20VC: 15 Term Sheets in 7 Days and Choosing Benchmark | Harvey vs Legora: Who Wins Legal and How to Play When You Have $600M Less Funding | Are AI Models Plateauing Today | Building a 9-9-6 Culture From Stockholm with Max Junestrand

25:38I heard there were loads of great YC stories So we got accepted back in August and YC for us at this point is like this mythical creature like this mountable limpus that you only get to go to if you're like the crème de la crème and We get so excited. We booked this like really nice Airbnb Which turned out to be not as nice in person, but it looked really nice on the pictures It had this little campfire and we said oh, we're gonna like go to YC and we're gonna ship and we're gonna like sit around the fire and have a beer and go to all these nice sessions and we're going to meet some old men. We're going to do all these things.

26:11And we get to I see and I'm just completely locked in on sales and growing the business because we had started getting the initial traction from all the big firms in the Nordics. And so me and our founding AE2HIN, we effectively buy these ring lights to put on our laptops. It's like the influencer, like almost like these lights, like the influencer things you can put on your laptop. So it doesn't look like it's in the middle of the night when we sit through sales calls between 1 a .m. and 10 a .m. every night. And I think we closed our biggest deal at that point. It was like 500k in the middle of the night at 4 a .m.

26:48And we managed to do that or I managed to do it for about a week. And then I just said, guys, I'm out. Like I'm going back to Stockholm. I'm locking myself in the law firm again because we couldn't afford office space back then. So I locked myself in the firm just did all these conversations. I was running around the city with my little briefcase then to him came back at some point too. So for the actual program you weren't in Silicon Valley. So I was not there. Did you miss out by not being there? Yes, of course. Everybody else made a lot of good friends. I missed out on that. But I think like my reasoning was.

27:19Got a close deals. Yeah, I get that. Yeah, and maybe that comes back to the whole, you know, do you think it was worth it doing why I see them? Yes, it was. I mean, we were a Swedish company by nobody's. And YC put us in the global spotlight. And I think we took every opportunity that that provided for us. We served that wave so incredibly well. When you think to that, sorry, I love that. I think in clips, challenge of being in my brain is every conversation you have, you think in social media clips. Right. Imagine you're going on a date with me. It's shit. So you're like, clip, clip, clip. But my question to you there is, You said you really took advantage of that global spotlight that YC brought.

28:03What did you do, for example, to take advantage of it? I'm thinking of Vassons. It's just a normal. Now there's a lot of Swedish YC companies. Back then, I think there were maybe five. There hadn't been a Swedish YC company for a really long time. And I used to work at the PICT for a week. I worked there for a week. But between them and us, there were nobody else, I think. I'm going to start a fund called Just Depicked Ventures. and anyone that comes out of it just gets an automatic turn sheet. That's not about it. Well, did the same with LaGuard at some point. Yeah, I'll fund it. Yeah. And I think we realized that if we want to play in the global space, we need to be known in the US and YC put us on the map.

28:43And so by being in YC, we raised money from benchmark who we would have not been introduced to if we weren't in YC. Well, okay, so take me to that. So we go through the batch, we close deals in Sweden, and then it comes to demo day. I mean, the YC advices you raise some time for five weeks before demo day because it's become so competitive That's when we make the switch. I'm in Stockholm. My team is in SF and then we switch So I tell them you need to come home and you need to take care of the customers because I'm gonna go in fundraise I go to SF. I locked myself in this nice Airbnb that we've had and I think it went something like I arrive on a Tuesday on the Wednesday I sit down with Gustav and he tells me Max.

29:24I think you guys should go and raise like a big around you guys are doing really well Well, we're having easy right now. We're like one million a hour Wow, so we went from 200 KMR to almost a million of a hour. So 200 a million Yeah, basically got you okay fuck that's And then you talked to all these funds you got to know them. Do I see an interesting tool? No, they introduced it to a lot of them, but I think it was also a combination of a lot of inbound. Because I think as soon as you announced that you've been exacted into IC, you get 500 inbound, you know, VC emails that you need to deal with.

30:01That's amazing. I think I set up this filter that would like auto reply, hey, I'm headstown, I'll see you in like end of March. I get these responses. And I'm like, dude, I'm a podcast, they're all good. I have VCs too. That's always my combat. No worries, I'm not a VC. Yeah, and I think it's like, because if you're gonna have all those conversations to early, it's too much context -witching. And so it's just nicer to bundle it because then you're in the zone. Do you bundle the fundraise into a 10 -day process? And I thought it was gonna be a six -week process because that's what YC recommend or thought.

30:33And then it ended up being a seven -day process. Okay, who ensues you to Chathen? Yuri Sagalov, who made the ticket that saved us from not running out of money during West -Eat. And they didn't know this, but they were apparently like neighbors. Wow. I did not know this. Chatham, that you just responded to our tweet. And so it was a 10 and a half million around there. Yes. And Chatham, that that. Yes. And then that your Jack Altman's came in that time too. No, Jack Altman came in the round after. Ah, I got you. Okay, so we raised 10 and a half then. Dude, that's a lot of money there. Yeah, it was a lot of money.

