct me if I'm wrong, are you a first-time founder?

28:19Winston Weinberg:I am.

28:20Ellis:And correct me if I'm wrong, you were an associate for one year at a law firm. Yes. Is that right? Okay, so how do you convince all of these customers that you know what you're talking about?

28:30Winston Weinberg:Yeah. Do you know what you're talking about? Do I know what I'm talking about? Yeah, great question. I mean, in the beginning, it was you just have to spend so much time with them. And you speak, I do think it is helpful coming from the domain, right? Like just being able to speak their language and understanding, even going through law school is a little bit of a process, right? And we work with a lot of law schools right now actually. And there is some sort of universal bond that you get just through going through law school, even if you haven't practiced for a very long time. And that kind of makes you more familiar and you can get in there.

29:06Winston Weinberg:And then over time, I think you just build trust, right? Like you build, you sign a bunch of firms, they really love the product, the users start reaching out to you, you start to create a community and ecosystem, and you can build that. But I still get, there are so many comments on the internet about baby lawyer, like they call me a baby lawyer. So that definitely exists. Do you send them the valuation in response to that? I don't know if that would make me feel more or less of a baby lawyer. My point here is, I think you have to be very humble and go to them and say, I understand some of this industry.

29:41Winston Weinberg:I at least have the bones of this industry in me, but you have a lot more experience than I do. And I think at this point now, the thing that I can actually help them with is market data, right? So we have enough customers, both on the corporate side and the law firm side, that I at least know how the market is thinking about these things, including their clients, right? And so that builds tons and tons of trust. You're only three years old as a company, right? Yeah. But do you have any data on what employment hiring looks like at the firms you work with? Do they hire less? Do they hire more? Yeah, we don't have data on that yet.

30:18Winston Weinberg:And I don't think there has been a significant impact on hiring yet. Do you think there will be? My gut is there will be some hiring freezes. So I don't think that it will be cutting. It'll be some potential hiring freezes as they figure it out. I'm not sure if that'll be more on the law firm side or the in-house corporate side. I've definitely seen some of that on the corporate side. I've seen the reverse. I've seen corporates say, actually, what we're going to do is hire more people in-house, right, and send less work to outside counsel. So it really depends by organization. I love when the CO actually answers the question.

30:53You know, we ask AICO's that kind of question all the time, and it's very pie in the sky. Like, I love that you just answered that.

31:00Winston Weinberg:I mean, I think we'll just see. The one comment I will have for legal work is, you know, 50 years ago, 20 years ago, there were basically, like, no international mergers, right? So when you did a merger, it was normally, like, pretty local. There probably weren't that many documents in the data room, et cetera. Fast forward now, like, how many law firms do you think were involved and how many geographies were involved in the Microsoft Activision merger? Oh, God. I mean, just, like, hundreds of different parties. Yeah, a beak wedding for that. How many documents do you think were in that, right?

31:31Winston Weinberg:And so now let's fast forward and say that those two companies were going to merge in 10 years. What do the data rooms look like and how complex is that merge then? And so I think one thing that people don't think about with legal and professional services is most of it is actually cyclical with the economy. So there's bankruptcy and litigation, which is counter cyclical, but most of it is cyclical, which means as things get more complex and GDP goes up, you need more lawyers to support it. And so we'll see. Don't you need it when it goes down, too? Isn't it both? That's for bankruptcy and litigation.

32:08Winston Weinberg:You're going to be good no matter what, basically. Yeah, but I think that most law firms' revenue, the consistent revenue, comes from the transactional side, which does parallel the economy.

32:19Ellis:I know another angle of looking at teams and how they're changing. You talked about reducing burnout.

32:24Winston Weinberg:Yeah.

32:25Ellis:I know that's a very big debate right now, whether you call it Jevons paradox or something else that, you know, if you make a tool that makes people faster, they'll just do more work. I know the legal world is definitely known for its intense demands. How is it going to reduce burnout? Is it just going to mean people do more work or how are you thinking about that?

32:43Winston Weinberg:Yeah, so this is the thing I think I'm most excited for. And it's because I was a junior associate. I work, you know, when I was a junior associate, maybe I worked, I don't know, 70 hours a week, 60 hours, something like that. I work much more than that now. I'm way less burned out. It's like not even close. And so my point with this is I do not think that in 10 years lawyers are going to do less work. They'll work exactly the same hours. Like, I think that is completely nonsense. Like, that's not what's going to happen. But if they are doing work that they enjoy significantly more, they won't be as burnt out.

