In short
How Legora’s CTO (Jacob Lauritzen) uses AI tooling and “agent” workflows to accelerate enterprise software delivery, while managing new bottlenecks (product work, review, security) and risks (AI-generated vulnerabilities, token maxing).
Guest background
Jacob Lauritzen is CTO at Legora, an enterprise legal-tech company. Legora reportedly reached $100M ARR in 18 months and targets $250–$300M this year. He focuses on engineering org design, developer experience, AI agents, and enterprise rollout.
Key claims
AI makes code writing “super cheap,” shifting bottlenecks to code review and especially product synthesis. Legora uses AI code review bots and expects engineers’ jobs to move toward systems architecture and agent “meta-engineering” (guardrails, loops, experimentation). They still review every human PR for security. Token “maxing” is criticized; reward output/efficiency, not token usage.
Notable examples
AI incident/postmortem agents; an internal “Canada-to-Sweden” migration app built via vibe coding in ~1 day; AI-driven local dev setup with concurrent agents; fair queuing for large batch workloads (10k vs 100k cells).
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VODeveloper Salary and AI Tooling
0:00 to 0:27
Discusses the opportunity cost of spending on AI tooling for developers.
“What percent of developer salary would you be willing to spend on AI tooling for them?”
Developer Salary and AI Tooling
0:59 to 1:51
Discusses the opportunity cost of spending on AI tooling for developers.
“But before we dive into the show today, you know what's wild?”
Developer Salary and AI Tooling
2:29 to 4:27
Discusses the opportunity cost of spending on AI tooling for developers.
“That means faster resolutions, more consistent support, and just better experiences for every customer.”
The Unique Experience at Legora
4:27 to 4:50
Jacob shares insights about working at Legora and its engineering org.
Building Teams in a Changing Landscape
4:50 to 6:04
Discusses the differences in building teams and products in 2026 compared to prior years.
“I just have to be really, really humble about it.”
The Bottleneck in Software Development
6:04 to 8:13
Explores the shift in bottlenecks from code writing to review and product work efficiency.
“If we unpack that, why is it through the roof?”
AI's Impact on Code Review and Generation
8:13 to 10:59
Examines the role of AI in code review and the future of engineering roles.
“is constantly what's the bottleneck to our velocity?”
Security Concerns with AI-Generated Code
10:59 to 13:23
Jacob talks about the security threats posed by AI-generated code and the need for human review.
“I spend a lot of time with Jason Lamkin and Anjali Mitter, who's amazing.”
Process Changes Due to AI
13:23 to 14:00
Jacob discusses how AI has transformed processes like postmortems and PM prototyping.
“I definitely don't think we're there yet.”
Efficient Postmortems and Prototyping
14:00 to 14:55
Learn how AI enhances postmortems and rapid prototyping in software development.
“Actually, postmortems is a great example.”
Show all 36 chapters
Rethinking Design Stages
14:56 to 15:38
Explore the evolving role of design in software development with rapid prototyping.
“to something that actually fits in the system and is super reliable.”
The Impact of Taste in Tech
15:39 to 17:21
Discuss the significance of taste in tech products and how it shapes identity.
“But it's more for consistency, UX, UI sake, and for taste sake rather than functionality.”
Product Value in a Competitive Space
17:22 to 18:36
Understand how to maintain product value amidst rapid competition and imitation.
“You're in a very competitive space and by the way, people can copy you very quickly.”
Balancing Speed of Development and User Adoption
18:37 to 19:28
Investigate the disparity between AI development speed and user adoption.
“there's the speed of AI, there's the speed of our product, and then there's the speed of humans.”
Vibe Coding and Internal Tool Development
19:29 to 21:14
Learn how vibe coding facilitates internal tool creation for improved efficiency.
“we're a little away from that because there's other high priority things, but I think an email client is where our lawyers sit a lot.”
Deciding Between Custom vs. Off-the-Shelf Solutions
21:15 to 22:16
Discover how to choose between building custom systems and using off-the-shelf products.
“my chief of staff took three weeks off and basically VibeCoded Cooper and we replaced Cooper and it works and it's brilliant.”
The Evolving Role of Product Managers
22:17 to 24:05
Examine how the role of product managers is changing with AI integration in teams.
“engineering, which is kind of always what PMs did and did best.”
Continuous Learning in the Tech Landscape
24:06 to 24:58
Understand the importance of adaptability and continuous learning in tech careers.
“What would you advise me to be best placed in the next three to 10 years?”
Model Quality and Product Reliability
24:59 to 26:13
Explore how the quality of underlying models affects product reliability and user choice.
“And every time the models become better, our product becomes better, our agent becomes better.”
The Future of Open Source and Model Efficiency
26:14 to 28:00
Discuss the implications of open source models and future trends in AI efficiency.
“I think open source is having a great moment.”
Current Architecture and Future Needs
28:00 to 28:28
Discussion on the limitations of current AI architecture and the potential for new innovations.
“One thing is just like the current architecture.”
The Rise of Internal AI Systems
28:29 to 29:38
Exploration of the importance of AI roles within enterprises and the need for efficiency.
“I think the internal AI systems role thingy for enterprises.”
Hiring and Team Dynamics
29:39 to 30:48
Insights on hiring strategies and the importance of team size for productivity.
“I consistently underestimated how many people we need to be.”
Enhancing Developer Experience
30:49 to 31:48
Discussion on the role of developer experience teams and their impact on efficiency.
“And they are making everyone's life so good.”
Regional Differences in Hiring
31:49 to 33:09
Comparative analysis of hiring practices and candidate expectations in Europe versus the US.
“But then, you know, the productivity of each engineer to Nexus, say.”
Token Economy in AI Usage
33:10 to 34:49
Advice on managing token usage in AI to enhance efficiency without waste.
“So that's been a little bit difficult for us, right?”
Scaling for Future Growth
34:50 to 36:42
Insights into scaling challenges and the necessity of preparing for significant growth.
“Okay, because you think now that they're tied to X?”
Leadership and Problem Solving
36:43 to 38:54
Discussion on the qualities of effective leadership and the importance of adaptability.
“It doesn't always have to change, but there are certain limits that you often will put in place.”
Collaboration in Engineering Teams
38:55 to 40:45
The importance of close collaboration among engineering teams for efficiency.
“I've told both of them when I hired, if there comes a day when I think you'll do better than I will, then we swap or I do something else.”
Acquisition and Talent Integration
40:46 to 42:01
Insights into acquiring companies and integrating talent effectively.
“How many engineers were you having two years or by the end of 2027?”
Building a Cohesive Engineering Team
42:01 to 44:18
Learn about the integration challenges and strategies in small engineering teams.
“they're able to attract really good talent.”
Hiring Challenges and Management Insights
44:19 to 48:26
Discover the complexities of hiring senior management and the importance of technical leadership.
“And what I mean by that is like, you know, one of my dear friends, Jason Lemkin, from Stashy.”
