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

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Twenty Minute VC (20VC) Episode Featuring Max June Strand of Lagora

Title:
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 June Strand

Release Date:
August 14, 2025

Participants:

• Harry Stebbings: Host of The Twenty Minute VC
• Max June Strand: Co-founder and CEO of Lagora

---

1. Introduction to Max June Strand and Lagora [00:00 - 03:56]

Harry Stebbings introduces Max June Strand, highlighting his impressive journey:

• Career Shift: Max turned down a multi-million dollar career in gaming to build Lagora.
• Funding Success: Secured investments from top firms like Benchmark and IVP.
• Operational Efficiency: Scaled Lagora in Stockholm with only $120 million, compared to competitor Harvey's $800 million.

Notable Quote:
Harry Stebbings [00:00]: "There is nothing I love more than a European giant being built."

---

2. Max's Background and Early Career [03:17 - 06:36]

Max shares his early passion for gaming, which inadvertently honed his competitive spirit and problem-solving skills. His journey includes:

• Esports Ambitions: Excelled in games like World of Warcraft and Dota 1, contemplating a career in gaming versus academia.
• Educational Path: Pursued dual degrees in computer science and business simultaneously during the COVID-19 pandemic.
• Transition to AI: The emergence of ChatGPT pivoted his focus towards AI applications in the legal sector.

Notable Quote:
Max June Strand [04:05]: "I think that was a much better outcome. I enrolled in computer science and very quickly realized that wasn't like a full-time job."

---

3. Founding Lagora and Early Challenges [06:36 - 08:32]

Max details the inception of Lagora:

• Collaborative Effort: Met co-founders at a pandemic volleyball event, uniting interests in machine learning and coding.
• Initial Product Development: Shifted from early, ineffective BERT models to leveraging GPT for building a robust legal AI platform.
• Market Entry: Focused on the Nordic market to establish credibility before expanding globally.

Notable Quote:
Max June Strand [07:35]: "It's going to be obvious."

---

4. AI Models and Product Development Insights [08:32 - 12:28]

Harry and Max engage in a discussion about the evolution of AI models:

• Progression of AI: Transition from BERT to GPT marked significant advancements, with subsequent improvements being incremental.
• Application Layer Potential: Max emphasizes that current AI models are underutilized, with applications only tapping into 10-20% of their capabilities.
• Cost Implications: Exploring the use of "swarms" of AI models to enhance output quality, though this approach increases costs exponentially.

Notable Quote:
Max June Strand [09:20]: "What's the best case scenario with playing this video game, winning a huge tournament, and the money's good."

---

5. Fundraising Journey and Y Combinator (YC) Experience [15:24 - 33:44]

Max recounts Lagora's aggressive fundraising strategy:

• Initial Seed: Raised angel money and navigated early investments during a competitive legal tech acquisition.
• YC Acceptance: Secured a spot in YC's winter batch, providing global exposure and connections to top-tier investors like Benchmark.
• Rapid Scaling: Leveraged personal loans from family and friends to bridge funding gaps, enabling immediate hiring and product development.

Notable Quotes:
Max June Strand [21:19]: "This space is going to move quickly, and so we need to scale."
Max June Strand [25:00]: "Venture capital in Europe is running at 2.0 on the treadmill."

---

6. Competing with Harvey: Strategies and Challenges [34:47 - 39:51]

Max discusses Lagora's competitive stance against Harvey:

• Funding Disparity: Harvey raised $800 million versus Lagora's $120 million.
• Product Differentiation: Focused on superior product and service offerings rather than price-cutting.
• Brand Building: Emphasizes building strong relationships and delivering exceptional results to secure long-term partnerships.

Notable Quote:
Max June Strand [38:52]: "The other thing is happening, huh? It's the other way around."

---

7. Scaling, Hiring, and Building Company Culture [39:51 - 56:35]

Max shares insights on rapid scaling and team building:

• Hiring Philosophy: Prioritizes curiosity and ambition over experience, ensuring team members are adaptable and passionate.
• Cultish Culture: Strives to create an environment where work feels mission-driven, akin to a "cultish" culture to maintain focus and dedication.
• Global Expansion: Established offices in key regions (London, New York, Australia) by recruiting top performers and providing clear growth paths.

Notable Quotes:
Max June Strand [53:01]: "The curiosity combined with ambition is like the two values that I've over time converged towards."
Max June Strand [54:22]: "Well, I think you need to do something like building a cultish culture."

---

8. Advice to Founders and Lessons Learned [56:35 - 77:35]

Max offers valuable advice to aspiring founders:

• Prioritization: Ability to correctly prioritize amidst vast opportunities is crucial.
• Deep Industry Knowledge: Founders should immerse themselves deeply in their chosen problem space before product development.
• Prototype and Iterate: Leverage the reduced cost of software development to quickly build and refine MVPs based on customer feedback.
• Leadership Growth: Transitioning from individual contributor to effective manager requires a mindset shift towards team growth and delegation.
• Balancing Work Ethic: Advocates for hard work and dedication but acknowledges the importance of personal sacrifice and maintaining work-life balance.

Notable Quotes:
Max June Strand [71:53]: "I think that it is the ability to correctly prioritize when the opportunity set is so massive."
Max June Strand [77:03]: "If you want to be a leader that inspires people, you need to do so by doing."

---

9. Future Outlook and Final Thoughts [77:35 - End]

Max concludes with reflections on Lagora's journey and future prospects:

• Exponential Growth: Lagora rapidly scaled to $7 million ARR with plans to reach $120 million by 2025.
• Market Positioning: Focuses on being a leading AI-powered legal platform rather than solely competing on funding against Harvey.
• Founder's Perspective: Emphasizes passion for the product and the intrinsic value of building a company aligned with personal identity and mission.

Notable Quote:
Max June Strand [76:14]: "The floor is always ChatGPT. And so ChatGPT is improving quite quickly, like the platform ChatGPT and the product ChatGPT is becoming better, which requires us to be even better than that."

---

Key Takeaways:

• Strategic Fundraising: Aggressive and strategic fundraising can provide the necessary runway for rapid growth, especially when combined with accelerators like YC.

• Product Over Funding: Building a superior product and fostering strong client relationships can mitigate the disadvantages of having less funding compared to competitors.

• Cultural Foundations: Establishing a strong, mission-driven culture is essential for maintaining focus and driving exponential growth.

• Adaptive Leadership: Founders must evolve from hands-on roles to leadership positions that empower and grow their teams effectively.

• Market Dynamics: Understanding and navigating the complexities of AI in the legal sector requires deep industry knowledge and the ability to prioritize effectively.

---

This episode provides a comprehensive look into Max June Strand's journey with Lagora, offering invaluable insights into startup fundraising, product development in AI-driven legal tech, and the intricacies of scaling a company in a competitive landscape.

