Today, more than 3% of the world’s lawyers use Legora, and the company has grown from $1 million to $100 million in ARR since launching in October 2024.
At Startup School 2026, Legora co-founder and CEO Max Junestrand shares how they built one of the fastest-growing enterprise software companies in the world, from cold emailing lawyers and moving into a customer’s office to freezing sales for six months to rebuild the product. He explains why building a company is ultimately about people, how to create a culture that wants to win, and why founders have to learn to love the hustle.
Timestamps
00:07 — From 3 Engineers to $100M ARR
03:15 — How Legora Got Started
05:09 — Learning the Legal Industry From Scratch
07:22 — Getting Rejected by YC
09:36 — Moving Into a Customer’s Office
11:11 — Going From Zero to $1M ARR During YC
13:26 — Why We Froze Sales for Six Months
15:18 — Rebuilding the Product From Scratch
17:26 — Building a Company Is About People
21:51 — Creating a Culture That Wants to Win
25:26 — You Have to Love the Hustle
27:55 — Do Founders Need Domain Expertise?
29:14 — Betting on Models Getting Better
36:29 — When Should You Start a Company?
45:04 — How to Become More Ambitious
48:18 — The Skills Founders Need Today
Transcript
Max: This is a much warmer welcome than what we had coming into Y Combinator the first time. Legora’s YC journey started with a rejection, but more on that story later. In YC, they teach you something called the two sentence description. It is: describe your company in two sentences. Legora is the agentic operating system for lawyers, and it handles complex legal work from start to finish so lawyers can achieve more than ever before. Over 3% of all the world’s lawyers are now active users of Legora. You will learn more about this when you get accepted into YC. When we started looking at the legal industry, it felt like one of the biggest opportunities to apply large language models to solve real problems. The software that we were up against looked like it had been built in the ‘90s. As software engineers, we have been incredibly spoiled with great software because we love to build for each other and for ourselves.
But in the legal industry, this is what the software used to look like and what we were up against when we started out. Now, Legora has grown into a global brand, putting celebrities like Jude Law at the New York Wall Street. And still, I feel like we are only getting started. My favorite Slack channel in Legora is customer love. It is where our customers post things that they truly feel they couldn’t have achieved without our system. We mine many of our sales calls for quotes like this. I wanted to share just a couple with you because I think at the end of the day, this is what it’s all about. A parent asked me at one of the tournaments how I juggle work and all of the golf travel. One word: Legora. Never has the path between an idea and execution been so short.
Never, man. If Legora went away tomorrow, I’d just go back to coaching high school basketball. When Legora went into YC, we were questioned about the idea of even selling and working in the legal industry. It is such a conservative business that had never been lenient to software before. But from the time that we went into GA in October 2024 until the last end of quarter, we’ve grown from one to a hundred million in ARR. Starting from just three engineers in Sweden to a company of over 750 people all over the world, this is awesome. The fact that we’ve gone in to do this starting from Europe, I think just adds another feather in that hat.
But the Legora story almost didn’t happen. And it actually didn’t start with me. In fact, it started almost like the great beginning of a joke. A lawyer, a physicist, an engineer, and a psychologist back in 2020—before GPT, before AI was cool—started a company called Judilica. What they observed was that law school students were going into their internships basically to summarize court cases. With the early models from Google called BERT, they started to explore what this space could be and what was possible to build. My story started in the Swedish archipelago at an island which looks something like this. I met my two co-founders at a volleyball game.
I think startup founder stories can come from many different places. This definitely wasn’t a high-odds place to start. But when I met August and Siga, they showed me a demo of the product they had built. Our group chat actually looked exactly like this. They gave me a demo of the project. With GPT-3.5, they had built a very simple product that could explain what a stock option agreement really meant. We started with that and I said, “This is a super cool demo, a super cool project.” My co-founder Siga said, “I’m glad you want to help out.” I ended up helping out a little bit more than just that.
When GPT-3.5 came, that was the internet moment of our generation. I dropped out of college. I never finished my master’s thesis because the opportunity cost of not building had become too large. But when we started out, it wasn’t obvious that we were going to be a success. To learn about what the legal industry was, what it meant, how lawyers actually worked, we came up with the ingenious plan of cold emailing lawyers on the emails we could find on their websites and writing to them on LinkedIn asking for a lunch where we could learn more about their different practice areas. We offered to pay their hourly fee to have lunch with us. Many of them took us up on that offer, but fortunately for us, many of them didn’t make us pay for the hour. Many of them even paid for the lunch.