Future Competitiveness in Tech
48:27 to 50:24
Understand the mindset required for startups to compete against larger corporations.
“What sports team would you most like to see a Ligora across?”
Final Thoughts and Revenue Predictions
50:25 to 50:58
Reflect on the conversation and discuss future revenue expectations.
“What are we going to end the year at revenue wise?”
Final Thoughts and Revenue Predictions
51:52 to 52:18
Reflect on the conversation and discuss future revenue expectations.
“As AI agents become more common in customer experience, teams often end up juggling multiple silo tools for every job.”
Final Thoughts and Revenue Predictions
52:24 to 52:55
Reflect on the conversation and discuss future revenue expectations.
“That means faster resolutions, more consistent support, and just better experiences for every customer.”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00What percent of developer salary would you be willing to spend on AI tooling for them? I don't want to say infinite, but for me, it's a question of opportunity cost. We're in a competitive environment. So many things that we can do. The cost of not doing it is extremely high and it almost outweighs any sort of token cost. Honestly, just work harder than the 800 pound gorilla. People underestimate this. Like no one in the 800 pound gorilla is extremely excited to be there.
0:27Jacob Lauritzen:This is 20 Product with me, Harry Stebbings. Now, I'm so excited to welcome Jacob Luritson, CTO at Lagora, to the show today. Lagora is the fastest growing enterprise company in history. They hit 100 million in ARR in just 18 months. They're going to finish this year at 250 to 300 million. I'm pushing them to do 300 million because, hey, I'm an investor and it's easy to throw peanuts from the side. But Jacob is one of the best product minds I've had on the show, specifically from the last crop of product leaders in this AI generation. Time to get the notebooks out. It goes quite deep into some pretty granular technical aspects, but this is a must listen.
1:04Jacob Lauritzen:But before we dive into the show today, you know what's wild? We have AI superpowers now, yet so many product teams are still flying blind. Buried in spreadsheets, chasing feedback across 10 different tools, Jira Product Discovery fixes that. I've spoken with hundreds of product leaders, and the best teams all do one thing differently. They build a system to capture ideas, validate them with real data, and focus their roadmap on the right things. Well, that's why product teams at Canva, Deliveroo, Toast, and Decathlon use Jira Product Discovery. It pulls ideas and feedback into one place with built-in tools to prioritize what will have the biggest impact.
1:41Jacob Lauritzen:That's when a roadmap stops being an endless list of ideas and becomes a plan people actually believe in. Join more than 25 ,000 teams already using Jira Product Discovery. Head to Atlassian.com forward slash Harry and start building the right thing today. While Jira product discovery turns feedback into priorities, Finn turns questions into instant answers. As AI agents become more common in customer experience, teams often end up juggling multiple silo tools for every job. Well, Finn was built to change that. It's a single unified agent that works across your entire customer experience, from service to sales to success and beyond.
2:19Jacob Lauritzen:Finn is the agent making perfect customer experiences possible for thousands of customers. It's powered by custom models, trained on years of real customer interactions, so it understands the nuance and complexity of customer service better than any other agent. That means faster resolutions, more consistent support, and just better experiences for every customer. It's also designed to be fully self-manageable, so you can easily improve and adapt it as your business evolves. No third parties required. Leading companies like Gamma, Asana, DoorDash, and Crypto.com already use and love Fin to deliver better customer experiences.
2:54Jacob Lauritzen:So see what Finn can do for your team at fin.ai forward slash 20VC. While Finn helps answer the customer, Framer helps impress the next one. You know that moment when marketing wants a landing page, design mocks it up, and engineering says, yeah, we'll get to it. Thousands of businesses from early stage startups to Fortune 500s are choosing to build their websites in Framer, where changes take minutes instead of days to solve this very problem. Framer is an enterprise-grade no-code website builder that works like your team's favorite design tool, and it's used by companies like Perplexity, Miro, Mixpanel to move faster.
3:32Jacob Lauritzen:Designers and marketers can fully own the site with real-time collaboration, a robust CMS built for SEO, and advanced analytics that include integrated A-B testing, so you're not just shipping pages, but you're maximizing what works. And when you're ready to ship, changes go live in seconds with one click, publish without relying on engineering. Plus, Framer is built for scale with premium hosting, enterprise-grade security, and 99.99 % uptime SLAs. Whether you want to launch a new site, test a few landing pages, or migrate your full.com, Framer has programs for startups, scale-ups, and large enterprises to make going from idea to live site fast.
4:13Jacob Lauritzen:Learn how you can get more out of your.com from a Framer specialist, or get started building for free today at framer.com slash 20vc for 30 % off 30 % off a framer pro annual plan that's framer.com slash 20vc for 30 % off framer.com slash 20vc rules and restrictions may apply you have now arrived at your destination jake dude i am so excited for this i think max is one of the most do you know i think it takes a psychopath to no one and he's like fuck you harry already but he's just exceptional i know the bar of talent that he has and so i know that this show is going to be amazing so first thank you so much for joining me yeah of course thanks for having me now we were just chatting and you said lagora is the first kind of big company or like company of this size that you've worked at and i was thinking is that a blessing or is that a curse How do you think about that?
5:13I'd like to think that it's a blessing. I just have to be really, really humble about it. So essentially, I don't have any priors coming into how to build an engineering org. Building an engineering org in 2026 is very different from doing it in 2024, maybe even. And so I think in that way, it's really good that I come in naive and I'm like, okay, let's try to do it this way. And if it doesn't work, we keep iterating, just like we keep iterating on our product. We keep iterating on sort of our organization and our processes. and I just work with the team. Like what's working well, what's not working well?
5:43How do we solve that? Just like any other problem. Dude, how is it different building a team in and your product in 2026 versus 2024 and years prior? Everything's just changing all the time right now. You know, productivity is through the roof. Processes are up in the air. You can be huge teams. You can be tiny teams. Productivity is through the roof. Yeah. If we unpack that, why is it through the roof? Well, just AI tooling. It's simply like, what do we use internally? It's Cloud Code. It's Cursor. Use both? Those two are competing. Yeah, yeah. Because everyone's like run from Cursor whenever I interview them.
6:18Yeah, yeah. So you still have Cursor users? We still have Cursor users. The Cursor harness is quite good. You know, there's some personality differences on our team, but a lot of people still use Cursor. Some use Cloud Code. Some use Pi. Because Cloud Code harness is annoying sometimes. We allow people to do both. Okay, and so we have like efficiency gains there. And so we just ship more? We ship more. we ship faster, we debug things faster, we iterate faster. Everything is faster now. And each engineer can produce much more than they could previously. And that just has a ton of ripple on effects throughout the org, basically, and how you structure it.
6:51Because, I mean, I think a way I like to think about it is when you build software, there's kind of like three phases. There's phase one, which is the product work. You know, what are we building? Translate user pain, user dreams, nightmares into something tangible that we can try and we can iterate on and we can figure out of it works. And once you have that, you know sort of what you want to build. Then you built it, you write the code, and then you review the code and you merge it and you get it going. And number two was the primary bottleneck for the past 100 years almost. So like the rate limiter was how quickly can you write code.
