Building a Team at AI Speed | Harvey’s Maggie Landers

20:03We're just not at that phase anymore. So I think that given that we're that in-between, which frankly, I love, and I know a lot of people love, where you've got this vision and strategy and leadership team that folks can learn a ton from, but you also aren't this big sort of behemoth that's working as a machine.

20:32Katie Kirsch:That's not for everybody. Some people want more structure. Some people want less structure. And I think that's okay. Our goal, especially on my team as a recruiting team, is to make sure the resort matches the brochure. We want people to basically get as close to life within Harvey during that interview process as possible for them to be able to make the call. Does this feel right? Does this feel exciting? Does this feel like, you know, this is the kind of work I want to do? This is the work that gets me excited? And if not, I think that's, we're doing our job also by showcasing, I think, what the role entails with a company is about and knowing that people are going to self-select in, they're going to self-select out.

21:23But yeah, I think that this, the industry and the stage and the size and the way of working is not for

21:38Katie Kirsch:everyone.

21:39Maggie Landers:Yeah, like I described as kind of you're in this in-between period. And so you're looking for other people who are down for that ride of taking a company from its teenage years all the way into adulthood and who have kind of passed the point where everything is scrappy and undefined, but not yet at the point where there's systems for everything. And so you need people who are willing to and excited about, you know, creating those more scalable systems. Totally.

22:06Katie Kirsch:That's absolutely right. And I also think that AI application layer companies in general are trying to transform industries. I think that we attract folks who have a certain customer centricity and an interest and a desire to sort of genuinely sort of reshape something like the legal industry. It is very tangible. We are very close to our customers. We start off every all hands with sort of a customer testimonial. It doesn't matter what team you're on. You're very, very connected to what our customers are trying to do. And we have so many lawyers or folks who are no longer practicing law, but once were within Harvey and all sorts of roles.

23:12Katie Kirsch:Of course, we have an internal legal team, but we also have applied legal researchers who sit in product. We have legal innovation partners who sort of liaise with various, you know, CIOs and the innovation community. We have our legal engineers and legal engineering product specialists who sit on the sales team. And so there's this like deep admiration and respect for the legal industry, for, you know, these law firms, for these in-house legal teams, what they're trying to do. And the folks at Harvey are genuinely looking to be part of transforming all of it. And I think that there are a lot of companies that, whether they're focused more on sort of the other layers of the stack, maybe purely, you know, building models themselves or, you know, infrastructure companies, etc., that have very cool technology but don't necessarily touch the customer in the same way.

24:16Katie Kirsch:I think it takes a certain person to be, I think certain folks are motivated to work on these customer problems. And that might look different at different places.

24:27Maggie Landers:Is that what in part inspired you to join Harvey? Or actually tell me about the story of you first hearing about Harvey and deciding to join.

24:36Katie Kirsch:I had been at my previous company for almost a decade. And I had gotten a call from a recruiter. he kind of laughed and basically said, I have the perfect role for you for two reasons. One being Katie, my boss, being probably one of the most sort of inspiring leaders in the people space. She's now taken on the COO role at Harvey. But I knew that her scope was very big and she was working across many different priorities and that I could learn a ton from her, not just in the recruiting or HR space, but just about business in general. And the other piece was what Harvey was doing in the legal industry, but also in AI.

25:24Katie Kirsch:I felt like it was a massive, a massive opportunity. And frankly, we have a very upmarket motion and we are super customer centric and AI transformation is more than just building a great product, but we have essentially this like heavy people motion where for all of our customers, we have essentially an army of go-to-market resources for them, both pre-sale and post-sale. And we had plans to get to 16 markets in a year. So the growth that was going to be required to sort of actualize our potential and essentially give our customers the attention they needed created a very unique recruiting challenge in terms of how quickly we were going to have to hyperscale across so many different markets and do it with a level of quality and care while maintaining a really high bar.

