20VC: Inside Legora: $100M ARR in 18 Months | Jude Law Generated $50M in Sales Pipeline: The Economics Broken Down | Competing Against Harvey, the 800 Pound Gorilla | Why Legora is Undervalued at $5.5BN with Patrick Forquer, CRO @ Legora

19:46We have a lot of data from, like, pilot participants. How can we give, you know, insights into that data that are going to help the firms and the companies that we work with make decisions around adoption frameworks, ROI, and things like that?

19:58Harry Stebbings:So what is this? Sorry, if I'm a founder listening to this, what does that actually mean? So we use pilot data to then encourage net new customers. So we say, hey, 84 % of people that use this type of email actually convert better. Yeah, exactly. So within a law firm context, for example, we'll segment out by practice area. And so let's say that a big firm's got, let's say, 10 practice areas, and then you have, let's say, X number of people within each practice area. We can report out on consumption and usage by practice area. And also we track and create frameworks and use case banks for actual applications and workflows that we're building.

20:36So let's say within that example, we've got 10 practice areas, seven of them we see really high usage. We're creating and capturing new use cases. We're sharing that back with them on a regular basis, but maybe there's three where we're not. And you can start measuring things like, did the quality of your work increase? Did you decrease the amount of non-billable work that your associates were doing? Were you able to attract more talent using a tool like Logorix? People get excited about using the latest and greatest in AI. And so if you take that and you apply it to the three practice areas where maybe we're not doing as well, we can show them insights as to who's really leaning in and who's not and where we need help from a change management perspective.

21:12Harry Stebbings:Totally get that. And so one insight, execution and being prepared. Anything else on how to navigate that? Hey, we're looking at Brex versus Ramp, Harvey versus Lagora. One of my biggest bits of advice found is always be respectful. Knocking your competition is not in a sales process. It just doesn't come across that well. Sell yourself, don't bash them. Exactly. Exactly, and we try to stay in our lane and focus on ourselves. Now, obviously, as you mentioned, we have one big competitor, and they come up on every... It's a death match on every deal. It's super competitive. We have a ton of respect for them.

21:47It's not like anyone over at Legora is just thinking that every deal we're going to is a cakewalk. It's the exact opposite. They're very good. They're very aggressive, and we take them extremely seriously. And so we screen for intelligence, we screen for effort, and we screen for competitiveness. because at the end of the day, you really want to win. You got to go out, execute, not deliver and evolve your playbook. We run pilots very differently now than we did a quarter ago, the quarter before that.

22:11Harry Stebbings:That's interesting. How do you run them differently today than you used to? We have a lot more tools. We have a lot more reporting. We have a lot more specialty in terms of implementation change management. So going back to like the firm context, as an example, you can't just have like a litigation attorney go talk to an M &A team. Like you got to have an M &A attorney go talk to an M &A team. And so as we've scaled out from just me to a much bigger team in the US right now, we've hired specialists who focus on different areas of the law who can, again, sort of go in bed with our clients and the folks and pilots and sort of build those bespoke workflows for them.

22:46And we're able to do that. We're able to get on site. Getting on site is super critical because people don't pay attention on Zoom. We all know that, right? And so on site.

22:53Harry Stebbings:And so when you say getting on site, what do you mean? You say in the sales process, it's like, hey, get into their office? Yes. I encourage every GTM and every legal engineer, if you're not in their office by the second or third meeting, something's wrong. Now, certainly some companies are especially on the corporate side. Maybe they're hybrid. Maybe they're remote. You can't always do it. But in particular, for a deal of really any size, because at the end of the day, for firms, this is sort of a bet the company type decision. This is an existential decision-making process. And so from that perspective, you're going to bet on the team just as much as you're betting on the product.

23:27And so at the end of the day, you're betting on a team is going to meet you in the future with the solutions and adoption frameworks that are going to help you get there.

23:34Harry Stebbings:It is about the decision, because this is their core investment in AI technology field, if you look at it from the partnership perspective as a law firm. With that in mind, and with the stickiness that can come, how do we think about giving it away for free and margin reduction in order to have market share gain? Yeah, we don't give Legora away for free. So we try and have price integrity. We try and be very transparent around what our pricing model is and how we go after things. But in a competitive dynamic, we do face that from various competitors. And do Harvey give it away for free? They have.

24:09And certainly from our perspective, I always make the joke when I'm talking to folks in a competitive dynamic, when you're getting down to the decision-making process, you're focusing on the product score from the pilot, you're focusing on the commercial model, you're focusing on the roadmap. One thing we do is we have what we call like the eight mile talk track. And at the end of eight mile where he just sort of says everything that's wrong with him about him and his family, we just sort of say like, this is exactly what's going to happen. If you pick us, this is what the counter is going to be.

24:39This is what they're going to go to this point. And we have a pretty good point of view on what will happen and it usually does. And so from that perspective, we just try and stay ahead of it.

24:48Harry Stebbings:Do people churn when they're embedded in a product? If switching isn't frequent and it's supremely sticky, if I'm Max and you're Patrick, easy one, I'd just say, let's just give it away for free to everyone for the first year. Let's just get everyone for free on it and get them as embedded as usual. We'll tell all of our investors that our margin is going to suck. There's no revenue. It's going to suck. But next year, we're going to be at a billion five in revenue. Well, there's one way to look at it. But the way I think about it is, first of all, if a company is not spending any money on a product, doesn't matter, then they're not going to put the resources and attention into it that they need to.

25:23And we really need our customers to lean in and want to change. Because at the end of the day, we can have the best team that we want. We can have the best team focused on all the right things. But if the customers aren't leaning in, then it's going to be tough. And so I think from going to zero is not helpful in that sort of dynamic. But I see what you're saying. We do try to be easy to work with. And so from that perspective, we try and be as flexible as we can be.