7:23That is now super cheap. So that's sort of been compressed. And so the bottleneck now is like the two other ends, which is review. How can we do that much more efficiently? And then it's how can we actually do the product piece much more efficiently? because if you believe that code is cheaper to write, then naturally the two other things are bottlenecks. And that means one of the focus areas is how do we do the product work as efficiently as possible? How do you think about that then? That's a great question. Part of that is how do we make our PMs as efficient as possible? How do we sort of take all the working with clients, synthesizing what they think, our own strategic priorities, our own tastes and opinions of our vision of where our product is going, How do we make them do that as efficiently as possible and hand that over to engineers as efficiently as possible?
8:09I'm not sure if I've solved that yet, but I do think it's like, that's the way that I'm thinking about it is constantly what's the bottleneck to our velocity? And then we try to solve that. You said about the kind of review being one element of it that could be a bottleneck. Do we see AI code review becoming the dominant source of review and does that then remove it as a bottleneck? I think so. I think that's one of the solutions. We do AI code review today and it's in its nascent phase. It's like when I was fat when I was young. My mother used to just say I was big boned. Okay, yeah, exactly.
8:40It's like, no, you just ate all the Maltesers, huh? It's in its nascent phases, sweet. Yeah, that's the nice. Yeah, rough edges still. But no, I think that's right. I think that's part of it is we have AI review bots. You can have like security review. You can have different specialized reviewers. They do tons of review and they sort of iterate with the AI coder. And it's like kind of weird because you see this pattern where it's like agents fighting each other until they arrive at something. But even then, I think current review tools are not good enough. I think we need something new. I keep telling people at all events that I'm at, like, if you're going to do a startup, please do something that solves the review thing.
9:16Because no one wants to look at all the lines of code. What's important is, what's the impact on systems architecture? What's the impact on systems design, stability, security boundaries? How does it sort of take our system in the right direction? That's the kind of stuff that you want to review. and if that doesn't change, then maybe you don't have to review it at all. Just unleash the agent. But if it does, if there are some strategic trade-offs, then you want a human to be like, yeah, this is the right direction to take. Is that the future of engineering being systems design, systems architecture, and then bluntly code creation, code maintenance is actually completely done by AI?
9:50Yeah, I think so. I think so. I think that's right. The job of an engineer is changing from typing a bunch of code to sort of one layer above it, which is what does the system look like? And then you can have AI running around inside each of the pieces of the system, but you sort of have engineers thinking about the higher level one abstraction above, which is like, what does the system look like? What are the bets we're making in different places? Do we want to invest into doing something here that we can reuse a bunch of places over here and it's going to make everything much more stable? That's one of them.
10:18I think the other thing that engineers are doing more and more, which is an explicit role with us soon, which is like kind of the meta-engineering of making agents really effective. So you know how you have developer experience teams that they might help write custom linting or custom developer setups to make developers efficient? We kind of need to have the same team for agents. Like how do we make agents really, really effective? How do we make sure that we can enable agents to independently self-improve the system? Can we gather data in a really good way so that we can just unleash agents and say, hey, increase conversion rate on my e-commerce store?
10:51And it can just like go and run experiments. That sort of setting up the loop so agents can just like run and optimize, I think that's going to be the actual job of a lot of engineers. How do you think we do that? I spend a lot of time with Jason Lamkin and Anjali Mitter, who's amazing. But they both told me that fundamentally, in a world where agents are the pickers of software, the API quality that we have is the core determinant of what agents will choose software based upon. How do you think about how we make agents more effective? Is it a simple question there of data and making sure we're the best at that?
11:23How do you think about that? We have to set up the guardrails really effectively. This is actually something that I'm thinking about right now. So our code base is starting to get large. Happens. It's a good problem to have. We're starting to be a lot of engineers. We're also starting to be a lot of agents that are working on this together. And so you start to think about how can I mechanistically enforce the system to behave a certain way. And so I'll try to give an example here, which is you can have custom rules, for example, which is like the agent tries to do something and we tell it, no, you can't do that.
11:50There's like, for whatever reason, you can't do that because we want the system to be in this way. And I think that type of guardrail setting will see everywhere. And so if you're a big enterprise and you're rolling out AI tooling and you have agents that build your own internal software, you have AI tools that build your HRAS system and your ATS system and whatever else, you probably have some engineers that are just setting up the, like, this is where you get the data, this is what you can do, this is what you can't do, and then you can just let agents run amok inside of that system, basically.
12:20You mentioned the expansion of the Lagor code base today. What percent of code created today is AI generated versus human generated? Actually, I took a look recently and it's Claude and Cursor on the top. And there's like, I think it's like 2 % between them. So they are really, really close. And then it's miles above the next engineer. So they're way above 50%. Do you worry that we will see a next generation of security threat with the amount of AI generated code that bluntly opens vulnerabilities we didn't know we had? Yes, absolutely. This is very top of mind for me. And that's why we still at Legora and probably in a bunch of other enterprise software, we still review human PRs, every single one, just because we have to be sure.
13:04I think that's inefficient. I want to get some risk scores in there and change that so that we can run really fast. But fundamentally, I think you're right. I think red actors are extremely efficient now, which means they can try so many different things and they can keep running at it. And so we need just as good defense. and I'm not sure if we're there yet. I definitely don't think we're there yet. No. Which is why we see so many hacks. And so whenever I see the hack on Twitter, I'm like, oh, poor. And their weekend is thoroughly ruined. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I had a security incident. Oh, not me.
13:36One of our vendors had a security incident just yesterday. We just rotated a lot. I mean, just to be clear, this internally doesn't affect any of our clients or anything like that, but it's just, I think we're going to see more of them. Yeah, yeah, no, I totally get that. I interrupted you when we spoke about the efficiencies earlier that comes with AI. You mentioned the second was the processes that change. How do processes change, be it PRs, be it postmortems? Actually, postmortems is a great example. We run them really efficiently now. It's great. If you have an incident, now you just unleash an SRE agent, an incident agent, and it will just super quickly figure out what's going on, look at all the logs, look at all the metrics, telemetry, and it's really, really good.
14:16And so instead of having a bunch of ingenious wake up in the middle of the night, you still have some waking up in the middle of the night, but they are really well equipped. And the postmodern basically almost writes itself as well. So that's actually a great example of something that we can run really efficiently. But I think more broader in sort of the software development lifecycle with AI, PMs can prototype super, super fast, which is really, really great because that means you can front load a lot of the work. So like a PM can start hyper long before once he or she has the smallest inkling of an idea that we might want to do this.