Transcript

[Harry Stebbings]

This is 20 VC with me, Harry Stebbings. Now I cannot wait for this show today. There is nothing I love more than a European giant being built. Max June Strand is the co founder and CEO at Lagora, the collaborative AI powering the next generation of lawyers. Now this is an insane story for many reasons. First, Max turned down a multi million dollar career in gaming to build Legora. Second, he's raised from the best in the business including Benchmark and IVP to name a few. Also, he's done it from Stockholm. And then third, he's scaled the firm with one sixth of the capital. Closest competitor Harvey, who've raised a reported $800 million while Agora has raised just 120 million. But before we dive into the show today, Secure Frame empowers businesses to build trust with customers by simplifying information security and compliance through AI and automation. Thousands of fast growing businesses including Nasdaq, AngelList, 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 and more. Backed by top tier investors and corporations like Google and Kleiner Perkins, the company is among Forbes list Of the top 100 startup employers for 2024 G2's best software awards for higher satisfaction products and a recipient of the 2024 Cybersecurity Excellence Awards, something I definitely never got in school myself. Learn more [e-mail] and speaking of incredible companies, let's talk about Brex, the ultimate financial stack for startups. So when Brex was founded, it wasn't just about creating another financial product. It without solving the really gritty challenges that founders face daily. Let's be honest, building something from the ground up is hard enough without dealing with clunky outdated banks that pile on fees and leave your cash idle. Brex is different. It's the financial stack that scales with you no matter where you are in your journey. From corporate cards to maximizing your Runway to earning yield on your cash, Brex was designed with founders in mind to make every dollar go further so you can focus on building. And here's what really stands out to me. Brex combines the best of checking, treasury and FDIC insur insurance in one powerhouse account. You can send and receive money globally at lightning speed, earn Yield from day one and still access your funds whenever you need. Plus, with 20x the standard protection through program banks, your cash is not just working harder, it's working safer too. It's no surprise that 1 in 3 venture backed startups in the US with companies like Anthropic, Coinbase and Robinhood. My God, these companies are incredible. Trust Brex to help them grow. If you want to join the smartest startups on the planet, head over to Brex.com startup startups and see what they can do for you. Now, let's talk about making your product do exactly what you want it to, Whether it's the software you build or the software you buy. Your tech stack should be creating results, not creating roadblocks. Well, Pendo's no Code Software experience management platform makes your software better with tools to see where users get stuck. Guide them with in app messaging and constantly improving your UI. It's so easy that over 14,000 businesses use Pendo to increase revenue, lower costs and reduce risks. Businesses love the control engine. Engineers love the freedom. Everyone wins. Start for free today at Pendo iO20 product.

[Max June Strand]

You have now arrived at your destination. Max, dude, listen, I actually remember messaging you when we were talking about Project Europe and I was in a car going to a football game and we were talking about work ethics and work culture and I was just like, this guy's fucking awesome. I need to make a show happen. So I'm so glad that we made it happen with you in town.

[Harriet]

So am I, Harriet. This is great. I'm really excited to be here.

[Harry Stebbings]

Now, I would love to start with a little bit of background because I.

[Max June Strand]

Heard from some of your investors that you were a pro gamer before, but.

[Harry Stebbings]

Then we were chatting before and you said there's actually a cool story before.

[Max June Strand]

That that we should start with. And so I'm going to leave it to you in terms of how you want to start with those two options.

[Harriet]

When I was 6, my dad bought me World of Warcraft and that was actually how I learned English.

[Max June Strand]

It explains a lot.

[Harriet]

Well, yeah. So from an early age you start playing this game. And I grew up in a really off city outside of Stockholm. So we were 10 people my class. I was highly competitive and I think that space didn't give enough room for that competitiveness. And so you got into video games. Started with World of Warcraft and then moved over to Warcraft 3, which had this mod called Dota 1. And Dota 1 was this amazing game where you jump in five players, you meet five other players, and it was very complex. It was like playing 5D chess in real time. I got so into that that when it was time to pick between should I bet on a career in video games? Should I go to university I had to make a call. My reasoning was something like, what's the best case scenario with playing this video game, winning a huge tournament, and the money's good. You make five to $10 million if you win the biggest tournament.

[Max June Strand]

Were you that good?

[Harriet]

If I had made it my full time thing, I could have gotten that good because I was juggling school on the side and the people I was competing against were not. And then I thought, okay, what's the best case with going to university? Probably something like this. And I thought that was a much better outcome. I enrolled in computer science and I think I very quickly realized that that wasn't like a full time job. So I got a full time job on the side, which was esports betting. So I was building statistical models for Dota 2 and Counter Strike based on server feeds. So we got all the data and then we built the odds that determined how you would bet on those games. And then Covid hit and computer science got so boring because we were like 300 dudes in hoodies not going to university anymore. So nothing happened. And in Swedish college, you can't pick your course. You need to pick a program and then you stick to that program. So if you go to computer science, you can never pick any business courses. The business university is separate from the engineering university, so you never mix. And I wanted to do both. So I threw in an application to the computer science university, get enrolled. And then I did the same for the business university by kind of redacting the first application and then calling them and saying, hey, I fucked up. Can you please invite me back in? So then I got enrolled in both universities in parallel, so I could finish them both during COVID which was really easy because you would have these exams that even if they ran across, you could just have two phones and film yourself doing one exam for one of the universities and doing another exam for the other university. I finished one of the degrees, so if my girlfriend's parents ask, I've finished my degree. And if investors ask, I'm a dropout, which I think is great. And then ChatGPT came out and just everything changed.

[Max June Strand]

I absolutely love that. Okay, so ChatGPT comes out and everything changes. I do also just want to pick up on a moment, though, in the pandemic, because you met your co founders at a volleyball pandemic event.

[Harriet]

Yes.

[Max June Strand]

This feels like a paradox, Max.

[Harriet]

Yeah. So we went out to play volleyball and you meet people who have a similar interest in machine learning, coding, building things. I think this group in Stockholm is still Quite small. So we hit it off and then nothing really came of it. But when GPT came, they gave me a phone call and said, hey, we want to apply to this business accelerator, but we need somebody who went to the business school to be on the paper in order for us to apply. And since I had done the double thing with the computer science university and the business university, they thought of me. I get in, they put me on the paper and I ask them, why do you want to apply to this business accelerator and not yc? And they're like, oh, what's yc? Well, it's basically the business accelerator, but it's for real companies.

[Max June Strand]

Did they have the idea for Lagore or layer the timeline?

[Harriet]

The idea for the business was not a product, it was a problem space. It was the fact that AI and legal is going to be a thing. And they had been playing around with early BERT models that came up from Google and also a version of them called Sweebirt. They were so incredibly bad, frankly. I mean, you couldn't really solve anything back then. And so they had built their own documents management system, they had built their own editor, they had built like a legal research platform, they had all this code. And when I came in, I sort of said, let's just delete all of it and let's build on GPT and let's build a version of it that at the end of the day lawyers are benefiting from.

[Max June Strand]

Okay, so that was 2021 with Bert.

[Harry Stebbings]

That was four years ago.

[Max June Strand]

And now you look at the models we have today. We're going to go back to the story and I want to finish that. But if that was four years ago, do you think we see the same continued progression rate in model development or do you think we start to plateau?

[Harriet]

The gap from the BERT models to GPT was the biggest gap ever. And I think the gaps since then have been much more incremental. I actually think the biggest things allowing for new products to be built is not the models themselves, but the frameworks around them. Take structured outputs, take tool calling, take MCP servers. Like these are the frameworks now that are forming around the models that allow us to build massively awesome things. So I actually think that the product to model gap today is massive. Where the products are today, I don't think we utilized 10, 20% of what the models can do with a huge sort of gap and way to go. And I think we could just given more time with the models we have today, given no incremental improvement in them. Still have years and years to years to build on.

