← The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Inside Legora: $100M ARR in 18 Months | Jude Law Generated $50M in Sales Pipeline: The Economics Broken Down | Competing Against Harvey, the 800 Pound Gorilla | Why Legora is Undervalued at $5.5BN with Patrick Forquer, CRO @ Legora
01:14:17
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- [00:00]
Harry Stebbings
How much did the Jude Law cost?
- [00:02]
Patrick Forquer
We generated over $50 million of qualified pipe. We had so many leads that we weren't able to follow up with them. When I started, we were at 40 people. Today we're over 500. When we get into a deal, when we get into a pilot, we convert pilots 78% of the time into a closed one opportunity deathmatch on every deal. It's super competitive. We've got to play defense and offense at the same time and that's what makes it fun. Every two weeks we have a new hire class and at this point it's between 40 and 50 people joining every every two weeks. This market is being made right now. This is one of the hottest markets of all time. Our average attainment last year was 280%. It's more about time than, than money right now. When you have momentum and you have an advantage, press the advantage.
- [00:46]
Harry Stebbings
This is 20 VC with me, Harry Stebbings. And joining me in the hot seat,
- [00:50]
20VC Announcer
we have Patrick Forquer, CRO at Legora,
- [00:52]
Harry Stebbings
the fastest growing enterprise business ever to
- [00:56]
20VC Announcer
hit 100 million in ARR. And now on track to hit 50 million by the end of the year. Unparalleled growth, which led to a $550 million Series D at a $5.5 billion
- [01:08]
Harry Stebbings
valuation led by Excel.
- [01:10]
20VC Announcer
Note, 20 VC did participate in this round and this conversation took many twists and turns, including how a Jude law advert generated $50 million of pipeline for the company. Get your notebooks out.
- [01:24]
Harry Stebbings
This is a masterclass in company scaling.
- [01:27]
20VC Announcer
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- [02:39]
Harry Stebbings
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- [02:40]
20VC Announcer
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- [04:30]
Harry Stebbings
You have now arrived at your destination. Patrick Dude, I've heard so many good things. I was literally just chatting to Chathan and to Logan before this show. They gave me phenomenally helpful insight. Especially Logan. So thank you so much for joining me dude.
- [04:44]
Patrick Forquer
Oh, thanks so much for having me. It's awesome to be here.
- [04:46]
Harry Stebbings
So you were at Braze for six years?
- [04:48]
Patrick Forquer
Yeah.
- [04:49]
Harry Stebbings
What was the single biggest sales lesson that you took with you from Braze to Ligora?
- [04:54]
Patrick Forquer
I think the biggest thing that we did really well at Braze that I've sort of taken over is implementation change management. So Braze is really hard to implement. So, you know, you're on a legacy product, you're consolidating 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 different tools into one tool. Implementations take, you know, 6 to 12 months is a lot of effort. There's a lot of stakeholder management, technical work streams, all these different things. And for us at Lagora, obviously we have an amazing product, but at the end of the day our focus and our obsession is around like helping our customers adopt those tools, like the Legora tools into their workflows, which is really hard. So general change management strategies and take all the learning I took from Braze and taking that logora is probably the biggest thing.
- [05:34]
Harry Stebbings
So I had Matt Fitzpatrick on the show and this is why I don't normally send out the schedules because they just kind of go by the wayside very, very quickly. But Matt Fitzpatrick, who's like this CEO of Invisible, which is a data provider, and he was like, oh, you can't sell into enterprise without FTEs today. Is that true? And when you reflect back on what works in change management, what's the biggest advice?
- [05:57]
Patrick Forquer
Yeah, so there's a couple things that are still true and I think some things that are different, like in an agentic world. So the things that are still true is you still need a tremendous amount of executive sponsorship and support. The joke we used to make when I worked in consulting was the two things people hate the most are the way things are and change. So you need top down sponsorship, you need bottoms up sort of champion building, all the sort of normal adoption frameworks that you would use in traditional change management. I think the biggest thing with agent take work and why FDEs are required. And we have both forward deploy engineers, but we also have forward deploy legal engineers who typical, you know, big law attorneys who understand how individual practice areas work within a law firm as well as how corporate legal departments work within that sort of broader context. And with an agentic tool like Ligora, you log in and you see the agent. It's like the proverbial blank page. There's no sequential step of things that you click. Like in SaaS. In SaaS it was like you used to do things this way and now you do things this way. And this is why this is better. And this is all the sort of business impact with an agent it's like what do you want it to do? And most people don't think about their work in terms of like systems thinking in terms of what's the goal of what I'm doing, what are the steps I need to take to achieve the goal and what are the tools, skills and resources I need at each step and you know, who's in the loop at each decision making, inflection point, you know, sort of progress this to, to achieving the goal. Most businesses don't write things down like that. They don't think like that. And so having these four deploy folks who can do two things, integrate Logora into sort of the broader tech ecosystem so we have access to all the various tools and resources that we need to accomplish the goal. But also leveraging legal engineers to say, hey, we know how XYZ M&A workflow works in practice. This is how you do it before agents, this is how you do it in Lagora. That's the hard yards and where we spend a lot of time.
- [07:39]
Harry Stebbings
What level of contract do we need to justify an FDE model which is more costly? It's human hours upfront, it's margin reduction. What level of ACV do you think is needed?
- [07:51]
Patrick Forquer
Well, it's a great question and people keep asking me why we raise so much money and I'm like, lawyers are expensive, man. It's like we can afford to take this sort of human, this very human centric approach right now, but we do it for, you know, pretty much anything in six figures and above. You've got to really lean in and make that, make it happen. Because otherwise what you do is you sell, you're in danger of selling software that doesn't get used. And we're very focused on, again, like I said, adoption frameworks and making sure that if we sell you 10 licenses that you use all 10 and you get a lot of value out of it.
- [08:23]
Harry Stebbings
And we're going to go to like metrics that matter. Adoption frameworks. Yeah, I do just want to ask. On the advice side, there's a lot of operators who are at traditional SaaS companies, traditional enterprise companies, and are contemplating, should I move to an AI company? There's so much hype, there's so much buzz around them. I don't want to be left behind. Braze is an incredible company, but it's a traditional company. What advice would you have for those operators who are thinking about moving to an AI first company and a next gen company?
- [08:51]
Patrick Forquer
Yeah, for sure. And I've become that person at Briz that people call when they're, oh, you know, I'm thinking about leaving and how'd you think about it? And da da, da. So I' had this, this talk A lot with, with friends and colleagues and well, the first thing is always it's what do you want to do? Because I can tell you, working in this world is, is completely insane and unhinged and it's over, it's all consuming. So you've really got to want to do it, you've got to want to lean in. And it's very different than traditional SaaS. The pace of development, the pace of the market, in terms of the competitive market, competitive dynamics and things like that, it's very different. And you've got to really want to come in and build and figure stuff out and do things differently. Get a little uncomfortable, if you're okay with that. I'm always encouraging people to make the leap.
- [09:33]
Harry Stebbings
What's insane and unhinged, if you think
- [09:36]
Patrick Forquer
about the news that comes out every week, the competitive set, the model capabilities, who's buying what. There's so much sort of hype around, even in our, even in just our space. You know, every time we win a deal or lose a deal, there's a PR announcement about, about it. So the level of pressure, the level of development and then the product development, specifically like the product from Lagora a year ago, I thought was incredible. You know, I quit my job and joined the company. I was so excited, excited about it. But that versus what we have now is night and day. And so your ability to stay on top of it, to learn and to have that level of deep product expertise is really tough. And like I said, you've got to take it very seriously in terms of enablement and education.
- [10:15]
Harry Stebbings
I can't remember if it was Logan or Chatham. And so I'm going to give credit to both of them. But they said that you've been phenomenal in terms of bluntly creating a new playbook for this era. And I think what's challenging with what you said there, with the transience of models, competition, you name it, is like your playbook becomes relatively irrelevant.
- [10:34]
Patrick Forquer
Yes.
- [10:34]
Harry Stebbings
What remains from traditional SaaS, playbooks and what's like that is useless now get rid.
- [10:40]
Patrick Forquer
One area I still like to ground my team in is we want to be customer obsessed and you want to have. There's a guy, Brian Walsh of Force Management taught me this phrase, positive business intent. So if you're there and you're showing up and you're genuinely like taking the point of view of I'm here to help, I'm here to help transform your business and make a big impact and help you win, I think people can feel that and be Prepared, be professional, you know, come with a point of view, understand their business, do your homework. All the stuff that you would do from a preparatory perspective, like you still have to do, you still have to prepare and, and take the point of view of like understanding their business deeply so you can understand, you know, the impact that you can make sort of long term. That's still the same. But you know, Braze, we never ran pilots in Lagora. We just, we run pilots all the time as an example. So there's a tremendous amount of education you have to do. Because as we were talking before the show, I think AI literacy generally in the market, not just within the legal context, but AI literacy general is very, very low. And even when we're working with firms who have put a ton of investment and enablement into it, the models are developing, the capabilities are developing, and staying on top of it is a big challenge. And we view part of our job as being that partner to help you stay up to speed with the cutting edge technology and everything you can do with it. So that part is quite different.