33:18Winston Weinberg:Like the main reason you have so much burnout in a lot of these professions is not just the hours, it's what you're doing. It's monotonous. Yeah, it's monotonous. That's like mostly what it is. And that's why you see, you know, in law school, a lot of law schools, you work just as hard as you do in big law. You don't burn out in law school though. And it's because it's much more exciting and you're learning new things and you're trying new things. And in a lot of law firms, it depends which law firm, it depends who your mentors are, you're doing things that are incredibly monotonous, right? And you do that as a discipline mechanism because at some point in 10 years, you're maybe going to go to trial, right?

33:54Winston Weinberg:And if you can go to trial in three years or something like that, I don't think you'll get as much burned out. You'll still work 60, 70 hours a week, 80 hours a week. So AI helps us just work more, but feel better about it? Yes. No, I think that's right. I work the same, but feel better about the work that we're doing. I strongly believe that's what will happen. Yeah.

34:14Ellis:So tell us more about the initiative with colleges, trying to get in early with the students. I have a very fond memory of getting my first MacBook that came with an iPod. Do you remember that when it was for like 18 year olds going to college for the first time? And then you become an Apple user for life, right? Yeah. Is that the idea here?

34:32Winston Weinberg:Whoa, whoa, whoa. So, well, aren't you happy that you got that computer? Oh, sure.

34:37Ellis:I'm not saying it's a bad strategy. Yeah.

34:39Winston Weinberg:So, yeah, we partner with a lot of law schools. I think that there's a couple reasons why we're doing that. One is everyone was using ChatGPT. I'm like, let's just be honest. Like, even if the law schools ban these things, like, they're still using ChatGPT on the side. So students are going to learn how to use AI. Like, they're going to figure it out, whether the school bans it or doesn't ban it.

35:00Ellis:You're saying law schools clearly is rampant.

35:02Winston Weinberg:Yeah, it's just like... What you need is me. My point here is they're going to use AI tools, right? And I think there were a lot of law schools in the beginning and they were banning these tools and things like that. And basically we decided to partner with them and say, here's a tool that's much more fitted, right? And it hallucinates significantly less. Here's a bunch, it has legal data, things like that, right? And I do, yes, part of the strategy is that they use that and they understand how to use it and then they get to a firm and they're used to using it or they get to a corporate or something like that.

35:33Winston Weinberg:But I also think it's just a really good experience to experiment with the product. Because what you do in law school is very different than what you do in practice. And one thing that I really am interested in building is if you have AI systems that can actually do a lot of work from start to finish You could turn them into training modules really fast And then you have basically like personalized law school training programs And that would be really interesting to me and you can think of the same thing for associates, too

35:59Ellis:I know there's been some skepticism online About the company and its capabilities. What have you learned from that experience even if it's just responding? Oh yeah, this was the Reddit thing or something? And you're like, here's my retention numbers. Yeah, yeah. Feast on this. Feast on this.

36:16Winston Weinberg:Yeah, I mean, that was maybe a good strategy, but then I also realized that our customer base probably isn't totally sure what the retention numbers mean. Or it's like, what is Reddit? Yeah, yeah. It is crazy how much perception of these things can kind of like spread. And I am not the most vocal founder. And I think that it's really important to make sure that you are like actually as the founder going out and telling your story and talking, I know this is going to work well for you, and going out there and saying the narrative for you and just being direct about what the statistics are, what the product usage look like, where are the problems, where have you made mistakes?

36:54Winston Weinberg:If you don't do that, someone's going to do it for you. And that's the main thing that I've learned.

36:57Ellis:I mean, as we're seeing in all sorts of realms, whether it's political or otherwise, I feel like people would so much rather you just be honest and if you make a mistake, apologize, than try and pretend that everything's perfect and hunky-dory and this and that?

37:11Winston Weinberg:And nothing is perfect. I mean, there's no way, like, any of these startups that are growing this fast, I mean, hey, if someone has this magically down and they don't feel like their company is at all times like going up and down and up and down and they're growing as fast as we are, like, congrats to them. They're the best in the world and that's awesome. It's really hard, right? And you do, like, we have made some product mistakes. I think in, like, 2023 we had some product mistakes. Our usage is incredible now. And I probably should have been a little bit more honest about some of the mistakes we made in the earlier years, instead of kind of just being like, our usage is amazing right now, right?