14:46They can prototype it, and they can just go to users. They can test it, and they can iterate themselves. They don't even need to bring in engineering until they have something that's clearly super valuable. And then we can switch, and we can say, okay, now we take this from prototype to something that actually fits in the system and is super reliable. Do we skip the design stage in a world where prototyping and getting to V1 is so much easier? Yeah, that's a great question. Probably some companies will skip the design phase. I think we can skip the design phase on functionality. You don't need to necessarily have this long discussion where you said 10 people need to figure out where should the button be.
15:21I do think design still has a place, but it's one level above the individual features and the individual stuff that we build. It's the design language that we choose to have. It's the taste. It's the opinionated stance we have of who we are and what does the gore look like. What's the navigation? What's the hierarchy? But it's more for consistency, UX, UI sake, and for taste sake rather than functionality. Do you still use Figma today? We still use Figma, yes. I know where you're going with this. I think as soon as you start building a system that's larger than something very small, you want consistency and you want to have a design language and all that kind of stuff.
16:00And so you need somewhere to store what your button looks like and what your pages look like and what's this and what's that. And for us, that's Figma and it works great for it. Do you think that's the case moving forward? I don't mean anything against Figma, but it's like that's like a storage feature. Yeah, no, exactly. It could be something else. Yeah, you're right. Then the question is, is it faster for designers to take a prototype to something really crisp in Figma versus prototyping? We mentioned the wonderful word earlier. It's like the word of the moment, which is taste. Taste is what separates us.
16:30How do you think about the, don't worry, taste is what the differentiator will be? Is that true? Or is that bluntly Silicon Valley and tech BS that's trying to protect us? I think taste is important. There's different flavors to taste, fun intended. It depends on what you mean with taste. I think, you know, in tech, taste is like we have an opinionated stance on something. I think if you don't have taste, then you let AI slop converge to sort of grayness and everything looks the same and everything's just like, you need to have taste to have sort of an opinionated stance in the world. This is who we are, this is what we do, and we don't do these other things.
17:08And that's not for everyone. I think to me, that's what taste means. It's like, this is who I am. This is who we are. And some of you are going to hate it. And that's okay. Because you need to have some edges. You know, if you're just like letting AI rip, you're going to look the same as everyone else. When the cost of copying is quicker than ever, does that change how you think about product? You're in a very competitive space and by the way, people can copy you very quickly. Does that change how you think about product? No, not really. The important thing for us is that we're building something that our clients get a lot of value out of.
17:39and we build that as fast as we can, but we don't build it faster than that. There are tons of people that are vibe coding. There's people that are vibe coding Legora. There's people that are vibe coding Salesforce and Docsign and other companies. It's very quick to get to the 90 % where it looks the same and in 80 % of the cases, it works similarly. It's the other 90 % that are difficult. It's ensuring all the edge cases work and all the unhappy paths and all the audit locking and all the RBAC and all the weird scenarios that you end up at at a certain scale. that's what's difficult so no we just we keep focused on how do we create the most value for our clients and sprint towards that as fast as humanly possible my girlfriend is a lawyer and wonderful but they're not the fastest in terms of adoption and usage I'm gonna get in huge trouble for saying that I was not talking about her I was talking about the legal profession you can build products so much faster than your customer can consume it yes how do you think about that that's a great question we have this notion internally that there's the speed of AI, there's the speed of our product, and then there's the speed of humans.
18:43And they're not the same necessarily. I think that's part, honestly, of the beauty of what we're doing is that we're translating the immense speed of AI development into a user base that's been historically underserved. We're sort of taking them along for the ride. Sometimes it can be frustrating, but it's also really rewarding that we can actually take this huge base of people and we can really change the way that they work and their efficiency and their productivity and we can remove buttloads of awful work that they've spent their time doing and focus on the more strategic, more important work.
19:19What have you not done that you wish you had done? An email client would have been really cool. I would have loved to build that. I vibe code one just for fun. We're probably a few ways, you know, we're a little away from that because there's other high priority things, but I think an email client is where our lawyers sit a lot. Do you vibe code internally within Lagora for customer presentations, for you name it? Constantly. Is that the future of enterprises or is that bluntly Lagora at the very precipice of innovation? It will be the future. I don't know when, but it will be the future. I think there's like...
19:50And just so we understand, like, what does that mean? You build sites for Slaughter and May so you can pitch to them and Clifford Chance so you can pitch to them? No, but it's way broader than that. it's like we have a team now that's internally at enablement which is just like reimagining you know again from first principles with all the stuff that we have today if you're building the most efficient company to go from let's say 200 to a thousand employees what does that look like and that means obviously you know cloud co-work and similar things for everyone but it's also like can we just build a bunch of the tools that we need ourselves can we just vibe code a bunch of the tools can we vibe code our hr system can we vibe code our talent acquisition system can we vibe code our payroll system.
20:31Like so many things where tools exist out there, but you always need to customize them so much and they always basically never really work. And we just built them now because it's so cheap to build. What have you been able to vibe code away? Well, we've added a bunch of things that are additional or additions to vibe coding. So a great, really stupid example is Ryan, who joined from Canada. We have a team of people joining from Canada. They're all moving to Sweden. And he vibe coded an app to help everyone migrate. So very specifically, if you're Canadian, and these are like all the laws and all the steps you take.
21:00And there's like, it's interactive and you can see how far you've made it. And it's awesome. And it took, I don't know, a day to VibeCode and it saved so much time for an entire team. So it's like, you can build the big systems, but even just all the small ones that you can build really add up. I was with a friend who's a public company CEO the other day and he was like, you know, my chief of staff took three weeks off and basically VibeCoded Cooper and we replaced Cooper and it works and it's brilliant. What do you say to people who are like, that's ridiculous. why would you ever bother vibe coding and taking months to do an hr system when you could just buy it off the shelf it really depends on the system let's say there's two axes to systems there's there's the the horizontal one which is like how big is your product surface area and there's the the vertical one like how complex is it so if you're deep you're essentially your surface area it looks quite similar it's a simple app but it's just a lot of complex stuff it hides away a lot of complexity to the user.
21:55And there's the other one, which is your very shallow app, which is like tons of things you can do, but there's not that much complexity. If it's a shallow app and it requires a lot of customization from you, maybe you just build it. That's probably actually the right thing to do. If it's a very deep one, there's just too much stuff for you to build and it's not viable for you to do. We mentioned PMs and their proximity to customers and then that delivery mechanism back to engineering, which is kind of always what PMs did and did best. Does the role of the PM change? in the next few years? Yes and no.
22:27I think there are certain people that are, or a lot of people are saying that product and engineering are converging. It's becoming one thing. It's like one person can do the product work and build the system and ship it and everything. And I think for some companies, that's true. I think for companies where you really need PMs, it's not true, or it can be true, but it's inefficient. And I'll tell you why. So we were talking about product, you do the product work first, the scoping, and then you build it and then you ship it and you review it. In a company like Legora, we're always focused on the bottleneck and the bottleneck is no longer coding, which means the bottleneck is the product work.