31:04What was the price? I think we did about 50 something. It's like chunky. When you'd reflect on that, how do you advise founders on the right amount to raise? And also the right price to raise that. I think you think about it in terms of how much money do you need to get to the next stage, and then you optimize for dilution. Like, I wanted to dilute less than 20%. That was my goal. You might say, okay, our threshold is 25 % or it's something else. And then you say, okay, how much money do I need to get to the next point, or to turn profitable? That's how much money you should raise. And when you do it preemptively, I think you could almost think about it in a way where the valuations are high when you preempt your round, right?

31:41but you think about it, within 18 or 12 months, we'll get to a revenue stage which times 20 or times 25 or something. Validates that valuation. Things should take the preemptive money. When you look at YC companies now raising with 10 % dilution in rounds, do you wish you'd done that? I know it sounds obvious. No, because I don't think I would have gotten benchmark at a 10 % dilution. And I think the VC that you get in the beginning, at least as a first -time founder, is quite important. because you don't want to get people in your corner who are going to get you off track. The world of YC opens up a huge amount to you.

32:17Does the world of benchmark open up how much does their brand play a role in validating you? I think there are some stats that like 99 % of benchmark companies end up raising a Series B. That's the only stat you need to hear. Okay, I totally agree with you and you're absolutely right. They also had the highest hit rate of $5 billion companies. Yeah. Incredible start that Cole Rotman did this analysis. Okay, and so we raised that money. How many terms did we have? Like 15, I think. Was it an easy decision? It was an easy decision based on the partner. And the reason for it is you're going to do this for a really long time.

32:55That's always how I thought about it. I want to make the decisions now that I'm going to be happy with a decade from now, if I'm still in my shoes. I think then you got to pick on who do I have chemistry with, who do I think is going to be in this for the long run together with me and who when you call Unintroduced references say in Thick or Thin this guy had my back and Would in an instant fly to whatever country or help me close this deal or When we didn't hit this quarter they put in even more money because they said we're gonna double down You can only date so many fans and partners, I guess.

33:34Okay, so we raised the 10 and a half from benchmark. Chatham does it fantastic. What happens then? Now, YC's over. We've got the 10 and a half to hold teams back in Stockholm. Yeah, I go back the same day. Me and Chatham negotiated the terms it like this in person. And then the same day after we signed, he's like, oh, so when are we going back to Stockholm? And I'm like, oh, I guess tonight? And he's like, yeah, sounds good. So go back to Stockholm and we lock in, we have the money, we start scaling, then we pre -empt our A -round. So we were chased by a couple of the funds who were interested in our seed round and said, hey, we keep hearing that you guys are doing really well.

34:13We'd love to lead you next round. And then I join a firm for a standard catch -up call and they're like, we want to do your A -round, name your price. And I just go, well, you know what, like I have enough money, I don't need any more right now and they say, well, we'll do your next round now. And I said, okay, well, give me a price. And they say, all right, we'll do it that one of 50 or something, which was the three X from the seed drawn. I thought, okay, so it's pretty good. Send me a term sheet. And then we go through some dancing or partner pictures. Yadayada. Was Chathen happy about this?

34:48I think it was pretty happy about it. But I would not have been happy if I was on your cap table, all right? If I was Chathen, I would not have been happy because I think for you to suddenly in just $25 million when you just rose 10 ,000 off, which is a lot for a seed round, respectfully as a first time founder and you come across much older. You're 23, 24 at this point. 25. Oh, yeah, 24 back then. Yeah. Yeah. It is really hard to not get distracted, to remain focused and be laser, laser focused on the right things when suddenly you now have $35 million. I agree. So I'll tell you what happened in our first born meeting.

35:21I turned to Red Point and to Benchmark and I said, we're not gonna sell for the next four months because if we sell and we start onboarding all these great attorneys, they're not gonna have the best experience and they're going to think that the product can solve for the standard things that we talked about in the beginning. Red Point kinda looked at me and said, dude, we just gave you like 25 million, are you not gonna sell? Like, no, we're not gonna sell. We're gonna wait the summer out. we're gonna work really fucking hard and we're going to onboard, you know, the firms and the people we want to work with in September October.

35:55And I think that required a lot of ice in the stomach. How do you think about that in terms of if you don't gobble up those firms, that someone else will, but if you gobble them up and give them a bad experience, it's very difficult to get back. Yeah, one shot. And if you mess it up, they're churning. But you don't want to let someone else get them first. Well, even if somebody else got to them first, at this time, almost everybody would churn, because the products were so chat -gpt -esque and they required so much sophistication from the attorney or the lawyer to get value out of. And that's the gap that we had to close.

36:35You're serving somebody who's quite untchnical and they're really short for time. So they're going to come in and they're going to expect brilliant results. And if they don't get that the first time, they're never opening up your product again. What was the advantages and disadvantages of being second in timing to Harvey? I think they made a lot of fundamental errors around, for instance, fine tuning and spending time on the wrong things. Whereas because we came afterwards, we had to catch up on product. So we were only thinking about the application later. There were frankly a lot of firms who had piloted them back then who had an awful experience and who thought GPT -4 was better.

37:17And so that's kind of the point that I'm talking about because if you're coming in with the product and you're charging 10X the price of TchGPT -4 and the partner tries the prompt in the two systems and thinks the GPT -4 is better, you're churning and you burn your one shot. Now I think both of them and us have gotten to the brand level where you might get a second and you can come back and you can say, well, our product has improved by so much and we have all these new features that you need to try it again. But we only had one shot really. And so I took that very seriously. What strategic mistakes did they make that you learned from?