37:47Ellis:Yeah, it is funny. It's a blessing and a curse to have users that love you so deeply. And I speak from that from personal experience from the browser company years. You know, you build such a strong relationship with people. And when you make a decision this way or the other, all of a sudden the expectations are a lot different because you've been so transparent this whole time. So it definitely can bite you as well.

38:09Winston Weinberg:Yeah, the nice thing is like it's a plus and a negative where all of our users are very loud, which is awesome because I think it makes it so that you kind of have like a short-term moat of just because you have so many, you have hundreds and thousands of users and they're all being so loud with feedback, right? And it's just hard to like amass that amount of feedback from users. At the same time, you know, sometimes it's more the negative feedback than the positive feedback. And so it can feel like the usage numbers aren't the same as like the feedback you're getting.

38:37Ellis:Yeah, I haven't got to ask this. I keep forgetting to ask someone. So you're going to be the guy. Are you applying AI to all of the customer support, feedback, requests, this and that? I wonder like that's got to be getting dramatically better as a product company, right? Just when you can get through all that stuff and it isn't just keyword tagging or something like that.

38:54Winston Weinberg:We do tons of it internally, like a massive amount internally. Because one of the biggest problems is when you're shipping this quickly and you have enterprise clients, Enterprise clients have like extremely strict comms requirements of basically like how you, you can't just ship tons of things and not tell them about it. That is like not, they're going to get upset. You have versioning and all these different things. And so we found that doing the internal stuff helps a lot, but the external still is mostly like in-person and things like that.

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40:08Winston Weinberg:I'm pretty confident talking into a mic. Hey, I'm doing it right now. But home projects, I second guess everything. Is that noise normal? Is that water damage? And who should I even call?

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40:29Winston Weinberg:Instead of second-guessing or searching for hours, you get clarity and can hire the right pro with confidence.

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40:45Rumor is you're working on a mobile app. Is it going to be Android first? It is not going to be Android first. Tell us about it, then. Tell us about the mobile strategy. Yeah, great question.

40:56Winston Weinberg:Yeah, I already got the wrong answer. So the mobile strategy is actually pretty simple. A lot of partners, like the higher-ups, so our usage, actually 22 % of our users is partners, which is quite high. But I want that to be higher than it is. And mobile is just where most partners live. Actually, mobile and tablet. So tablet is incredibly popular among professional service providers. Not this one, but that one. Yeah, only that one. And so it's basically, there's a lot of functionality that you can do that's really interesting. So I'll give you an example. Some of the things that we process, it's not like chat-based.

41:32Winston Weinberg:It's basically I want to like ask a bunch of questions over millions of documents. That can take like 10 minutes, right, or a decent amount of time. And so if you can do something where you send that request, just like you'd be sending that request like an email to an associate to go do the task, and then Harvey does that task on the platform, and then you get an email back that says it's ready, and then you go on. even that is like a massive massive deal um just in terms of the communication and being able to send work uh you're probably getting sick uh of being asked about this but uh rappers so you you know you all are i think looked at as probably the preeminent example of a very good quote unquote rapper company that used to be derogatory yeah now i'm not sure now i feel like people have moved on from it rappers are hot like everyone's a rapper company and they're killing it um and so i'm wondering like what it was like going through that initial phase of like oh my god you're doing a wrapper to now yeah and what what shifted what changed yeah um i mean i think like the the main thing that started to happen at least for us so so one thing that happened internally uh for sure is almost like the vast majority of our enterprise clients have like enterprise gpt like chat gpt they have they have it or they have anthropic or they have something like that and they still use us, right?

42:48Winston Weinberg:And so I think that's partially what happened is a lot of the wrapper fear was it's just like a distribution problem. Like in other words, all these enterprises, because in the beginning, a lot of what enterprises did is they bought Azure instances and they made like Acme Corp chatbot, right? Like that's like what they did. They didn't actually buy from Anthropic or OpenAI. And so I think part of what happened is now that penetration is quite high and these apps are still very successful. And so I think that the Valiant investors and founders and everyone in the ecosystem discovered, wait, there are like moats that you can build here so far, right?