25:46Harry Stebbings:It's a very interesting behavioral economic study, which is they give away yoga class for free in a park. And it had a 52 % attendance rate. And then they charged$35 and it had a 92 % attendance rate. Yeah, exactly. It's like people commit to what they pay for. Exactly. And you have to place value in your partners. And we find that to be true. I interviewed Winston and Harvey. And I thought it was very smart one of their GTM approaches, which is using PE as this kind of expand funnel into the clients that they have in law. How do you think about that? Yeah, that's definitely an angle. And certainly within the sort of legal services ecosystem more broadly, you look at the influence in decision making on tooling, for example.

26:28It's like if you're selling to a corporate, they're going to ask all their law firm panel, what tools are they using? If you're selling to a law firm, they're going to ask their big corporate clients the tools they're using. And certainly private equity -

26:40Harry Stebbings:Who has the power? Does the PE firms have the power over the law firms? Or does the law firms have the power over the PE? I think it depends on the firm and depends on the PA company, for sure. But there's definitely a lot of interconnectivity. And one of the most fun things about selling into this market is that every deal is very different. Like selling to a law firm, there's a lot of personalities. Stakeholder management is very different from firm to firm. So there's innovation teams, there's knowledge management, but there's also partners. And the degree to which partners want to lean in and get involved, and then there's AI committees, and there's all these subcommittees and all these different things.

27:12So it's very intricate, the decision-making processes. And one client of a firm might have an outsized voice at the table for or against you, as an example. You have to be very mindful of that. That sort of map is very complex.

27:25Harry Stebbings:There's many different clients' processes. Biggest lessons or advice on lead scoring, going back to that? Anything you see people doing way wrong? Lessons. The one thing that remains true is that the longer you let a lead sit, the worse the conversion rate is, right? And so we just try to optimize for the highest intense signal with the fastest response time. And so we automate a lot of that from sending out the calendar invite for the initial call on the right system with the right person. We just try and be as fast and as accurate as possible with that. I don't think we have any like... Dude, it's exactly like a deal.

27:59Harry Stebbings:When you almost see it in two weeks, it's like, ah, I wish I was done. And if you miss something or something gets dropped and this happens to everyone, then your chances of converting that go way down. And that remains true. and I don't think we have any big insights on that. We have that. Cool. You're advising me. I'm an early stage founder. I have biggest advice on sales qualification, the hard questions to ask, what not to ask, the way to do it. For us, it's a couple of things. Going back to the pilot example, one thing that we've learned is we've had some firms who say, oh, we have this really onerous InfoSec process.

28:33So we want to do a pilot, but we don't want to go through InfoSec. So we're just going to do it on test documents or publicly available things. That's a recipe for, again, low engagement, low excitement, and just generally doesn't work out well. You've got to have a little bit of give-get. There is a little bit of pain on the front end of identifying the use cases that you want to test, identifying the stakeholders that you want to be involved in the pilot to go through, yeah, some pretty, as you can imagine, working with Deloitte and these big law firms and EY. The InfoSec process is non-trivial.

29:08So if you can get buy-in on identifying the success criteria for the pilot, who's going to be involved, what use cases we're going to test, what metrics are involved, and you can go through that initial sort of painful period, then you know you've got something there.

29:22Harry Stebbings:How do you bring in people with true buying power? I imagine they're not always on the first calls. How do you make that transition of like, I'm so pleased, Patrick, that you're excited about Lagora. Can we please try and get your boss in now because I want to progress this? I have to say one of the things about Legora that's floored me, at Braze, we had this problem. So at Braze, the executive buyer was the CMO. And getting access to a CMO was so hard. And we would get it done very, very rarely. And we always sort of bend over backwards to get this done. With Legora, because there's so much chatter in the market about AI and the firms and corporates both want to understand what others are doing, we actually get access to power pretty easily.

30:05And people want to learn because on a law firm side, they're getting asked by their clients, how are you using AI and what tools are you using? And what are the use cases? And where are we going to see this value in our bill, for example? And on the corporate side, they're getting a ton of pressure from the board and the CEO of like, hey, go figure this shit out. Like, we need to optimize like XYZ process and AI everything. And so we get access to senior stakeholders who want to like lean in and learn from us. But I think typically, if you don't have that access early to your question. What we try to do is we try to focus on the highest value use cases and highest value impact as quickly as possible.

30:41So you want to grab attention really fast. And lucky for us, the Lagora product's awesome. So coming in with the perspective on the company and the role based on the ICP that you're talking to, talking about some of the high value use cases that we have, learning about what's most important to them, and then showing them how we'd solve that quickly. They're like, wow, I want to show this to my boss. And that's generally a framework that's been successful.

31:02Harry Stebbings:I come from an industry that is traditionally called sheep-like in terms of following others. I don't understand why anyone would attribute that to us. To what extent is legal a sheep-like industry where it's like, oh, Clifford Chance, Slaughter and May, you name it, use X. To what extent do they follow others? There's certainly an aspect of a flight to safety during these sort of category creation moments because this is all new. The sort of general understanding of how agents work and how AI works and how to think about use case design is still being developed. And the executive buyers at the firms and at the companies generally aren't as up to speed on that.

31:41Some of them are, but broadly, probably not. And so there is this flight to safety. And I think generally people want to feel like you never got fired for hiring IBM. And at the end of the day, there is an aspect, there is definitely an element of that. Do you not feel both you and Harvey at IBM at this stage? I was going to say, last year, we were the new entrant. We were trying to make our name, and we were - You were not IBM at last year. We were definitely not last year. I think at this point, working with the firms that we work with, having Devovoys and Linklaters and other big firms advocating for us really goes a long way.

32:17And I think we have that stamp now, but that's been a journey that we've been on.

32:21Harry Stebbings:You've got 20 of the 100 AMLO, and Harvey've got 40 or 60? I don't know their numbers, yeah. I think they said 50 of Amlor. Yeah, 50. Does that mean we're fighting over the next 30? Or does that mean we're fighting for each other's candidate? Both, for sure. I mean, they know who we work with. We know who they work with. We're both trying to get in. We're very aware that they know who our customers are. We know who theirs are. We're both going aggressively after it and also scaling up quickly to go after the next 50 or whatever the number is. So we've got to play defense and offense at the same time.

32:53And that's what makes it fun. God, the old SaaS world feels quite nice. Yeah, exactly.