37:48I think they've done a lot of things great, but I think they came in and set the expectations really high. And they weren't able to deliver on that in terms of product back then. And this allowed us to come in and say, well, we're maybe somewhere in between here. And here's what we can do today. Here's what we think we can do tomorrow and I promise you we're gonna deliver on this and then we are more than At some point we had almost like a two to one in terms of our CS and post sales team in comparison to our new sales team Which was you know a very Unstandardized thing for a sauce company like this But we had almost lawyers who were forward deployed working with our customers on getting them from We have no idea what AI can do for us to holy shit we just delivered this project with a twice as fast turnaround at the same quality because we managed to work with AI in a smart way.

38:39I spoke to someone before the show and I said, yeah, the gur are taking loads of clients from Harvey, and they said, yeah, but dude, they are price cutting the shit out of Harvey. And I was like... That's not true. Not true? No, but the other thing is happening. Huh? It's the other way around. What do you do when that happens? Like, they have so much money, they can afford to give it away for free. They have a 693 million delta between you guys. They could buy a small country. What do you do when you're compared to how much more money? Well, it's like the Uber and Lyft situation a little bit, right?

39:16If you just pour money into it in that world, but that's when you have a very low differentiated product. Now, I'm building LaGoura in a way where even if Harvey's free, a firm will choose to work with us because that's how much better I want to be in terms of our product than our service offering and where we take our clients and the work we do for them. And so then it doesn't matter how much money it is. How far do you think you are away from that? Quite a bit. Yeah. But every day we get closer to it. Do you worry about the brand that they've built from being first and also just raising so much?

39:49They have a lot of brands through fundraise. Not really. I think we're in all the conversations. Now, I think it's a two -wise race, just something stands for sure. And I think they've done some things incredibly well. I think we've done some stuff really well as well. And I think the most impressive part is probably how we've sort of more than caught up with a fraction of the funding and just being super focused on that. Totally agree. As I said, the delta between you and funding is like enormous. Going back to that. So the board meeting, every board member was going, fuck, we just gave this Swedish guy.

40:22a huge amount of money and he's now not gonna sell. So then it's September, October, I guess, summer's gone through. And we're onboarding everyone. And I think we're at this point where I tell the product team and the engineering team, we need to be in a spot where we could onboard a thousand lawyers a day on the platform and nothing can break. And we do it. And since then, while it's been an exponential journey upwards. Okay, so September though, we're really starting to sell. Yes. And I spoke to Logan Barlett before the show. And he said Max became one of the best enterprise sellers that I've worked with.

40:57Ask him how, how did you become so good at enterprise sales? And what would you advise founders who are maybe more engineering and products slanted on becoming good at enterprise sales? Well, I'm an engineer. Yeah. And so I'll start with that. I didn't go through the sales school. I do. You're Pete nerd. I'm Pete. Pro gamer. I do. Yeah. And I think there's one interesting dynamic in the legal world, which is these firms are not spending the company's money, they're spending their own money, because every year the firms split the profit. And so they're asking themselves, should we invest now at this level to reap X rewards and is that better than buying a nice summer house or something like this?

41:41Like, you know, a bit excited, but that's the thinking. And so I think immediately I came in with this idea that you will not bluff these people. They're super smart, they're super hard workers and they get their business and so I came in with very open cards and said here's where the tech is, here's what I think we've done well, here's what we're going to do, here's what I think that will lead to for your firm if we partner and I think that's a very compelling story and a very compelling pitch and I think we've more than followed through on that. But I mean the many of the early firms, this is a bet.

42:19It's a bet to say, okay, we think these guys are going to figure it out. And so we want to be part of that. And now we've been able to pay them back with, I think, a lot of very promising and excellent results. You said earlier about allowing people to test product for free. And also the challenging situation it puts you in financially. For other founders who are aware that they need customer feedback, they need usage to understand more. Do you recommend product usage for free or does it make it more challenging? Of course, it makes it more challenging. The market dynamics for us is that firms are piloting different software's and they're stacking it against each other.

42:54I mean one way you can view this is every firm that we work with have selected us out of a portion of different products or bundle of different products because they get to test everything. Of course, ideally, I mean you have this idea and I think why she said it first like you know, you got to go sell and then you build it and you sort of iterate quickly and so on. One thing I did and this is maybe a set like on a tangent. I reached out to like a hundred attorneys when we started out and I said could I pay you your hourly rate for a lunch with me. Of course they wouldn't take my money because they were so nice and it's a, oh no wait you don't have to pay me 500 bucks to lunch with me.

43:31But then I just asked them all these things and I think by doing that like you got to be in this learning mindset of okay you want to soak up as much information as much things as possible. I love that. Yeah I was a small move. I'm happy I did it. Yeah. And I think because I if you open with that and you say, hey, I'm going to respect your time so much that I'm willing to pay for it. And you know, 90 % of them also paid for the lunch because, you know, they had money and I didn't. So, but I think if you come in with that level of enthusiasm, nobody in our space had met somebody who was as enthusiastic about selling legal take as me.

44:05And they just thought that was infectious. Do you think we do cold emailing badly? So I think my outbound is done so badly. People always ask me, dude, how did you get the guests that you get on the show? Yeah. I might honestly, in a world, especially now, where you have deep research, you can find incredible bits of information that are so personal. If you got a note from a young 18 -year -old engineer that said, oh my god, I heard you on 20VC, I loved Dota 2, it was my start, and really was insightful about the way that they positioned it in a short. You would respond. Of course I would. So you agree that it's just done badly.