43:27Winston Weinberg:And I feel very confident that, you know, like our largest indirect competitors are the large language model providers, like 100%. And I think you should constantly think about your company as that. Like that's way, they're way more of competition long-term than anyone else. Yeah, do you worry about getting Sherlocked by OpenAI or Anthropic? 100%, and I think it is the best, Hygiene for an application layer company to have like I think If you are thinking that you are going to make some company bets that prepare you for that long term It's gonna make you maybe eat some short-term gains But it will help you long term and I'll give you an example of this as simple as we started our GTM strategy Going to like the largest firms and the largest enterprises the reason why is is partially, I strongly believe that if these systems get better, a lot of the lower-end legal work is going to get commoditized.

44:18Winston Weinberg:So if you build something for that, it's much easier for, you know, Chattruby to come in and just basically obliterate you, right? And so even simple, simple things like that, like that probably slowed down our revenue growth by a lot, right? But I think it's worth it because long-term. And there's a lot more bets that we've made that are like that, but I think you just constantly have to have that mindset. Is it a tricky balance though? because I feel like you probably talk to people at the labs all the time. I mean, you're a revenue source for them through their APIs. How does that song and dance go?

44:46Yeah, I mean... You probably get previews of new models. Like, how do you... We do, but... But then you're also like, oh, they may try to kill me one day.

44:54Winston Weinberg:Yeah, there's two levels to this, I think. So level one, which hopefully everyone is constantly thinking about, is in order to get value capture, my platform has to be X amount better than whatever you can get from them, right? So that's number one. Hopefully everyone is thinking that way long term. That's the easiest one. The easiest to think about. The second one is just assume that they're just going to directly go into your vertical. Just no matter what. Just assume that they're going to. How would you defend against that and on what time scale, right? And you can think like what are the advantages that they would have?

45:25Winston Weinberg:What would they build? How would they get mass distribution? Like all of these different things. And if you're thinking about that stuff long term, you might be giving up ground to some current competitors in the startup space, but long-term, you have just a much bigger moat against, I think, what actually matters.

45:43Ellis:I like the way that you framed it as layers, because I think there's more to it than we often think here in tech. I think as so many of us being tech-savvy and loving products and many engineers here, they're like, oh, if it's 5 % to 7 % better, I'm switching. But you forget that when you use something like ChatGPT, even if it's a custom one, not only have they maybe never reached out to your company to explain exactly how it maps to your use cases, but the user interface itself is also in the end kind of generic, right? And so I actually think there are a lot of opportunities, even if it's the wrapper layer, to really provide that solution, as it were, to the customer, the actual job to be done, which includes onboarding, which includes distribution, especially, I would think, for these companies that are not quite as tech savvy, right?

46:32Winston Weinberg:Oh, 100%. And the other problem for this is, like, even if you thought the best product ever was just chat GPT with all the correct sources, which I don't think it is, but pretend that that's what you did, how do they get all of the correct context? Like, if you think about how difficult it is to get all of the context for an M &A, it is all over the place. And so you have to build systems that, A, in the first place, can actually pull that context, and then, B, get the right answer. And the reality is a lot of the reasoning of getting the right answer isn't something the models just randomly will understand.

47:07Winston Weinberg:Because it's more like in the past we've agreed to these set of terms and in the future we'll agree to other ones, right? So there's a lot of market data and all of these other things. You told us before we got on that you don't want to get asked about AGI, so I'm not going to ask you about AGI. But as someone who is building your business on top of these LLMs and is obviously very much matters to you and your company where they go, how they trend. What do you expect to happen over the next year or so? What are the gains you're expecting to see? What are you excited about that Harvey can build on?

47:40Winston Weinberg:I want tool use to get really good. That's like the most important thing for us. I think of most of the problems that we need to solve as the product problem is how do you build the surface area for every single complex, like legal, tax, compliance use case. And then the AI problem is how do you orchestrate all of the tools together to get the right answer? The first part, I just don't need the models to get better to do. The second part, I do.

48:07Ellis:So I have another question about the future of these products. I know we often have best practices, you know, when it comes to the way that products look or are designed. How are you thinking about that, making it both powerful but also accessible in a way? Like, a lot of these folks are not using the new material expressive from, you know, Google on their new phone with all the colors and bounce and juice. We love that stuff. But that could be pretty scary to some of your customers.