26:33Katie Kirsch:So the opportunity for impact in my role in particular was pretty unique. I knew what the growth plans were. The growth plans expanded quickly after I started. And I definitely wasn't sure it was possible. I wasn't sure we could pull it off. and I think that that's sort of the the story of Harvey you join and you're being asked to do something that you don't actually know is maybe whether or not it's like maybe possible or possible in that amount of time or possible at the level or quality and execution that you think you should be able to to operate but then you just do it you just do it we have a funny saying on our

27:27Maggie Landers:the new media team at A16Z, we always say, you can just do things. And you just got to do it. Someone's got to do it. And you just had to get in there, roll up your sleeves and figure it out. It sounds like that's what the role was, you know. Like Maggie, we think you can do it.

27:42Katie Kirsch:For sure. And also, we're going to help you do it. So that was a big part of it too. I think that in a head of recruiting role or a head of talent role, it's important how the leaders look at the function. It's important that they actually believe that it matters to go out to market and hire some of the best, you know, people in the industry. It's important that they believe that part of their job is doing that. It's not another team's job to just go out and bring folks in. And also, they were willing to resource it and staff it. I mean, that is a very important component of, I think, asking people to push themselves is to give them the resources and the support.

28:39Katie Kirsch:And we do that across the board. So my team went from, I want to say, about 16 to 80 folks in a year in order to support that growth. But if you look across other teams, whether it's engineering teams or product teams or marketing teams, I think that they would all agree that they're being given, you know, all the tools that they need in order to do what they need to do and build something great for our customers.

29:15Maggie Landers:And you're hiring hundreds of people right now. We are. What, how does that work? What teams are you hiring for? what roles. I want to hear about the interview process. Yeah.

29:29Katie Kirsch:We have over 400 jobs open right now, so I won't go into the specific roles, but we are hiring across every team. We are hiring pretty much across every region. We have added many new regions. We will continue to add some new regions. I won't share any today. But stay tuned. Stay tuned. The interview process definitely differs by team. The engineering loop looks very different than the SDR loop, as you would expect. I would say that the commonalities across the processes and different regions, we have a values interview for all candidates when they come on site. the values interviews structured around our three values.

30:23Katie Kirsch:So simplicity, decisiveness, and jobs not finished. It's an opportunity both to understand how people have worked in the past, but also give candidates the chance to like dig in and dive into our values and ask questions about what they mean and how they show up. And frankly, as we talked before about self-selection, think about is this the kind of environment where I want to work? And how they might approach scenarios that come up with those values in mind. Can you give me like a quick one-liner on each of these values and what you look for? Absolutely. So for decisiveness, Winston loves to say we don't take the square root of the weather.

31:07Katie Kirsch:What does that mean? What it basically means is we want to move fast. we'd rather make mistakes and learn than overanalyze and spend all this time pontificating on how is this going to go or what do you think of this thing or that thing it's almost about just being willing to build and put things out into the world and then react really quickly and so that is I think sort of the underlying value or mentality that drives our pace you can't operate at the pace we do and be, you know, completely afraid to make a mistake. You can't move at our pace and get, you know, 300 people to weigh in on every decision that you want to make.

32:00Katie Kirsch:It's not a consensus-driven place. It's really about people being able to take ownership and leverage and make those decisions and move forward and be able to own when they were the wrong decisions, but also understand that if we don't act, we're never going to move things forward. Simplicity, again, I think is one of the reasons why we are able to move fast, right? It goes hand in hand with the decisiveness, but let's not overbuild. Let's put something out into the world. Let's get feedback. Let's go from there. Let's make this simple. I think that those two in conjunction with this sort of jobs not finished mentality, which is really about the fact that kind of not just the work is never done, but that we have a sense of humility and openness to the ways that it could be done better or could have been done better.

33:03Katie Kirsch:I think those three things, hand in hand, create that environment I was describing to you about sort of the straight A student giving up some of the perfectionist tendencies. Yeah. Ultimately, for the satisfaction of being able to have this massive impact on the industry and frankly drive their career forward incredibly quickly. It also creates a real culture of discourse. I think that the ability to speak openly about mistakes, the ability to put things out in front of people before they're completely perfect, the ability to make a decision without all the necessary information, just doing the best that you can.

34:00is this sort of like hotbed for growth and learning.

34:08Katie Kirsch:It's not a place about sort of posturing and sharing, you know, all the things that you've done right. So, yeah, I think for folks who genuinely want to kind of go through this crash course of essentially like learning and growing and getting all this feedback and building a bunch of stuff and seeing what works and seeing what doesn't work and doing it with other people who are also just like kind of in the same boat.