44:41I agree that it's typically done badly and I also think that there's other venues of reaching out The good thing about attorneys is that they all have their phone numbers on their websites. So you cool No, I would text them. Huh? Well, that's more personal. I would say in Swedish. Hey, my name is Max I am working on this legal plus AI Project you wouldn't say company say project because that's more interesting and I'd say I'm trying to learn more about the space I went to these universities because they would know them. I would love to sort of pick or brain on X -area that I saw that they were an expert in.

45:18Would you be willing to grab lunch with me? I would even pay you your hourly rates because I'm so interested in what you do. And 90 % response of says, hey Max, that sounds wonderful. I'm really busy, but how about we do it in three weeks at this place? And it also takes you to somewhere nice. Lawyers want to go and have a nice lunch and so you get a good lunch and you get to learn more about the industry I love that that is fucking amazing and I think they're core skill that I'm not sure if something I developed or had was this I think I'm I'm easy to help I'm very coachable. What do you think you do that makes you coachable that makes people want to help you?

45:59I think I'm the same but I have a strategic way of doing it. Okay, I'm not sure if I've thought about it that deeply I'm very appreciative. I think I'm quite loosely held in a lot of my opinions, which makes possible to switch my framework quickly. And then people see that they have an effect. And then I think you try to pay it back. And then that creates a very good loop. So I found that, if someone is giving help, they need to feel like you're the subordinate. Like you are in some ways beneath them. So I will always start with this position of almost vulnerability. It helps in creating that subordination role.

46:30And then I will be incredibly effusive. in terms of one compliments. Yeah. Amazing again, elevated. Great. And then to help me understand. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, I think that's a good summary of super, super. I love that. And even in sales, you can do it. 100%. To maybe tie it back to some comparison between us at Harvey or Winston. Like I came in with the attitude of legal NAI is standing in front of the most exciting time that it's ever been in. There's the most amount of opportunities. We don't know exactly where it's gonna land, but together you and I, Harry, can figure it out. And I think that positioning is very compelling.

47:15And it's not this way of coming in and saying, hey, it's my way or the highway. Pay us a million bucks or we're going to the next firm. You said there about kind of the exciting time with the conjunction of legal and AI. You also said about messaging the lawyers and saying about a specific segment of the market where they work, as you want to talk about. When I did our show recently with Jason and Rory, I don't know if you heard it, we spent quite a lot of time on the legal space. And we said actually that the biggest mistakes I've made in investing is when you think that the market's much bigger than it is, and it slowly gets more and more carved up.

47:47And suddenly, we're in Solve, which just patents. You then have other players attacking different verticals and slowly the market fragments away. And what seemed like a $50 billion market or whatever it is, It's suddenly a lot smaller because of the fragmentation. I worry about that here. I don't understand Harvey being a $5 billion company and seeing the upside to 20 given that fragmentation. The other way of looking at it is these models will continue to improve. You might not need to build as much to verticalize them. So I had the benefit of spending time with restructuring lawyers and with patent lawyers and with competition lawyers and data protection lawyers and litigators and yes, everything looks quite differently, and especially in -house, right?

48:32Like that's the other side of this coin. But there might be enough in common to build a single platform that assists the attorney in doing a lot of that work. And the other thing that I think is quite interesting is as these frameworks around the agents are improving, you'll effectively have agents going out and running other pieces of software. So take an example like translations. You have translation companies like Deepel and others who are brilliant companies, But they're a very, very narrow use case. And then you might have something like redlining, or you might have something like comparing documents.

49:04All these things are very different things. And what you can do is you can put an agent on top of it that can run structured tool calling. So you just go to Ligua and say, Hey, please help me translate this document. And it will throw the document to the correct API and retrieve back the results. And so what you effectively get is you get like this universal interface to a lot more functionality, which if you're a senior partner at XFIRM in the States, you might use three apps on your phone. And so in your work, you're using Microsoft Word, you're using Outlook and you use your document management system.

49:38If you wanna add a fourth product to that bucket or to that list, I think it has to be able to do a lot of things because you're not gonna go and learn 20 different tools. Do you agree that everything has a price? No. because if you told me max I'd give you 10 billion dollars but you'll die in 24 hours I wouldn't take it so it doesn't it doesn't have a price it's priceless can I buy Ligur of a five billion dollars today no 10 I'm having too much fun it doesn't have a price now it's part of my life it's I think that's priceless it's hard when a company becomes such an intrinsic part of your right, honesty.

50:13Yeah, it is. Yeah. It's like a relationship. Yeah, almost harder. Yeah. I can shed a relationship here. Okay, so I want to give out this. We become this fucking amazing enterprise seller that we are. And the company progresses, hiring progresses. Actually, as an issue one on the hiring side, what are your biggest lessons on hiring? And your first time founder, what it took to hire such a crack team, what worked and what didn't? Yeah, I think it's easy to repeat what you know, I've heard other people say in the past, but you haven't internalized it until you went into the traps yourself. What traps did you get?

