He Built A $1.8B AI Company With No Experience | Max Junestrand

Not building in AI, I think, is the biggest career risk, actually. Like, not being part of an AI company. But also, it puts immense pressure on those people who have been working the same way for the last 20, 30 years.

That's where the real change is hard. And so I'm seeing a huge transition there, actually. The whole space is going to change, because if AI can do something, it will do it. And what it's doing to the workforce is—

Max Junestrand is one of the early pioneers bringing AI into legal work, and now he's revealing how AI is rapidly reshaping the oldest professions and careers.

And what you need to do to stay relevant in the AI era.

AI will rewire and change the way that knowledge work gets done. And to give you one example, legal work. It's one of the oldest occupations in the world, but what's happening is AI is pushing the individuals to, earlier in their career, move up the ladder.

So it used to be junior associate, senior associate, partner. But now you're adding a fourth step to that ladder, which is AI. And I think it's actually highlighting more of the skills around AI: your intelligence, your problem-solving skills, your charisma with the client.

These things start to matter even more. And so I would look at recruiting maybe slightly different. I would not be gunning for the under-confident overachievers, but the entrepreneurial, problem-solving, curious people who understand that, yes, this is going to change, but I'm going to change with it.

But what happens is, if they are not incentivized and they're not encouraged by the partners, then it creates a really difficult atmosphere. And I think one of the key learnings for me and what's difficult is the—

Hey, Max, welcome to the podcast show. It's so great to have you here.

Thank you so much, Ollie. It's great to be here.

So legal AI, you know, is not the most exciting category that every founder thinks about entering into, but you decided to do it. What was that kind of eureka moment for starting Legora, and why did you want to enter this space?

Well, I think it's the most exciting vertical. And I think, you know, more people probably should be building in legal AI. Well, look, my two co-founders started working on the seed that came to Legora back in 2020. So that was pre-LLMs, I like to say, before AI was cool.

And it was really hard to build, frankly, anything very useful on the ML models back then. And so when GPT came, it became this, you know, paradigm or eureka moment for this industry. And suddenly, so many problems that we previously couldn't solve became possible.

And we were very pragmatic about it and said, well, let's run at the industry, let's apply the new capabilities that we had been armed with, and go solve problems. And in the very, very early days, we actually embedded with one of the big law firms here in the Nordics, Mannheimer Suttling.

And together with them, we sort of went, OK, practice area by practice area, let's go solve real problems. And when people started working with the product, then, you know, I think that's the most motivating thing as a founder.

You start getting this momentum, and you get the feedback from the early users, and you start to iterate. And the more you iterate, the better it becomes, and the better the feedback you get. And then we were off to the races.

It's incredible. And, you know, one setup that I find absolutely amazing about you guys is your ARR has doubled. It's doubling every quarter. How are you moving at this speed?

Well, Ollie, I tell my team that when they join us from a normal SaaS company, they need to take the idea of what they could achieve in a year and condense it to a quarter. And so I think we've actually been operating at the pace of, OK, whatever you used to do, now you're going to do it four times faster.

And if the entire company operates like that, then you grow really fast. But also, the demand for this new category of products that are coming out is just astronomical compared to many other things. I think we actually have the luxury of not going in and sort of replacing or ripping out an existing system.

But we're getting to almost innovate and build our category as the underlying technology is developing as well. I mean, every sort of three to four months, we're getting access to a new model, new frameworks, new ways of working with the models, or sort of squeezing them for even more juice.

And that's allowing us to solve even more things. And so it's almost like this growing we're getting to grow with our customers. And that is really exciting. And what we're also finding is, in some of the cases, we might land with one specific team, like the M&A team or the litigation team in a firm.

But then very, very quickly, it spreads. Because once they start to have real success stories that they can parade internally, you know, the excitement just kind of, like, carries it away. And most law firms, I think, have never experienced that kind of, you know, technology rollout.

More often than not, it's the case of, you know, we're rolling this out, but nobody wants to use it. And so I think everybody's just at awe in what we can do, and then you just run.