Once we had gotten our feet under ourselves, we approached one of the largest law firms in the Nordics named Mannheimer Swartling. But just two years before that, their managing partner had gone on TV and said that AI, back when they were starting to use it, was really more artificial than intelligence. We had to work really hard to change the perception of what both technology and AI could be in the area of law. In law, you are not paid when things go right. You are punished when things go wrong. Many of the initial AI solutions in the space had required an immense amount of training. You had to bring a lot of use cases and examples just to get very, very little results. When GPT-3.5 came, that really changed the story. With Mannheimer Swartling, we ended up moving into their offices and working really closely with them.
And as I said in the beginning, the warm welcome here was quite different from the first time we interacted with YC. We applied in May of 2023 with a promise of being able to query all legal documents using large language models. When we came to our interview, one of the first questions we got asked was, “What type of lawyers are you serving?” Not very knowledgeable about the legal space yet, our response was, “What do you mean? Are there different types of lawyers?” That did not land very well with the YC partners at the time. I actually remember very painfully that Tom Bloomfield started laughing in the interview when we gave that response, and we knew that we were cooked.
But that also gave us the perseverance and the drive to continue. With a lot of letdown, the day after we did not work, but the day after that, we got back to building. Two months later, we got accepted under a new name and with a different platform. We had done our homework. We had done the work. From Sweden, the idea of getting accepted into Y Combinator felt like we were going to Mount Olympus. We were going to dine with the gods and get to work with other startup founders who came from all of the great tech companies that we knew of. Once we got to Y Combinator, we realized that we actually knew a lot more than we thought we did. This is one of my favorite pictures. It is the screenshot I took after we did the video call after our second YC interview when we knew that things had gone a lot better than the first time.
After we got accepted into Y Combinator, we moved into this law firm I mentioned earlier, Mannheimer Swartling. It was the biggest law firm in the Nordics, but they had no real clue about how to work with software and how to work with technology. We ended up getting a conference room with no real windows where the AC would turn off at about 5:00 PM, but it was really close to the Coke fridge. At about 6:00 PM every day, one of the engineers would go up, grab the door, and start waving it back and forth to get more oxygen into the room. Those conference chairs still made an imprint on all of our backs, I think, three years later. Me in the car there with two more screens is when we made the move from the conference room of a law firm to our first real office.
I think one of the key takeaways from this entire experience is that, first off, we quickly learned not to take no for an answer, but also the power of simply reaching out and asking for help. One big lesson from these first three years of building Legora has been that it is very powerful to be a person and to be a company that others want to see succeed and that others want to help.
We came to San Francisco. We got a room at an Airbnb up in Bernal Heights and started building. During YC, we grew from zero to a million dollars in ARR. We also learned the hard way that working across San Francisco and Europe took a big toll on the team. I couldn’t find a picture of this, but I bought an influencer ring light that I put on my laptop. The reason I had that ring light was because I was doing sales calls between 1:00 AM and 10:00 AM every single day in San Francisco to Europe because that was where our initial customer base was. After a rocket trajectory during YC, which now two years later is slow compared to what some of the companies are doing, we set off to fundraise. This was my first time fundraising.
I had no idea what to expect, but we had lined up 80 investor meetings in a week and a half. We had European investors, American investors. The main takeaway from that experience for me was that you need to become a really good storyteller in order to drive interest and to get people on your team. It was also a very different experience talking to some of the European investors versus some of the American investors. I feel like in the US, we think more about what can go right rather than what could possibly go wrong. We ended up working with a venture firm called Benchmark. This is a picture of Chethan, our partner, when we had signed the term sheet. I remember negotiating that term sheet on his desk with a computer open, going on decimals in Excel to determine the exact number of shares.
They ended up investing $9.51 million. Following that investment, Redpoint pre-led our Series A just three weeks later, and we started to run into a challenge. We had about $35 million in the bank. We were 10 people in the team. There was actually a month following that when we made more money from interest rates on those $35 million than we did from customers. That is not a very good sign when you have become a bank. Going into our first board meeting, we had Chethan and we had Redpoint, and it was me and my co-founders. We made a very hard decision, which was to freeze our sales motion. When you work with lawyers, you only really get one chance to get it right. If you show up and the product doesn’t work, or if the lag in the system is too high, or if a system goes down when there’s too much traffic on your Azure instance, you are toast.
After that six-month sales freeze was when we really started ripping. That’s where you see that curve from one million to a hundred million really starting. What happened at the start of that was turning from a small startup looking for PMF to really establishing what our business and what our product was going to be.