32:58Harry Stebbings:It's like 30 % growth a year. Do you pay attention to social? Because for VCs, you saw it last week, the VCs. Paul Graham tweets and then Matt Miller tweets back. I'm not saying anything about either individual. I like them both immensely. But does it impact team? I don't know how much it impacts the team. We definitely hear about it. When PG tweeted that, my phone blew up. Shout out to him, by the way. That was awesome. What a hair. I do wear shorts everywhere. He's a guy after my own heart. Yeah, even in Scandinavia. But I try not to think about it too much. And obviously, we've got Chaitan and others really advocating for us in the public sphere.

33:37We really appreciate that. But I leave that stuff to them. I'm not on Twitter. Do you bring VCs in to help you win deals? Definitely.

33:45Harry Stebbings:That's interesting. 100%. I mean, the cool thing about the space that we're occupying is because the VCs themselves, If you think about Iconic, General Catalyst, Bessemer, they have huge legal networks themselves. They're big spenders on legal services more broadly. And so they definitely have big networks and are advocating for us whenever they have the opportunity. And certainly, our competition do the same thing. And that's definitely an element of these sort of opportunities. I always tell founders that I work with, use your cap table as a weapon. Yeah. Like, absolutely. Exactly. What did Harvey do better than you today?

34:21That's a hard one. And I don't want to give, I don't know if I want to give an inch at all. But I mean, certainly the strength of their brand is something that is hard to deny. They've done a great job. They were the first intrant and they've sort of built this amazing brand and kudos to them.

34:36Harry Stebbings:When we said earlier about kind of the playbooks, again, going back to something that Chathan said, he said training in particular is something where we've done incredibly well and ramping people. What's the biggest lesson on how to do training well? Because it's not easy, actually. Well, and this is another thing as a leader that's very different than in the SaaS environment. How so? Because I thought talent development would maybe be the same. Well, yes, but in the SaaS world, it's much more predictable and on this very clear, slow operating model. So you had quarterly releases with some monthly shipping in between.

35:10Ahead of the quarterly release, you've got all this documentation. You do a big certification. You go through all these programs. With Lagora, we do big, huge product things like every week. And the team has to stay on top of that. And there's no way you could do a global certification program for every big feature we launch in real time all the time. And so we have to do a lot at a team level, regional level. And we do a lot async with video content. We use Notion really heavily. The product teams really embed with the individual sales and legal engineering teams and engagement folks to make sure that, we're all up to speed, but you can't do it all centrally.

35:48You have to really distribute through both async video and Notion content, as well as team level enablement. So we activate on our

35:56Harry Stebbings:product guys in that way. Don't worry about being too specific. How does that look then for sales training then? First week, what do I get? I get a Notion link and a load of video libraries? No. So this is actually something we've really elevated and something I'm really proud of. So when I first joined, Vilgat told me to go to Best Buy and buy an Apple computer. And then I went and had a couple of videos of Max doing a demo. Now, every two weeks, we have a new hire class. And at this point, it's between 40 and 50 people joining every two weeks. We send everyone to Stockholm doing immersive five days.

36:31And this is not like something where you're just going to go do a couple of video things and then go like walk around Stockholm. This is intense, immersive. We expect GTMs and LEs to come out of that week to be ready to go. From a ramp perspective, it's a straight line up. We expect to drop people in and see them be very productive very quickly.

36:52Harry Stebbings:When you say ready to go, you mean they are ready to sit on calls on their own with clients? Yes. That's quick. It's very quick. Yeah, I had a guy do in his second week do a demo with one of the biggest companies in the world and he killed it. I mean, obviously I joined because, you know, the nature of who the company was. Now Patrick decided to sit that way. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I was sort of there for guidance. But we expect productivity to happen very quickly. So we do an immersive first week. What does that mean, an immersive first week? I'm sorry to be specific, but there's so many founders that listen literally with notes.

37:27Harry Stebbings:Yeah. What does an immersive first week mean? So we have a cross-functional sort of education program focused on everything from, this is our sales stages, this is our opportunity cycle, this is the entry and exit criteria. We do a full day of demo work. We have a huge library, yes, of gong and video content from a demo perspective. But we also do a lot of role plays, and we do a lot of education on the market generally. We hire a lot of lawyers. We also hire a lot of technologists. So the lawyers, you have to sort of train up on how the tech stuff sort of works, and then the technologies you have to train up on, the sort of subject matter expertise from a legal services perspective.

38:05So we have a ton of content on industry education, product education, competitive landscape. The competitive landscape, as mentioned, changes every week. So we have to update all the product information, the new product information. So we just have basically a university-style four-day program where every department comes and enables the new hires on that particular program and how we operate. We have all that available for them and the new hire sort of notion. And then all the reps have their own personalized ramp page where we track all the metrics that we're looking at from a ramp perspective.

38:37Harry Stebbings:Of the 40 to 50, how many do you think make it? That's a good question. When we move on from sales folks, we do it typically within the first quarter. And we actually have really high retention rates relative to the market. What are the signs that someone's not gonna make it? We score demo quality using AI. We use Gong. And then you can create like a scoring mechanism for how the call went. How was the discovery framework? what was the demo flow, et cetera. And then when we get a red flag on that, our team goes in and our enablement team goes in and sort of looks at the call and does a playback with that person.

39:10So if you look at call quality scoring plus opportunity development from a pipeline perspective, you can see pretty quickly who's tracking. We know what good looks like and we know what good doesn't look like and you can see pretty quickly within about 45 days.

39:24Harry Stebbings:So is it bullshit then, the traditional notion that, oh, well, you know, enterprise is really difficult to understand whether someone's a good sales rep because the sales cycles are long. From a traditional SaaS perspective, that might still be true. With us, even our enterprise folks, when they come in, they're going to be buried in deals within 60 days. Like our best people are closing deals typically within 90 days, even on an enterprise team. So from that perspective, because we're very hot right now, this market is being made right now. And so from an opportunity point of view, it's not like you have to go take your territory list, get your BDR, go do some account based marketing, get the initial meetings.