It's insane,right? And when I think of this, like, paradigm startups, I mean, ChatGPT just turned three years old,right? November the 20th, sorry, November the 30th. You know, we've gone from, like, generative AI, we've gone to AI agents, now vibe coding, and now it feels like AI is being adopted across basically every single category.

What is the latest happening in legal AI? And have you been just surprised how far and quickly this whole category has basically emerged?

Yeah, so, I mean, to tell you the story of, like, most of the products started in the sort of ChatGPT-esque, ChatGPT wrapper, you know, state. I don't think every six, five, six months, there's, like, this new paradigm or new set of features that are sort of expected of our category.

So that started with moving from the chat to what we call tabular review, or the grid, where instead of analyzing, you know, a couple of documents that you throw into the chat, we're running across tens of thousands of documents.

And every row in a big grid represents a document. Then we moved into Word. So we started drafting and reviewing documents inside of Microsoft Word. And the challenges there is actually not the models themselves, but sort of how to manipulate the Word document in such a way so that all of the edits are being made correctly.

And there, we started with simple use cases like redlining and NDA. But now we're starting to move into the realm of drafting really complex documents based on attached precedent, so previous written documents that the lawyer thinks are sort of the golden standard.

And the new terms, like the term sheet. And you just sort of attach all of it, and you tell Legora to go figure it out. And the models are starting to become so good that they can make, you know, 500 edits.

And then the lawyer can just sit and track that. So what's happening from a user standpoint is, earlier in the careers of these lawyers, they're moving into the role of being a reviewer. So it used to be, you know, junior associate, senior associate, partner, and then they review each other's work.

But now you're adding a fourth step to that ladder, which is AI. And what's exciting to me is, it's now starting to become almost unethical to not run it via the AI as well, because it's like getting another pair of eyes.

And to talk about some of the new tech developments, I mean, MCP is pushing the ecosystem forward, because then a system like Legora can connect with other ecosystem players that the law firm is already using. But I'm also really excited about new developments in, like, memory, in mimicking styles, in being able to, you know, you don't love having to instruct the AI the same way every time because it doesn't remember, like, your style.

So you would love to have the Ollie style and then your firm's, you know, style. Maybe it would be Forsyth and Junestrand,right? And you'd almost want the AI to, like, know what that style is and then mimic that when it writes for your behalf.

Isn't that amazing? I mean, like, before this, you know, three, four years ago, OK, there were some kind of AI legal tools out there, but it's just progressed, like, so much quickly. One thing I've been surprised about is just how, I mean, back to your point, is just how accurate some of these, you know, AI models are on AI legal work.

Yeah, it's extremely good.

It's super good,right? And it's only going to get better. But then what does this mean for the, you know, junior lawyers coming in or the lawyers who are in their first, you know, what, one or two years?

Because this whole space is surely going to change.

Well, I think you'reright. I think the whole space is going to change. I think being a junior engineer looks different today than what it did three years ago. And if you would take what we have today and sort of go back three years in time, they would, I think many of us would go, holy shit, like, that's AGI.

Or, you know, like, that's amazing. That's incredibly good. And what it's doing to the workforce is, it's pushing the individuals to, earlier in their career, move up the ladder,right? And I think it's actually highlighting more of the skills around AI.

Because if AI is going to review the data room and find the change of control clauses, you're no longer just, you know, pushing paper. Your intelligence, your problem-solving skills, your charisma with the client, these things start to matter even more.

And so I actually think that if I was running a law firm, I would look at recruiting maybe slightly different. I would not be gunning for the under-confident overachievers, but, like, the entrepreneurial, problem-solving, curious people who understand that, yes, this is going to change, but I'm going to change with it,right?

And I think, yes, it has big impacts for the people starting their careers, but also, it puts immense pressure on the management and the partners who have been working the same way for the last 20, 30 years. Those people, that's where the real change is hard.

Because everybody's coming out from university. I mean, they're already pretty savvy with AI. And so we're actually seeing the biggest adoption from that group. But what happens is, if they are not incentivized and they're not encouraged by the partners, then it creates a really difficult sort of organizational change management atmosphere.