In the very, very early days at Leia, even pre-Legora, the way we would decide what to build was by voting. We would make democratic votes in the entire team. For anyone who has built software before, you know that if you have too many chefs in the kitchen, that typically does not make a very good dish. That was exactly what was going on. We were working on too many features. We had to rebuild everything for the product launch that we were going to have after the summer, after the sales freeze. We had to build a platform that was adaptable to foundations that were constantly changing, both with the underlying models and with the frameworks we were using to build agentic workflows like LangChain, et cetera. So in October of 2024, we wrote down what we called the layout product manifesto.
This was basically gathering everything we had learned, putting it into one very simple document that we shared with the entire 25-person team back then, and that we would rally the troops around. At the time, we were doing about $1.3 million in annual recurring revenue. Many of our competitors were doing 10 times that with products that only had one of these features. I also think that’s a function of having started in Sweden. The market is not big enough to house a real unicorn or a decacorn or something even bigger than that. One of the earliest questions we got from YC was, when will you move to the United States? When will you make the jump? It was off the back of this product refocus that we were able to not only compete with the competition on product, but build enough momentum to make the jump over to the US and start to compete for the biggest logos in our markets.
As engineers and as tech people, we often overemphasize the reliance on product and on the tech. But if there’s anything I’ve learned in these past three years, it’s that it’s all about the people. Building product is one thing, but building a company is a very different thing. We made many early mistakes around this.
One of the hiring patterns that we had to unlearn was looking for fancy logos on resumes or what we like to call y-intercept. If you think about somebody’s skill curve, it might start out really high, but if they don’t have a good trajectory upwards, they’re going to have a really hard time working in a company that is scaling exponentially. So instead, we started to look for people like us who wanted to work insanely hard with very high growth potential, and we doubled down on that talent over and over again. Our top seller today is 23 years old and he has sold more than $10 million worth of Legora. He had no sales background. He jumped out of university. By continuously doubling down on that type of talent, I think we have built a very unique culture at Legora. One of those things has been about bringing and building cultural fit.
Up until the point where we were around 500 people, I interviewed every single candidate outside of engineering. Now I interview every director and upwards. But what we have done is set the cultural foundation in the business where it self-selects. We have three values at Legora: lean in, fight for excellence, and grow together. Together they make LFG—let’s fucking go.
That also sends a signal to leaders and others who join the company from perhaps more established backgrounds, where joining a company whose values include profanity quickly tells them what this is about. Another very complex cultural thing, starting a company in Scandinavia, is something called Jantelagen or the law of Jante. This is very foreign to our American friends, but in Swedish culture, this basically means that you should not think that you are somebody or that you are more important than anybody else. Your ideas are not better than anybody else’s. I think a part of this humility is good and it supports a culture where the best ideas win and where people earlier in their careers feel empowered to speak up.
But it’s very hard to build one of the fastest growing enterprise companies in the world if you don’t think that you are somebody or if you don’t think that you are better than anybody else. So we have had to really create a nice cocktail of US, European, and Asian culture all in one to create a global company that is Legora today. I really think that building a strong company culture is the best guarantee to attract and keep the best people. Another way that company culture gets expressed at Legora is through articles like this one that ended up in Sifted.
For us, there is only winning. Everything else is losing in a winner-takes-all market or winner-takes-most market. The company has to run like there’s no place for number two. I think it actually would be fair to say that when Legora was founded, it really had no reason to exist. We were one of many legal AI companies. But because of this mentality and because of not feeling like we’re safe, even though we have achieved extraordinary numbers by any normal measures, we continue acting like professional swimmers who are looking down in our lane while the competition is looking sideways at what we are doing. At Legora, we have had to build a culture to really support that ambition. So starting years behind some of our biggest competition and having to build this intensity in a country where most people want to go for fika at 3:00 PM, which means having a cinnamon bun and a coffee, or go home at five.
One of the ways that has been done is to create cultural values and cultural moments that really distinguish us from many others. In Swedish, there is a saying: you can wake up with a taste of blood because you’re so excited about something. I was doing an article in Swedish and I used that saying, and I didn’t know that the interviewer was going to release that article in English. When this came out, it got lots of fun reactions. One of them was, is Legora made up of vampires? The second one was, you guys need to floss better. Many good ideas, but this has now turned into the word “blood smoke” internally, which means that. And we just keep going at it. I think part of having our HQ in Stockholm has helped us keep this.