48:33Winston Weinberg:Yeah, so I actually, I think that one of the traditional problems with like B2B versus B2C is B2B has usually not allowed for that much creativity. And so creative folks sometimes like don't want to do those things or they feel limited or like hamstrung. The reality is there aren't B2B companies anymore. There are AI companies. And because of that, I think customers are more willing to explore something different. And so you can be more creative with like, in a traditional industry where normally you'd have a UI that is very much like, it has to be this way, it has to be templated, et cetera. I think you can take more creative risk there because your customers are open to it.

49:18Ellis:So there's almost like a permission now with this step change. Yes, 100%.

49:21Winston Weinberg:Like everyone kind of has the energy of we can, everything's gonna change, right? And because of that kind of like entropy, you can get folks to be more on board with wild ideas. and even if that wild idea is like adding a little bit of color to a legal tool.

49:37Ellis:Speaking of wild ideas, with a few minutes we have left, I hear you like to interview candidates inside of Google Docs. Is that true? Shout out Google.

49:45Winston Weinberg:Somewhat. Yeah, I mean, very quick writing samples, like doing a written project back and forth is very, very helpful. And there's something about, I've definitely had folks that are very good at presenting things, and then once they get to writing it out and you guys are working on very direct questions in this Google Doc, things like that, it can break down. And what I've found is if they are very good at, here's a problem set. Whether I start with the document or they start with the document, comment in this, and then we just go live and start going back and forth, going back and forth, it actually is a very good indicator of how well we'd work together.

50:25Ellis:It's more so just doing the work. Correct. I mean, I guess you already see a lot of that in engineering.

50:30Winston Weinberg:You do see this and I think like one of the big problems with hiring in the other roles is there are folks that are really good at talking and they're just terrible at doing and To me what that's going to turn into is they ask for a billion one-on-one in strategy sessions And so why not start the interview process async? No, I'm serious Like do a lot of the meeting in person But then figure out how you'd work together async because I mostly work async right like with the ports that I work best with It's async right. That's how everyone moves quickly. Otherwise, we're gonna have 17 strategy meetings to like do anything Is that the way you, I mean, because I imagine your headcount's exploding right now, right?

51:03You're growing like crazy. Is that how you make sense of all of this as you're scaling? Yes, yeah.

51:07Winston Weinberg:I mean, I'm definitely a zero out slack every like 20 minutes person. But I...

51:13Ellis:I think your valuation just went down.

51:15Winston Weinberg:Yeah, yeah, maybe. Yeah, I'm not scaling. No, I actually, this is something I think you can scale much better. The reason, I mean, I'm sure there's a scale where you can't. But the reason I think this isn't as hard as people think it is, is if you are constantly paying attention to like most things that are going on at the company, all you're doing is going from yesterday to today. Like that's all the catch up that you have to do. And so it's very easy. You can read like the first two sentences and know exactly what's going to come next, right? If what you do instead is you completely ignore parts of the business and then you come back in after a month, it's just context overload.

51:56Winston Weinberg:It is impossible to get all of that information. And you basically have to rely on very good direct reports. And they are very good, but you're going to miss something. You're going to. And so I try to do a decent amount of just async reviewing and things like that.

52:11Ellis:Yeah, I know there's always a tendency with new founders to want to try and reinvent everything. Is there anything you're telling yourself, no, I can't touch this?

52:21Winston Weinberg:Yeah, I mean, one thing I definitely argue with my chief people officer about a lot is, I'm like, I should have more direct reports. That's trendy now, right? Yeah, it is. Yeah, and I think it's just a delicate balance, because what I find is, this is kind of like the question you asked earlier, which was best and worst advice. There are problems at the company that are best served by scale, Like disciplined scale. There are problems at the company that are best served by a Navy SEALs team, right? And figuring out what is the combination of both is super important. If you only do the scaling, you're just gonna lose.

53:02Winston Weinberg:It's too slow. If you do only the Navy SEALs, once you get to a certain level of revenue of folks, et cetera, it's just gonna be impossible to stay on top of and you're gonna not be able to scale. So the thing I'm trying to balance constantly, and I haven't figured out the best answer, to this is how do you combine the scaled system with the Navy SEAL system? And I think you do need both. Like I strongly strongly believe you need both.

53:24Ellis:Yeah, I've seen examples of it gone right and wrong, especially with over or under documentation in something like Slack. Have you created an etiquette? Are you threads people? How do you all do it?

53:39Winston Weinberg:We definitely have etiquette for like certain channels. We had a time when there was just like every single thing was put into like the company general channel and it was just like no one read anything.