Because you're trying to mimic what the seniors are doing. Because, of course, you know, those are the people who are deciding whether you get promoted or not.

Yeah, I can see that. And I can also kind of see when, you know, if we go back to kind of early days when you were just launching, finding your first customers, when you went into your first legal firms, were they, like, what is this stuff?

And how quickly did they actually adopt it?

Yeah. So that's actually a funny question. I think before the summer of 2023, because we launched in May, and I talked with a couple of firms then, the atmosphere was, this is more artificial than intelligent. And AI is never going to be able to do, like, sophisticated work.

And after we worked, like, and we were coding that entire summer, just building. And when we came out of it, it had changed, I think, for two reasons. One, many people got exposed to generative AI via ChatGPT during that summer, having to write a poem for, you know, their loved one or having to write a speech.

Like, they actually got, you know, they got exposed to generative AI. So they understood what it was more. But also, we were very hesitant to launch the product before it was great.

Ah, OK.

We actually didn't go into general availability until October 2024. So really just a year and three months ago. And I think that you get one shot when you introduce a new technology to a legal team. So it really has to work, and it has to be great.

And the consensus moved from, oh, you know, this is something we'll kind of wait on and see to, this is going to be a competitive advantage. And if we don't start to, one, learn this, two, use it, our competitors are.

And when clients started to ask more and more, Ollie, how are you using AI to deliver me a better and more cost-efficient service? If you can't answer that, you look like a clown.

Yeah.

Right? And so I think it's the job of lawyers to be ahead of their clients, meaning that they also need to be ahead on AI.

You'reright. I think it's, I mean, yes, it's just insanely impressive how quickly this category has changed,right, just in the last two or three years. But also surprising just how quickly it's being adopted within the workforce. How are lawyers using the product today or AI in general?

And, you know, why did you guys decide to go down the route of actually building the full stack of what lawyers need versus just building one very specific product, which typically is what we've seen in the past with other AI legal tools?

Yeah.

So on the first question, Ollie, I've spent enough time with lawyers to learn to say that it depends. And that's because it looks very different in different practices. So if we're looking at M&A versus if we're looking at litigation versus if we're looking at in-house, they're leveraging Legora in different ways.

But there are sort of three overarching categories: reviewing, drafting, and researching. And then these look different depending on what you're trying to achieve. And in Legora, that sort of works, it sort of works like their daily workspace, where they have access to all of these things from a very central, you know, unit or a cockpit, if you will.

And to give you one example, let's say you're running a due diligence on a company in an M&A deal, and you get access to the data room. You need to analyze a ton of commercial contracts, real estate and lease contracts, loan agreements, and you need to make sure that there's no red flags here.

It's called a data room because it actually used to be a physical room where all of the data was hosted

in boxes,right? Then it moved to a virtual data room. So you would go in there, you would have all the files, you would go Control + F and start to kind of look for the change of control clauses.

But now, in Legora, you just stuff in all the agreements. You let Legora know, these are the things that I'm looking for, flag anything for me. And then you let it go to work. And it's amazing. Like, it's so incredibly good that when we run benchmarks on the AI system versus what the human system or what the human would accomplish, many times it's better,right?

And so it will inevitably change the way you think about delivering services. And importantly, I think it will change the way that law firms monetize, because you're not only delivering a service anymore, you're actually productizing some of that service.

Because software has never been able to do the things that it can do today. And so it's been very difficult for these organizations to get scale without building out a bigger pyramid. And that's the transition that we want to help them on.

It's going to be interesting,right? I mean, when you say that, also, lawyers are notoriously known for being super expensive. And if all of a sudden,right, and maybe you've already seen this, maybe you have some insights, but if a lawyer is drafting an AI agreement, an agreement which is being written by AI, how can they still charge $5,000, $10,000 just for an agreement, you know?

Are we going to see a shift in how lawyers charge as well?

Well, so

I'm of the view that if AI can do something, it will do it.