Everybody globally from the company does their onboarding in Stockholm, which is a lot nicer in summer than in the winter. But that has created the same vibe in any Legora office, regardless of where you walk in all over the world. I think one great example of this was we had a very big law firm in the US that our competition was working with, but that law firm had a specific problem around being able to draft certain types of documents based on incoming term sheets. Our competition had promised that they were going to solve that problem for them and they hadn’t. So one of our US-based legal engineers, lawyers, learned about this use case, got on a flight to Stockholm, spent a week with our engineers, solved the problem in Sweden, and then went back to the US and delivered it to the customer.
I think that Swedish base has become one of Legora’s real superpowers.
So to round things off before we jump into the Q&A, I’m sharing this stage this weekend with people who have built things at a scale that I haven’t yet gotten close to. I will leave many of the big lessons for them. But what I can tell you is that three years in, it’s a little bit smaller than that. Most of what actually mattered in the company and in Legora so far did not revolve around signing a big client or closing a new round of financing or opening a new big office in Manhattan. It happened in a windowless room without much oxygen or on a call on our way to the airport, a Slack channel at 2:00 AM trying to fix a bug before a big presentation on Monday. Nobody puts that in a pitch deck, but that is what makes the company.
You shouldn’t wait around for those big moments. You have to love the hustle. If I can leave you with anything, it’s that even though we started in a small law firm in Sweden, I was born in the Swedish Archipelago with a class of 10 other people. I thought I had a big plan for my life and I was going to go to McKinsey after school. But when GPT-3.5 dropped in our laps, we truly made that into our thing and we captured what I believe to be our generation’s internet moment. So you can just do things. Legora and myself are living proof of that. So with that, we’re going to jump to Q&A and I want to invite a very good friend, our partner from Y Combinator, Gustaf Alströmer. Gustaf, we’re really becoming professionals at this now.
Gustaf: This is not the first time we’re
Max: Doing this. No. It’s great. It’s good to see you.
Gustaf: You too. Good to see you. Thanks for the talk. That was awesome. Real good.
Max: Thank you.
Gustaf: And always thank you for coming back and speaking to YC and to founders here at Startup School.
Max: Of course.
Gustaf: Ready
Max: To be back.
Gustaf: I wanted to ask the first question, which is one that I’ve gotten from a lot of founders who ask about you, which is you guys are three founders or were three founders who were not lawyers. Yeah. And you started the best legal AI company in the world. Does domain expertise not matter that much anymore?
Max: So there’s actually a story of a Swedish VC who was very bullish on doing the pre-seed of Leia, but they ended up not doing it because we did not have any lawyers in the team. I met one of the partners from there at the airport quite recently, and they were very, very bitter. Leia or Legora turned out to be the lesson for them that perhaps domain expertise is not what you need to succeed. I think that you need a willingness to learn about the market, which we did very, very early by exposing ourselves and spending lots of time with lawyers as much as we possibly could. But I don’t think you need domain expertise. Probably dependent on the market that you’re going after. Maybe if you’re building in quantum computing or in fusion, that’s a good idea.
But legal was easy enough for us to pick up as we went along.
Gustaf: I spoke to some founders yesterday and we spoke about the next categories where the LLMs are not sufficiently good yet, but they will be. It made me think of what you just said when you were toying around with Bard in the early days. What gave you the confidence to build a legal AI product on a model that wasn’t good enough? It was good, but not good enough. There are many other founders probably in this audience who are thinking about the same problem, but in a different domain, maybe mechanical design or some other part where the models are just not good enough.
Max: I think the sort of tribal knowledge when we got started was that you have to fine-tune a model. In 2023, 2022, that was really
Gustaf: The name of the
Max: Game. I even remember, I think it was Bloomberg who spent millions and millions and millions of dollars building a Bloomberg law model. Our view was partly because we didn’t have enough money and partly because we truly believed that to be right. The models will keep improving. I’m sure Sam is going to come up on stage and say that later today.
Gustaf: Yes.
Max: And so by just betting that the models will keep improving, what you should be focused on is how you can deliver the value that the models generate to your market. That was the crux for us. Even with the first generation of ChatGPT, that was unusable in law, partly because the model wasn’t good enough, but partly because it actually didn’t support private conversations or European data hosting. I remember the first sales I ever did, we basically said, “We are like ChatGPT, but we are compliant in Europe.” That was the pitch. That was not a very strong pitch. And clearly ChatGPT would figure out how to do that later on. But at the time it was good enough. And so I think we recognized that you don’t have to build for the world over here. You need to build for the world today and maybe one step ahead. It’s kind of like this ladder where you should maximize the opportunity now, make sure that you get really good relationships with your customers, so that you can also have that conversation with them.
Because if everybody’s betting on this exponential uplift in model capability, the Legora platform will continue delivering more and more value. I think that we have built 1% of all the software that we will build over the company’s history. And probably the product will look very different from what it does today a few years down the line.