40:03That's like sort of traditional. I've ramped cold territories before. I've managed teams that have done that in a SaaS perspective. This isn't that. This is one of the hottest markets of all time. When we drop GTMs into their book, they're into typically something like five pilots within their first quarter. And so we're asking people to get very productive very quickly because this is not something where we can go like do a bunch of handholding for a long period of time. And we have so much inbound and so much interest that you know quickly because the volume of opportunities that they're working is much higher than it would be in a traditional SaaS environment.

40:36Harry Stebbings:Would you rather hire someone who has experience selling to law firms or someone who has experience selling this size of deal? I would rather have someone who has this size of deal. Really? Because legal tech traditionally, we're selling much bigger deals than traditional legal tech companies. Are ACVs like 250, 500? Around that. It depends on the segment. But yeah, roughly. But we're doing a lot of seven big, high seven figure deals. And a lot of legal tech companies were like more niche. And so the ACVs and ARRs were not what ours are. We have hired some folks from legal tech and some have done really well.

41:15but they're not used to sending a million dollar proposal across the line. And I'd much rather have someone who is really strong in understanding organizational dynamics and change management and was really confident in sending large proposals and being able to work that sort of angle.

41:31Harry Stebbings:What was the hardest deal to win and why do you think you won it when you reflect on it, like a win post-mortem? So I'm thinking about, I don't know if I want to say the name, but as a big, big global law firm that we won. How big was it? It sort of medium seven figure deal. For us, it was hyper, hyper competitive. It was global. So we were using the full force of our global team in the US, Europe, and the UK and Australia. So we had all four regions activated working this from a pilot perspective. It was very close. There was influence on both sides. Do you know when it's close? Yes. How? And it came down to, this is how we knew how close it was.

42:14It came down to executive presentation of our CEO and their CEO in front of their executive panel. And that's how they ended up making the decision. And we won. Well, I would be nervous if I was Max. Yeah, yeah. You were just like, you want to be on form.

42:29Harry Stebbings:You sleep well on the night before. Honestly, the biggest thing we have going for us is that we have Max and no one else does. And so we feel he inspires a lot of confidence. Is that very rare to have CEO to CEO bake off? It is. I mean, in my career, yes. But in terms of the Legora experience, no. Because again, these are such important decisions. If you're a top law firm, I don't think it feels unreasonable. No, you want to know who you're betting on. And you want to have a deep level of understanding of who they are, what the vision for the company is. Does that align with your vision? Does it align with your values?

43:00You know, the product strategy and execution. People really want to get in and get into the nitty gritty and understand not just Max, myself, the team more broadly, the chops of the folks who are going to be delivering the services, like they look at all of that. It's a really fine tooth comb that they go through this stuff with.

43:15Harry Stebbings:Okay, dude, everyone has a flip side. Take me to a deal you lost. When you look back on it, what's the postmortem? Like what more could we have done? I'm thinking about one right now. And as always with enterprise, it goes back to multi-threading and who you get to and who you don't. And so within a law firm context in particular, the decision making is sometimes opaque and there's oftentimes there's these panels and sometimes let's say there's five people on a panel sometimes you get to meet all five people sometimes you meet four out of five sometimes you meet one in terms of like one-to-one engagement and relationship and there was one key member of the panel that we never got time with and weren't able to build a relationship with and they did and oftentimes with panel making decisions sort of the loudest voice gets what they want.

44:01And we weren't able to get that. So that was really painful.

44:05Harry Stebbings:Is the days of steak buying dinners over or actually not? It's not like it used to be. I mean, you know, back in the early days when I was first, you know, I graduated college in 2008 and that was still in the era where steak lunch, steak dinner, a lot of entertainment and sales. I mean, it's definitely, it's definitely evolved. I think more so these days people want to do like activities, you know, get out and maybe not go to a steak dinner or do something a little more fun oh god it reminds me of like mini golf dates yeah yeah well not quite like that but i mean relationships are still really important and certainly for us it's actually conferences there's so many conferences and so many events and any chance we have to sort of show up and show and that works because in like traditional tech i think there's been a realization that and it's helpful for our business that actually being a brand logo on viral podcast clips is the new gold yes and like having a banner in a conference that no one really wants to go to not so much in traditional tech.

45:00Harry Stebbings:Is that not the case in legal? Legal tech right now is having this like renaissance. There's so many new players, there's so much money coming in. But going back to the conference point, you can waste money on conferences and you can make money on conferences and it sort of depends. And so we've got a pretty good playbook for that. What did you spend money on that was an absolute banger and you learned something from that that I should know? When they go really well, these sort of fireside chat type executive dinners. So we hosted one, some of our investors, their office is at Zero Bond in New York.

45:32And like everyone was, one thing is true is like everyone still wants to go to like a fancy restaurant and hear someone smart speak. And so we still find that these sort of thought leadership, AI, thought leadership dinners are super effective and they cost a lot of money and you have to, you know, get some talent in the room from a thought leader point of view and to have them do like a fireside chat with Max, that's highly, highly effective and something that we do very often and really well.

45:58Harry Stebbings:What have you spent money on? And you're like, guys, I can't believe we fucking spent money on this. Going back to the conference thing, I think we averaged a conference a week last year. We showed up at every conference you could think of. And some of them we repeated this year and some of them were like, we're never doing that again. I love that. Speaking of, we said that, Would you rather have someone who's versed in law or someone who's versed in deal size? When we think about incentivizing teams, I think sales comp packages are really hard to get my head around. Traditional SaaS, going back to this traditional versus new world, 4X OT, good.

46:35Harry Stebbings:Then I have Becca from Clay who's like 6 to 7X. And then I have my dear friend Carlets from Eleven Labs who went very viral saying 20X. Yeah. And I'm like, oh my God, I feel like such an insignificant human being. I heard that 20X number. I got so many, I mean, obviously I follow the show. You got so many pings. Every CRO got so many pings. All my friends who are in this business were like, wait, what's your multiple? Did you hear this guy? Everyone got that. I feel a little bit bad for the rest of the CRs. Like, how do you think about effective sales comp setting today? So, well, just to start it off the top, ours right now, it depends on the segment in the region, but ours right now are between sort of 8 and 12X is where we sort of landed.