[Max June Strand]

Wow, that's so interesting. So essentially it's like the application layer doesn't fully utilize the model layer capacity.

[Harriet]

Exactly.

[Max June Strand]

What more could the application layer do to utilize that capacity layer?

[Harriet]

Well, that's what we're figuring out.

[Max June Strand]

Right.

[Harriet]

That's why we're working so hard. But I mean, even if you take the O3 models, and right now I think in many ways we're still working with the models in a sort of single API call manner. We've started playing around with this idea of swarms of LLMs being thrown at a problem.

[Max June Strand]

So swarms of LLMs thrown at a problem. It's when you take a grok anthropic and OpenAI model.

[Harriet]

Well, and you throw, instead of doing one API call, you do 100 or 1,000. And I mean the quality of the output is drastically improved. So if you take something like writing a legal research memoir, if you just use one model, one deeper research model, or one reasoning model call, you get some output. But if you use 100 calls and you let them rebuild and improve what you already have over and over and over again, it gets massively improved. But this takes hours to run and they're quite expensive.

[Max June Strand]

What does that do to cost? It's just quite expensive. Is that double? Is that 10x?

[Harriet]

No, it's, I mean 100x.

[Max June Strand]

It literally is 100x. So the unit cost is the same for every increase?

[Harriet]

Yeah, basically.

[Max June Strand]

Wow. Does that drastically change in an 18 month time period?

[Harriet]

We will start to see products utilize the models in much more creative ways than what we're seeing today. Today it's still quite basic. I think the biggest thing that we've done, for instance, is if you look at a task like due diligence where you need to review hundreds of documents. Well, instead of throwing the entire document in and asking all the questions at the same time, you do everything in parallel. So you'll say, okay, I have 100 questions, I want to run across this file and I have 100 files. So effectively we run 10,000 parallel API calls. And of course that scales the cost structure. But I think you could imagine a world where Instead of throwing 10,000 API calls, you throw 100,000, because you run them all 10 times as well. Because the cost of the models in comparison to the hourly billable rate of a great lawyer is still miles and miles apart.

[Max June Strand]

Is the winner, ultimately the compute provider. When you have a scale of API calls of 100x like that, does the model provider ultimately not the model provider, sorry, the compute provider, ultimately be the winner.

[Harriet]

I think you're right in that the model providers are not the winners because that's completely commoditized. Yeah.

[Max June Strand]

Is it commoditized today?

[Harriet]

Yes.

[Max June Strand]

Who do you work with?

[Harriet]

All of them, really.

[Max June Strand]

And there's not a discernible difference?

[Harriet]

Not really. There's a discernible difference for some types of tasks. And we've realized, okay, Sonnet is better here, Gemini is better here. I think the gemini deep research1 is maybe a bit better than the OpenAI, but then they sort of continue battling that out. So, yeah, I do think that the compute providers are for sure winners, but I also think that there's a huge piece of the cake in the application layer. And in particular there's a cake in the application layer which is not only on the software side, but on the service side. And here's where the legal market is interesting because legal software market is 20 billion, legal service market is a trillion. The way you should think about it is not how do you play for the software market, it's how do you work with the best firms in the world to play for the service market?

[Max June Strand]

Well, I think the biggest question with all AI software today is fundamentally, are you able to transition from technology budgets to human labor budgets? If so, my word. We have an exciting future ahead as founders and VCs. If not, then it's not as exciting. Bluntly, my question to you is you are then partnering with the people you are going to kill?

[Harriet]

No, I don't think about it that way. I think we're partnering with them so that they can win and we can get a piece of that cake too. I want to show you an example here. I realize I just turned off my phone, but I have a couple of stats from a pilot we just ran with a AmLaw 200 firm and they have some examples of tasks where they reduced the time required to deliver the work from 10 hours to 15 minutes.

[Max June Strand]

Do lawyers want that because they work on a billable hours basis? Do lawyers want to reduce 10 hours to 15 minutes? Does that not cannibalize their business in terms of the timesheet nature of it?

[Harriet]

Of course it does.

[Max June Strand]

So they just then change it to project based finance?

[Harriet]

Yes. And so you have a structure in the largest law firms in the world where they're moving from the billable hour to fixed pricing. And what you have in finance is you take a portion of the transaction value and we will start to see that happening too in transactional law.

[Max June Strand]

That's Fascinating. So my takeaway is Buy More Nvidia. Okay, cool.

[Harriet]

And I think the other way to think about it is you also have the corporates who are trying to figure out how much work they can take in house and how much they can pressure their firms to go AI native. And this is rapidly happening today. If you're a large bank like hsbc, you are paying hundreds and hundreds of millions in legal fees and you're thinking about how do I work with my law firm to get the most amount of value here? The opportunity for the law firms are massive, but they have to be forward leaning and say, all right, in this new world where there's a new equilibrium and there's a new demand and supply function for our services, we need to get majority market share and we need to own the conversation because right now I'm finding that it's sometimes quite reactive.

[Max June Strand]

What do you mean by that?

[Harriet]

If you are a big firm today, you make a lot of money, you have innovator's dilemma. Then you have companies like Crosby, Udia and others who are trying to play for the pure service part. Our play is quite different. I think that the law firms and the best attorneys in the world will go software powered and we help them do that.

[Max June Strand]

For me, it's like if you want to build like $100 billion business, you have to be software powered. If you want to build the next generation of coolie, which is an amazing business by the way, doing 100 isn't 100 million. But then you do the Crosby more certainty to a more capped upside. I would say almost kind of interesting.

[Harriet]

Yeah.

[Max June Strand]

Okay, so going back to this story, so we meet these two other co founders at the volleyball event. They've got the idea paradigm of okay, AI law, we've got the right time. What happens next?

[Harriet]

We decided to start working on this full time in May of 2023 and we set up the initial structure, we raised some angel money and we say, let's work on this over the summer, three weeks into it, we see the Casetext acquisition for 650 million and we all think to ourselves, wow, there seems to be some money in legal tech. You had this company that had as some others also did pre access to GPT4, which was an incredibly unfair advantage in some ways. But we started in a much smaller market, we started in the Nordics and I quite quickly realized that nobody was going to take three software guys very seriously in this world of law. And so I basically went to the top three law firms in the Nordics and We landed with the biggest Manheim Mer Swartling, and we moved in with their firm.

[Max June Strand]

I often listen to podcasts and they say things like you just did there. And I'm like, but how. How did you go into, like, the biggest law firm in Sweden and let them accept you and welcome you into their office to see how they work?

[Harriet]

Yeah, good question. And I think it required a bit of skill, but also a quite open mindset from them. So I managed to get a meeting with their managing partner, Jan Dan Stam. I was trying to get the meeting. Somebody told me it's harder to break into his calendar than the Fort Knox, but somehow we managed to do it. I go to their offices, we sit down like this for 30 minutes, and I realize we're sort of a pre seed company. We have no product, we have nothing to show for. So I need to make the impression that AI is going to be a very important part of their business and that I'm a guy that he's going to want to work with. I had done my research. This was pre deep research from the LLM, so it was actually real journalistic research. And I had seen that he'd. He'd had some statements in the past, effectively saying that AI is more artificial than intelligent.