Gustaf: Yeah. A lot of news on models this week or last two weeks.
Max: It’s going to be a great episode for whoever makes the documentary.
Gustaf: I’m hoping in some ways we’re making a documentary right now about everything that’s going on. I’m not sure if someone is, but I hope they are. Open weight model is very much the topic right now. And when we spoke on stage a couple of months ago, you talked about that you’re not attached to one specific model. You can work with many different models. Have you updated your view based on this week? How do you think about it? I’m sure there was a moment a year and a half ago when it seemed like there was just one or two models that were really sufficient to power Legora and now there seems like a lot more.
Max: Yes, which I think will be great. Clearly there will be applications of different models in different use cases. If you take customer support, you’re optimizing for speed of turnaround, latency to the customer, and cost on solving a particular ticket. I think Finn used to charge $1 per solved customer ticket.
In law, you actually want the most amount of intelligence quite often because the fraction of a token spend or software spend compared to human expertise applied to the problem is really tiny. If you’re solving complex litigation, you’re going to want to throw the most brain that you can on that problem. So we have really two different camps. One group of our users are asking for the ability to loop really complex models just to work on problems for a long period of time, racking up big LLM costs. Another group of our users are saying, “Can we get access to open source? That is going to be cheaper on our consumption.” I think the answer is somewhere in between.
I think ultimately one of the core IPs and muscles that I encourage as many of you as possible to build is the ability to eval new models and to eval new use cases because that is the superpower that then allows you to route things effectively. We did a lot of that early on because we hired a lot of lawyers into Legora and we made part of their job customer-facing, but part of their job was also to build out use cases that we would throw our evals on. The frontier of cost intelligence and where that frontier lies is yet to be seen. I think there’s also a compute problem where when we lock in big contracts with the labs and with our compute providers, that is actually a huge thing. We cannot have our system go down when a percentage of all the lawyers in the world are working with it and their clients rely on it.
Gustaf: And are there specific benchmarks you look at for how—I’m sure you are.
Max: Well, we look at the Legora bench. We actually announced and released that on Friday last week. That has been work for the past three years and we’ve kept that internal up until Friday. The reason for that was it was basically OpenAI or the Anthropic models, so it wasn’t that interesting to publish benchmarks on. We would only make those two models available in our system and the user could pick. Now the smorgasbord of available options is a lot larger. Actually, we found to our surprise that SpaceX and Grok was one of the best performing models, especially given the costs on our benchmarks. We don’t even have them on our data processing agreement, so we actually can’t yet offer them to our customers, but now we will start to.
Gustaf: And do you see your customers having strong opinions about which models they want to use or is it just that they want whatever is the best?
Max: Some of them have a strong opinion, especially banks and big law firms. They don’t want Chinese models.
Gustaf: Yeah, makes sense.
So I want to go back to just a little bit earlier when you decided you want to build a startup. A lot of people in the audience here—I’ve had two dinners in the last few days with attendees at Startup School. We talked about when should you start a startup. People are working at DeepMind, people working at internships or jobs right now. Often you’re one or two years into it. What would you say was the trigger for you to say, “I’m just going to do this and not do McKinsey,” or the other options that you had?
Max: So my dad had two companies during the dot-com boom, both of which went to zero after raising too much venture capital. So maybe—
Gustaf: Has he been a good mentor for you?
Max: Yes, absolutely. And—
Gustaf: How often do you speak about—
Max: Agora? Oh—
Gustaf: He speak
Max: Probably every day or every other day.
Gustaf: About
Max: Gora? That’s great. Yeah, about lots of stuff. Now I’m too tired to walk home often, so I have to take the train or take a cab. But I used to walk home and I would call him and that would be a lot of fun. Sometimes we call him senior advisor. Actually, for one of our biggest customer pitches, we were stretched for resources, so he came in and did the PowerPoint for that client.
Gustaf: He knew
Max: Everything at this point. Yeah. He knows most of it. He had two companies in the dotcom era, both went to Xero, and then he had a boat business in Archipelago when I grew up. So I’ve always been surrounded by entrepreneurship. I always felt like I wanted to prove myself in that arena. I’m very competitive. I used to play video games. I used to play Dota 2 more than I went to school. And then I think building a company is the optimum. It’s the biggest arena that
Gustaf: You
Max: Can enter. And you’ll either leave victorious or you’ll leave defeated or you’ll be okay. I was very decided that I should probably learn more about the world, which I thought McKinsey was going to be a great place to start, which I still think it is. I think it really teaches you how to work. You learn work ethic there. But I did an internship, and so I think I got a bit of that even during my studies. Then we had this pivotal moment with GPT. We were talking about this. You weren’t as excited about investing a few years back pre-LLMs because there wasn’t a lot of—
Gustaf: There wasn’t a lot going on. I think the last year or two before COVID, there were not a lot of new ideas.