23:02And so you don't want your product people to do engineering because the opportunity cost of that is really high because what you really want them to do is the product work. Talking to customers, figuring out, doing the synthesis, that's the bottleneck. So if your PMs are coding a lot, if they're spending 50 % of their time coding, we're missing out on so much product work. So that's how I think about it right now. And for certain companies, if you're doing developer tooling or doing consumer where engineers intrinsically have a good sense for their own or there are their own clients, you maybe don't need a PM at all because like you haven't needed a PM before AI either there.
23:32So I don't think that changes with and without AI. PMs can now do engineering that changes with AI, but it's not always efficient to do it. It's like a matter of opportunity cost. There's handover cost, which is if I do all the product work and then I give a PRD and I give it to an engineer, then you lose efficiency there. it's good if PMs do some amount of vibe coding to show very high fidelity, here's a prototype, this is exactly what it looks like. To reduce the handover cost. Exactly, yeah, exactly. But they shouldn't spend a lot of their time engineering because if they just focus on actual engineering, we lose out on the product work.
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24:04I'm your little brother coming out of CS at university. What would you advise me to be best placed
24:10Jacob Lauritzen:in the next three to 10 years? So if I were to advise someone on social media marketing, I'd say, hey, you need to be full stack. You need to be able to create the image, get it out, and amplify. Similar thing, I think actually the most important thing is you need to learn how to learn. You need to figure out how you constantly reinvent yourself and keep learning and improve. Because things change all the time right now. It's every week there's something new you should be doing. You need to change your way of working or whatever. The most important thing that you can do for yourself is figure out how you keep at the forefront of what's happening all the time.
24:47And if you can do that, if you're adaptable enough and you are ambitious enough, then the rest kind of works out. Because if you can just learn faster than everyone else, then, you know, over time, you win. To what extent does the quality of Legora as a product depend on the quality of the underlying models? Much less than most people think. The value of Legora is there's so much more around it, whether it's like the primitives that make sense for legal, that make it more efficient to work with AI, or it's all the enterprise-y features or the optimal routing between models. We wouldn't exist without the models.
25:21And every time the models become better, our product becomes better, our agent becomes better. But let's say you took away a model from Ligora, people would still pick Ligora. So they don't buy it based on the model. How has model usage changed for you over time? It changes a lot. I mean, the best model changes bi-weekly. We've been between OpenAI and Anthropik. We keep evaluating all the different models. Do you use like 15 at the same time for different tasks? Not 15, but yeah, maybe 10. So for each task, we will evaluate what model is best at this. Latency, performance, not so much cost. Eventually it will be cost, but latency and performance is most important.
25:59Performance needs to be here. How much can we increase latency without dropping in performance? By building our agent and our other AI features in a way that you can decompose the problem, you can use really efficient models. have latency or performance like the fastest but it may not be the best output or slower but great output yes yeah which one i have to choose yeah uh almost always almost always performance performance is more important almost always if you're a lawyer you can wait two seconds more for the output if it's better you can probably wait an hour more for the output if it's better what do you i'm just fascinated now what do you think about the future of open source as we do move more and more to a focus on cost.
26:40How do you think about that? I think open source is having a great moment. It really, really is. There's so many great open source models now, and they're really easy to run. There's great inference providers that let you run really efficiently. We are moving very close to being able to do things on device. I mean, transcription can run on device. It can run on my iPhone. I have local transcription on my Mac. When I do flights and there's no Wi-Fi, I have local models running so I can keep coding, but it's just like a Gwen model that runs and helps me code. So I think open source is going to play a huge role.
27:08I hope it continues to evolve the way that it currently is. And I think it's an important thing that we have open source model for sovereignty reasons and for security reasons. We should have great open source models. Can I ask, what worries you today? A lot of people are worried about the open source Chinese models, which is why I was kind of thinking about it. More broadly, what worries you when you look at the landscape that we've discussed? I really hope to see European and American open source models. They've been lacking. and I think it would be really, really good to have some. Game theoretically, we won't end up in a great place if there's a duopoly or a monopoly on the models for obvious reasons.
27:46You know, you do want to have some competition. Does Europe have any place to play in the model race today? It should, but it doesn't yet. How far do you think are we in the efficiency frontier on training? Are we like 1 % of the way there? Or is it like, ah, we're 90 % and we might eke out a little bit more? That's a great question. One thing is just like the current architecture. How long does that, you know, does that plateau? Do we need something new? I mean, there's one model released two days ago that's subquadratic, which is huge context length. That's super exciting. I don't know if I trust the benchmark yet.
28:19You know, we need to validate that. But there's architecturally innovations going on still. And I don't know, maybe the current LLM architecture is not the one to take us all the way. What role does not exist today that you think will be very common in five years' time? I think the internal AI systems role thingy for enterprises. I think IT can have a flowering moment here and go from being internal IT that's setting up your computers and whatever to maybe have a sister team that's building tons of internal tools that just make your life so much easier. If enterprises don't create that role, I will get really annoyed because there's so much efficiency to gain there.
29:00Really getting into the enterprise and having all of that for them. Do you have to have FDs to have usage in enterprise? You work with relatively sticky lawyers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you have to have people show them, here you go, here you go? We currently do, yeah. But I think that's just, that's an education thing. In five years, maybe we don't at all. That's the price you pay for being, you know, on the forefront. You have to educate and you have to help. And that's why people want to work with us also. Are you ready for an unfair one? Yes. What have Harvey done better than you from a product perspective or an engineering perspective?
29:34I've been more aggressive with hiring. I have not been aggressive enough with hiring. Because I've always tried to have a very, very small, very lean team, which I believed a lot in. I consistently underestimated how many people we need to be. I had this slide that I drew up a year and a half ago that I showed the entire company. And it was, you know, the 300 Spartans versus the Persians. and it was like Legora and the 300 Spartans. And I said, I'm pretty sure I said, we will cap out at 20 engineers, something like that, which is like way undershooting it. How many engineers do you have today?
30:05Today we are about 80. Yeah, you got that wrong on 20, didn't you? Yeah, I got that really wrong. And we're way too small still. As a result of being too small, you are too slow or you're not able to build what you want to build? Second, there's loads of features that you can basically staff a team to build. Can you ramp as quickly as you need to and retain quality? Yes, we're really good at this. First, we're extremely selective with hiring. Maybe that's also why we're slower at hiring. So we hire really great people and the ramp up time is extremely fast. How do you make ramp really fast as specifically as possible?
30:40Anything that you do? I can tell you what we probably should do. Because the reality is things move really fast. You need to have, so we have a developer experience team, relatively new. Again, a mistake I made. I should have staffed that earlier. And they are making everyone's life so good. What do they do? So they make sure that our local development setup works really, really well. It's super fast. It spins up really quickly. We have our own background coding agent that they built that allows each engineer to have like 10 different agents running concurrently with like all of our local development, a browser, all the iteration stuff.