[Max June Strand]

Tough audience, tough audience.

[Harriet]

And this was back when the early promise of AI started to come into law, and everybody completely burned themselves because the expectations and the marketing was up here, but the delivery was down here. And you effectively had to sit and train the system yourself, which nobody had time for. So we get in and I think the essence of the conversation is something like, dude, I don't know law, you don't know AI, but this is going to be a thing and we're going to need each other. And they had an innovation lab, so they had actually put in a structure to welcome companies like this into their space. It wasn't that well structured, but the idea was there and we got accepted in. I can show you a picture of the room a bit later. It's this really small conference room without any windows, and we were five guys in there. The AC would turn off at 5pm and we would sit there until midnight for six months. It was really close to the Coca Cola fridge, though. So we had all the good benefits of being in a big law firm. I think I started getting almost like this rumor of bringing my laptop with me to the lunch canteen every day. And I'd sit next to somebody new and sort of bother them on the lunch and be like, hey, we're Building this demo. Do you want to look at Leia? And they're like, oh, Leia. Oh yeah, you guys are the AI guys, right? And we're like, yeah, that's us. And I show them, I watch them play around with it, see what they try to do. I think very quickly you realized, okay, these are the sort of buckets of things that people want to do. And I think broadly, you can say they wanted to do legal research, they wanted to review contracts and they wanted to draft things. But people would come in with this expectation of I want the LLM to draft me a 300 page spa with one prompt. And of course, he couldn't do that. So we had to build the staircase of the capabilities of the platform, but also educate the firm and educate the attorneys about what they could expect from.

[Max June Strand]

A platform like this, from doing this very close integration with your first kind of partner to build product. What are your biggest lessons or advice to founders on building product with customers and when to listen and when not to.

[Harriet]

Yeah, that's the heart of the question. Right?

[Max June Strand]

Because you don't just want to build a product that's in their paradigm of behavior.

[Harriet]

No, and we didn't. They were in many ways asking for a faster horse and we wanted to build a car. What I realized was that we needed the brand and we needed to be coupled with a firm that had a very serious position in the market. They are innovative, they are pushing the agenda. And you had our competitor getting close with A and O. And so we needed kind of the same. And we were based in the Nordics, so manhemit was the firm that we went to. I think when you talk with your customers and you want to understand what are they trying to solve and how are we going to solve for it, you need to realize that there's a huge information gap between they fundamentally, most of them, at least 99%, don't fundamentally understand the technology at all. You're just looking at the behavior of what are they trying to do given the tools that you provided them. And then you almost need to come in with this process mindset. I love lawyers, I love attorneys, but they're not that. That process nerdy. And I spent eight weeks at McKinsey. Not enough to be sort of indoctrinated, but good enough to be dangerous in PowerPoint. And you come in and you look at a process like say a due diligence or writing a submission and you say, okay, this seems to be the core steps. What can AI do today? What can it not do today? And how are we going to engineer the platform in a way so that we can do everything here? I think there's this quote from the guy who built Gmail that's like, your product can have three features that should be good. That's kind of what we had for a very long time. Time. Two things. We were very good at them. And then you get people to understand what they can actually achieve with them.

[Max June Strand]

Okay, so we're partnered with this firm. We're internal. We're in this kind of soulless, dark room, drinking too much Coke, but staying up until midnight with sugar. Brilliant, brilliant health. When do we decide to go to yc? And why does that decision come about?

[Harriet]

We're locked in with this firm from August of 2023 until February of 2024.

[Max June Strand]

Wow.

[Harriet]

But we get early accepted into YC, so we got accepted for the winter batch. That happens between January and March in 2024, all the way back in August. And I actually had a term sheet from a Swedish vc, which I got the same day as we had our YC interview. And this was our second YC interview because we had totally botched the first one.

[Max June Strand]

Why? What happened?

[Harriet]

I think, in essence, we came in with a very limited understanding of our problem space. And we needed the sort of two to three months of grinding and doing the foundational work to be ready to explain what we wanted to build. Because we just said, oh, legal and LLMs seems like a good area. Let's go build here. And I think the YC partners were quite unimpressed by that. And I frankly think that they've also burnt themselves in the legal tech space many, many times. That's T.R. gustav, our partner from YZ. Even after our final interview, he called me and he was like, max, are you really sure you're going to sell into law firms? And I was just like, yes, it might be contrarian at this point, but it's going to be obvious.

[Max June Strand]

And so on the second interview, it goes, well, and you get in.

[Harriet]

Goes way better.

[Max June Strand]

Yeah.

[Harriet]

And we get in, we realize, okay, we need to flip our Swedish company into a Delaware. We had only raised, like, 50,000 bucks in initial angel money on capital.

[Max June Strand]

Like, yeah.

[Harriet]

And then we were going to run out of money, basically. But so that's why we had the term sheet from the Swedish vc. So we had an out. But when we got accepted into yc, we realized, okay, this space is going to move quickly, and so we need to scale. And I think I realized quicker than others that, okay, we had Harvey, we had Casetext we had a few other companies who thought that legal tech was going to be a big thing. And so if you want to play here, you got to go fast. And that meant that instead of waiting the three months to kind of flip our Swedish company into a Delaware, I just went out and I raised a loan against the investment that was going to come in from Y Combinator. So we raised a loan against the collateral that the money was going to come in, immediately hired four more guys who just strapped in and started coding.

[Max June Strand]

Whoa, wait a minute. So Jeanette told me about this from GC and she said though, that you raised this. So you went out to like a loan provider?

[Harriet]

No, we got it from some family and friends.

[Max June Strand]

Okay, so you went to family and friends and said, hey, I've got 200k coming in from YC.

[Harriet]

Yeah, and we need a loan today. And I'm not sure if I said this publicly, but we were also going to run out of money during the YC batch because we were running so aggressively. You know, a lot of the early pilots and client relationships were like, oh, you know, test the product for free, so we didn't get paid in the beginning. And then Yuri Sagalov, who's now the, I think head of early stage at GC, he did a 500k safe on us in February or January, the same day I landed in sf. And I think this is an important difference between Europe and the States because I land in SF completely jet lagged. I text Yuri and I'm like, hey, are you around? He's like, yeah, let's go grab a coffee. So we go for a coffee, we chat for 30 minutes. I tried to raise on a 50 million safe. And he was like, dude, you have 20K MRR, I'm not investing on a 50 million valuation. And I said, okay, will you do 25? And I think that's what he did. So we got the money and he wired it the same day. That would not have happened in Europe, I think.

[Max June Strand]

What the speed of his decision.

[Harriet]

Yeah, I talked with a couple of European funds angels about taking that 500k and they passed on it. And then when they wanted to be part of the seed round, they were just too slow.

[Max June Strand]

That pains me so much. I actually wrote the other day on Social that venture capital in Europe is running at 2.0 on the treadmill. If you know treadmill is 2.0 is like fucking pathetic.

[Harriet]

Yeah, 20 is the most.