Max: Right. And I remember sitting down pre-GPT, here are all the startup ideas I can think of. Most of them were pretty boring. I don’t think most of them would’ve worked out. And then small companies got a really big advantage versus big companies. I think you saw this in just the way that Microsoft would build Copilots. It didn’t work for a really long time. I remember when that came out and we were like, “Oh my God, we’re so screwed. Every lawyer already works in Word and Outlook, and now they’re just going to use Copilot.” But it turns out it didn’t work. The ability for us then to still build a lot of value was huge. Reflecting back on that, you learn so much by having to figure it out. I really think that the amount of things you learn is a function of the amount of discomfort that you are willing to endure.
When we started Legora, I was super introverted. I really didn’t feel comfortable talking to customers. I wanted to code as much as possible. When you have to go separate ways with an employee for the first time, all of this is just so hard, but you realize that startups are one of the places where you can learn the most in a short amount of time. If I were to build a company again or join a company, I still feel like I learned a lot working at other startups. I actually worked
Gustaf: At
Max: YC startups before starting my own. I would say you should think really deeply about who you start with and the problem space. I think we picked a space more than we picked a problem, which I think is two different ways of going about it. It was completely obvious that legal and AI was going to be a thing. How it was going to be a thing was very uncertain. So we just said, let’s march in this general direction and then we’ll figure it out. That’s one way of doing it. I guess the other way of doing it is you find a specific problem, you solve over that very clearly,
Gustaf: You
Max: Generate ROI, and then you expand from that.
Gustaf: Yeah. You mentioned earlier, well, I know that you are extremely competitive. How is that expressed inside Legora? How does a Legora employee know that Max is a very competitive CEO and loves to win?
Max: Everybody at Legora is like that.
Gustaf: I think it’s self-select. How’s it expressed? Is it like a Friday meeting, here’s our goals?
Max: Well, yes. Everybody knows every monthly goal. I think setting quarterly goals is a little bit tricky.
Gustaf: Is that how it was from the very beginning, was it the three of you guys?
Max: No, then it was no goals. Then it was just every day you try to maximize the outcome.
Gustaf: And
Max: Then when you’re 750 people, you need to plan a little bit better and have some better internal communication. Actually, communication is the thing that really breaks when you scale. I think a lot of people have talked about that already. But you really feel this drive from engineering that they want to build the best product and the best feature. If you compare our tabular review versus the other alternatives in the market, you stack rank it. We have lots of people on vacation now in Stockholm because it’s July. Most of the engineers who are on vacation are more productive than they have ever been because they’re taking a bit of time off, but then they also get to code now on problems that they want to beat and they want to win. It’s a team sport.
Gustaf: And
Max: I think you can be competitive, but be it in a team way. You really need to solidify this winning or losing together strategy. When we get a big win, that is really celebrated. When we have a loss, we really mourn it together. Then we immediately make a plan of how can we flip it, or how can we make a land and turn it around? I feel like people are in solution mode rather than blame mode. I think that has been a big momentum driver for us, but also we’ve been chasing. There were other legal AI companies that were bigger than us when we started. So we always felt, at least in the beginning, like we were chasing. Now we are much bigger.
Gustaf: Let’s say you are the biggest one at some point very soon.
Max: Yes.
Gustaf: Is that going to impact your motivation or your competitiveness? I think
Max: At that time. So that’s interesting. I thought a lot about what happens at that moment. I think we need to either pick out another enemy and go, okay, we have to be bigger than them now, or we have to really find this way of being better than ourselves yesterday. I think that having competitors is a good thing. You should not be overly focused on what they’re doing, but it’s definitely a carrot. And it’s an easy thing to rally around because what you don’t want is a lot of side questions. You want everybody focused on the same thing.
Gustaf: So one question I got from the audience is how do you become more ambitious? And when I ask this question, I’m thinking of a company I’m working with right now who’s like, oh, we want to do this country in Europe and then we’re going to do this other country in Europe. And then maybe next year we’ll do US. You guys did a lot of countries in Europe just during the batch and then -
Max: And now we’re in 50 countries.
Gustaf: And now you’re everywhere and you scale up really quickly. Is that ambition or is that the product was working or did you know that -
Max: Definitely ambition. I think it’s -
Gustaf: How does someone learn that? Or how does someone become more ambitious? Is that possible?