- [11:56]
Harry Stebbings
Does the traditional sales playbook work of old in a new AI world?
- [12:00]
Patrick Forquer
I think it's a blend. There are certain things you have to throw out. So the traditional SaaS playbook is like, you don't want to demo, for example. The old school SaaS thing is like the products weren't very good. You know, you want to hold the demo as long as possible, do discovery, build rapport, do all these things and then you demo like the second or third meeting. That's what like the old school guys would tell you with Ligora and with, with agentic tools, you have to still do discovery and still come with a point of view, but you have to use the product to sort of show what the future looks like. And especially for us in a category creation moment, you're dealing with what they call traditionally unrealized pain. We're not typically replacing a tool. I mean, occasionally we will be, but more often than not, we're sort of the first tool of its kind sort of coming into the organization. And so you have to be willing to be audible, ready to ask questions, and then be able to pivot really quickly into building like an agentic workflow off the cuff as you're talking to someone. And that's quite difficult.
- [12:56]
Harry Stebbings
Can we actually use that as a way of explaining the valuation? Because I think people question the multiple. As we said, it raised a lot of money and at a 5.5 billion, I think it was post, which is public but people are like, wow, that's what you have to assume a lot. And you gave me an answer before, which I'd love for you to share because I thought it was a good one. How do you think about that expansion from where we are to where we can be in terms of what Ligura does?
- [13:22]
Patrick Forquer
Yeah, if you look at the legal tech sort of market, I think it's like 40 billion is the number that I see sort of floating around. Depends on who you talk to. But legal tech generally is a $40 billion market. So then if you look at us, you look at our competitive set valuation, that sort of doesn't add up. But then if you look at sort of legal services more broadly, that's a trillion dollar market and certainly there's a bunch of work within that that's not work that's done by law firms, for example, but it's more sort of like rote, repeatable, document extraction type of work. And that's where we see ourselves really sort of playing in the long term is not just the legal tech market, but there's an element of the services market as well where there's a high degree of application. For Ligar, I want to go to
- [14:05]
Harry Stebbings
the start of the funnel, so to speak, because again, this was Chathan or Logan. I can't believe I'm forgetting age, my friend. It's a killer. You said it's insane and unhinged. It's the same for media, by the way. I'm in venture and media and so I'm like double fucked.
- [14:21]
Patrick Forquer
I know the busiest guy in venture and media right now.
- [14:25]
Harry Stebbings
Honestly, it's a savage world. I can't wait for them to create an AI. Harry, if Ligura can do that, I'll pay double.
- [14:32]
20VC Announcer
But if we start at the pipe,
- [14:34]
Harry Stebbings
what's the biggest lesson in how to construct an effective pipe in an AI world and how that pipeline building process is done?
- [14:41]
Patrick Forquer
This has been a big point of evolution for us. So for example, we just did a big brand campaign with Jude Law. But before you do something like that, you have to do a ton of work in terms of the plumbing, in terms of like, what's our inbound lead scoring, how do we do data enrichment, how do we do lead routing and lead scoring from a probabilistic perspective. So there's a ton of infrastructure you have to put in place first before you can really sort of go big on, you know, from an inbound perspective. So on that basis, we've done a ton of work leading up to that campaign. But like, even last year of like getting our systems in place, getting the territory assignments in place, like all the rules and sort of SLAs around. If we get a lead, you have to respond in this amount of time. And even last year, from an SMB perspective, we had so many leads that we weren't able to follow up with them as many as we wanted in a timely way. So the other thing was staffing. We've had to hire a tremendous amount. When I started, we were at 40 people. Today we're over 500. And we still need more people and more systems to keep up with the demand.
- [15:39]
Harry Stebbings
How do you do lead scoring today? Is it simply a size of contract?
- [15:42]
Patrick Forquer
Yeah. So right now you look at the size of the firm, you look at the number of attorneys and compliance workers internally, and then you look at where they're located. Located, and you're routed to the right team.
- [15:52]
Harry Stebbings
Gio plays a role in that.
- [15:53]
Patrick Forquer
Yeah. So we've got teams all over the place. So in Europe, we have pods looking after every major market. And for example, in Germany, we're doing so well that we just opened an office in Munich.
- [16:02]
Harry Stebbings
So you run the GM model. I'm seeing this more and more. You have like mini CEOs of each country. 11 Labs is very much pivoted to that.
- [16:07]
Patrick Forquer
Yeah, exactly. So we've got leo, who runs our European business. And then under leo, we've got a number of folks with, from a country perspective and a team behind them to go execute. So we have to be really cognizant of. There's a lot of, you know, Europe, European data sovereignty, regulatory compliance thing. So we have to have teams who are really specialize in that.
- [16:25]
Harry Stebbings
I know you've got to get a permit to go to the bathroom. I'm sorry.
- [16:29]
Patrick Forquer
Exactly. Exactly. You gotta get my eater on the way in.
- [16:32]
Harry Stebbings
How you want to get up to go to the bathroom? You need a permit for that?
- [16:35]
Patrick Forquer
Yes.
- [16:35]
Harry Stebbings
Yeah. That's 25.
- [16:37]
Patrick Forquer
I can't say the exact number, but I can tell you it was worth every penny.
- [16:40]
Harry Stebbings
Was it? Yeah, because people are going to watch this and they're going to say, Harry's an ambassador and it's bias. I wasn't sure about it.
- [16:48]
Patrick Forquer
Yeah.
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Harry Stebbings
And so, like, tell me it was worth it. And I'm thrilled because I want it to be so.
- [16:52]
Patrick Forquer
Last month alone, we gener over $50 million of qualified pipe. And that's. That's not. That's not just inbound leads. That's pipeline that we talked to qualified and moved into like A sales conversation kind of blunt.
- [17:04]
Harry Stebbings
What was the month before? To give us context on like, is that good or bad?
- [17:07]
Patrick Forquer
That was a pretty big jump, month over month. I don't know the exact number. I don't want to, I don't want to misquote. But you know, from, from that perspective, we're seeing a ton of interest in demand. And look, when I, when I started
- [17:17]
Harry Stebbings
Lawyers Give a Shit about law, it's,
- [17:20]
Patrick Forquer
it's, it honestly wasn't even necessarily for the folks. The lawyers in the big markets know. It's more for the folks that don't. And we just want that sort of brand awareness. Because I can tell you when I started in the, I was our first US hire. The first office that we had in the US was my apartment in Brooklyn. And we, you know, as I sort of was slowly building out the team over there, no one knew who we were outside of the people sort of in the know, in the legal tech community. And so for us, you know, we were late to a lot of deals. And when we get into a deal, when we get into a pilot, we convert pilots 78% of the time into a closed one opportunity. But the biggest challenge that we had was just not being in the room. And so for us, brand awareness is everything and the strength of our brand is better than ever. And yeah, the Jude Law campaign wasn't for everyone, but overall we got really positive feedback and the biggest thing is just brand awareness for us.
- [18:13]
Harry Stebbings
Super interesting in terms of brand awareness. I had Nick from Revolut on the show and he said one of the biggest lessons that he always had is he always thought brand awareness was fluffy bullshit. And actually it's one of the most powerful drivers of business.
- [18:24]
Patrick Forquer
And that's one thing that we report on to the board. Like Stuart and our marketing team have created a framework for how we, we score our brand sort of efficacy in different markets and we, we track that we're making big progress and we have a lot more coming.
- [18:36]
Harry Stebbings
Can I ask you, in terms of the pilots there, you know, the undeniable truth is you are in a two sided fight, or however we want to say it's a war. It's you versus Harvey. How do you advise founders? I don't want to make this like Legora versus Harvey. How do you advise founders? Because there are a lot of markets where it's, whether it's Brax versus Ramp or Stripe versus Air Wallix, whatever, how do you advise founders when it's one versus the other? When you're in that sales process.
- [19:03]
Patrick Forquer
At the end of the day, it comes down to preparation and execution. And one of the companies I really admire and try to model after is Ramp, like you said. And we talk a lot about them internally in terms of how they've built the execution layer from a go to market perspective. If you've talked to anyone who's engaged with a ramp sales team, they're always prepared, they don't have to take things back to get answers. There's a degree of professionalism and preparation that goes into every conversation. And also so often in go to market people talk about using AI to automate different processes like oh, I want to update my opportunity notes or draft this email and of course we do all that stuff. But the other thing that people don't think enough about is how are you using AI to deliver more differentiated from a services and insights perspective, we have a lot of data from pilot participants. How can we give insights into that data that are going to help the firms and companies that we work with make decisions around adoption frameworks, ROI and things like that.