[Max June Strand]

Yeah, that's mo far speed. But I had two companies that basically for six months had not been able to raise in Europe. And then in the US they got a 30 million pound term sheet and a 12 million pound term sheet within 72 hours of landing. Yeah, okay, so we land there, we get the 500k safe. Thank God. We're not going to run out of money.

[Harriet]

We're not going to run out of money.

[Max June Strand]

Okay. And so now we're in yc.

[Harriet]

We're in yc. I think we had one of the more unique YC experiences.

[Max June Strand]

I heard there were loads of great YC stories.

[Harriet]

So we got accepted back in August. And YC for us at this point is like this mythical creature, like this mount of Olympus that you only get to go to if you're like the creme de la creme. And we got so excited, we booked this 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 going to go to YC and we're going to ship and we're going to sit around the fire and have a beer and go to all these nice sessions and we're going to meet Sam Altman, we're going to do all these things and we get to yc 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 AE Tuhin, we effectively buy these ring lights to put on our laptops. It's like the influencer, 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 1am and 10am every night. And I think we closed our biggest deal at that point. It was like 500k in the middle of the night at 4am and we managed to do that, or I managed to do it for about a week and then I just said, guys, I'm out. 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.

[Max June Strand]

So for the actual program, you weren't in Silicon Valley.

[Harriet]

I was not there.

[Max June Strand]

Did you miss out by not being there?

[Harriet]

Yes, of course. Everybody else made a lot of good friends. I missed out on that. But I thought my reasoning Was got to close deals.

[Max June Strand]

I get that.

[Harriet]

Maybe that comes back to the whole.

[Max June Strand]

Do you think it was worth it doing YC then?

[Harriet]

Yes, it was. I mean, we were a Swedish company by nobodies, 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.

[Max June Strand]

When you think to that. Sorry. I love that. I think in clips, the challenge of being in my brain is every conversation you have, you think in social media clips.

[Harriet]

Right.

[Max June Strand]

Imagine going on a date with me. It's shit like, clip, clip, clip. But my question to you there is, you said you really took advantage of that global spotlight that YC brought. What did you do, for example, to take advantage of it? I'm thinking of Vessence. It's just in the. Yeah.

[Harriet]

Now there's a lot of Swedish YC companies back then. I think there were maybe five. Like, there hadn't been a Swedish YC company for a really long time. And I used to work at Depict for a week. I worked there for a week. But between them and us, there were nobody else.

[Max June Strand]

I think I'm going to start a fund called just Depict Ventures and anyone that comes out of it just gets an automatic term sheet.

[Harriet]

That's not a bad idea. We'll do the same with Ligora at some point.

[Max June Strand]

Yeah, please. I'll fund it.

[Harriet]

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. And so by being in yc, we raised money from Benchmark, who we would have not been introduced to if we weren't in yc.

[Max June Strand]

So take me to that. So we go through the batch, we close deals in Sweden, and then it comes to demo day.

[Harriet]

I mean, the YC advice is you raise sometime four or 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 going to go and fundraise. I go to sf, I lock 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, I think you guys should go and raise a bigger round. You guys are doing really well.

[Max June Strand]

What revenues are you at now?

[Harriet]

We're like 1 million ARR.

[Max June Strand]

Wow.

[Harriet]

So we went from 200k MRR to almost a million of ARR.

[Max June Strand]

So 200k to a million?

[Harriet]

Yeah, basically.

[Max June Strand]

Got you. Okay.

[Harriet]

Fuck, that's amazing. And then you talk to all these funds, you get to know them.

[Max June Strand]

Do YC introduced you to all of them?

[Harriet]

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 accepting into YC, you get 500 inbound VC emails that you need to deal with.

[Max June Strand]

That's amazing.

[Harriet]

I think I set up this filter that would auto reply. Hey, I'm heads down, I'll see you in end of March.

[Max June Strand]

I get these responses and I'm like, dude, I'm a podcaster. All good. I hate VCs too. That's always my comeback. No worries. I'm not a vc.

[Harriet]

Yeah. And I think it's because if you're going to have all those conversations too early, it's too much context switching and so it's just nicer to bundle it because then you're in the zone.

[Max June Strand]

Do you bundle the fundraise into like a 10 day process?

[Harriet]

And I thought it was going to be a six week process because that's what YC recommend or thought and then it ended up being like a seven day process.

[Max June Strand]

Okay, who introduced you to Chathan?

[Harriet]

Yuri Sagalov, who made the ticket that saved us from not running out of money during yc. And they didn't know this, but they're apparently like neighbors.

[Max June Strand]

Wow, I did not know this. Chathan literally just responded to our tweet and so it was a ten and a half million round there and Chathan led that. And then your Jack Altman's came in that time too.

[Harriet]

No, Jack Altman came in the round after.

[Max June Strand]

Ah, got you. Okay, so we raised ten and a half then. Dude, that's a lot of money then.

[Harriet]

Yeah, it was a lot of money.

[Max June Strand]

What was the price?

[Harriet]

I think we did it at 50 something.

[Max June Strand]

It's like chunky when you reflect on that. How do you advise founders on the right amount to raise and also the right price to raise at?

[Harriet]

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. But 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 preempted money.

[Max June Strand]

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.

[Harriet]

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.

[Max June Strand]

The world of YC opens up a huge amount to you. Does the world of benchmark open up? How much does their brand play a role in validating you?

[Harriet]

I think there's some stats that like 99% of benchmark companies end up raising a Series B. That's the only stat you need to hear.

[Max June Strand]

Okay, I totally agree with you. And you're absolutely right. They also had the highest hit rate of $5 billion companies. Incredible stat that Cole Rotman did this analysis. Okay. And so we raised that money. How many term sheets did we have?

[Harriet]

Like 15, I think.

[Max June Strand]

Was it an easy decision?

[Harriet]

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. That'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 going to double down. You can only date so many funds and partners, I guess.

[Max June Strand]

Okay, so we raised the 10.5 from benchmark. Chathan does it. Fantastic. What happens then? Now YC is over. We've got the 10 and a half to hold teams back in Stockholm.

[Harriet]

Yeah, I go back the same day Me and Chetan negotiated the term sheet like this in person. And then the same day after we signed, he's like, oh, so when are you going back to Stockholm? And I'm like, oh, I guess tonight. And he's like, yeah, sounds good. So we go back to Stockholm and we lock in. We have the money, we start scaling. Then we preempt 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. We'd love to lead your next round. And then I joined a firm for 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? I have enough money. I don't need any more right now. And they say, 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 at 150 or something, which was a 3x from the C drop. I thought, okay, sounds pretty good. Send me a term sheet. And then we go through some dancing or partnering pitches, yada yada.

[Max June Strand]

Was Chathan happy about this?

[Harriet]

Yeah, I think he was pretty happy about it.

[Max June Strand]

But I would not have been happy if I was on your cap table already. If I was Chetan, I would not have been happy. Because I think for you to suddenly ingest $25 million when you've just rose ten and a half, 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.

[Harriet]

25. Oh, yeah, 24 back then.

[Harry Stebbings]

Yeah.

[Max June Strand]

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.