50:50Yeah, so you know, you're trying higher for why intercept and not slope and I burned myself there a couple of times. I think when it comes to building a culture that ships or sells or builds and you know markets. You want people that you almost need to go to them and be like, dude, you need to go home, you need to sleep, and as you come back tomorrow, and we'll continue. I think we managed to do that, but it's difficult when you need to scale head counsel quickly, because we very quickly became a global company. We have operations in the states, in London, in Stockholm, but we also have sort of hubs in Finland, Germany, Spain, France, with people who are working on the ground with our clients, And now we just open up in Australia as well.

51:36What happens is when you're not there, how are people treating the work? That's the thing you need to optimize for. And I think I made the mistake of bringing in some execs with the idea of, oh, just repeat what you did in your old company. And that's not gonna work because none of them have worked in an AI company that is going 10x year over year. Did you move fast enough to change it? Yes, you did. Yes, that's hard super hard some of the hardest conversations in you know I've ever had to knowing what you know now You would not have hired for the blue blaze of wearing you would have hired for slope anything else The curiosity Combined with ambition is like the two values that I've over time Converged towards especially in engineering and in product because there's so many product directors at Clarner or at Spotify or these companies that have made it that they're not incentivized to be curious Anyway, they're kind of incentivized to keep the company on the track It is whereas in this native AI world you need to be ultra curious You need to have every LLM on your phone and you need to work with voice mode and you need to test Daily everything that's coming out because our iterations cycles are not quarters their weeks or days I think you can test for that and I think we've started testing for it more and more and more.

53:01How do you test for it? Well, you just ask them. Pull up your phone and show me all the things that you're currently curious about. Then I ask them, what was the last time you nerded into something and tell me about that? Sometimes people go, oh, I'm going to tell you about this book I'm reading, about XYZ, then you just see it in their eyes. They're intellectually and emotionally engaged. And then what happens is as they come into the company and you sort of form them in the onboarding, they get the same spark in their eyes about LaGuora and about what we're building and about the next feature and about solving that problem for that client.

53:37When you build a team like that, you come in and it doesn't feel like work to people. It feels like we're on this mission, it's a little bit like a cult. But I think you need to build a cultish culture when you're scaling this fast. How do you build a cultish culture? You know, I got killed and I think we actually messaged about it. But I got killed for saying about, if you want to be a top 1 % founder, you need to work seven days a week. And the valley has turned up the intensity on work, I think. And everyone killed me for it. I find life very funny. Everyone always recommends the book The Car is To Be Disliked.

54:11And then when you actually gain that courage, they will shoot you. So my question to you is, do you agree with 9 .96 mentality? policy and how would you reflect on what I just said? Yeah, I mean the short answer is yes, because we did it for a while and we did it with large team buying. If you type back to our space, our view of it is there's clearly going to be a couple of very valuable businesses in our area. And if we're playing to be number one, we're going to need to out work, out deliver, out care, our competitors. and you can do that through different ways than just pure hours, but I think it's part of that function.

54:52Of course, like if you work 10 hours a day and I work eight, I mean at some point you're gonna achieve a lot more, unless I'm very productive in my hours and I need time to reset. And I think there are people who can be quite different. I think it's different if you're building high complexity systems where you need to think deeply about directionally where you're going or if you're sitting and answering emails. So there's different work for different places. Do you worry that Europe had such a viscerally negative response to the 9 .96 vibe? But it's like, yeah, like people are vocally against it, but then you still have people in my team who are, I need to tell them on a Saturday at 10 p .m.

55:33to go home. D. Yeah. Do you do anything to inspire that? Of course I do. When I think about leadership, especially as a young founder, although I think I did a lot in the years that I've had I'm young and age and I think the only way to do that is like through like leading by example. And here my co -founder, Sige, RCTO, I mean, he sets the pace for the team. When I'm out traveling, he's in the office, he's coding, he's building and sets the pace. You have the best people of our growth team that when you look in the CRM, you see who's doing what? And that sets the pace. And if you hire for people who want to be winners and who want to grow and who want to be part of building something very generational I think they all understand that that comes with some level of sacrifice.

56:21The pace to win, it's hard to win in the US period. It's hard to win in the US even more so for your European company. What do you think you did so effectively to gain ground in the US while so many European companies before have not? So we had this idea that, okay, we need to be able to serve a couple of very large clients and partners in the states from Europe. And if we can do that and if we prove that we win in these AB tests, then we have enough proof points to go and set up a business. And then we started recruiting the team on the ground. What we've done is we've sent, I mean, the, some of the best people in the team, when we opened the London office, they went here, they moved here, and we're doing the same for the states now.

57:02What you do is you send a very clear signal that, like, hey, if you're the top performing team member and you want to go from Stockholm to New York, there's a path here. And that creates a culture again in that part of the office or that part of the world that again, like they're an extension of the core team and they're there to win and they have their own mission. I think what we also managed to do was we sort of got the word out in a good way. And I think it was red point to help us get the NASDAQ thing. And that sounds a pretty clear signal that like, oh, these guys are here to play. They're not here to be the European winner.

57:36So what would you advise then founders? I mean, so many founders who are preseed seed in Europe. And they're like, everyone's telling me that I have to be in the US. What do you say to them? Well, I don't think you have to be in the States. I'm not in the States yet. I'm, well, I'm on a plane, maybe, mostly. But you've got to figure out like where you're strong. And what we were strong was we got the buy -in from a couple of very influential clients in the States who said, we've had the taste of the things around the table. We prefer the taste of Obligora and we're going to double down on them as a partner.