- [20:00]
Harry Stebbings
So if I'm a founder listening to this, what does that actually mean? So we use pilot data to then encourage net new customers. So we say, hey, 84% of people that use this type of email actually convert better.
- [20:14]
Patrick Forquer
Yeah, exactly. So within a law firm context, for example, we'll segment out by practice areas area and so let's say that they've a big firm's got let's say 10 practice areas and then you have let's say X number of people within each practice area. We can report out on consumption and usage by practice area. And also we track and create like frameworks and use case banks for like actual applications and workflows that we're building. So let's say within that example we've got 10 practice areas, seven of them. We see really high usage, we're creating and capturing new use cases, we're sharing that back with them on a regular basis. But maybe there's three where we're not not. And you can start measuring things like did the quality of your work increase? Did you decrease the amount of non billable work that your associates were doing? Were you able to attract more talent using a tool like legorix? People get excited about using the latest and greatest in AI. And so if you take that and you apply to the three practice areas where maybe we're not doing as well, we can show them insights as to who's really leaning in and who's not and where we need help from a
- [21:11]
Harry Stebbings
change Management perspective, totally get that. And so one, it's like execution and being prepared. Anything else on how to navigate that? Hey, we're looking at Brecht versus Ramp, Harvey versus Lagora. One of my biggest bits of advice to fans is always be respectful. Knocking your competition is not in a sales process.
- [21:30]
Patrick Forquer
Yeah.
- [21:30]
Harry Stebbings
Just doesn't come across that well. Sell yourself, don't bash them.
- [21:34]
Patrick Forquer
Exactly. And we try to stay in our lane and focus on ourselves. Now, obviously, as you mentioned, we have one big competitor and they come up on. It's a deathmatch on every deal. It's super competitive. We have a ton of respect for them. We, you know, it's not like anyone over at Lagora is just like thinking that every deal we're going to is a cakewalk. It's the exact opposite. They're very good, they're very, you know, they're very aggressive. And we take them extremely seriously. And so we screen for intelligence, we screen for effort, and we screen for competitiveness. Because at the end of the day, you gotta really want to win. You gotta go out, execute, not deliver, and evolve your playbook. We run pilots very differently now than we did a quarter ago, the quarter before that.
- [22:12]
Harry Stebbings
That's interesting. How do you run them differently today than you used to?
- [22:15]
Patrick Forquer
We have a lot more tools, we have a lot more reporting, we have a lot more specialty in terms of implementation, change management. So going back to, like, the firm context as an example, you can't just have like a litigation attorney go talk to an M and A team. You got to have an M and A attorney go talk to an M and A team. And so as we've scaled out from, you know, just me to, you know, a much bigger team in the US right now, we've. We've hired specialists who focus on different areas of the law, who can get, again, sort of go in bed with our clients and the folks in pilots and sort of build those bespoke workflows for them. And we're able to do that. We're able to get on site. Getting on site, super critical. Because people don't pay attention on Zoom. We all know that, right? And so when you say getting on
- [22:55]
Harry Stebbings
site, what do you mean? You say in the sales process, it's like, hey, get into their office.
- [22:59]
Patrick Forquer
Yes. I encourage every GTM and every legal engineer. If you're not in their office by the second or third meeting, something's wrong. Now, certainly some companies, especially on the corporate side, maybe they're hybrid, maybe they're remote. You can't always do it, but in particular for a deal of like really any size. Because at the end of the day, for firms, this is sort of a bet the company type decision. Like this is an existential decision making process. And so from that perspective, you're going to bet on the team just as much as you're betting on the product. And so at the end of the day, you're betting on a team that's going to meet you in the future with the solutions and sort of adoption frameworks that are going to help you get there.
- [23:35]
Harry Stebbings
It is about the decision because this is like their core investment in the AI technology field. If you look at it from the partnership perspective as a law firm. With that in mind and with the stickiness that can come, how do we think about giving it away for free and margin reduction in order to have market share gain?
- [23:53]
Patrick Forquer
Yeah, we don't give Legora away for free. So we try and have price integrity, we try and be very transparent around what our pricing model is and how we go after things. But in a competitive dynamic, we do face that from various competitors. And do Harvey give it away for free? They have. And certainly from our perspective, I always make the joke when I'm talking to folks in a, in a competitive dynamic, when you're getting down to the decision making process, you're focusing on the product score from the pilot, you're focusing on the commercial model, you're focusing on the roadmap. One thing we do is we, we have what we call like the eight mile talk track. And you know, at the end of 8 mile where he just sort of says everything that's wrong with him about him and his family, we just sort of say like, this is exactly what's going to happen if you pick us. Like, this is what the, this is what the counter is going to be like, this is what, you know, they're going to go to this point and we have a pretty good point of view on what will happen. And it usually does. And so from that perspective, we just try and stay ahead of it.
- [24:49]
Harry Stebbings
Do people churn when they're embedded in a product? If switching isn't frequent and it's supremely sticky, if I'm Max and you're Patrick easy one, I just say, like, let's just give it away for free to everyone for the first year, let's just get everyone for free on it and get them as embedded as usual. We'll tell all of our investors that our margin is going to start, there's no revenue, there's no suck, but next year we're going to be at a billion five in revenue.
- [25:12]
Patrick Forquer
Well, that's one way to look at it. But the way I think about it is, first of all, if a company's not spending any money on a product, doesn't matter, then they're not going to put the resources and attention into it that they need to. And we really need our customers to lean in and want to change. Because at the end of the day, we can have the best team that we want. We can have the best team focused on all the right things. But if the customers aren't leaning in, then it's going to be tough. And so I think from going to zero is not helpful in that, in that sort of dynamic. But I see what you're saying. And we do try to be easy to work with. And so from that perspective, you know, we try and be as flexible as we can be.
- [25:46]
Harry Stebbings
It's a very interesting behavioral economic study which is they give away a yoga class for free in a park and it had a 52% attendance rate. And then they charged $35 and it had a 92% attendance rate.
- [25:58]
Patrick Forquer
Exactly. Yeah, exactly.
- [25:59]
Harry Stebbings
It's like people commit to what they pay for.
- [26:01]
Patrick Forquer
Exactly. And you have to have value. You place value in your partners. And we find that to be to be true.
- [26:07]
Harry Stebbings
I interviewed Winston Harvey and I thought it was very smart one of their GTM approaches, which is using PE as this kind expand funnel into the clients that they have in law. How do you think about that?
- [26:18]
Patrick Forquer
Yeah, that's definitely an angle. And certainly within the sort of legal services ecosystem more broadly, you look at the influence in decision making on tooling. For example, it's like if you're selling to a corporate, they're going to ask all their law firm panel what tools are they using. If you're selling to a law firm, they're going to ask their big corporate clients and the tools they're using. And certainly private equity has the power.
- [26:41]
Harry Stebbings
Does the PE firms have the power of the law firms or does the law firms have the power of the pe?
- [26:46]
Patrick Forquer
I think it depends on the firm and depends on the PE company for sure. But there's definitely a lot of interconnectivity. And one of the most fun things about selling into this market is that every deal is very different selling to a law firm. There's a lot of personalities. Stakeholder management is very different from firm to firm. So there's innovation teams, there's knowledge management, but there's also partners and the degree to which partners want to lean in and get involved. And then there's AI committees and there's all these subcommittees and all these different things. So. So it's very intricate the decision making processes and one client of a firm might have an outsized voice at the table for or against you as an example. You have to be very mindful of that. That sort of map is very complex.
- [27:26]
Harry Stebbings
There's many different clients processes. Biggest lessons or advice on lead scoring going back to that anything you see people doing way wrong lessons.
- [27:35]
Patrick Forquer
The one thing that remains true is that the longer you let a lead sit the worse the conversion rate is. And so we just try to optimize for the highest intent signal with the fastest response time. And so we automate a lot of that from sending out the calendar invite for the initial call on the right system with the right person. We just try and be as fast and as accurate as possible at that. I don't think we have any.
- [27:58]
Harry Stebbings
The dude is exactly like a deal when your owl will see you in two weeks it's like yeah.
- [28:03]
Patrick Forquer
And if you miss something or something gets dropped and this happens to everyone then your chances of converting that go way down. And that remains true. And I don't, I don't think we have any big insights on that.
- [28:14]
Harry Stebbings
We have that. Cool. You're advising me. I'm an early stage founder. Biggest advice on sales qualification. The hard questions to ask, what not to ask, the way to do it.
- [28:24]
Patrick Forquer
For us it's a couple things going back to the pilot example. One thing that we've learned is we've had some firms who say oh we have this really onerous infosec process so we want to do a pilot but we don't want to go through infosec so we're just going to do it on test documents, you know or like publicly available things. That's a recipe for again low engagement, low excitement and just generally doesn't work out well. You've got to have a little bit of give get like there is a little bit of pain on the front end of like identifying the use cases that you want to test identifying the stakeholders that you want to be involved in the pilot to go through. Yeah some pretty as you can imagine working with Deloitte and these big law firms and you know ey the infosec process is non trivial so if you can get buy in on identifying the success criteria for the pilot who's going to be involved, what use cases we're going to test what metrics are involved and you can go through that initial sort of painful period, then you know you've got something there.