31:13They're building custom review agents. They're building features so that it can wait and see and wait until everything looks green and all the reviews are good and then raise it to a human the efficiency gains there are huge and they will then also build tooling that helps onboard people and so it can just be like make sure you have really good readme files in your repository so that a new engineer will just ask their cloud code or their cursor about all their questions like that's remarkably effective so it's just like even just ai tooling makes it faster to ramp how many do you have in developer experience and when do you think you should have done it we have three people now which is too few.
31:48I should have done it when Opus 4.5 came out, I think, because that's when I should have done it before that. But then, you know, the productivity of each engineer to Nexus, say. And so if you can make everyone 20 % more efficient, it's even more gains. How does hiring engineers in Europe differ to hiring in the US? There's a few different ways. In the US, people are less risk averse. So like they'll be ready to jump on a lot of things to test. I think in Europe, people are more risk averse. People in Europe generally are more, I don't want to call them mission driven or loyal, but they're like, they really buy into the company that they work for and work with.
32:29So it takes a lot of time to convince them, but once they're convinced, they really stay. That's great. And US is more transactional? I think so, yeah. Do you find the attachment to equity different? It's actually something that we had to sort of educate people on in Sweden. And in Europe, I think it's people are just not used to the venture thing. They don't know how to value equity the same way. Like you have to really, this is how it works. This is what it means. Like these are the, if this happens, then you get this much money. But you don't get it in cash. It's not like, yeah. Yeah, exactly.
33:02And then there's tax. I do it with our team and they're like, wait a minute, you're giving me half a million dollars? Exactly. Not literally, but like in the future. In a way, yeah, exactly. Exactly. So that's been a little bit difficult for us, right? But I think that's part of just creating the ecosystem. In 10 years, the next startup that comes out of Stockholm, hopefully, won't have this problem. Everyone is encouraged to use as many tokens as possible. I'm on the board of public companies, and they're like, oh, I'm hearing about token maxing and talking about that. What do you advise a CEO in terms of intelligent usage of ai and should we just be pushing tokens as much as fucking possible so a few different things on that i think one having a leaderboard a lot of people say this get a leaderboard bring up token users at performance reviews and that leads to token maxing which is people just burn tokens just to look good that's a really stupid way to do anything do hack days do demos have people show everyone else how efficient they are and like how much better they're doing it reward them for being effective and efficient and having more output not for necessarily using ai but like ai will be the way there that's one of the points i had another point for enterprises this is actually where i think cursor has a reason to live a reason to exist which is if your options are codex and cloud code and a neutral third party and you all be you know you pay consumption based cursor can help you optimize your token spend a lot because because they can optimize your usage, right?
34:32They can route them to the cheap open source model or help you set limits for whatever models you want to use for what thing. Well, can they now post acquisition by Grok? Well, we'll have to see if they're first part of everyone. I respectfully disagree, and that's why I actually think both Cognition and Factory will do very well, because they're model independent, but if you... Okay, because you think now that they're tied to X? 100%. Yeah, I was a bit surprised and a bit sad to see the acquisition. Why? Because I thought that they could, If they stayed independent, they had a really cool story.
35:04But I mean, I see the synergies. Obviously, they don't have enough compute. They can't train their own models. They probably have to train their own models. I just think it's a shame that the industry is vertically integrated in that way. Do you think IDEs are dead? I think the current shape of an IDE will die, yes. I don't know what the new, the next IDE is, but it's not reading lines of code. Maybe it's graphical, honestly. Maybe it's the systems, the architecture that you look at and you review and you plan it there and then like agents run off and make sure that whatever you're planning actually is what's being made i don't think it's lines of code what percent of developer salary would you be willing to spend on ai tooling for them i don't want to say infinite but for me it's a question of opportunity cost we're in a competitive environment you know um are you yeah i didn't know that Gotcha.
35:55That's fascinating. I know. There's so many things that we can do. The cost of not doing it is extremely high, and it almost outweighs any sort of token cost. Any efficiency gain is worth so much to us. That's for us, but for certain companies, that will look different, right? The budget on tokens is mostly a question of opportunity cost. Is it worth us spending a ton of tokens to learn if it maybe gives us 20 % efficiency? For us, yes, we have a really high opportunity cost. What did you do that you wish you hadn't done? You know, not investing in developer experience fast enough. Definitely a problem.
36:30Underestimating our growth, also a problem. Now I make sure everything we build will scale to 100x the usage. I used to say 10x, and then that was not enough. So now everything needs to scale to 100x. What changes when you're building for 100x versus 10x? I'm sorry, I'm very naive. No, that's not naive at all. It doesn't always have to change, but there are certain limits that you often will put in place. just be like, yeah, this probably is good enough for the next three months. Like, yeah, okay, if we bound the problem in this way, which is maybe 10X, then we can do X, Y, Z. But maybe that doesn't hold if you're 100X.
37:02And so sometimes you need to think about, I think, particular problems where there's burstiness to it. So Tabular Review is one of our products where you can bulk extract from many documents and many cells. And there's a very big difference between 10 ,000 cells and 100 ,000 cells, just like on the load of the system, because it spikes immediately. And so that's one of those systems where there's actually a difference. And so what do you do in that case where the spike is so immensely different? Yeah. What does that mean you subsequently do differently? We have to think about the experience. If 10 people do that crazy thing at the same time, and we still have a bunch of other users that we want to have a good experience.
37:35So we need to think about fair queuing, basically, which is like, okay, if you're running 100 ,000 cells, you're probably okay waiting a bit. You can go grab a coffee and that's fine. But if you run 10 cells at the same time, those should be really fast. If I ask a really unfair one, if I gave you access to a superior model for six months ahead of anyone else, or superior engineers for six months ahead of anyone else, which would you rather have? Engineers, for sure. Because the models, they change all the time, they get better all the time. But if you have really good engineers, you can build a system that exponentially improves, and that's worth a lot more.
38:09What do you know now that you wish you'd known when you started day one? Honestly wish I'd known how quickly we were going to scale. because that was the thing that I underestimated all the time. I don't think I was ready for this journey. I became ready really quickly because I got slapped in the face every three months. Do you buy that people are destined for certain stages of companies? I'm getting very personal. If I was you, now I'd have in my mind, am I the CTO that takes this to public company? It's a very fair question. No, I don't buy that. I think to me, it's a question of how quickly can I solve problems?
38:44Am I the person that can solve the problems that we have right now the fastest? Or can someone else solve them faster than me? We have a great culture in Legora in that no one has any ego. I've told this to, I currently have two engineering directors. I've told both of them when I hired, if there comes a day when I think you'll do better than I will, then we swap or I do something else. I have very little, and they also have very little, tied into their title or their role. We are here to build something huge, and that's the most important thing. I continuously evaluate myself on my job performance.
39:15If I don't do well, I try to rectify that really, really quickly. And I haven't been able to not rectify it yet, but maybe there comes a day. What's the secret to hiring the best engineers with no ego? And how obvious are they? They're obvious if they have ego. Even just when you negotiate salaries and titles, you can tell. I don't know about you, I always say great people want more money. Yeah. They don't mind so much about the title. I think that's right. Absolutely right. Most of the people that we hire, we don't even talk about their title. We talk about the difficult problems that they're going to work on.