47:21But we don't just take a multiple and apply that to the sort of competitive market OTE. You've got to really take like a bottoms up approach to it and look at all of the metrics we were just talking about before. So look at ramp time, productivity per head, ARR per head, pipe evolution within certain territories. We did a bottoms up approach of that last year and we got to those sort of range. But we also had a year last year where we absolutely blew out every metric that we put in front of the team. So I don't know how effectively we're doing that, but that's how we're doing it right now.

47:54Harry Stebbings:But you think 8-12 acts today is where you sit, which is good. Yeah. What percent of people should hit that? Our average attainment last year was 280%. Wow. Is that an ineffective attainment setting? Yeah, that was a bad job by me. Yeah, no offense. Yeah, no, I mean, when I started, again, just going back for context, We were$3.5 million, and Chetan and the Red Point guys were like, can we do$25? And that fell. I remember giving, we raised our Series B, and I remember giving a big rah-rah. We had everyone to Stockholm. We did a big rollout. When Logan did it. Yeah. I give, you know, I'm a VC, so I give credit to other VCs for a living.

48:34Harry Stebbings:But I give credit to Logan on that one, which is like he paid up in advance for something that wasn't that obvious, respectfully, and like credit to him. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, he got me. that's how I got connected with Max was through Logan. And he actually introduced me to Braze as well. So I'm always a big fan of the Redpoint team. Sorry, you joined and it was like three and a half. So then we're like, can we do 25? And I remember we were at like seven, we raised a series B, we had everyone to Stockholm and I'm giving a big, you know, rah-rah speech to the global team at that point, which fit in the kitchen of our Stockholm office, basically.

49:10So we hit 25 in Q3, and then we went nuts in Q4 and blew through every... We ended the year at 70, and then obviously crossed 100 earlier this year. So the projections are very hard from our side. So from a forecast perspective, at the beginning of the year, I only gave guidance to the board based on a rolling six-month basis. So at this point, based on the data that we have and the sort of pipe analysis that we have, we feel pretty good about our ability to forecast a sort of top line business. The individual productivity stuff can be a little all over the place because obviously there's like bluebird deals that happen and things like that.

49:45And we also have a ton of inner quarter open and close. And so being able to forecast that is a little bit of a pin the tail on the donkey challenge, but we're getting better at that piece of it.

49:54Harry Stebbings:What's your biggest advice to other CROs when you look at the CROs that ping you on the 20X that we discussed? What's your biggest advice to CROs on how the fuck to do forecasting effectively in this very dynamic landscape? It's really hard. And the first thing I say is you got to have a little grace with yourself and set expectations appropriately. Because in this market, it's been relatively elastic so far and that won't continue forever. But right now, that's sort of the experience that we're having. So I do two things. I do like a rep and manager, commit, roll up, like bet your life. Rep, roll up, first line manager, second line manager.

50:29Harry Stebbings:So what does that actually mean? I'm sorry for being a rep, roll up. Yeah. So you have, if you're a sales director at Lagora, and let's say you have a team of eight people. You go all eight people, like bet your life how much ARR are you going to close this quarter? That level of seriousness. And then that manager has to take the rep roll up and then they have to commit whatever number based on that sort of input from the reps. The directors take that to the VPs. The VPs take their director roll ups and then they commit like a regional number. And right now we have, including India, we have five regions.

51:02So APJ, India, EU, the UK, and the US. I take the VP roll-up, and then I compare that to the weighted forecasts. So then we've got this amazing woman, our RevOps team, Lulu, who I worked with to create this weighted version of what a weekly, monthly, quarterly forecast would look like based on the opportunity stages. So with that, you have to have really, really tight rigor around opportunity management. So the stages and the amounts on the opportunities have to be really dialed and updated in real time. In last quarter, the rep regional rollup and what we call LuluCast, which is the weighted, sort of what I call the math version of the forecast, were the same.

51:41And we were pretty accurate on both. Where do stages go most wrong? If you don't have really good entry and exit criteria, as you could explain to your grandma. What does entry and exit criteria mean? So, let's say in our sale, if you think about a sales process, there's sort of the two-sided buyer journey, right? There's the funnel on the way in to close one, and then there's the funnel on the way out as you look for advocacy and adoption. On the way in, let's say we have five sales stages. For example, I mentioned the pipeline that we generated off of Jude Law. To get into qualified pipe, you have to go through a discovery call where we ask questions around the buying process, what they're looking for, interested in, things like that.

52:18And then to progress that to the next stage, certain things that they say have to be true, meaning they have to be in a buying cycle, have to have budget. Think about BANT frameworks like budget, authority need time. And then as you move into the qualification criteria, it's like, okay, the next stage is the pilot. What do we need to do to get into the pilot? I sort of alluded to executive buy-in, InfoSec, budget allocation, things like that. If you get that right and you have consistency across the global teams, then typically the forecasting is right. And if you get the right weighting based on your sort of funnel progression historically, then you can get to a weighted forecast that's like directionally accurate.

52:54Harry Stebbings:You said there about the different regions that you have. If you're advising CRO CEOs today, do you have to be everywhere all at once today? Yes, it's different. And the speed at which we're doing it is very different. Going back to the Braze experience, New York Tech, we had a London office. That was like sort of the next move. But it took us a really long time, for example, to expand into Germany, which we eventually did, expanding into Japan and other places. Whereas all of those, we just opened in Germany. We just opened in Spain. We've opened five offices, maybe six in the US, Sydney, Bangalore.

53:27We've been all over the place.

53:29Harry Stebbings:India feels like a strange one. It's just such a different universe. What was the thing you buy in India and how's India going? We typically follow the ball in terms of pipeline. From that perspective, we had a ton of initial interest. We have great interest in the Middle East. We have great interest in India. So there was a ton of inbound sort of signal. Where's the hardest? Again, Carla spoke about Japan and South career. I'm friends with Daniel from UiPath, who always says about that being a difficult region. Where's the hardest? That region is very hard. And we've been consulting a lot of our investors, a lot of advisors on how best to enter those markets.