- [29:22]
Harry Stebbings
How do you bring in people with true buying power? I imagine they're not always on the first course. How do you make that transition of like, I'm so pleased, Patrick, that you're excited about Lagora. Can we please try and get your boss in now? Because I want to progress this.
- [29:35]
Patrick Forquer
I have to say one of the things about Legora that that's like floored me at Braze. We had this problem. So braze, the executive buyer was the cmo. And getting access to a CMO was so hard and we would get it done very, very rarely. And we always sort of bend over backwards to get this done with Legora because there's so much chatter in the market about AI and the firms and corporates both want to understand what others are doing. We actually get access to power pretty easily. And people want to learn because on the law firm side, they're getting asked by their clients, how are you using AI and what tools are you using and what are the use cases and where are we going to see this value in our bill, for example, and the corporate side, they're getting a ton of pressure from the board and the CEO of like, hey, go figure this shit out. We need to optimize XYZ process and AI everything. And so we get access to senior stakeholders who want to lean in and learn from us. But I think typically if you don't have that access early to your question, what we try to do is we try to focus on the highest value use cases and highest value impact as quickly as possible. So you want to grab attention really fast. And lucky for us, the Lego are products. Awesome. So coming in with a perspective on the company and the role based on the ICP that you're talking to, talking about some of the high value use cases that we have, learning about what's most important to them and then showing them how we'd solve that quickly, they're like, wow, I want to show this to my boss. And that's generally a framework that's been successful.
- [31:03]
Harry Stebbings
I come from an industry that is traditionally called sheep, like in terms of following others. I don't understand why anyone would attribute that to us. To what extent is legal a sheep like industry where it's like, oh, Clifford Chance slaughter in May, you name it, use X. To what extent do they follow others?
- [31:23]
Patrick Forquer
There's certainly an aspect of a flight to safety during these sort of category creation moments, because this is all new. The Sort of general understanding of how agents work and how AI works and how to think about use. Case design is still being developed. And the executive buyers at the firms and at the companies generally aren't as up to speed on that. Some of them are, but broadly, probably not. And so there is this flight to safety. And I think generally people want to feel like. Like you never got fired for hiring IBM. And at the end of the day, there's an aspect. There is definitely an element of that.
- [31:56]
Harry Stebbings
Do you not feel both you and Harvey at IBM at this stage?
- [31:59]
Patrick Forquer
I was gonna say last year, we were, you know, the new entrant. We were trying to make our name and we were.
- [32:05]
Harry Stebbings
You were not IBM.
- [32:06]
Patrick Forquer
We were definitely not last year. I think at this point, you know, working with the firms that we work with, you know, having, you know, devavoys and, you know, linklators and other big firms, you know, advocating for us really goes a long way. And I think we have that stamp now, but that's been a journey that we've been on.
- [32:21]
Harry Stebbings
You've got 20 of 100. Amlaw and Harvey have got 40 or 60.
- [32:26]
Patrick Forquer
I don't know their numbers.
- [32:27]
Harry Stebbings
Yeah, I think they said 50 of AMLOR.
- [32:30]
Patrick Forquer
Yeah, 50.
- [32:31]
Harry Stebbings
Does that mean we're fighting over the next 30 or does that mean we're fighting for each other's? Candidly, both, for sure.
- [32:38]
Patrick Forquer
I mean, they know who we work with, we know who they work with. We're both trying to get in. We're very aware that they know who our customers are, we know who theirs are. We're both going aggressively after it and also scaling up quickly to go after the next 50 or whatever the number is. So we've got to play defense and offense at the same time. And that's what makes it fun.
- [32:54]
Harry Stebbings
God, the old sass world feels quite nice. Yeah, exactly.
- [32:58]
Patrick Forquer
Exactly. There's like 30% growth a year.
- [33:01]
Harry Stebbings
Do you pay attention to social? Because for VCs, no, but you saw it last week, the VCs. Paul Graham tweets, and then Matt Miller tweets back. And I'm not saying anything about either individual. I like them both immensely. But, like, does it impact team?
- [33:16]
Patrick Forquer
I don't know how much it impacts the team. We definitely hear about it when PG tweeted that my phone blew up. Shout out to him, by the way. That was awesome.
- [33:24]
Harry Stebbings
What a hero. Dude wears shorts everywhere. He's a guy after my own heart.
- [33:28]
Patrick Forquer
Yeah. Even in Scandinavia. But I try not to think about it too much. And obviously we've got, you know, Chetan and others really advocating for us in the public sphere. We really, you know, appreciate that. And. But I leave that stuff to them. I'm not on Twitter.
- [33:41]
Harry Stebbings
Do you bring VCs in to help you win deals?
- [33:45]
Patrick Forquer
Definitely.
- [33:45]
Harry Stebbings
That's interesting.
- [33:46]
Patrick Forquer
100%. I mean, the cool thing about the space that we're occupying is because the VCs themselves, like, if you think about iconic General Catalyst, Bessemer, they have huge legal networks themselves. They're big spenders on legal services more broadly. And so they definitely have big networks and are advocating for us whenever they have the opportunity. And certainly our competition do the same thing. And that's definitely an element of these sort of opportunities.
- [34:13]
Harry Stebbings
I always tell founders that I with. Use your cap table as a weapon. Yeah, like, absolutely.
- [34:18]
Patrick Forquer
Exactly.
- [34:19]
Harry Stebbings
What do Harvey do better than you today?
- [34:21]
Patrick Forquer
That's a hard one. And I don't want to give. I don't. I don't know if I want to give an inch at all. But, I mean, certainly the strength of their brand is something that is hard to deny. They've done a great job. They were the first entrant and they've sort of built this amazing brand. And, you know, kudos to them.
- [34:36]
Harry Stebbings
When we said earlier about kind of the playbooks, again, going back to something that Chetan said, he said, you know, training in particular is something where we've done incredibly well and ramping people. What's the biggest lesson on how to do training? Well, because it's not easy, actually.
- [34:52]
Patrick Forquer
Well, and this is another thing from a. As a leader, that's very different than in the SaaS environment.
- [34:57]
Harry Stebbings
How so? Because I thought, like, talent development would maybe be the same.
- [35:00]
Patrick Forquer
Well, yes, but in the SaaS world, it's much more predictable. And on this, like, very sort of clear, slow operating model. So you had quarterly releases with some monthly sort of shipping in between, ahead of the quarter release. You've got all this documentation. You do a big certification. Like you go through all these programs. With Ligora, we do big, huge product things, like, every week, and the team has to stay on top of that. And there's no way you could do a global certification program for every big feature. We launch in real time, all the time. And so we have to do a lot at a team level, regional level, and we do a lot AI async with video content. You know, we use Notion really heavily. The product teams really embed with the individual sales and legal engineering teams and engagement folks to make sure that, you know, we're all up to speed. But you can't do it all centrally. You have to really distribute through both Async video and notion content as well as like team level enablement. So we activate on our product guys
- [35:57]
Harry Stebbings
in that way can I don't worry about being too specific. How does that look then for like sales training then like first week, what do I get? I get like a notion link and like a load of video libraries.
- [36:09]
Patrick Forquer
No. So this is actually something we've really elevated and something I'm really proud of. So when I first joined, Vilgott told me to go to Best Buy and buy an Apple computer and then I went and had a couple videos of Max doing a demo. Now every two weeks we have a new hire class and at this point it's between 40 and 50 people joining. Every two weeks we send everyone to Stockholm doing immersive of five days. And this is not like something where you're just going to go do a couple video things and then go like walk around Stockholm. Like this is intense immersive. We expect GTMs and LES to come out of that week to be ready to go. You know, from a ramp perspective it's, it's a straight lineup. Like we expect people, we expect to drop people in and see them be very productive very quickly.
- [36:53]
Harry Stebbings
When you say ready to go, you mean they are ready to sit on calls on that their own with clients?
- [36:58]
Patrick Forquer
Yes.
- [36:59]
Harry Stebbings
That's quick.
- [36:59]
Patrick Forquer
It's very quick. Yeah. I had a guy do in his second week do a demo with one of the biggest companies in the world and he killed it. I mean obviously I joined because, you know, the nature of who the company was.
- [37:12]
Harry Stebbings
Now Patrick decided to sit.
- [37:14]
Patrick Forquer
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I, I was sort of there for guidance. But we expect productivity to happen very quickly. So we do an immersive first week.
- [37:22]
Harry Stebbings
But then what does that mean in immersive first week? I'm sorry, sorry to be specific, but there's so many founders that listen literally with notes.
- [37:28]
Patrick Forquer
Yeah.
- [37:28]
Harry Stebbings
What does an immersive first week mean?