34:42Katie Kirsch:It's pretty amazing. Yeah.

34:45Maggie Landers:Sounds like a very like iterative, let's experiment. Let's just see how it goes. You know, there's only, it goes back to what you said about you can't take the square root of weather. You just need to run with it, break it down, make decisions, learn by doing.

34:57Katie Kirsch:Yeah, most companies move out of that phase really quickly. And they're very afraid to make mistakes. And they slow things down and create a bunch of friction so that people can't move so fast. And I would say that we don't operate out of fear. Winston said recently in one of our co-founder AMAs that the thing that he wants to hold on to most as we grow is trust. And the trust that we have for our employees and frankly, the agency that we give folks to just run and execute without a lot of the policing and without a lot of the friction is what continues to allow us to hire the amazing folks that we do and move as quickly as we do and experiment the way that we do.

35:52And so people forget that we're only four years old, but we still have held onto that trust.

36:05Katie Kirsch:We still allow folks to have that level of agency and autonomy and the values enable it. They allow you to move quickly. They allow you to make mistakes. And without that, you know, I think that we would not be seeing the success that we have. Yeah.

36:25Maggie Landers:I love that it all comes down to trust. I have maybe one or two last questions. So one, you mentioned the team is opening up new locations. I won't pry. We'll have to wait to get the reveal on where you're opening up. But you already have offices here in San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Dallas, London, Dublin, Paris, Madrid, Milan, and many more. Correct. Which is crazy. Sydney, Singapore. Yep. I missed a few. Sydney, Singapore. It's wild. I probably missed a few too, but yes. Are all the offices different? Have you been to all of them? You're based in San Francisco. What is that office? You know, give me a sense of just the different locations and what that's looked like for your team.

37:06Katie Kirsch:I have not been to all of the offices. I plan to get to a few more this fall, but I've spent a lot of time. I'm based in our San Francisco office. I've spent a lot of time I'm in our New York office as well. I've been out to our London office. I would say that we do a great job of having sort of a core Harvey brand and vibe, but also each office feels distinct for that market. And not every office has a, like, the same mix of functions. So EPD, which is our engineering product design team, went from one location just in San Francisco about 18 months ago to four locations. So San Francisco, Toronto, New York, and Bengaluru, India are sort of the home of our four EPD hubs.

38:08Katie Kirsch:And those offices have that mix of EPD and go to market. A lot of the other global offices start out with our legal engineering function, some of our go-to-market function. And because lawyers practice law differently in different parts of the world and speak different languages, and as I mentioned, we do so much to sort of help our customers not just, you know, implement Harvey, but truly transform their organizations. Yeah. We want to make sure that the folks that are on the ground in those regions understand how law is practiced there. You know, they have experience working within that jurisdiction and speak the language, etc.

38:55Katie Kirsch:And so a lot of our growth has been around providing our customers with this amazing experience. And they take that knowledge and sort of the local nuances, and that definitely shapes sort of the differences in how the offices feel. But we have a great workplace team. We have a great real estate team. we tend to find the right spots. We tend to find great locations. We have beautiful spaces. And it's also important, I think, for our customers to know that, you know, they can come visit us and spend time with employees in like a beautiful space, typically near where a lot of law firms work. But there's more that we're going to continue to do and build out so that our customers can access us wherever they need to.

39:57Maggie Landers:And are there certain locations where you're hiring more aggressively than others? Or is it pretty spread across the board?

40:04Katie Kirsch:It's spread across the board. We tend to swarm new markets and do events and kind of go that extra mile early on when we're entering a new place to sort of deep dive with the talent there and sort of understand the landscape. But the founding teams are super important. I think we put these strong founding teams in place and then through referrals and great sort of leaders there, they tend to have this sort of flywheel effect in bringing a lot of great folks in.

40:39Maggie Landers:And you're based in the San Francisco office. Right. Tell me about the San Francisco office. Yeah. Do you work in there like five days a week? Is the team pretty hybrid?