58:10And then we said, okay, with this amount of traction, we're going to invest in also building up an office. And so, what I've done from an enterprise perspective is you go for like a top 10 logo. And if you get them, then you say, okay, let's build an office here. Like, let's invest more. And we've had a very top -down motion. Our first partner was the biggest firm in the Nordics, and then we've done that in every new country basically. Totally, yet you and I like that. Can I ask, what did you do to you wish you hadn't done? I'm actually quite happy with a lot of the results that I have in my hand, or how we've done things, and most of the things that I regret would have been very hard to know beforehand.

58:53But I think one of the things that I'm that I wish I hadn't had done is I wish I did a better job of juggling the intensity of the work and everything outside of it. You're so in it to win it in terms of how you build the business and on a personal level that requires a lot of sacrifice and I probably have like 50 unresponded texts on my phone from friends and people who I used to be very close with that I like haven't had the capacity to pick up And they understand, but I wish I did a better job, especially as we started out, like, chucking those two things. Do you think it would have been possible?

59:30I'm not sure. That's my point. That's hard. I can completely get you. Okay. And so, sorry, going back, we have you said red point there building, you know, helping you with the billboard. Sales is ripping, company in New Asnow as well. And then it comes to another round and it comes. Well, it's an hour in 2025. Now in 2025. And I think we're around 120 people. I remember messaging you before the round came out and you were like, yeah, you're loads of cash and everything's good. And I was like, oh, would you do something now? And you're like, no, we've got loads of cash. I didn't plan to do it.

1:00:03It kind of happened. That's what me then. That's bad of me because I kind of just took you for it. I was like, OK. Well, and so what happens then? Because you're seven million of error at the time. Yeah, something like that. And we're obviously scaling really fast. We don't necessarily need the money, but to your point about being seen as large, you want to be big enough to be in all of the rooms. And you want to be considered in every possible deal, and you want to have all the exposure that you can get, especially if it's on good terms. Again, like the thing that I always try and optimize for is, of course, sort of structure of the round, but also who am I now getting as a close ally of the company that will help me win and achieve the mission that we're doing?

1:00:46on. I think both iconic and GC have some very core strengths. So they just say approach you. Well, I think I had some catch ups and then again, very similar to how the preempted A round happened, somebody threw a term sheet and then it's like, oh, I guess we're doing this. Who threw the term sheet? I think it was GC through the first one. Love it. Well, dungeon at. Yeah. Okay. So she throws a term sheet. It was fun and timing as well with with Yuri going on G -C full time. Oh, yeah. Did you negotiate price? Yeah, we did. And so then you raised, I think it was 80 million. Where is 80 million on 675?

1:01:23It's 80 million on 675. That is not much dilution. And so my question is, if I'm them, I'm getting like 6 and a half per cent each. It's not a huge amount. Well, I've always said, and this is how I talk to people who are joining the company. You'd much rather own a small portion of something that becomes very, very, very large than the opposite, right? And I think when I look at it this space again when you think about the software market versus the service market Did they want to work together because if I'm them Yeah, respectfully it both iconic and GC can write an 80 million dollar shake I just say you don't need the other one get down that I'll take the full 12 and a half percent Whatever it is.

1:02:00Well, I mean everybody who participated in the round wanted more which I think is a very positive thing and If everybody leaves the table a little bit unhappy including me then we've landed in a good space When I think about fundraising, it's how can we spend as little time fundraising as possible and as much time as possible building the business? There is only in the last month in my world a lot of things are happening. There is definitely something true to the fact that you need a work chest to compete. Do you need a lot more money? Because now? Yeah. No. I mean, out of the 35 that we raised, I think we had only spent five or six.

1:02:39So now you're sitting on a hundred and a half minute? Yeah, basically. So there's nothing that you would do with more money. No. So I'm sorry, what are Harvey doing? I'm with so much more money. Great question. Maybe it's expensive. I've got it. That's a short way. Yeah. Well, I also think it's like how do you build a very cash -efficient business? I think here definitely helps to be a European company. I mean, you have access to raise money in the states. And you get to build the business here. And I think we also built it in a very sound way with good margins and a way to scale it from here.

1:03:10There's going to come a time when Harvey and I have a little bit like put a lid on the horizontal legal tech play, if you will. If you think about the earlier talk track about how do you go very deep on certain verticals? It's good to have cash and I also think that there's something around. You start running a little bit on the treadmill and you need to keep the public perception, although I don't necessarily care for it, the market cares for it. And so funding announcements are a way to boost things. And I mean, just to give you an example, like, yes, since we did the row, like a month and a half ago, we've doubled revenue, more than double revenue.

1:03:50And I think last month, like we added more than a million of ARR a week. Why is that? Is that because of the visibility? Is that because of the confidence that they're funding around in BC? Well, I think it's look, again, like these partners who are running these law firms, they're amazing business people. They think about, Who do I want to work with who's going to put me in the best position to become an AI native or an AI first Legal service provider and you want to bet on the horse who you think is going to be your best long -term partner There's nothing as impactful as being able to say hey We just went out and raised all this new money and now we have run away for years and years and years so we're gonna be around You can tell them yeah, we have a lot of cash that a lot of the but you know the external signalling of it also helps When you think about lawyers as customers, I always have this perception that they're incredibly sticky.