- [37:31]
Patrick Forquer
So we have a cross functional sort of education program focused on everything from this is our sales stages, this is our opportunity cycle. This is the entry and exit criteria. We do a full day of demo work. We have a huge library. Yes. Of like gong and sort of video content from, from a demo perspective. But we also do a lot of role plays. We do. And we do a lot of education on the market generally because we're sort of. We hire a lot of lawyers. We also hire a lot of technology. So the lawyers you have to sort of train up on like how the tech stuff sort of works and then the technologies you have to train up on the sort of subject matter expertise from a legal services perspective. So we have a ton of content on industry education, product education, competitive landscape. The competitive landscape as mentioned, changes every week. So we have to update all the product information, the new product information. So we have a, we just have a basically a university style four day program where every department comes and enables the new hires on that particular program and how we operate, we have all that available for them in the new hire sort of notion. And then all the reps have their own personalized ramp page where we track all the metrics that we're looking at from a ramp perspective.
- [38:37]
Harry Stebbings
Of the 40 to 50, how many do you think make it?
- [38:40]
Patrick Forquer
That's a good question. When we move on from sales folks, we do it typically within the first quarter and we actually have really high retention rates relative to the market.
- [38:48]
Harry Stebbings
What are the signs that someone's not going to make it?
- [38:51]
Patrick Forquer
We score demo quality using AI, we use gong. And then you can create like a scoring mechanism for how the call went, how was the discovery framework, what was the demo flow, et cetera. And then when we get a red flag on that, our team goes in and like our enablement team goes in and sort of looks at the call and does like a playback with that person. So if you look at call quality scoring plus opportunity development from a pipeline perspective, you can see pretty quickly who's tracking. We know what good looks like and we know what good doesn't look like and you can see pretty quickly within about 45 days.
- [39:24]
Harry Stebbings
So is it bullshit that the traditional notion that, oh well, you know, enterprise is really difficult to understand whether someone's a good sales rep because the sales cycles are long.
- [39:34]
Patrick Forquer
From a traditional SaaS perspective, that might still be true with us. Even our enterprise folks, when they come in, they're going to be buried in deals within 60 days. Like our best people are closing deals typically within 90 days, even on an enterprise team. So from that perspective, because we're very hot right now, this market is being made right now, now. And so from an opportunity point of view, it's not like you have to go take your territory list, get your bdr, go do some account based marketing, get the initial meetings, that's like sort of traditional, you know, I've ramped cold territories before. I've managed teams that have done that. In a SaaS perspective. This isn't that this is one of the hottest markets of all time. When we drop GTMs into their book. They're into typically something like five pilots within their first quarter. And so we're asking people to get very productive very quickly because this is not something where we can go like do a bunch of hand holding for a long period of time. And we have so much inbound and so much interest that you know, quickly because the volume of opportunities that they're working is much higher than it would be in a traditional SaaS environment.
- [40:36]
Harry Stebbings
Would you rather hire someone who has experience selling to law firms or someone who has experience selling this size of deal?
- [40:45]
Patrick Forquer
I would rather have someone who has this size of deal really, because legal tech traditionally like we're selling much bigger deals than traditional legal technologies tech companies
- [40:54]
Harry Stebbings
probably CV is like 250, 500 around that.
- [40:57]
Patrick Forquer
It depends on the, on the, on the segment. But yeah, roughly. But we're doing a lot of, you know, seven big high seven figure deals and a lot of legal tech companies were like more niche. And so the ACVs and ARRs were, you know, not what, what ours are. We have hired some folks from legal tech and some have done really well, but they're not used to sending, you know, like a million dollar proposal across the line. And I'd much rather have someone who is really strong in understanding sort of organizational dynamics and change management and was really confident in sending large proposals and being able to work that sort of angle.
- [41:32]
Harry Stebbings
What was the hardest deal to win and why do you think you won it when you reflect on it like a win post mortem?
- [41:39]
Patrick Forquer
So I'm thinking about, I don't know if I want to say the name but as a big, big global law firm that we won.
- [41:45]
Harry Stebbings
How big was it?
- [41:47]
Patrick Forquer
Sort of medium seven figure deal for us it was hyper, hyper competitive. It was global. So we were using the full force of our global team in the us, Europe and the UK and Australia. So we had all four regions activated. Working this in a, from a pilot perspective, it was very close. There was influence on both sides.
- [42:06]
Harry Stebbings
Do you know when it's close?
- [42:08]
Patrick Forquer
Yes. And it came down to, it came down to, to this is how we knew how close it was. It came down to executive presentation of our CEO and their CEO in front of their executive panel. And that's how they ended up making the decision. And we won.
- [42:24]
Harry Stebbings
Oh, I would be nervous if I was Max. You want to be on form, you sleep well the night before.
- [42:31]
Patrick Forquer
Honestly, the biggest thing we have going for us is that we have Max and no one else does. And so we feel he inspires a
- [42:37]
Harry Stebbings
lot of confidence Is that very rare to have CEO to CEO based take off?
- [42:41]
Patrick Forquer
It is. I mean in my, in my career, yes. But in terms of the Lagora experience, no. Because again, these are such important decisions.
- [42:49]
Harry Stebbings
If you're a top law firm, I don't think it feels unreasonable.
- [42:52]
Patrick Forquer
No, you want to know who you're, who you're betting on and you want to have a deep level of understanding of who they are, what the vision for the company is. Does it align with your vision? Does align with your values. You know, the product strategy and execution. People really want to get in and get into the nitty gritty and understand not just Max, myself, the team, more broad, broadly, the chops of the folks who are going to be delivering the services. They look at all of that. It's a really fine tooth comb that they go through this stuff with.
- [43:16]
Harry Stebbings
Okay, dude, everyone has a flip side. Take me to a deal you lost. When you look back on it, what's the post mortem? What more could we have done?
- [43:24]
Patrick Forquer
I'm thinking about one right now and as always with enterprise, it goes back to multi threading and who you get to and who you don't. And so within a law firm context in particular, the decision making is sometimes opaque. Opaque. And there's oftentimes there's these panels and sometimes, let's say there's five people on a panel. Sometimes you get to meet all five people. Sometimes you meet four out of five, sometimes you meet one in terms of like one to one engagement and relationship. And there was one key member of the panel that we never got time with and weren't able to build a relationship with, and they did. And oftentimes with panel making decisions, sort of the loudest voice gets what they want and we, we weren't able to, to get that. So that was really painful.
- [44:05]
Harry Stebbings
Is the days of steak buying dinners over or actually not?
- [44:10]
Patrick Forquer
It's not like it used to be. I mean, you know, back in the early days when I was first, you know, I graduated college in 2008 and that was still in the era where steak lunch, steak dinner, a lot of entertainment and sales. I mean it's definitely evolved. I think more so these days people want to do like activities, you know, get out and maybe not go to a steak dinner or do something a little more fun.
- [44:29]
Harry Stebbings
Oh God, it reminds me of like mini golf dates.
- [44:32]
Patrick Forquer
Yeah, well, not quite like that, but I mean relationships are still really important. And certainly for us it's actually conferences. There's so many conferences and so many events and any chance we have to sort of show up and show.
- [44:43]
Harry Stebbings
And that works because in like traditional tech, I think there's been a realization that it's helpful for our business that actually being a brand logo on viral podcast clips is the new gold.
- [44:54]
Patrick Forquer
Yes.
- [44:55]
Harry Stebbings
And like having a banner in a conference that no one really wants to go to, not so much in traditional tech. Is that not the case in Eagle?
- [45:02]
Patrick Forquer
Legal tech right now is having this like renaissance. There's so many new players, there's so much money coming in. But going back to the conference point, you can waste money on conferences and you can make money on conferences and it sort of depends. And so we've got a pretty good playbook for. For that.
- [45:16]
Harry Stebbings
What did you spend money on? That was an absolute banger. And you learned something from that that
- [45:22]
Patrick Forquer
I should know when they go really well. These sort of fireside chat type executive dinners. So we hosted one some of our investors, their offices at Zero Bond and York. And like everyone was one thing is true is like everyone still wants to go to like a fancy restaurant and hear someone smart speak. And so we still find that these sort of thought leadership, AI thought leadership dinners are super effective and they cost a lot of money. And you have to, you know, get some talent in the room from a thought leader point of view. And to have them do like a fireside chat with Max, those are. That's highly, highly effective and something that we do very often.
- [45:57]
Harry Stebbings
And what have you spent money on? And you're like, guys, I can't believe we fucking spent money on this.
- [46:04]
Patrick Forquer
Going back to the conference thing, I think we averaged a conference a week last year. We showed up at every conference you could think of and some of them we repeated this year. And some of them were like, we're never doing that again.
- [46:18]
Harry Stebbings
I love that. Speaking of, we said there, would you rather have someone who's versed in law or someone who's versed in deal size? When we think about incentivizing teams. Teams. I think sales comp packages are really hard to get my head around. Yeah. Traditional SaaS going back to this traditional versus new world 4xot. Good. Then I have Becca from Clay who's like 6 to 7x. And then I have my dear friend Carlos from 11 Labs who went very viral saying 20x yeah. And I'm like, oh my God, I feel like such an insignificant human being.