39:46How important is it that you're together in Stockholm? It's been very important for running really fast. I mean, we talked about the handover cost. If you have a PM and a designer and an engineer and they just sit together, you can almost not even have the handover. You can just be like, run at this problem and do it together, the three of you, then it's done. But if you have them siloed and there's handover in between, you lose so much efficiency. Jump on a Zoom call, lacking clarity. Yeah, this doc is not well-written enough. You have to do another meeting, and then you have to do three reviews of the document, and then someone else has an opinion that sees it somewhere and writes a comment somewhere, and then you have to talk about that.
40:23How do you factor that into how the best engineers like to be remote? Well, we're very opinionated about who we are and who we aren't. If you're a great engineer and you want to be remote, then you probably also want to work on very isolated problems. That can be fine. We probably have those and we probably will have those, but they're not for us right now. We'd rather find the people that want to solve the same problems with other people. How many engineers were you having two years or by the end of 2027? You're 80 today. Yeah. I'm going to say a number that's too low. I'm going to WhatsApp it to you on the 31st of December, 2027.
41:00Were you wrong? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know. 300, 200? 200 and 300 are different. You've got to put your name on one. If I have to put my... I want to say the lower number. Let's say 270. 270. Okay, so we're going to have 190 more. Yeah. Can you retain A-only talent with 190 more? That's essentially adding two and a half a week. Is that possible? If it's linear. I think so. I'd rather miss my number and have A players than hit it with B players. As soon as you have people that you don't trust or that the team doesn't trust, the A players won't stick around. You're buying more companies than I'm doing podcasts these days.
41:41And you're laughing because it's true. It's not true. I'm essentially an investor now. My question to you is, do you have to buy companies to get the truly, truly A talent in a lot of cases today? I don't think so, but it's faster. Because if you find a really good person, a really good founder, they're able to attract really good talent. And so you have a small group of five people that are just a talent, and then you get five in one week, you know, if you have to get two every week. And that's much faster than going to all the big companies or even the startups and trying to convince them to come over.
42:15People also, like if you have a small startup of five, eight people, they want to work with each other. Do you just shed their code bases then, or is it like pure aqua highs in a lot of cases? It can be both. If they've worked on adjacent things or think it's in a similar field or even unrelated but similar technology, we'll take all their learnings and we might rebuild it into Lagora. I think that's what happens in most cases. But they become fully embedded into the team. They're all Lagorians working on the Lagora code base and then they might bring some learnings. Is integration hard? It's surprisingly easy if you hire people with low ego.
42:48So if you get five great engineers that don't care about their titles or where they sit in the org chart that just want to solve problems, it's surprisingly easy to integrate. When you've got engineering hires wrong, what did you not see that you wish you had seen? When this goes wrong, it's actually because of my, I'm going to be a little bit introspective here. It's probably because of my own, I don't have, you know, I've not run an engineering team this big before. and so I start doubting. I'm not confident enough in saying this person who's more senior than me, has seen more than me, is wrong.
43:21It's happened once or twice when there's a very, very senior person. We talk and they talk about all this sort of org building and org design and how they think about all this stuff and I sense that something's wrong and I kind of know that all the time but in the end I end up convincing myself that no, they probably know more than me or they figured it out or whatever. Two weeks in, four weeks in, six weeks in, you start to figure out they didn't. How fast do you know if you've made a mishire? A month. Then you know. And then you give them really strong feedback. I give really strong feedback after two weeks.
43:48What does really strong feedback mean, Jake? Really strong means you're not going to stay if you don't change this. Has anyone ever recovered from a you're not going to stay if you don't change this? No. But they need to get the chance. And if they do, they stay. What is the hardest role to hire for today? This is a great question. All of them. No. I think senior management is extremely difficult to hire for. Senior management or horizontal senior management? Engineering directors. Maybe that's always been difficult. We only have really technical people also being managers. And so anyone who's seen scale typically also is no longer technical.
44:21Do we still have managers? And what I mean by that is like, you know, one of my dear friends, Jason Lemkin, from Stashy. It's like anyone on LinkedIn who talks about their team, fire them. Fire them straight away. We don't want managers who manage other managers who manage other managers. If you can't do full stack, get out, pick up your severance and go away. Do we still want like senior managers? Well, you can build a company of super senior engineers that can do everything, and you probably don't need to manage them at all. Especially if there's really strong, if they know what they're trying to achieve, the Codex team, for example.
44:53They all know what they're building, they can just run at it, and they don't need anyone to tell them that they're doing well. But if you have a more complex product that can go in many directions, and you have to do constant prioritization, and you have a suite of engineers and a team of engineers. So the way that we have engineering teams is relatively small teams, let's say six people. PM and an engineering manager. The engineering manager is super technical, spends most of their time coding. They're not like people hold each other's hands and sing songs. But it's still important that I have someone that's accountable to the team health.
45:24Are people doing good jobs? Are people having fun? I can't walk around and judge everyone. Are they doing well? And so I think it's important to have someone who's accountable. And that's how we run it, right? They decide their own roadmap, they're their own little startup, but one person is accountable. Is Max on every new product feature? On big ones, yes. On small ones, no. Is that right? It's worked for us. His time, Max is an amazing salesman, which you'll probably know. And so I think Max spends his time on that, and he spends his time on product vision and the important product things. So big launches, big things here.
45:57He's involved early and for the duration of the project. But for small things, that's the reason you hire great people is that you can let them do this. The thing with Max that is special is you know he so believes what he says. Often when you're being sold, you kind of know you're being sold too. No, no, like there is no way that he sees himself being wrong in his bones. Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. And also like, you know, I think that was just brilliant. We naturally hate them because they're shit, but Sifted did that piece. With the Taste of Blood piece? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Did everyone in Lagoro just go, oh my God.
46:33Yeah, that was hilarious. Yeah, yeah. There's screensavers now that say bloatsmuck on the... It's like becoming this internal meme. Did you guys like the Jude Law? I loved it. You know I've sat on that secret for like nine months. Did you think it was done well? I think so, yeah. You asked, I guess, if it was not done well. I think the Jude Law idea was great. Did it do well for you guys, do you think? Amazingly well. No, no, crazy well. It's wild. People see it everywhere, which is great. people talk about it a lot, which is like the goal of the campaign, right? It's like we need to get everyone talking about us.
47:06Dude, we're going to do a quick fire round. So I say a short statement, you give me your immediate thoughts. Does that sound okay? Yeah, let's do it. So what have you changed your mind on most in the last 12 months? Hiring. Hiring? Yeah. We need to hire more. As long as adding someone is net positive, we should add someone. What's the most underrated AI company today, do you think? Lagora. Dude.