53:50Ellis:It's kind of a sad moment when that general channel Oh my god. ends right? It's like ah. It is. There's gotta be a number. I don't know exactly what it is.

53:58Winston Weinberg:Yeah my guess is it's like 150 or something.

54:01Ellis:Oh we didn't have Slack back then. Oh yeah. We were not so lucky. Yeah.

54:05Winston Weinberg:We definitely, we run like everything through Slack. Like if I get in, I don't know, the emails are like the worst way to reach me on earth. And I think like our leadership team is really good at this, of just kind of like being on top of this too. We used to have like a Slack rankings, but we got rid of it, which was basically just like how many messages have you sent back and forth? But I think people were, including myself, were kind of rigging it, so we got rid of it.

54:28Ellis:You said you don't post a lot, but I feel like you do a good job repeating messaging from the company. Is that a conscious thing?

54:37Winston Weinberg:it's because I'm trying to do it better internally and so what I've found is the best comms strategy you can't it's almost impossible to have a different comms strategy internally than you do externally it's almost impossible or it seems very very difficult and so a lot of our comms going straight into my deck at this one thing that's that's I think been super helpful is repetition is something I'm bad at. Like, I'm just terrible at it. And if I am doing a poor enough job at it internally, there's no way I'm doing a good job of it externally, right? And so I think naturally by improving it internally, I've started doing it more externally, right?

55:19Winston Weinberg:And I think your internal is a very good bar where, again, if you are having trouble communicating something internally, like, you're screwed trying to do it externally.

55:26Ellis:And Alex is going to get the leak anyway, so. Yeah, yeah, it doesn't matter.

55:29Winston Weinberg:But that stuff I'm very much like, I'm much more, you can say whatever you want with these sort of things. It's like, if competition has your roadmap and you still can't win, you're screwed. I want to end kind of looking towards the future. So you are scaling very quickly in all these law firms. Right now it seems very focused on enabling lawyers. Is there ever a world where Harvey AIs are settling cases together? Are you thinking about that right now? So, yeah, the two things that we're thinking about are, this we're thinking about a little bit more, like we do a lot of work with the Singaporean Supreme Court.

56:09Winston Weinberg:And one of the things we do there is basically, if you are a citizen there, you can file a small claims with Harvey, right? And eventually you can imagine a world where both folks do that. And then it says, here, this is the likely chance of settlement. Would you both agree? And then you go forward, right? So that's something we're actively exploring. We'll see what happens with that. But if you think, this already happens with arbitration. That's what arbitration is. I saw this. Did the Arbitration Association, they're doing an AI arbitrator? They're thinking about this. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's basically like you're, as long as it's civil, right?

56:42Winston Weinberg:Like you both are just allowed to agree to this, right? And so that's how arbitration works. And so I think that's something that we're interested in. I think the other thing that's maybe happening a little bit faster is we're finding that our tool is starting to spread into other verticals that we haven't necessarily built it for, but just because the nature of legal work is similar to things like tax and compliance. And so a lot of our enterprise customers, they'll use us for legal, and then it just spreads to their tax and compliance teams because a lot of the work they do is pretty much exactly the same.

57:17Winston Weinberg:They just aren't technically a lawyer.

57:18Ellis:So new verticals for Harvey. Yes, yeah, definitely. I think my main takeaway is that we don't have the Terminator yet, but we do have the arbitrary. Exactly.

57:26Winston Weinberg:That'd be great. Perfect. Thank you so much,

57:28Ellis:Winston. Yeah, of course. Thank you guys. Thank you all.

57:30Winston Weinberg:Thank you.

57:33Ellis:Thanks to Winston for coming on the show. A reminder that we're off for Thanksgiving break. We'll be back the first week of December. We're also a new show, so please follow, like, subscribe everywhere you get your podcasts. You can also find us in video at AccessPod on YouTube. If you liked this episode, please leave a five-star review or thumbs up and And please share with all of your lovely lawyer friends. You can find my newsletter at sources.news. And you can find me at Hamburger on Twitter and at meaning.company. Access is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our producer is Shiraz Dume.

58:09Bye.

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58:52Ellis:The contractor said it's structurally unsound, but they're just being babies. But switching to Geico saved me hundreds, so my bank account is safe.

59:00Winston Weinberg:It feels good to save some hard-earned cash. It feels good to Geico.