- [46:49]
Patrick Forquer
I heard that 20x number. I got so many. I mean I obviously, I follow. Got so many pings.
- [46:53]
Harry Stebbings
Every so many CRO got so many pings.
- [46:56]
Patrick Forquer
All my Friends who are in this business were like, wait, what's your, what's your multiple? Did you hear this guy?
- [47:02]
Harry Stebbings
Everyone got that? Yeah. Yeah. I feel a little bit bad for the rest of the CROs. Like, how do you think about effective sales comp setting today?
- [47:11]
Patrick Forquer
So, well, just to start off the top, ours right now, it depends on the segment and the region, but ours right now are between sort of 8 and 12x is where. Is where we sort of landed. But we don't just take a multiple and apply that to the sort of competitive market. Ote. You've got to really take like a bottoms up approach to it. And look at all of the metrics we were just talking about before. So look at ramp time, productivity per head, air per head, pipe evolution within certain territories. We did a bottoms up approach of that last year and we got to those sort of range, but we also had a year last year where we absolutely blew out every metric that we put in front of the team. So, you know, I don't know how effectively we're doing that, but that's, that's, that's how we're doing it right now.
- [47:54]
Harry Stebbings
But you think 8 12x today is where you sit, which is good.
- [47:58]
Patrick Forquer
Yeah.
- [47:58]
Harry Stebbings
What percent of people should hit that?
- [48:01]
Patrick Forquer
Our average attainment last year was 280%.
- [48:05]
Harry Stebbings
Wow. So is that ineffective attainment setting?
- [48:08]
Patrick Forquer
Yeah, that was a bad job by me. Yeah, yeah. No, I mean when I started again, just going back for context, like we're three and a half million and Chetan and the Red Point guys were like, can we do 25? And that fell. I remember giving, we had, we raised our Series B and I remember giving a big, like rah rah. We had everyone to Stockholm. We did a big rollout.
- [48:29]
Harry Stebbings
Logan did it.
- [48:30]
Patrick Forquer
Yeah.
- [48:31]
20VC Announcer
I give.
- [48:31]
Harry Stebbings
You know, I'm a VC, so I give credit to other VCs for a living, but I give credit to Logan on that one, which is like he paid up in advance for something that wasn't that obvious. Respectfully. And like credit to, to him.
- [48:43]
Patrick Forquer
Yeah, absolutely. I mean he got me. That's how I got connected with, with Max. Was, was through, was through Logan and he plugged. He actually introduced me to Braze as well. So I'm always a big fan of the, of the Redpoint team.
- [48:55]
Harry Stebbings
But sorry, you joined. It was like three.
- [48:56]
Patrick Forquer
Yeah, three and a half. But so then we're like, can we do 25? And I remember we were at like 7. We raised a Series B, we had everyone to Stockholm and I'm giving a Big, you know, rah rah speech to the global team at that point, which fit in the kitchen of our Stockholm office basically. So we hit 25 in Q3 3 and then we went nuts in Q4 and blew through every. We ended the year at 70 and then obviously crossed 100 earlier this year. So the projections are very hard from our side. From a forecast perspective, at the beginning of the year I only gave guidance to the board based on a six month rolling six month basis. So at this point, based on the data that we have and the sort of pipe analysis that we have, we feel pretty good about our ability to forecast a sort of top line business. The individual productivity stuff, stuff can be a little all over the place because obviously there's like bluebird deals that happen and things like that. We also have a ton of inner corridor open and close and so being able to forecast that is a little bit of a pin the tail on the donkey challenge. But we're getting better at that piece of it.
- [49:55]
Harry Stebbings
What's your biggest advice to other CROs when you look at the CROs that ping you on the 20x that we discuss, what's your biggest advice to CROs on how the fuck to do forecasting effectively in this very dynamic land landscape?
- [50:08]
Patrick Forquer
It's really hard. And the first thing I say is you have to have a little grace with yourself and set expectations appropriately because in this market it's been relatively elastic so far and you know that won't continue forever. But right now that's sort of the experience that we're having. So I do two things. I do like a rep and manager commit roll up. Like bet your life rep roll up, first line manager, second line manager.
- [50:29]
Harry Stebbings
So what does that actually mean? I'm sorry for being rep roll up.
- [50:33]
Patrick Forquer
Yeah, so you have as a, if you're a sales director at Legoro and let's say you have a team of eight people, you go all eight people, like bet your life how much ARR are you going to close this quarter? You know, that level of seriousness and then that manager has to take the rep roll up and then you know they have to commit whatever number based on that sort of input from, from the reps. The directors take that to the VPs. The VPs take their director roll ups and then they commit like a regional number. And right now we have, you know, we, including India, we have five, five regions. So apj, India, eu, the UK and the uk, us, I take the VP roll up and then I compare that to like the weighted forecasts. So Then we've got the, we've got this amazing woman, our Rev ops team, Lulu, who I worked with to sort of create this sort of weighted version of what like a weekly monthly quarterly forecast would look like based on the opportunity stages. So with that you have to have really, really tight rigor around opportunity management. So the stages and the amounts on the opportunities have to be really dialed and updated in real time. In last quarter, the rep, regional roll up and what we call Lulu cast, which is the weighted sort of what I call, you know, the math version of the forecast were the same and we were pretty accurate on, on both.
- [51:44]
Harry Stebbings
Where do stages go most wrong?
- [51:46]
Patrick Forquer
If you don't have really good entry and exit criteria, as you could explain
- [51:50]
Harry Stebbings
to your grandma, what does entry and exit criteria mean?
- [51:52]
Patrick Forquer
So in our, let's say in our sale, if you think about a sales process, there's sort of the two sided like buyer journey, right? There's the funnel on the way in to close one and then there's the funnel on the way out as you look for like advocacy and adoption on the way in. You know, let's say we have five sales stages. For example, I mentioned the pipeline that we generated off of Jude Law to get into qualified pipe, like you have to go through a discovery call where we ask questions around like the buying process, what they're looking for, interested in and things like that. And then to progress out to the next stage, certain things that they say have to be true. Meaning like they have to be in a buying cycle after a budget. Like think about band frameworks like budget authority, need time. And then as you move into the qualification criteria, it's like, okay, the next stage is the pilot. Well, do we need to do to get into the pilot? I sort of alluded to executive buy in infosec, you know, budget allocation, things like that. If you get that right and you have consistency across like the global teams, then typically the forecasting is right. And if you get the right weighting based on your sort of funnel progression historically, then you can get to a weighted forecast that's like directionally accurate.
- [52:54]
Harry Stebbings
You said there about the different regions that you have. If you're advising CROs CEOs today, do you have to be everywhere all at once today?
- [53:03]
Patrick Forquer
Yes, it's different and the speed at which we're doing it is very different. Going back to the Braze experience, New York Tech, we had a London office that was like sort of the next move. But it took us a really long time, for example to expand into Germany, which we eventually did, expanding into Japan and other places. Whereas, you know, all of those we just opened in Germany, we just opened in Spain, we've opened five offices, maybe six in the U.S. sydney, Bangalore, like we've been all over the place.
- [53:30]
Harry Stebbings
India feels like a strange one. It's just such a different universe. What was the thing you buy in India and how's India going?
- [53:36]
Patrick Forquer
We typically follow the ball in terms of pipeline. From that perspective, we had a ton of initial interest. We have great interest in the Middle east, we have great interest in India. So it was a ton of inbound sort of signal.
- [53:46]
Harry Stebbings
Where's the hardest again? Carlos spoke about Japan and South Korea. I'm friends with Daniel from UiPath who says about kind of that being a difficult region. Where's the hardest?
- [53:56]
Patrick Forquer
That region is very hard. And we've, we've been consulting a lot of our investors, Investors, a lot of advisors on how best to enter those, those markets. But yeah, I would say APAC is probably the most complex and certainly each region has its own nuance with respect to like, data hosting requirements, processing requirements. Like you can't process stuff in Europe or the us you have to process certain things in region. Some of the model providers don't provide, you know, for example, if you're selling into China, certain model providers don't provide access to the models in China and other places. So there's definitely some architectural work that goes into it and there's a ton of work we're also doing. We announced today a big project we've done with McKinsey focusing on European public sector work. And if you think about the Fed ramp in the us, there's all kinds of things that are really hard from a technology perspective that you have to keep in mind.
- [54:41]
Harry Stebbings
With the greatest of respect, I'm probably going to hold. Sovereignty is kind of an interesting word that's thrown around. But to what extent do you see Americans choose Americans and Europeans choose European? Is that a thing?
- [54:52]
Patrick Forquer
It's definitely a thing. And certainly we have the perception when we come into a deal that I think everyone. People think I'm from Sweden, for example,
- [55:01]
Harry Stebbings
A lot of people, you look Swedish, seriously, you could change your name to Sven and partially be that. Just don't talk.