[Harriet]

I agree. So I'll tell you what happened in our first board meeting. I turned to Redpoint and to Benchmark and I said, we're not going to sell for the next four months because if we sell and we start onboarding all these great attorneys, they're not going to have the best experience and they're going to think that the product can't solve for the sort of standard things that we talked about in the beginning. Radpoint kind of looked at me and were like, dude, we just gave you like 25 million or you're not going to sell? Like, no, we're not going to sell. We're going to wait the summer out. We're going to work really fucking hard and we're going to onboard the firms and the people we want to work with in September, October, and I think that required a lot of ice in the stomach.

[Max June Strand]

How did you think about that in terms of if you don't gobble up those firms, someone else will, but if you gobble them up and give them a bad experience, it's very difficult to get back.

[Harriet]

Yeah, yeah, one shot. And if you mess it up, they're churning.

[Max June Strand]

But you don't want to let someone else get them first.

[Harriet]

Well, even if somebody else got to them first, at this time, almost everybody would churn because the products were so chatgpt 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. You're serving somebody who's quite untechnical 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.

[Max June Strand]

What were the advantages and disadvantages of being second in timing to Harvey?

[Harriet]

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 layer. There were frankly a lot of firms who had piloted them back then who had an awful experience and who thought GPT4 was better. And so that's kind of the point that I'm talking about. Because if you're coming in with a product and you're charging 10x the price of ChatGPT4 and the partner tries the prompt in the two systems and thinks GPT4 is better, you're churning and you burn your one shot. Now, I think both them and us have gotten to the brand level where you might get a second shot 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.

[Max June Strand]

What strategic mistakes did they make that you learned from?

[Harriet]

I 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 going to deliver on this. And then we onboard then at some point we had almost like a 2 to 1 in terms of our CS and post sales team in comparison to our new sales team, which was a very unstandardized thing for a SaaS 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.

[Max June Strand]

I spoke to someone before the show and I said, yeah, Ligura taking loads of clients from Harvey, huh? 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?

[Harriet]

No. But the other thing is happening, huh? It's the other way around.

[Max June Strand]

What do you do when that happens? Like they have so much money they can afford to give it away for free.

[Harry Stebbings]

They have a 693 million delta between you guys.

[Max June Strand]

They could buy a small country.

[Harriet]

Yeah.

[Max June Strand]

What do you do when your competitor has so much more money?

[Harriet]

Well, it's like the Uber and Lyft situation a little bit. Right. If you just pour money into it in that world. But that's when you have a very low differentiated product. Now I'm building Legora 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 and 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 you raise, how far do.

[Max June Strand]

You think you are away from that?

[Harriet]

Quite a bit. But every day we get closer to it.

[Harry Stebbings]

Do you worry about the brand that.

[Max June Strand]

They'Ve built from being first and also just raising so much? They have a lot of brands through fundraise.

[Harriet]

Not really. I think we're in all the conversations now. I think it's a two horse race to some extent 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 more than caught up with a fraction of the funding and just being super focused on that.

[Max June Strand]

Totally agree. As I said, the Delta between you and funding is enormous.

[Harry Stebbings]

Going back to that.

[Max June Strand]

So the board meeting, every board member is going, fuck, we just gave this switch. Swedish guy A huge amount of money, and he's now not going to sell. So then it's September, October, I guess.

[Harriet]

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, well, it's been an exponential journey upwards.

[Max June Strand]

Okay. So September, we're really starting to sell. And I spoke to Logan Bartlett before the show and he said Max became one of the best enterprise sellers that I've worked with. Ask him how, how did you become so good at enterprise sales? And what would you advise founders who are maybe more engineering and product slanted on becoming good at enterprise sales?

[Harriet]

Well, I'm an engineer.

[Max June Strand]

Yeah.

[Harriet]

And so I'll start with that. I didn't go through the sales school.

[Max June Strand]

Oh, dude, you're peak nerd.

[Harriet]

Yeah, I'm peak nerd.

[Max June Strand]

Pro gamer, engineer. Yeah.

[Harriet]

And I think there's one interesting dynamic in, 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? A bit exaggerated, 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 would 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, many of the early firms, this is a bet. It'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.

[Max June Strand]

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?

[Harriet]

Of course it makes it more challenging. The market dynamics for us is that firms are piloting different softwares and they're stacking it against each other. I 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 a bundle of different products because they get to test everything. Of course, ideally, I mean, you have this idea and I think YC 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 on a tangent, I reached out to 100 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 they'd say, oh no, wait, you don't have to pay me 500 bucks to have lunch with me. But then I just ask them all these things. And I think by doing that, you got to be in this learning mindset of, okay, you want to soak up as much information and as much things as possible.

[Max June Strand]

I love that.

[Harriet]

Yeah, it was a smart move. I'm happy I did it because I think 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 90% of them also paid for the lunch because they had money and I didn't. 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 tech as me, and they just thought that was infectious.

[Max June Strand]

Do you think we do cold emailing badly, say? 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? I'm like, 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 love 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?

[Harriet]

I 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.

[Max June Strand]

So you would call them?

[Harriet]

No, I would text them.

[Max June Strand]

Huh.

[Harriet]

Well, that's more personal. I would say in Swedish, hey, my name's Max. I am working on this legal 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 your brain on X area that I saw that they were an expert in. Would 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% respond says, hey, Max, that sounds wonderful. I'm really busy, but how about we do it in three weeks at this place? And they'd also take 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.

[Max June Strand]

I love that. That is fucking amazing.

[Harriet]

And I think their core skill that I'm not sure if something I developed or had was this. I think I'm easy to help. I'm very coachable.

[Max June Strand]

What do you think you do that makes you coachable? That makes people want to help you? I think I'm the same, but I have a strategic way of doing it.

[Harriet]

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 it 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.

[Max June Strand]

So I found that bluntly, if someone is giving help, they need to feel like you're the subordinate. 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. And then I will be be incredibly effusive in terms of one, compliments. It makes them again, elevated.

[Harriet]

Great.

[Max June Strand]

And then two, like, help me understand.

[Harriet]

Exactly. And yeah, I think that's a good summary of super.

[Max June Strand]

Super. I love that.

[Harriet]

And even in sales, you can do it 100% to maybe tie it back to some comparison between us and Harvey and Winston. Like, I came in with the attitude of legal. Nai is standing in front of the most exciting times that it's ever been in. There's the most amount of opportunities. We don't know exactly where it's going to land. But together, you and I, Harry, can figure it out. And I think that positioning is very compelling. And 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.

[Max June Strand]

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, which 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.

[Harry Stebbings]

And we said actually that the biggest.

[Max June Strand]

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, and suddenly we're in solve, which is 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, suddenly is a lot smaller because of the fragmentation. I worry about that here, and I don't understand Harvey being a $5 billion company and seeing the upside to 20, given that fragmentation.

[Harriet]

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 and litigators. And yes, everything looks quite differently, and especially in house. Right? Like, 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 DeepL 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. All 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 Liguora 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 X firm 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. If you want to add a fourth product to that bucket or sorry, to that list, I think it has to be able to do a lot of things because you're not going to go and learn 20 different tools.

[Max June Strand]

Do you agree that everything has a price?

[Harriet]

No. Because if you told me max, I'd give you $10 billion, but you'll die in 24 hours. I wouldn't take it. So it doesn't have a price. It's priceless.

[Max June Strand]

Can I buy Ligura for $5 billion today? No, 10.