40:48Katie Kirsch:We have a hybrid three-day-a-week policy, but I would say people are in typically more than that. It is very much tarot versus stick when it comes to that hybrid in-office policy. we are not a place that has to do policing in terms of how many days a week have you come in we have a an energy and I can speak for for the San Francisco office there is a buzz for sure in the office people are there they're collaborating it's a beautiful space to work in there's always something going on you're running into somebody in the hall you're asking a question somebody's like, oh, I forgot to tell you this thing or that thing.

41:41Katie Kirsch:You get a lot done. I think you learn from your team members. As I mentioned, so many people are new, and most people are frankly onboarding or ramping in some way. And so being able to sit next to somebody who's maybe six months ahead of you or four weeks ahead of you and ask questions is so important. I actually see people who tend to come in sort of more than those three days because they'd rather be in the office than working from home. Anything you want candidates to know? If you actually take a step back, transforming the legal industry is very different than trying to transform customer support or build an AI harness or create a model, even though we're now building some of our own models.

42:34Katie Kirsch:But So understanding what we are truly trying to achieve and how that is going to make your job different than working at Anthropic or at OpenAI or at Eleven Labs or at Sierra, I think is super important because it will be different. And so I think taking the time to actually think about that, what is unique about this industry? What is unique about the way law is practiced? How long it's been practiced for? The security requirements? You know, when we think about the fact that law is essentially like the basis of civilization as we know it and our aspirations to essentially transform this whole space.

43:22Katie Kirsch:Taking the time to think about it does, I believe, help folks start to differentiate some of these opportunities.

43:30Maggie Landers:So what I feel like I'm hearing is the thing you love to hear most from candidates is what about the legal industry gets you so fired up?

43:40Katie Kirsch:I think that's a big part of it. I also think that people are attracted to growth companies and they should be because it opens up a lot of opportunities. When a company is growing there, you just get more at-bats than if a company is shrinking or remaining flat. I think that what people should understand is that we are still a startup as well. And so what you're getting sort of while you're getting all these up, like while you're going to have all these at-bats, I think that, you know, people sometimes ask for processes that don't exist yet. And the right sort of mentality, I think, for Harvey is that passion to like be part of creating it and the ability to work through some of the what might be seen as noise and not get frustrated, but frankly, get like energized by it.

44:43Katie Kirsch:you can call it chaos. You can call it, you know, opportunities. I think that thinking about the kind of environment that you'd be, you know, excited to be a part of is super important. I think that there has to be a little bit of this sort of adventurous kind of maverick attitude. I think that like sort of managing the ambiguity is so, so kind of key and critical to being successful at Harvey.

45:17Maggie Landers:Yeah, you want, it sounds like you're looking for people you can pull into the trenches with you and who are excited to find their way through and that have a lot of resources and a lot of momentum behind them. But there's still these big questions that your company is asking and that you're looking for people who are eager to roll their sleeves to help you answer them.

45:40Katie Kirsch:Absolutely. Judgment's an important one as well. And it's hard because it's hard to assess and it's hard to measure. But I also think that when you're given agency and autonomy and opportunity for impact, and you're going to get a lot of at-bats because we do move relatively quickly, you have to have... that sort of spidey sense, right? You have to have good judgment. You have to have that like voice in the back of your head that's saying, hey, before I like press send on this thing, is there somebody who I should have like run through this with? Or, and it's not 10 people, right? It's like that perfect balance of, I'm not going to go out and ask for 20 people's feedback on this.

46:30Katie Kirsch:But like, who is the right person who should have seen this before I press send? Or is there like one spot check I want to do here before pushing this live? I think, again, hard to assess and hard to put your finger on it. But having that judgment in an environment that does move really quickly, where there is a lot of agency and autonomy, is kind of a critical part of success and also being able to maintain that trust.

47:05Maggie Landers:Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z podcast. If you liked this episode, be sure to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or review and share it with your friends and family. For more episodes, go to YouTube, Apple podcasts, and Spotify. Follow us on X at A16Z and subscribe to our sub stack at A16Z.substack.com. Thanks again for listening and I'll see you in the next episode. As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund.

47:44Maggie Landers:Please note that A16Z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the companies discussed in this podcast. For more details, including a link to our investments, please see A16Z.com forward slash disclosures. Thank you.