54:02But yeah, I would say APAC is probably the most complex. And certainly each region has its own nuance with respect to data hosting requirements, processing requirements. You can't process stuff in Europe or the US. You have to process certain things in region. Some of the model providers don't provide. For example, if you're selling into China, certain model providers don't provide access to the models in China and other places. So there's definitely some architectural work that goes into it. And there's a ton of work we're also doing. We announced today a big project we've done with McKinsey, focusing on European public sector work.

54:34And if you think about the FedRAMP in the US, there's all kinds of things that are really hard from a technology perspective that you have to keep in mind.

54:40Harry Stebbings:With the greatest of respects, I'm probably going to get in trouble. Sovereignty is kind of an interesting word that's thrown around. But to what extent do you see Americans choose Americans and Europeans choose European? Is that a thing? Definitely a thing. And certainly we have the perception when we come into a deal that I think everyone just people think I'm from Sweden, for example. You look Swedish. Seriously, you could change your name to Sven and just don't talk. That's like the guy from Frozen. Yeah. Sorry, he's mute. But yeah, there's definitely that perception that we deal with. So, you know, the LLMs, I always joke, the LLMs we use are all American.

55:20But yeah, that's definitely a thing, in particular in Europe, obviously, with a lot of the geopolitical stuff going on. In the US, people really care about understanding of like jurisdictional context and things like that. So it's a big thing. We spoke earlier about the

55:34Harry Stebbings:hardest challenge, and you said it was like just the speed and the velocity of scaling. Yeah. What breaks that people don't see? And what are the lessons from that? Things like the plumbing and rev ops of how you do billing and your billing systems and if you want to change anything in your pricing model, if you want to change anything in your billing system, and you're adding as many customers as we are every month, it gets very hard to do things like some of the billing systems, reporting and all that stuff. And a lot of it gets done manually at times because if you're changing from one system that worked for you at 10 million that doesn't work for you at 100 million, and you have to make those changes.

56:10We migrated CRM, so we migrated to Salesforce, which is awesome. But anytime you do a CRM migration, it's a huge pain in the ass. So you migrated to Salesforce? Yes. From what? Well, I don't want to say. Oh, okay. But I don't want to speak ill. No, no, no, I didn't mean that bad. Speak ill, but it wasn't working for us. And so I did a full survey of the market. We picked Salesforce. And anytime you go through a systems change like that, yeah, there's change management, but there's also opportunity management and different things of ways of working that are really hard to roll out and you have to get right.

56:44But people grumble.

56:46Harry Stebbings:Do you think Salesforce faces the threat of being a database which agents crawl on top of and you have no interaction slash engagement with? I think all the traditional SaaS companies are definitely under threat right now. But I have to say, I've been so impressed with Salesforce. If you look at, they sort of did a hard break glass in case of emergency pivot last year. and at their scale, they went full agentic and sort of the go-to-market framework and positioning. And credit for them for being, they're very early on that ahead of every other big tech company. And I don't know how it's going to shake out, but I know we did a survey of all the other sort of hyperscaling AI companies and most of them are using Salesforce.

57:26Harry Stebbings:If there's one CEO you would bet on for a tidal shift change in landscapes, it would be Benioff. Yeah, 100%. I've been, like I said, anytime the words Benioff and Davos came up in a deal review, you knew you were pretty fucked. So, yeah, he's definitely... But what I love about Benioff, which I actually see in Max, is Max would get on every freaking plane to close the deal. Yes, 100%. And you have to have that right now. And Max basically lives on a plane. I mean, as do I, candidly. So that's one you see guys like him leaning in and, yeah. I think Max is one of the, I work with pretty great CEOs and very lucky.

58:06Harry Stebbings:What does no one see about Max that you think makes him special? I think he leads from the front. So he's always up early, online, you know, pushing the ball, setting the tone for the team. So as a leader, he's someone who he's going to get on the flight. He's going to take the call. He's going to jump on an escalation. He's going to call into a deal. He's going to do whatever it takes. And I think that that permeates throughout the organization. but also he's very kind. And he cares deeply about the business and he cares deeply about building the business in the right way. He wants to build a business that's remembered with a culture that made a big impact on the people that work there.

58:45And he's very focused, not just on Legora being successful, but all the people at Legora developing their career and taking that next step. And he takes that stuff really seriously. And we work on that as a leadership team. Any lessons on culture with scale? That's one of the hardest things. When people ask me what's hard, maintaining the culture that we have as we add the number of people that we're adding is very difficult. Don't laugh.

59:09Harry Stebbings:I have this now where I don't have time to say hello to everyone internally. I used to come in and I was like under 20. Yes. And I could literally go around and say good morning to everyone, which is nice. And now I can't. And I find that really weird, which is pathetic given how tiny it is compared to you. But that's a weird one for me. Anything that you learn, know, do you? So our cultural values are LFG. lean in, grow together, and fight for excellence. So from a cultural perspective, I think it goes back to just being intentional. You have to repeat what your values are. You have to highlight what good looks like.

59:40And you have to constantly reinforce your expectations around cultural ways of workings. And so one of the things I always say is like, we're big on no assholes. The biggest way to get on my shit list is to be disrespectful to someone internally or, you know, heaven forbid, someone externally. And so living our standards and constantly reinforcing what those are is something that we spend a lot of time on and making sure that we're building company the right way.

1:00:05Harry Stebbings:And that's why Max never hired me. Kind of a weird one, but it's like everyone's talking about like token maxing now. For you as CRO, you're the man holding the budget. How do you think about like encouraging AI usage internally, token maxing, token budgeting, anything that CROs of the future will need to contemplate, consider that they're not today? We're pushing our teams to use AI in every aspect of the deal as much as possible. And thankfully for us, like budget isn't a huge concern at the moment. So we're really focused on automating the sort of - Is that difficult? And what I mean by that is actually, as the man with the budget, I don't want people to know that I have a lot of budget.