[Harriet]

I'm having too much fun. It doesn't have a price. Now it's part of my life and I think that's priceless.

[Max June Strand]

It's hard when a company becomes such an intrinsic part of your identity.

[Harriet]

Yeah, it is. It's like relationship.

[Max June Strand]

Yeah. Almost harder. Yeah, I can shed a relationship easier. Okay. So I want to get back. We become this fucking amazing enterprise seller that we are and the company progresses. Hiring progresses. Actually, that's an issue one on the hiring side, what are your biggest lessons on hiring again? You're first time founder on what it took to hire such a crack team. What worked and what didn't.

[Harriet]

Yeah, I think it's easy to repeat what I've heard other people say in the past, but you hadn't internalized it until you went into the traps yourself.

[Max June Strand]

What traps did you go into?

[Harriet]

Yeah, so you try and hire for Y 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 markets, you want people that you almost need to go to them and be like, dude, dude, you need to go home, you need to sleep and you need to come back tomorrow and we'll continue. I think we managed to do that, but it's difficult when you need to scale headcount so 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 opened up in Australia as well. What happens is when you're not there, how are people treating the work? That's the thing you need to optimize for. 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 going to work because none of them have worked in an AI company that is going 10x year over year.

[Max June Strand]

Did you move fast Enough to change it?

[Harriet]

Yes.

[Max June Strand]

Yes, you did.

[Harriet]

Yes.

[Max June Strand]

That's hard.

[Harriet]

Super hard. Some of the hardest conversations I've ever had.

[Max June Strand]

So knowing what you know now, you would not have hired for the blue blazer wearing, you would have hired for slope. Anything else.

[Harriet]

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 people, product directors at Klarna or at Spotify or these companies that have made it, that they're not incentivized to be curious in a way, 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 iteration cycles are not quarters, they're weeks or days. I think you can test for that and I think we've started testing for it more and more and more.

[Max June Strand]

How do you test for it?

[Harriet]

Well, you just ask them. Pull up your phone and show me all the things that you're currently curious about. And then I ask them, what was the last time you nerded into something? And tell me about that. And sometimes people go, oh, I'm going to tell you about this book I'm reading about xyz. And 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 Ligora and about what we're building and about the next feature and about solving that problem for that client. When 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.

[Max June Strand]

How do you build a cultish culture? 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 Ethic and everyone killed me for it. I find my friend very funny. Everyone always recommends the book the Courage to Be Disliked. And then when you actually gain that courage, they all shoot you. So my question to you, you is, do you agree with 996 mentality. And how would you reflect on what I just said?

[Harriet]

Yeah, I mean the short answer is yes, because we did it for a while and we did it with large team buy in. If you tie it 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 to outwork 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. Of course, if you work 10 hours a day and I work eight, I mean, at some point you're going to have achieved a lot more. Unless I'm very productive in my hours and I need time to reset. And I think there are. People 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.

[Max June Strand]

Do you worry that Europe had such a viscerally negative response to the996 vibe?

[Harriet]

But it's like, yeah, 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 10pm to go home.

[Max June Strand]

Do you?

[Harriet]

Yeah.

[Max June Strand]

Do you do anything to inspire that?

[Harriet]

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 in age and I think the only way to do that is through leading by example. And here my co founder, Sigje, our cto, 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.

[Max June Strand]

The pace to win. It's hard to win in the US period. It's hard to win in the US even more so if you're a European company, what do you think you did so effectively to gain ground in the US where so many European companies before have not?

[Harriet]

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 A B 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, 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. What you do is you send a very clear signal that 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, 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 Redpoint who helped us get the NASDAQ thing. And that sends a pretty clear signal that like, oh, these guys are here to play, they're not here to be the European winner.

[Max June Strand]

So what would you advise then, founders? I meet so many founders who are pre seed seed in Europe and they're like, everyone's telling me that I have to be in the U.S. what do you say to them?

[Harriet]

Well, I don't think you have to be in the States. I'm not in the States yet. Well, I'm on a plane maybe, mostly, but you gotta figure out where you're strong. And where we were strong was we got the buy in from a couple of very influential clients in the States who said, we've had a taste of the things around the table. We prefer the taste of Ligora and we're gonna double down on them as a partner. And 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 and you say, okay, let's build an office here or 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.

[Max June Strand]

Basically totally get you and I like that. Can I ask, what did you do that you wish you hadn't done?

[Harriet]

I'm actually quite happy with a lot of the results that I have in my hand of how we've done things and most of the things that I regret would have been very hard to know beforehand. But I think one of the things 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 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 haven't had the capacity to pick up and they understand. But I wish I did a better job, especially as we started out juggling those two things.

[Max June Strand]

Do you think it would have been possible though?

[Harriet]

I'm not sure.

[Max June Strand]

That's my point. Yeah, that's hard. I completely get you. Okay. And so sorry, going back, we have you said Redpoint there. Building helping you with the billboard sales is ripping company in us now as well. And then it comes to another round.

[Harriet]

So now we're in 2025 now in 2025 and I think we're around 120 people.

[Max June Strand]

I remember messaging you before the round came out and you were like, yeah, we've got 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.

[Harriet]

I don't know. Yeah, I hadn't planned to do it. It kind of happened.

[Max June Strand]

That's on me then. That's bad of me because I kind of just took you forward. I was like, okay, and so what happens then? Because you're 7 million of ARR @ the time.

[Harriet]

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, the thing that I always try and optimize for is of course the 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 on? I think both Iconic and GC have some very core strengths.

[Max June Strand]

So they just approach you.

[Harriet]

Well, I think I had some catch ups and then again, very similar to how the preempted a round Happened and somebody threw a term sheet. And then it's like, oh, I guess we're doing this.

[Max June Strand]

Who threw the term sheet?

[Harriet]

I think it was GC who threw the first one.

[Max June Strand]

Love it. Well done, Jeannette. Okay, so she throws a term sheet.

[Harriet]

And it was funny timing as well with Yuri going on GC full time.

[Max June Strand]

Oh, yeah. Did you negotiate price?

[Harriet]

Yeah, we did.

[Max June Strand]

And so then you raise. I think it was 80 million.

[Harriet]

We raised 80 million on 675.

[Max June Strand]

80 million on 675. That is not much dilution. And so my question is, if I'm less, I'm getting like 6.5% each. It's not a huge amount.

[Harriet]

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.

[Max June Strand]

Market, did they want to work together? Because if I'm them, respectfully, both iconic and GC can write an $80 million check. I'd just say, you don't need the other one. Get them out. I'll take the full 12.5%, whatever it is.

[Harriet]

Well, 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. In my world, a lot of things are happening. There is definitely something true to the fact that you need a war chest to compete.

[Max June Strand]

Do you need a lot more money now? Yeah.

[Harriet]

No. I mean, out of the 35 that we raised, I think we had only spent five or six.

[Max June Strand]

So now you're sitting on 110 million.

[Harriet]

Yeah, basically.

[Max June Strand]

So there's nothing that you would do with more money?

[Harriet]

No.

[Max June Strand]

So, I'm sorry, what are Harvey doing then with so much more money?

[Harriet]

Great question. Maybe it's expensive. I have no idea.

[Max June Strand]

That's extraordinary.