Max: Yeah, I think it’s possible. I actually think the best way to become more ambitious is to have a peer group of other very ambitious people. In my final years of high school, I was pretty lazy. I was playing a lot of video games. I had a pretty easy time in school and I didn’t work that hard. I didn’t know how big the world was outside of my sphere. The first two years in college were the same. Then I made a new friend group of very ambitious people. That made it click for me. I went from doing zero internships to doing eight jobs in one year. I actually think that’s one of the best parts about YC. PJ talked about that in one of the essays, which is you come here and then you just realize that, wow, every peer, everybody’s really ambitious, and so you become more ambitious together.
And I think now we are like that inside of Legora. I don’t feel like I’m the boss. I feel like I’m a peer in the team that is running the company. Our CFO sometimes challenges our marketing team to be more ambitious. A CFO maybe typically wouldn’t care about that,
But we’re all just so forward-leaning and it’s just so fun. Then you really get to assemble this group across the entire company. It’s not just at the top. It’s everywhere.
Gustaf: And
Max: Then you get to watch your creation spiral and become more and more and more ambitious. That is really fun. I also think you need to have big idols and big companies ahead of you. In the beginning -
Gustaf: Who was your idol?
Max: So we would look at Spotify and Klarna as the biggest success tech stories from Stockholm that have ever happened. Then we realized, wow, we have a bigger market cap than Klarna. That was kind of a weird moment. Because we feel like we have done zero to one. And one to 10 and then 10 to 100 still remains. It’s in front of us. So yeah.
Gustaf: Would you say, so people in the audience here are wondering what skills are either more valuable to have now as you’re in school or you’re graduating from school versus not that more valuable? Basically, are the skills that you need to start a company or skills that you need to get into your career changing in a very short amount of time now?
Max: I think storytelling is, at least for the CEO, I had completely underappreciated how important and how good of a skill that would be because what ends up happening is you need to sell the company to yourself.
Working this hard if you don’t believe in your own story is really hard. You need to sell employees. Now we are hiring people. We are competing with the labs for talent. We need to sell the story of how working at Legora is going to be better than working at Anthropic. You need to sell the story to investors. You need to sell the story to customers. I think that in college or in high school or wherever that is, spending time to learn that is useful. I don’t know how to learn it. I actually don’t know how I learned it unless I just had a lot of exposure. I always liked stories. I like video games. I enjoy a good story, but I think that is the most important skill. And then maybe the other really
Gustaf: Important skill - What about technical skills?
Max: Okay. I’ll say one more before we go to technical skills. I used to be a really bad teammate and a really bad collaborator. I played volleyball for a long time growing up. I would be the type of person on the team who, when my teammate missed the serve, I would yell at them and go, “You fucking suck. How could you miss that serve?” That doesn’t get you invited to play the next game.
Gustaf: Yeah. Makes sense.
Max: It doesn’t invite a followership and it doesn’t invite a good vibe. In high school, I really understood that and had to pivot that way of working. I think technical skills, I think that the velocity and your ability to iterate on customer feedback still is probably the most important skill to get started. Even now when we’re bigger, very often we will hear about a particular type of problem a customer’s having in a customer call. I will dump that in the product channel and I’ll go, “How quickly can we turn this around and delight the customer?” That’s a bit strange to do at a thousand person company scale, but still how we do it. You need to make sure that you don’t overly zig-zag and that you continue building towards the right vision. But I still think that your ability as a smaller company to be fast versus your incumbent competition is the superpower.
And when you have a superpower, you need to lean into that. And that’s still true for me. I should be doing the things that I’m uniquely good at and other people in the company do the things that they’re uniquely good at.
I think also technical skills.
Gustaf: Maybe they’re different these days. Technical means something else.
Max: Yes, but it still means being able to build systems at scale. Just because you can produce a lot of code with AI, it’s not an excuse for not being a very good software engineer. And I still think we need many good software engineers. We are hiring a hundred of them at Legora.
Gustaf: What’s the most interesting problems that people get to work on when they join Legora?
Max: Oh, one of the most interesting problems right now is this transition from reactive agents to proactive agents.
Gustaf: What’s an example?
Max: So for the last three years of working with the product, you would give Legora a prompt or a set of instructions and it’s going to go off and do that thing. Now we are basically connecting Legora to different pieces of context and when it gets a trigger, it will start to do something. That means that if the sales team gets a contract, it will get routed to a Legora agent. The Legora agent will start working on it in parallel. If it needs to escalate to a lawyer, it will. Otherwise, it might just execute the contract. Or you connect the entire data room to a Legora agent and the agent automatically starts organizing that data room and produces the due diligence report. It’s having the agent do things without you telling it what it should do. And that for us is the unlock of how does one lawyer produce the outcomes of a team of 10 lawyers with the help of Legora?