1:00:48Yeah, well, it's more around my expectations. It's less around the budgetary questions and more around, we have access to a bunch of different AI tools and we've created playbooks for things like account planning as an example, where we've created an agent that can do a one-click account plan and help you do meeting prep for use case development and things like that. So it's more around being really specific of, we expect you to be using these tools. Here's the stuff that we've built from a central team perspective, but I also expect our teams to be going out and building their own stuff and elevating the game.

1:01:22Because again, we can't do things the same way that we did things last year and expect to be successful moving forward. And I want them to share that stuff broadly. And we highlight what good looks like on all of our global team calls. Are you seeing non-eng people building their own tools? A hundred percent. Really? Yeah, a hundred percent.

1:01:39Harry Stebbings:In what way? I mean, we have legal engineers, for example, who will have a product idea around on something that we should build in Lagora, maybe for a specific industry. We have a funds attorney who works with us who's excellent, named Felix. And he had a perspective on some things we could build for our private equity clients. It'd be highly impactful. And he was having a hard time sort of describing the requirements to our product team and just spent a weekend, vibe coded up a version of what he thought would be impactful and showed it to the team, showed it to me. And it was like highly, highly helpful and just understanding is sort of what the vision of the product could be.

1:02:18So that's an example.

1:02:19Harry Stebbings:Final one before we do a quick fire, which is I know budget is not necessarily a constraint, but it always is slightly. Yeah, you have to keep it in mind. What would you do if you had unlimited money that you're not doing today? That's a great question. It's less about money and more about time. And the hardest thing that we have right now is taking the time to sort of pause and think about ways of working and like our operating model. And I'd love to, for example, do a two-day bootcamp where we bring in some AI experts and we go through every part of every process of every go-to-market team and every motion and build more automation and more agents to do more things to take sort of that rote work off of my team's plate so they can focus on those things that have the highest and biggest impact.

1:03:04The money is more about time than money right now. And taking that time to think strategically and get everyone together in person, there's so much value. We did our sales kickoff at the beginning of the year in Stockholm. There was so much learning. There was so much relationship building that happened. I wish we could do that stuff all the time. And just the speed of development of our business, we don't have time to get together in that way. And that's something I wish we were able to do a lot more of.

1:03:31Harry Stebbings:Did you ever doubt whether you were able to make the jump to next-gen CRO? Yeah, definitely. How do you get comfortable with that? I think everyone, I face it every day as an investor, where like what was good is no longer good. Lagora's growth is unparalleled. Before it was one to five. Yeah, exactly. We're forced to think through like, shit, maybe we need to be energy investors. Maybe we need to be infrastructure investors. And you are struck with this, am I good enough to make the jump? How do you reflect on that? For me, it's more about being super intentional about what I want and my vision for myself.

1:04:06And honestly, people ask me, what do you want to do next? Like, I'm doing it. This is what I've always wanted to do. Like the job I'm doing right now is the job I've wanted to do for a really long time. But more often than not, in this world, it's more around like, did you bet on the right horse? So I took a bet after leaving Braze and went to another company and it didn't work out. I was working really hard. I was doing all kinds of things that I thought were smart, and we just weren't seeing the results. And then, you know, come to Legora, right place, right time, right market. And so much of our success has to do with the company, the team, and the market that we go into.

1:04:41It's like, you know, it's like sports. You put the wrong person on the wrong team and the wrong system, like they're not going to be as successful as they would have been otherwise. And I just feel very fortunate.

1:04:49Harry Stebbings:The truth is true product market fit is so unwavering. Yes. Any question of like, oh, do I have it or not? If you have it, you fucking know. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And when you have it, when you have momentum and you have an advantage, press the advantage. If anything is working, disseminate that to the team. Press, press, press. In terms of playbooks and things that work competitively, when we find something that works, we document, share, and press on that immediately. That changes all the time and people react and things change. But that's the kind of stuff that gets me out of bed in the morning.

1:05:22Harry Stebbings:Final, final one. But there are a lot of people who maybe are questioning whether they took the right step or did the right decision. You mentioned the interim moves that you did, and we all respect a company, some decisions don't work out, don't want to require anything like that. But any lessons or advice to someone who's thinking, I don't know if I made that right step. I don't know if it was the right decision. Any advice? Mostly when people come to me and ask that question, I say, are you hitting your numbers? Like, are you doing well in your role? Do you like your boss? Are you learning?

1:05:53Are you getting better? And is this serving you in the way where you're making an impact on the company and the company is making an impact on you to help you level up and get better? And if the answer to all three of those things is yes, then typically I think you're in a good spot. If you've got two out of three or one out of three, you know, maybe it's time to think about what's next.

1:06:12Harry Stebbings:You know, I walk every weekend with my mother a marathon. Yeah, yeah. And I had to always talk about big decisions with her. And she gave me the best advice this weekend. I was talking about something specifically with real-star funds. And she said, you know, move fast, but don't be in a hurry. I thought it was brilliant. I think it's the same advice. That's a great line. Which is that you don't want to sit and rot in a company. Yeah. But you also don't want to jump too fast and too hastily. Exactly. You have to be really thoughtful around it. And like I said, it's so much of it's around picking the right market and the right company.

1:06:42I think people over-index on title and under-index on growth. I'd rather take a role maybe below the level you're at at a high-growth company. You did.

1:06:52Harry Stebbings:You took a VP of GTM, I think, or whatever, as the sole owner of your kitchen. Yes, yes. My kitchen was the hottest tech company in Brooklyn. But yeah, bet on yourself. Have confidence in yourself and bet on growth. Because if you're going to come in and operate at a really high level within a high-growth environment, that's the best thing for your career. as opposed to having some ego around like, oh, I'm X title, I want to stay that. I'd rather go somewhere where you can make a big impact than a growth framework. Final, final one, I promise. Someone's great, they want a bigger salary than the rest of the people in that role.