47:29Jacob Lauritzen:I'm an ambassador and even I'm like no shit dude come on you're gonna give me another one I had to say it one for me would be whisper flow like the pain of removing whisper flow for me it's like immense whisper flow is great I think we're gonna get more local models though whisper flow is not local you're probably gonna get a similar whisper well maybe they should just go local but the tool itself is great finish this sentence the biggest The threat to Lagoor is not Harvey, but dot, dot, dot. The thing that's going to kill us is if we don't keep reinventing ourselves. This sounds really boring, but I think we talk a lot about staying in our swim lane, focusing on our product and our users, and the entire environment is moving so much.
48:14If you had had me on this podcast a year ago, you know, it would have been very different. So I think the main thing that's going to kill us if we don't, if we lose the ability to constantly react and readjust and reinvent ourselves. You just worked with Jude Law in terms of brand campaigns. What sports team would you most like to see a Ligora across? Could be F1, could be football, could be NBA. F1 would be great. I'm a big F, but F1 would be awesome. Strategically, would that be awesome? You do golf very strategically. We do golf. The Yankees we sponsor in New York, which is also great. You sponsor the Yankees?
48:48Yeah, you didn't know this? Aaron Judge. fucking hell how much does that cost that I can't tell you but I would want you know the team that I would want us to sponsor my local FC Copenhagen football club that would be a childhood dream they're doing really bad right now though so it's probably really cheap actually it's called exposure yeah
49:06Jacob Lauritzen:you would get nil let's do it yeah exactly I mean the Champions League no Europa League they're not even top of the Danish league yeah that is no you should be CTO probably cheap don't be CTO no I know it's okay What is one thing you believe about the future of law that most people would say is crazy? If I had to get crazy, I think there's lots of analogies to coding in law. It's very text-based. So the agent AI features are similar. If I believe that coding, we're going to look less at source code and more of like one layer above, I have to say the same thing about law. Like eventually, lawyers will not be nitty-gritty about the language of the contracts.
49:47they will work a level above, which is maybe like, what's our negotiation stance? What risks are we okay? Which ones are we not okay taking? And not sit and type into Word. What's the biggest advice to a founder competing in a business slash industry where there is an 800-pound gorilla? Honestly, just work harder than the 800-pound gorilla. People underestimate this, like the 800-pound gorilla. No one in the 800-pound gorilla is extremely excited to be there. I think that's just like, if you're competing against Google, like the PM in Google that you're competing against he does not give a shit if it goes well or not.
50:20Maybe she tries really hard but if you're a small lean team you work really hard you can do really remarkable things. You ready for a bet? Yes. What are we going to end the year at revenue wise? It's going to be it's going to be above 250. We have 272. 272? Yeah. I think it's going to be above that too. I don't want to I don't want to get in trouble. I'm just a senior. I don't have numbers.
50:44Jacob Lauritzen:I didn't mean it, Max and Patrick, I don't know. David's going to call me really mad soon. Dude, this has been such a pleasure. I've loved having you and you've been fantastic. Thank you. Thank you. This is my first podcast ever, by the way. But before we leave you today, you know what's wild? We have AI superpowers now, yet so many product teams are still flying blind. Buried in spreadsheets, chasing feedback across 10 different tools, Jira Product Discovery fixes that. I've spoken with hundreds of product leaders, and the best teams all do one thing differently. They build a system to capture ideas, validate them with real data, and focus their roadmap on the right things.
51:23Jacob Lauritzen:Well, that's why product teams at Canva, Deliveroo, Toast, and Decathlon use Jira Product Discovery. It pulls ideas and feedback into one place with built-in tools to prioritize what'll have the biggest impact. That's when a roadmap stops being an endless list of ideas and becomes a plan people actually believe in. Join more than 25 ,000 teams already using Jira Product Discovery. Head to atlassian.com forward slash Harry and start building the right thing today. While Jira Product Discovery turns feedback into priorities, Finn turns questions into instant answers. As AI agents become more common in customer experience, teams often end up juggling multiple silo tools for every job.
52:05Jacob Lauritzen:Well, Finn was built to change that. It's a single unified agent that works across your entire customer experience, from service to sales to success and beyond. Fin is the agent making perfect customer experiences possible for thousands of customers. It's powered by custom models, trained on years of real customer interactions, so it understands the nuance and complexity of customer service better than any other agent. That means faster resolutions, more consistent support, and just better experiences for every customer. It's also designed to be fully self-manageable, so you can easily improve and adapt it as your business evolves.
52:39Jacob Lauritzen:No third parties required. Leading companies like Gamma, Asana, DoorDash, and Crypto.com already use and love Fin to deliver better customer experiences. So see what Fin can do for your team at fin.ai forward slash 20VC. While Fin helps answer the customer, Framer helps impress the next one. You know that moment when marketing wants a landing page, design mocks it up, and engineering says, yeah, we'll get to it. Thousands of businesses from early stage startups to Fortune 500s are choosing to build their websites in Framer, where changes take minutes instead of days to solve this very problem.
53:16Jacob Lauritzen:Framer is an enterprise-grade, no-code website builder that works like your team's favorite design tool, and it's used by companies like Perplexity, Miro, Mixpanel to move faster. Designers and marketers can fully own the site with real-time collaboration, a robust CMS built for SEO, and advanced analytics that include integrated A-B testing So you're not just shipping pages, but you're maximizing what works. And when you're ready to ship, changes go live in seconds with one click. Publish, without relying on engineering. Plus, Framer is built for scale, with premium hosting, enterprise-grade security, and 99.99 % uptime SLAs.
53:55Jacob Lauritzen:Whether you want to launch a new site, test a few landing pages, or migrateyourfull.com, Framer has programs for startups, scale-ups, and large enterprises to make going from idea to live site fast. Learn how you can get more out of your.com from a Framer specialist, or get started building for free today at framer.com slash 20VC for 30 % off. 30 % off a Framer Pro annual plan. That's framer.com slash 20VC for 30 % off. Framer.com slash 20VC. Rules and restrictions may apply.
From the publisher
Jacob Lauritzen serves as the CTO at Legora, the fastest growing B2B enterprise company in history; hitting $100 million in ARR in just 18 months . Legora boasts a valuation of $5.6BN and has raised a total of $866 million in funding. Legora's investors include the likes of Accel, Benchmark, and Bessemer Venture Partners, alongside strategic tech giants NVIDIA (NVentures) and Salesforce Ventures.
AGENDA:
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05:01 - How to Hire the Best Product Talent in 2026
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06:21 - The New Product Bottleneck: Shifting Beyond Code Creation
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09:24 - System Design vs. Code Creation: The Future Role of the Engineer
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14:04 - The Evolving Software Development Lifecycle & The Death of the Design Phase
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22:23 - Will Product and Engineering Fully Converge?
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29:16 - Scalability and UX: Designing for 10x vs. 100x Spikes
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38:15 - Scaling the Organization: What Breaks with a 250 Person Product Team
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47:05 - Quick-Fire Round: Hyper-Growth Tactics & Out-Working the Giants