[Harriet]

Yeah. What I also think is 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 a 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. There's going to come a Time when Harvey and us have a little bit like put a bit little 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, and I mean just to give you an example, since we did the round like a month and a half ago, we've doubled revenue, more than doubled revenue. And I think last month we added more than a million of ARR a week.

[Max June Strand]

Why is that? Is that because of the visibility? Is that because of the confidence that they're funding around in buses?

[Harriet]

Well, I think it's. Look again, 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 whores 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 Runway for years and years and years. So we're going to be around. You can tell them, yeah, we have a lot of cash, da da da da. But the external signaling of it also helps.

[Max June Strand]

When you think about lawyers as customers. I always have this perception that they're incredibly sticky. You need to get them first because they don't change software very often.

[Harriet]

I don't agree at all. And I found that their level of knowledge for these systems is increasing probably faster than we can build. So 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 in 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.

[Max June Strand]

We mentioned ambition before. I actually remember an old Swedish girlfriend of mine, she's going to 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.

[Harriet]

Like, oh, Yantelagen.

[Harry Stebbings]

Yes, this.

[Max June Strand]

And I was very perturbed by it. It seemed damaging to me that we should all try and be in this middle ground.

[Harriet]

Well, it effectively means you shouldn't think that you are something.

[Max June Strand]

Do you agree with me in thinking that's terrible and we should change that in Europe?

[Harriet]

Well, I think it would have been impossible to build Legora if I did not have a strike of overconfidence.

[Max June Strand]

Did you ever have a time when you were too confident?

[Harriet]

Oh, I mean, there's been loads of times. I can give you some fun examples. I went to circus class when I was a kid. I thought I was really, really great. And so I would try to climb up the largest piece of cloth and try to do a big spin going down, and I would just completely fall and 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 knit. And you do that a couple of times and then you learn. Okay, I need to study for.

[Max June Strand]

Have you done it with Legora?

[Harriet]

No, I don't think so. I think we've followed through on almost every single promise that we've done.

[Max June Strand]

What really upsets you with the team, What I mean by that is like, I don't like sloppiness. I can take lots of.

[Harriet]

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 15 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. And I had this happen to myself when I was in vc. So I used to work at Norwegian 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 partners and they find a mistake and then they spend 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 we don't want to be in this 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 opportunity is. And I think that maybe comes a little bit from the Yentelagen thing. But yes, there are big comparable companies close to us. Klarna, Spotify, King, many others. But sometimes people underestimate how big this actually is. And you just need to be like, here are the numbers. 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 screen, all of them are going to 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 going 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. You get a lot of early talent in, and you got to be pretty upfront with them and say, hey, this is the company's track. I'm betting on you to 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.

[Max June Strand]

What was the hardest bit to grow into?

[Harriet]

I think the hardest thing for me has been to move from an IC to a manager.

[Max June Strand]

Why?

[Harriet]

Because you are used to having to do a lot of things yourself. Even in school. If you're in a group project, if the group members are not that great, it's more effective to do the work yourself than 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 company is it's going to be around for years or decades. You need to flip your mindset because if you do the work today, yeah, you might save 15 minutes, but you actually need to make the team grow to handle this stuff before we move.

[Max June Strand]

Into a quick fire. When you speak to anyone related to Harvey, they say Harvey's just much bigger and Harvey's at 90 to 100 million and you're at whatever 16, 17 and that's a big difference. It's 20% of the size. How do you respond? Think about that in a world that's moving so fast and all about being the biggest and the fastest.

[Harriet]

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 moving the conversation forward. I think there's going to be built multiple massive businesses in this space. Again, the amount of penetration in the market is still in the low single percentiles versus what it can become. I 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 a B 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 at what they're doing but I'm not looking like this like I'm cheating on a test. I care much more about doing our things well than trying to copy what they're doing.

[Max June Strand]

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.

[Harriet]

Yeah, exactly.

[Max June Strand]

Listen, I want to do a quick fire round my friend. So I say a short statement. What's the most underrated skill for founders in 2025?

[Harriet]

I think that it is the ability to correctly prioritize when the opportunity set is so massive. Because right now and especially with LLMs you could go and build almost anything. You need to be very careful about what you pick and 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.

[Max June Strand]

How would you advise then a young engineering minded founder today wanting to do a company on a good versus a bad pick.

[Harriet]

It's too easy now to 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, I think it's the same thing again. You got to go super, super deep on the problem space that you want to work in. And then I think now the cost of building software has gone down so incredibly quick that you can prototype something pretty quickly and get to a stage where you actually have an MVP. 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.

[Max June Strand]

Ease of prototyping, will we skip the design stage?

[Harriet]

No, I think you need to think about how you design an entire experience that makes sense, because otherwise what you'll end up with is like a Frankenstein monster where, yes, every individual page kind of looks all right and makes sense, but then nobody has thought about the entire experience because the entire experience requires an eye of design. There's a huge difference in Legora'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 the 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. And that I think requires much more than just prototyping something. In an LLM build, in 10 years.

[Max June Strand]

Time, what job will sound as strange as fax operator does today?

[Harriet]

Young corporate lawyer sitting in the data room pressing control F to find clauses.

[Max June Strand]

Do you not need that training to create a pipeline of future partners?

[Harriet]

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 end 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, because 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.

[Max June Strand]

What have you changed your mind on in the last 24 months? So I actually disagree with something that you said earlier, I do think there's immense value in the model layer and I think specifically in OpenAI.

[Harriet]

But OpenAI is not a model company, they're a platform company, they're a software company.

[Max June Strand]

How would you differentiate between a model company and a platform company then?

[Harriet]

Well, so somebody who just does the model, take Llama 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.

[Max June Strand]

Would you rather invest in OpenAI at 300 or anthropic at 60?

[Harriet]

I think I'd invest in OpenAI. Well, actually we use mostly sonnet models, so maybe I'd say anthropic. But ChatGPT 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.

[Max June Strand]

And the question is, how big is that game?

[Harriet]

Yes. So an interesting part of being an application builder is the floor is always ChatGPT. And so ChatGPT is improving quite quickly, like the platform ChatGPT and the product ChatGPT is coming better, which requires us to be even better than that.

[Max June Strand]

How do you analyze Zuck's talent grab?

[Harriet]

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.

[Max June Strand]

What's the final one? What's the single best piece of advice you've been given in the journey that you think about most often?

[Harriet]

I 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 product is working and where it isn't working and on pushing our marketing things to be even better. And it's like when you're so deep in the founder mode of everything that's going on, people see that and if they see that, you care. They care.

[Max June Strand]

Listen Max, 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. But you've been fantastic. So thank you so much for joining me man.

[Harriet]

Thank you Harry. This is awesome.

[Max June Strand]

Now I want these shows to be.

[Harry Stebbings]

The best shows they can be for you. So let me know what you think.

[Max June Strand]

You can let me know on Twitter.

[Harry Stebbings]

Harry Stebbings or you can email me harry0vc.com likewise.

[Max June Strand]

It would make such a difference if.

[Harry Stebbings]

You left a review or left a.

[Max June Strand]

Comment really does help.

[Harry Stebbings]

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[Max June Strand]

Do exactly what you want it to.

[Harry Stebbings]

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[Max June Strand]

Episode coming on Monday with Anton at Lovable.