1:04:40You need to get them first because they don't change software very often. I don't agree at all. I found that their level of knowledge for these systems is increasing probably faster than we can build. They've gone from, oh, AI seems to be this thing and we just need to check the box and then we'll kind of forget about it. To, okay, I think my industry is headed in a way where software is going to be an integral part of our entire service offering. Now we need to fundamentally rethink our processes, some of our pricing and how we, to give you a Swedish sort of hockey reference, skate to where the puck is going.

1:05:23In that world, they are looking at software and as their partners in that world, very critically. And I frankly think that so far, none of the products are super sticky. They're quite easy to interchange, which has been very effective for us because we've done a lot of rip and replace. We mentioned ambition before. I actually remember an old Swedish girlfriend of mine, which will get me in trouble telling me about a Swedish word, which basically means you don't want to be different from anyone else. It's good to be like. Oh, young the login. Yes. Yes. This and I was like very perturbed by it. It seemed damaging to me that we should all try and be in this middle ground Well it effectively means you shouldn't think that you are something Do you agree with me in thinking that's terrible and we should change that in Europe?

1:06:12Well, I think it would have been impossible to build Ligora if I did not have a strike of overconfidence Did you ever have a time when you were too confident? Oh, I mean there's been loads of times Yeah, I can give you some fun examples. I mean, I mean, I went to circus class when I was a kid. I thought I was really, really great. And so I would try to, you know, climb up the largest piece of cloth and try to do like a big spin going down. And I would just like completely fall and, you know, hurt myself. And in school, I would instead of studying, go to the class or to the test and basically think like, oh, I'm so good, I'm just going to nail it.

1:06:50And you do that a couple of times and then you learn, okay, like at least I need to study before. Have you done it with LaGoura? No, I don't think so. I think we've followed through on almost every single promise that we've done. What really upsets you with the team? What I mean by that is like, I don't like sloppiness. I can take lots of... Well, yes, that's a good example. So when people start, I give them the same advice that I was given at McKinsey, which is like, take five to fifteen minutes and look through the work before you send it out, because if I find errors, I'm going to need to look through all of it.

1:07:24And I had this happen to myself when I was in VC. So I used to work at Nordgian VC. I had spent like six days building this monster Excel model. And there was one number wrong on the first page, which was just like a super sloppy dumb mistake. And I sent it out to the partner and they find a mistake. And then they spent 12 hours going through the entire thing. Everything else was correct. But yeah, that's something that I think if you tell people upfront about it, you should think about this because you know We don't want to be in the situation that really helps. I think to give you an example of something that I maybe don't necessarily agree with It's probably the idea that I need to remind the team often of how big the opportunities And I think that maybe comes a little bit from the Yantelog and thing but like, yes, they're big comparable companies close to us, Clorna has bought a few of them, many others, but sometimes people underestimate how big this actually is, and you just need to be like, here are the numbers.

1:08:25Like, can you imagine how big this is and the impact that we're having? We now have tens of thousands of lawyers logging into the platform every single day, and if something is wrong on the login screen, all of them are gonna sort of suffer from it. So the stuff we do now needs to be at a completely different level from what it was a year ago. And we're at this very exponential growth journey, which also means that you need to be on this exponential growth journey. Because you don't want to be in a situation where the company is growing like this. And you grow linearly, because at some point there there's going to be a very big delta, and it's going to be very hard to motivate.

1:09:01You get a lot of early talent in, and you've got to be pretty up front with them and say, Hey, this is the company's track. I'm betting on you to like grow this quickly with me. And that's maybe something that I've been surprised about personally. If I look back a year ago, I wouldn't say I'm a different person, but the amount of personal growth you've had to endure as a consequence of the company's growth is insane. What was the hardest bet to grow into? I think the hardest thing for me has been to move from like an IC to a manager. Why? Because you are used to having to do a lot of things yourself, even in school.

1:09:39If you're in a group project, if the group members are not that great, it's more effective to do the work yourself. Then trying to inspire them and trying to delegate to them to do great work. Because you're working under a very short transactional period where the group project is just going to be around for two months. Now the difference with the companies, it's going to be around for years or decades. You need to flip your mindset because if you do the work today, like, yeah, you might save 15 minutes, but you actually need to make the team grow to handle this stuff. Before we move into a quick fire, when you speak to anyone related to Harvey, they say Harvey's just much bigger.

1:10:19And Harvey's at 90 to 100 million in your whatever, 16, 17. And that's a big difference. It's 20 percent of the size. And how do you respond to think about that in a world that's moving so fast and all about being the biggest and the fastest? I actually don't think like a company here is our biggest competitor. I think about it as the biggest competitor is like non adoption and like moving the conversation forward. I think there's going to be built multiple massive businesses in this space. Again, like the amount of penetration in the market is still in the low single percent dials versus what it can become.

1:10:55I actually view it mostly as like a blue ocean scenario. Now, do I absolutely want to beat the other companies to become the biggest for sure? That's what we're playing for. That's why we're working so hard. But I don't necessarily think about it in that way. And when I get to talk with people who are associated with that business, we're very conscious of the fact that this is what we do well. This is why we're winning, AB tests or things like this. And so we're just going to keep doubling down on our strengths. I frankly feel like we're crushing it and the velocity has never been higher. Yes, I look a little bit up what they're doing, but I'm not looking like this.