I think that’s very interesting. We also have some very interesting problems just from a scale perspective. We’re spending millions and millions and millions of dollars on OCR and document parsing. And these are real engineering problems to go solve at a bigger scale.
Gustaf: Got it. And you grew from zero to 100 million ARR in 18 months in April. Keep growing at a crazy rate.
Max: Yes.
Gustaf: Your job has changed quite a lot in 18 months.
Max: Yes.
Gustaf: We talked earlier about you now interviewing exec teams. We had this talk from the founder of Dropbox at YC a couple years ago. We talked about the mini games that you play. You’ve done a lot of mini games in 18 months, and now you’re at the mini game of building out or hiring people to run your team. That sounds hard. And does it sound like something you’ve done before?
Max: Well, it’s definitely not something I’ve done before.
Gustaf: How do you learn something like that? It seems extremely important to hire the right executive.
Max: In a way, I think most of the work up until that point makes you qualified for that thing. If you’ve—
Gustaf: You get the next mini game by basically having seen the last one.
Max: Yes. But you need to make sure that you learn at part of every mini game. And I think you really need to put the company first, way ahead of your own ego in a way. And I tell this to the executive team, I need to re-qualify for the job as CEO of Legora every quarter. It’s a new company, new challenges, as do they. Running a sales team when you are one million ARR is very different from 150 million ARR. And I think for myself, if you enjoy that, if you enjoy learning new things, if you enjoy being challenged, if you accept the fact that now my most important job is building out the executive team and I’m going to go do that, you will succeed at it. And then I think as always, you try to build a good network of people who have done it before. The tough thing is there’s very few people who have done the company this quickly as we are. And even a lot of the executives that we are now bringing on, they come from SaaS and they come from this world of triple, triple, double, double.
If you grow 40% year-on-year, you are doing fantastic. You’re sort of on track. And—
Gustaf: That’s not enough anymore.
Max: It’s not enough. David, our CFO, joined from Vanta, another YC company. They’ve been very successful, but they’ve grown from 30 million to 300 million in something like four years. And now we’re doing it in one year. And so from 200 people to 1300 people over four years and we’re doing it in one year. And so you need to just compress timelines. I think you need to be brutal at saying no to things. And you need to understand yourself where you have the most competitive edge, where you can do the most.
Gustaf: When I landed in Stockholm at the end of April, all of the ads were basically Legora ads with Jude Law. And I’m curious how you get Jude Law to be the face of the company. And he was like, “If you haven’t seen the ads, I’d recommend you go onto YouTube and watch the Legora Jude Law ads.”
Max: Did you fall in love with Law again?
Gustaf: Yeah, I did.
Max: Yeah, you did? Good. And
Gustaf: What happened? How did you
Max: Score
Gustaf: That?
Max: Okay. So the inside baseball is we had a meeting with one of our marketing agencies and one of their pitches was, “Why don’t we redo very famous legal scenes? You can’t handle the truth. Why don’t we redo famous legal scenes with lawyers, but with Legora?”
Or no, the pitch was this. It was actually pretty funny. All of these movies about lawyers—what if they just had Legora and the movie would be over in a minute? So we got to this idea of working with actors. Then somebody said, “Well, Legora is like AI-powered law. What if we got Jude Law to be AI powered?” That got us down the track of, “Huh, maybe we could get Jude Law.” What’s funny in Hollywood right now is it’s pretty anti-AI with writing scripts, using AI in movies, etc. He thought we were completely unserious when we reached out the first time. Some Swedish AI company wants to work with Jude Law to make billboards and a campaign. But we were so persistent. I think one underappreciated form of negotiation is nagging. It’s one of the things my dad taught me.
And we nagged and nagged and nagged, and he said yes. On one condition: he got to pick his own scriptwriter and cinematographer. Who would’ve known? He brings an SNL script director and the cinematographer from Oppenheimer to light the scene and do the whole cinematography. They basically go into the set and nobody from Legora is allowed in. A few hours later, these magical productions come out.
Gustaf: It’s really good.
Max: It’s so funny. What I think it did for us was it put us in another light where even people outside of law now know about Legora. That has been really exciting.
Gustaf: Awesome. Thank you so much for coming to Startup School. This is awesome.
Max: Thank you, Gustaf. Appreciate having me.
Gustaf: Thanks everyone.