1:07:27Harry Stebbings:They're great, you and Max know they're great. Do you just suck it up and pay more? But what about what that does to everyone else who now wants that same? Yeah, you can't really do that. And when we have bands, and we have to have like parody and fairness for a reason, And that's one way to create, you know, sort of a toxic culture is if people figure that stuff out, then that leads to sort of bad things in the long run. Even though in the short term it might feel good because you get this person, like, you've got to go about it the right way, I think. It's tough, yeah. Right, my friend. You ready to rock and roll?

1:07:58Harry Stebbings:Let's do it. Quick fire. What do you know now that you go back to yourself on day one and say, you know, you should know this? Yeah, the degree to which the broader investor influence on our deals and the syndicate of influence around the opportunity, not just the opportunity itself. I wish I had known a few things on that sooner. It's interesting. It's almost like a land grab on investors as well. Exactly. Exactly. If you look at our last fundraise, our CFO, David, describe it as the investment syndicate. It sort of reminds me of the Mission Impossible syndicate. One of my friends is a GP at Airtree in Australia.

1:08:35Harry Stebbings:and he pinged me about Legora because they joined the round. Exactly. And it's like, land grab on Australia. Exactly. We want people that are leaning in and are going to really help. Yeah, no, I totally get that. We mentioned Jude Law. What personality, individual brand would you most like to be in the next Legora ad? Well, we have one coming up with Aaron Judge. That's going to be awesome. That's pretty cool. Yeah, very cool. I can tell you, I have a first grader in Brooklyn and you go to drop off at his elementary school and the number of Aaron Judge jerseys is astronomical. So very cool from a New York and US perspective.

1:09:12We're really excited.

1:09:13Harry Stebbings:What one tool could you not live without? I use Gemini all the time. Wow, I wasn't expecting that. Yeah. What's it best for? I find it actually best for like transcript analysis. It's really good at that, but it also has access to all the systems of work that we use. So we use Gmail, Calendar, and Google Drive. So from an agentic perspective, it has all the context and it has all of my stuff. And so it helps me with meeting prep. It helps me with managing my calendar. A lot of the sort of simple productivity stuff, it's very good at, not to mention making funny pictures. I have to say, I love Whisperflow.

1:09:47Yeah, Whisperflow is awesome. Definitely. That's one of those viral products that everyone in Silicon Valley is talking about. It's freaking great. It's great. It's really good.

1:09:55Harry Stebbings:The only shit thing is in offices. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. I'm standing in the middle of the office and I just like talk to my computer now. It's just weird. Yeah, yeah. Well, I actually think that that's going to be one of the ways of working. Our team hired headsets so they now look like customer support. I was going to say, we've got a lot of headsets and a lot of AirPods, you know, going around. What was the best advice you've ever been given? I had a mentor tell me, if you want to be a CRO, you need to be really well-rounded. I think mostly at the beginning of my career, I had been really successful in a more like transactional mid-market sort of role.

1:10:28And then I moved into leadership very early in my 20s and was like running a big team. And I thought I was killing it, right? But I couldn't get like a real VP job because I didn't have like big enterprise experience. But if you want to be a CRO, it's not just sales, it's customer success, it's partnerships, it's implementation onboarding. It's all these different things. And me taking a step back and doing different roles to give myself a broader set of experiences, I think has been really, really beneficial.

1:10:54Harry Stebbings:Dude, I absolutely love this. Thank you so much for being so open for putting up with my meandering. I got described the other day as the Louis Thoreau adventure, which I didn't know whether to say it was like a compliment or not. But you've been amazing. No, thanks so much, Harry. I really enjoyed it. Thanks for having me. But before we leave you today, you have the idea, but often with AI tools, you hit a wall. Well, Base 44 is where that friction disappears, turning how you talk into how you build. Full stack web and mobile apps, sites, autonomous super agents, all built in minutes, not weekends spent on damn configuration.

1:11:31Harry Stebbings:Base44 ships it all out of the box. The backend, the database, the authentication, and the hosting. It handles the heavy lifting, so you can just stay in the flow. It doesn't just replace the busy work, it multiplies you. It makes you so much more capable, an effective version of yourself. In this market, being fast is the baseline, but to win, you gotta be first. And Base44 is that edge. It's the move that lets you skip the troubleshooting and get straight to the breakthrough. Launch your next big thing at Base44.com. That's Base44.com. After Base44 helps you launch, Corgi helps you cover what comes next.

1:12:08Harry Stebbings:My word, what an arresting first line. Get your ass covered with Corgi insurance. And I'll tell you why. If you're running a business right now, you already know this pain all too well. Getting insurance, it's really slow. It's confusing. And my word, it's full of paperwork. Well, that's exactly why Corgi is here to change the game. Corgi is the first and only insurance carrier designed specifically for tech companies, allowing you to get covered in minutes instead of days. Corgi provides essential coverages for all growth stages, such as DNO, E &O liability, cyber, commercial, general liability, and more.

1:12:43Harry Stebbings:Get your ass covered. I love the way we say ass with Corgi Insurance, alongside thousands of other startups at corgi.com forward slash 20VC today. That's corgi.com forward slash 20VC. You won't regret it. While Corgi handles the coverage, Turing handles the talent. Frontier Labs keep facing the same limitation. Models perform well on benchmarks, but they fall short once they enter real coding tasks, real tools, and real workflows. That disconnect between synthetic evaluation and actual system behavior is now a core blocker for agentic models. That's why NVIDIA, Anthropix, Salesforce, Gemini, and other leading lab partners partner with Turing.

1:13:22Harry Stebbings:Turing is the research accelerator focused on post-training reliability. They build realistic RL environments, next-generation data quality systems built from real-world operational traces, and coding datasets that stress models under conditions where failures matter, state changes, workflow branching, brittle tool calls, and the coding errors that break RL agents but never appear in benchmark reports. In reality, a model may demonstrate correct reasoning in your evaluation setup, yet still select the wrong parameter or mishandle a code update in a realistic interface. Turing makes that failure visible and gives teams the signal they need to fix it.

1:13:59Harry Stebbings:For labs advancing agentic systems, Turing provides the structure required to understand why these failures occur. To find out how, visit turing.com forward slash 20VC. That's T-U-R-I-N-G dot com forward slash 20VC.