- [55:07]
Patrick Forquer
It's like the guy from Frozen.
- [55:08]
Harry Stebbings
Yeah, sorry, he's mute.
- [55:12]
Patrick Forquer
But yeah, there's definitely that perception that we deal with. So the LLMs, I always joke, the LLMs we use are all American, but. But yeah, that's definitely a thing. In particular in Europe, obviously, with a lot of the geopolitical stuff going on in the US People really care about understanding of like jurisdictional context and things like that. So it's a big, it's a big thing.
- [55:33]
Harry Stebbings
We spoke earlier about the hardest challenge and you said it was like just the speed and the velocity of scaling.
- [55:39]
Patrick Forquer
Yeah.
- [55:39]
Harry Stebbings
What breaks that people don't see and what are the lessons from that?
- [55:43]
Patrick Forquer
Things like the plumbing and rev ops of like how you do billing and your billing systems and like change. If you want to change anything in your pricing model, if you want to change anything in your billing system and you're adding as many customers as we are every month, it gets very hard to do things like some of the billing systems, you know, reporting and all that stuff. And a lot of it gets done manually at times because if you're changing from one system that worked for you at 10 million, that doesn't work for you at a hundred million and you have to make those changes. Like we, we migrated CRM, so we migrated to, to Salesforce, which is awesome. But anytime you do a CRM migration, it's a huge pain in the ass.
- [56:20]
Harry Stebbings
And so you migrated to Salesforce.
- [56:22]
Patrick Forquer
Yes.
- [56:23]
Harry Stebbings
From what?
- [56:24]
Patrick Forquer
Well, I don't want to say, but.
- [56:25]
Harry Stebbings
All right.
- [56:25]
Patrick Forquer
Yeah, but I don't want to, you know, speak.
- [56:28]
Harry Stebbings
No, I didn't mean that speak ill.
- [56:30]
Patrick Forquer
But it wasn't working for us. And so, you know, I did a full survey of the market. We picked Salesforce and anytime you go through a systems change like that, yeah, there's change management but there's also opportunity management and different things of like ways of working that are really hard to roll out and you have to get right. But people grumble.
- [56:46]
Harry Stebbings
Do you think Salesforce faces the threat of being a database which agents crawl on top of and you have no interaction? Interaction engagement with.
- [56:54]
Patrick Forquer
I think all the traditional SaaS companies are definitely under threat right now. But I have to say I've been so impressed with Salesforce. If you look at they sort of did a hard break glass in case of emergency pivot last year and at their scale they went full agentic and sort of the go to market framework and positioning and credit for them for being they're very early on that ahead of every other big tech company and I don't know how it's going to shake out, but I know. So we did a survey of all the other sort of hyperscaling AI companies and most of them are using Salesforce.
- [57:27]
Harry Stebbings
If there's one CEO you would bet on for a tidal shift change in landscapes, it would be Benioff yeah, 100%.
- [57:34]
Patrick Forquer
I mean, like I said, anytime the words Benioff and Davos came up in a deal review, you knew you were pretty fucked. So, yeah, he's a.
- [57:46]
Harry Stebbings
What I love about Benioff, which I actually see in Matt, is Max would get on every fricking plane to close the deal 100%.
- [57:53]
Patrick Forquer
And you have to have that right now. And Max basically lives on a plane. I mean, as do I, candidly. So that's one. You see guys like him leaning in and.
- [58:02]
Harry Stebbings
Yeah, I think Max is one of the. I work with pretty great CEOs and very lucky. What does no one see about Max that you think makes him special?
- [58:10]
Patrick Forquer
I think he leads from the front, so he's always up early online, you know, pushing the ball, setting the. The tone for the team. So as a leader, he's someone who. He's going to get on the flight, he's going to take the call, he's going to jump on an escalation, he's going to call into a deal, he's going to do whatever it takes. And I think that that permeates throughout the organization. But also he's very kind and, you know, he cares deeply about the business, and he cares deeply about building the business in the right way. He wants to build a business that's remembered with a culture that, like, made a big impact on the people that work there. And he's very focused, not just on Lagora being successful, but all the people at Lagora, you know, developing their career and taking that next step. And he takes that stuff really seriously. And we. We work on that as a leadership team.
- [58:57]
Harry Stebbings
Any lessons on culture with scale?
- [59:00]
Patrick Forquer
It's. That's one of the hardest things. When people ask me what's hard, maintaining the culture that we have as we add the number of people that we're adding is very difficult.
- [59:09]
Harry Stebbings
Don't off. I have this now where I don't have time to say hello to everyone internally. I used to come when I was, like, under 20.
- [59:15]
Patrick Forquer
Yes.
- [59:15]
Harry Stebbings
And I could literally go around and say good morning to everyone, which is nice. And now I can't. And I find that really weird, which is pathetic given how tiny it is compared to you. But that's a weird one for me. Anything that you learn? No.
- [59:26]
Patrick Forquer
Do so. Our cultural values are lfg. Lean in, grow together, and fight for excellence. So from a culture perspective, I think it goes back to just being intentional. You have to repeat what your values are. You have to highlight what good looks like, and you have to constantly Reinforce your expectations around culture, cultural ways of working. And so one of the things I always say is like we're big on no assholes. The biggest way to get on my shit list is to be disrespectful to, you know, to someone internally or you know, heaven forbid, someone externally. And so living our standards and constantly reinforcing what those are is something that we spend a lot of time on and making sure that we're building company the right way.
- [60:06]
Harry Stebbings
And that's why Matt's never hired me. Guys. A weird one but it's everyone's talking about like token Max, it's now for you as CRO, you're the man holding the budget. How do you think about encouraging AI usage internally? Token maxing, token budgeting, anything that CROs of the future will need to contemplate, consider that they're not today.
- [60:27]
Patrick Forquer
We're pushing our teams to use AI in every aspect of the deal as much as possible. And thankfully for us, budget isn't a huge concern at the moment. So we're really focused on automating those sort of.
- [60:41]
Harry Stebbings
Is that difficult? And what I mean by that is actually as the man with the budget, I don't want people to know that I have a lot of budget.
- [60:49]
Patrick Forquer
Yeah, well, it's more around my expectations, it's less around the budgetary questions and more around we have access to a bunch of different AI tools and we've created playbooks for things like account planning as an example where we've created an agent that can do a one click account plan and help you do like meeting prep for use, case development and things like that. So it's more around being really specific of we expect you to be using these tools. Here's the stuff that we've built like from a central team perspective. But I also expect our teams to be going out and building their own stuff and elevating the game because again, we can't do things the same way that we did things last year and expect to be successful moving forward. And I want them to share that stuff broadly and we highlight what good looks like on our all of our sort of global team team calls.
- [61:34]
Harry Stebbings
Are you seeing non eng people building their own tools?
- [61:37]
Patrick Forquer
100%.
- [61:38]
Harry Stebbings
Really?
- [61:38]
Patrick Forquer
Yeah. 100%.
- [61:39]
Harry Stebbings
In what way?
- [61:41]
Patrick Forquer
I mean we have legal engineers for example, who will have a product idea around something that we should build in Lagora maybe for a specific industry. We have a funds attorney who works with us who is excellent, named Felix and he had a perspective on some things we could build for our Private equity clients would be highly impactful. And he was having a hard time sort of describing the, the requirements to our product team and just spent a weekend vibe coded up, you know, a version of what he, what he thought would be, would be impactful and showed it to the team, showed it to me. And it was like highly, highly helpful in just understanding sort of what the vision of the product could be. So that's an example.
- [62:20]
Harry Stebbings
Final one before we do a quick fire, which is. I know budget is not necessarily a constraint, but it always is slightly. Yeah, you have to keep it in mind for sure. What would you do if you had unlimited money that you're not doing today?
- [62:32]
Patrick Forquer
That's a great question. It's, it's less about money and more about time. And the hardest thing that we have right now is taking the time to sort of pause and think about ways of working and like our operating model. And I'd love to for example, do a two day boot camp where we bring in some AI experts and we go through every part of every process of every go to market team and every motion and build more automation and more agents to do more things to take sort of that rote work off of my team's plate so they can focus on those things that have the highest and biggest impact. The money's. It's more about time than, than money right now. And, and how taking that time to think strategically and get everyone together in person is so there's so much value ever. We did our sales kickoff at the beginning of the year in Stockholm. There was so much learning, there was so much relationship building that happened. I wish we could do that stuff all the time. And just the, the speed of development of our business. We don't have top time to get together in that way. And that's something I wish we were able to do a lot more of.
- [63:32]
Harry Stebbings
Did you ever doubt whether you were able to make the jump to next gen CRO?
- [63:37]
Patrick Forquer
Yeah, definitely.
- [63:38]
Harry Stebbings
How do you get comfortable with that? I think everyone, I face it every day as an investor where what was good is no longer good. Ligura's growth is unparalleled. Before it was one to five.