1:11:32Like I'm cheating on a test. I care much more about doing our things well than trying to copy what they're doing. I always say the most important thing in life is to row your own race because you can always make yourself feel shit or amazing by looking at someone else. Yeah, exactly. Listen, I want to do a quick fire around my friends. So I say it's a statement. What's the most underrated skill for founders in 2025? I think that it is the ability to correctly prioritize when the opportunity set is so massive. Because right now, and especially with LLM, you could go and build almost anything. You need to be very careful about what you pick.

1:12:08And the ability to differentiate between what is a good opportunity and what is a good feature or what is a good thing to go after versus this is what everybody else seems to be doing. I think that's frankly the biggest strength. How would you advise a young engineering minded founder today wanting to do a company on a good versus a bad pick? It's too easy now to like try and sell something before you built it. So what I did was I went deep on my industry because I didn't know enough about it. And I think it's the same thing again. Like you got to go super, super deep on the problem space that you want to work in.

1:12:45And then I think now the cost of building software has gone down so incredibly quick You can prototype something pretty quickly and get to a stage where you actually have an MEP. That's mostly what we use the sort of LLMs for internally when you just think about the software side. It's not about building the super scalable infrastructure. It's about how do we prototype this thing pretty quickly, get it out to a couple of clients, and then iterate from there. With such easy prototyping, will we skip the design stage? No, I think you need to think about how you design an entire experience that makes sense.

1:13:18Otherwise what you'll end up with is a Frankenstein monster where every individual page looks alright and makes sense. But nobody has thought about the entire experience because the entire experience requires an eye of design. There's a huge difference in Ligora's UX and UI since our head of design Bert joined from V7. And I mean, he came in and just immediately sort of took responsibility for the end -to -end product and combined that with a brand. Remember, we went through a rebranding from Leia to Legora. You want to design the product in a way that takes those things into consideration as well.

1:13:58And that I think requires much more than just prototyping something in an LLM builder. In 10 years' time, what job will sound as strange as FIAS operated as today? Young corporate lawyer sitting in the data room pressing control F to find clauses. Do you not need that training to create a pipeline of future partners? I don't think you need the training of doing those specific work tasks. I think you need the training on the process and the value you're delivering to the and client and how every piece fits together. But I don't think you need to do the work of learning exactly how everything is phrased.

1:14:42Because I think here we're going to rely on AI systems to help us. And I mean, it's a similar parallel to engineering. Like, I don't think you need to understand exactly how every piece of row works if you understand how the system works. Because I don't think they're going to pay for it. I think in that future, you need to bundle in that no firm is going to pay for somebody to go through that education. What have you changed your mind on the last 24 months? So I actually disagree with something that you said earlier. Okay. I do think there's immense value in the model there, and I think specifically in OpenAI.

1:15:14But OpenAI is not a model company. They're a platform company. They're a software company. How would you differentiate between a model company and a platform company then? Well, so somebody who just does the model take Lama or Meta. They're doing the model, right? and they're kind of distributing it. And you have Anthropic, Gemini, and OpenAI, all playing for the horizontal platform of the AI -powered workspace for general productivity. And I mean, they're much more about providing good software than good models. Would you rather invest in OpenAI 300 or Anthropic at 60? I think I'd invest in OpenAI.

1:15:51Well, actually, we use mostly Sonnet models. So maybe I'd say Anthropic, but And Chatchy -Pity has much better distribution than Claude, although I think that some of the anthropic models are more interesting, especially on the Claude code. I think it's different for different things. Now, I think the majority bucket here is in the general productivity for the general consumer, and I think OpenAI is going to win that game. And the question is, how big is that game? Yes, but so an interesting part of being an application builder is the floor is always is Chatchy Petit. And so Chatchy Petit is improving quite quickly.

1:16:26Like the platform Chatchy Petit and the product Chatchy Petit is coming better, which requires us to be even better than that. How do you analyze Zox Talent Grab? Seems expensive. But hey, look, I recognize the things that I know and what I don't know. What I'm extremely nerdy about is how you bring the best application layer based on these models for legal work. And what I don't necessarily understand is how you build the best foundational models and win that game because there's a lot of well -paid people working on it. Was the final one? Was the single best piece of advice you've been given in the journey that you think about most often?

1:17:03I think about the fact that if you want to be a leader that inspires people you need to do so by doing and I think in the beginning I did that by carrying the highest quota myself and then I did it by working hardest on identifying where the the product is working and where it isn't working, and on pushing or marketing things to be even better. And it's like when you're so deep in the founder mode of like everything that's going on, people see that. And if this is the you care, they care. This is nice. I so enjoyed getting to know you before this. I've so enjoyed doing this with you. It's why I have such a great job, I think.

1:17:42But you've been fantastic. So thank you so much for joining me, man. Thank you, Harry. This was awesome. Now I want these shows to be the best shows as they can be for you. So let me know what you think. You can let me know on Twitter and Harry's settings or you can email me Harry at 20vc .com. Likewise, it makes such a difference if you left a review or left a comment really does help. But before we leave you today, Secure Frame empowers businesses to build trust with customers by simplifying information security and compliance through AI and automation. Thousands of fast -grown businesses including NASDAQ, Angel List, Doodle and Coda, trust secure frame to expedite their compliance journey for global security and privacy standards, such as SOC2 and ISO 27001, CMMC, NIST, Standards, and more.

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