- [63:49]
Patrick Forquer
Yeah, exactly.
- [63:50]
Harry Stebbings
We're forced to think through like shit. Maybe we need to be energy investors, maybe we need to be infrastructure investors. And you are struck with this. Am I good enough to make the jump? How do you reflect on that?
- [64:01]
Patrick Forquer
For me it's more about being super intentional about what I want and my vision for myself. And honestly, people ask me, what do you want to do next. Like, I'm doing it. This is what I've always wanted to do. Like, the job I'm doing right now is the job I've wanted to do for a really long time. But more often than not in this world, it's more around like, did you bet on the right horse? So I took a bat after leaving Braze and went to another company and it didn't work out. I was working really hard. I was doing all kinds of things that I thought were smart and we just weren't seeing the results. And then come to Lagora. Right place, right time, right market. And so much of our success has to do with the company, the team and the market that we go into. It's like sports. You put the wrong person on the wrong team in the wrong system, they're not going to be as successful as they would have been other otherwise. And I just feel very fortunate.
- [64:49]
Harry Stebbings
The truth is true, product market fit is so unwavering.
- [64:53]
Patrick Forquer
Yes.
- [64:54]
Harry Stebbings
Any question of like, oh, do I have it or not? If you have it, you fucking know.
- [64:58]
Patrick Forquer
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And when you have it, when you have momentum and you have an advantage, press. The advantage, if anything is working, disseminate that to the team. Press, press, press. In terms of playbooks and things that work competitively, when we find something that works, we document, share and press on that immediately. That changes all the time and people react and things change. But that's the kind of stuff that gets me out of bed in the morning.
- [65:23]
Harry Stebbings
Final, final one. But there are a lot of people who maybe are questioning whether they took the right step or did the right decision. You mentioned the interim moves that you did. And all respect to companies, some decisions don't work out. Don't want to begra anything like that. But any lessons or advice to someone who's thinking, I don't know if I made that right step. I don't know if it was the right decision. Decision. Any advice?
- [65:43]
Patrick Forquer
Mostly when people come to me and ask that question, I say, are you hitting your numbers? Are you doing well in your role? Do you like your boss? Are you learning? Are you getting better? And is this serving you in the way where you're making an impact on the company and the company's making an impact on you to help you level up and get better? And if the answer to all three of those things is yes, then typically I think you're in a good spot. If you've got two out of three or one out of three, three, maybe it's time to think about what's next?
- [66:13]
Harry Stebbings
You know, I walk every weekend with my mother. A marathon and I had to always talk about big decisions with her and she gave me the best advice this weekend. I was talking about something specifically with regards to our funds and she said, you know, move fast but don't be in a hurry.
- [66:26]
Patrick Forquer
Exactly.
- [66:27]
Harry Stebbings
I thought it was brilliant. I think it's the same advice that you don't want to sit and rot in a company.
- [66:32]
Patrick Forquer
Yeah.
- [66:33]
Harry Stebbings
But you also don't want to jump too fast and too hastily.
- [66:36]
Patrick Forquer
Exactly. You have to be really thoughtful around it. And like I said, it's so much of it's around picking the right market and the right company. I think people over index on title and under index on growth. I'd rather take a role, you know, maybe below the level you're at. At a high growth company.
- [66:51]
Harry Stebbings
You did, you took like DP of gtm, I think.
- [66:54]
Patrick Forquer
Yeah, yeah, whatever.
- [66:55]
Harry Stebbings
As the sole owner of your kitchen.
- [66:57]
Patrick Forquer
Yes, yes. My, my kitchen was the hottest tech company in Brooklyn. But yeah, you know, bet on yourself, have confidence in yourself and bet on growth. Because if you're going to come in and operate at a really high level within a high growth environment, that's the best thing for your. As opposed to like having some ego around. Like, oh, I'm a, you know, I'm X title. I want to stay that. I'd rather go somewhere where you can make a big impact in a growth framework.
- [67:21]
Harry Stebbings
Final, final one. I promise someone's great. They want a bigger salary than the rest of the people in that role. They're great. You and Max know they're great. You just suck it up and pay more. But what about what that does to everyone else who now wants that same.
- [67:33]
Patrick Forquer
Yeah, you can't really do that. And when we have bans and we have to have like parity and fairness for a reason and that's like, that's one way, way to create, you know, sort of a toxic culture is if people figure that stuff out, then that leads to sort of bad things in the long, in the long run, even though in the short term it might feel good because you get this, get this, this person. Like you've got to go about it the right way. I think it's tough. Yeah. Right, my friend.
- [67:58]
Harry Stebbings
You ready to rock and roll?
- [67:59]
Patrick Forquer
Let's do it.
- [67:59]
Harry Stebbings
Quick fire. What do you know now that you go back to yourself on day one and say, you know, you should know this.
- [68:06]
Patrick Forquer
Yeah. The, the degree to which the broader sort of investor influence on our deals and sort of the syndicate of influence around sort of the opportunity, not just the opportunity itself. I wish I had known a few things on that sooner.
- [68:22]
Harry Stebbings
It's almost like a land grab on investors as well.
- [68:24]
Patrick Forquer
Exactly, exactly. Like if you look at our last fundraise, our CFO David described it as the investment syndicate. Sort of reminds me of the Mission Impossible.
- [68:32]
Harry Stebbings
One of my friends is GP at Adriano Australia.
- [68:35]
Patrick Forquer
Yeah, yeah.
- [68:36]
Harry Stebbings
And he pinged me about Legoro because they joined the round.
- [68:38]
Patrick Forquer
Exactly.
- [68:39]
Harry Stebbings
And it's like land grab on Australia.
- [68:41]
Patrick Forquer
Exactly. We want people that are leaning in and going to really help.
- [68:44]
Harry Stebbings
Yeah, no, I totally get that. We mentioned Jude Law. What personality, individual, brand would you most like to be in the next Lagora ad?
- [68:54]
Patrick Forquer
Well, we have one coming up with Aaron Judge that's going to be awesome.
- [68:58]
Harry Stebbings
That's pretty cool.
- [68:59]
Patrick Forquer
Yeah, very cool. I can tell you with I have a first grader in Brooklyn and you go to drop off at his elementary school and the number of Aaron Judgers disease is astronomical. So very cool for, from a, from a New York and US perspective, we're really excited.
- [69:13]
Harry Stebbings
What one tool could you not live without?
- [69:16]
Patrick Forquer
I use Gemini all the time.
- [69:18]
Harry Stebbings
Wow, wasn't expecting that.
- [69:19]
Patrick Forquer
Yeah.
- [69:20]
Harry Stebbings
What's it best for? I find it actually best for like transcript analysis.
- [69:24]
Patrick Forquer
It's really good at that. But it also has access to all the systems of work that we use. So we use Gmail, calendar and Google Drive. So from, you know, an agentic perspective, it has all the context and it has all of my stuff and so it helps me with like meeting prep, it helps me with managing my calendar a lot, a lot of the sort of simple productivity stuff. It's, it's very good at, not to mention, you know, making funny pictures.
- [69:46]
Harry Stebbings
I have to say I love Whisper Flow.
- [69:47]
Patrick Forquer
Yeah, Whisper Flow is awesome. Definitely that's one of those viral products that everyone in Silicon Valley is. But it's freaking great. It's great. It's really good.
- [69:56]
Harry Stebbings
The only shit thing is in offices,
- [69:58]
Patrick Forquer
exactly in the middle of the office
- [70:00]
Harry Stebbings
and I just like talk to my computer now. It's just weird.
- [70:03]
Patrick Forquer
Yeah, yeah. Well, I actually think that that's going to be one of the ways of working.
- [70:06]
Harry Stebbings
Our team hired headsets so they now don't like customer support.
- [70:09]
Patrick Forquer
I was going to say we've got a lot of headsets and a lot of AirPods, you know, going around.
- [70:13]
Harry Stebbings
What was the best advice you've ever been given?
- [70:16]
Patrick Forquer
I had a mentor tell me, if you want to be a CRO, you need to be really well rounded. I think mostly at the Beginning of my career, I had been really successful in a more like transactional mid market sort of role. And then I moved into leadership very early in my 20s and was like running a big team team and you know, thought I was killing it. Right. But I couldn't get like a real VP job because I didn't have like big enterprise experience. But if you want to be a CRO, it's not just sales, it's customer success, it's partnerships, you know, it's implementation, onboarding, it's all these different things. And me taking a step back and doing different roles to give myself a broader set of experiences I think has been really, really beneficial.
- [70:55]
Harry Stebbings
Dude, I've absolutely loved this. Thank you so much for being so open, for putting up with my meandering. I got described the other day as the Louis Theroux adventure, which I didn't know whether to take as like a compliment or not. But you've been amazing.
- [71:09]
Patrick Forquer
No, thanks so much, Harry. I really enjoyed it. Thanks for having me.
- [71:13]
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