Ha.

Right? Like.

Simple.

If AI can do a piece of work, like, AI will probably do that piece of work.

Yeah.

And the question then kind of becomes, like, where does it get transacted? Like, where does that work happen?

Yeah.

I think we're not yet at the point, and it's probably quite a way until there,

where you would just, like, blindly rely on the AI. You'd get the agreement and you go, OK, perfect. Like, let's go. But when the lawyers are in the loop and they're verifying, making sure it's good, and they're setting up the system and they're embedding it with their expertise and knowledge, in many cases, it's the lawyers who know, of course, like, what does the process look like?

Like, what do we actually need to do here? Like, drafting the agreement, yeah, that's a small thing. It's guiding the entire deal to the conclusion. Because you're buying an outcome,right? I think a lot about, like, outcome-based pricing or value-based pricing.

Ah.

So instead of thinking about maybe the billable hour, which is the best way you could sort of measure it before, because it was very hard to understand what the value was, if AI is doing more of the work, I think we'll see a larger transition there.

And I also think that we'll see a monetization of

AI workflows and AI products that the legal service providers would be giving to their clients.

It's going to.

If you look at a deal, I mean, the way that the bankers get paid is a percentage of the deal.

Totally.

The way the lawyers get paid are, you know, by the hours.

Totally.

And so I'm seeing a huge transition there, actually, already. And AI has been on this almost exponential path of getting better. And I think it's our job to build a legal interpretation of that general increase in intelligence. And as we continue to walk up that path, I think it will just have broader and broader implications for the way that you market a firm, for the way that you market your services, and the way that you actually transact and monetize those services.

What's just incredible about kind of the whole Legora story is you guys only went through YC, went to 24,right, last year, doubling ARR every quarter, raised a couple hundred million dollars.

Yeah.

How difficult is it to, now you're kind of on this rocket ship, there are probably so many products you want to launch. How do you manage the role of expectations with the clients versus trying to ship as many products as you can and being the number one plan in this category?

Because that's what every founder wants to build,right?

So interestingly, the expectations of our clients is that we are going to ship a lot of new features. So they are buying Legora, I mean, very much for what it is today, but also very much for what we're doing.

They are not just picking a vendor and they're saying, oh, we bought some AI, let's do a press release, we're done. No, no, no, no, no. This is a decade-long journey and investment in the firms, the people, in the processes, in the clients.

And we're here to make those firms that we work with and those in-house teams win. It's our job to make them successful. Legora is only successful if they are successful. And

I think

in legal tech, there has never been

a team as ambitious and focused as Legora ever before, actually, in the entire world. Because never before has this many talented people been focused on just solving the problems of lawyers. And never before have we had access to such great tech to actually make those dreams and those ideas into reality.

And so when we think about the suite that Legora is becoming, I feel like we have done zero to one. And now we need to do one to ten. And then we're going to do ten to 100. And the clients want to walk with us on that path.

And so when they call and say, hey, wouldn't it be really cool if you could email a task to Legora? Because I'm on my phone all the time. I'm on Outlook. And then Legora emails you back with a response.

Yeah.

We go, yeah, that'd be great. Let's build it. And, you know, a month later, we roll out the feature. And so it's very, very iterative. And it's iterative and collaborative with our clients, because they are the best legal service providers in the world, the best law firms in the world.

They're the best lawyers in the world. We are the best software developers for them in the world. And so we're saying, OK, if we bring you the software and you continue what you're doing, then together we're going to be even more successful.

Because there are companies, startups, venture-backed companies who are trying to go after the service and the software,right? Like, they're building the full stack. And that's very different to our model. We want to build the operating system for the law firms and for the in-house teams so that they can do the work,right?

We want to empower the lawyers to be even, even better. And what's difficult is the prioritization.

Yeah.

Because there are so many things we want to build, and there are so many things we're being asked to build that you've got to sit down and then you need to take some hard decisions. What will deliver the most value to all of our collective clients?

And what can we build now that will be sort of

compounded, compound the value of our platform? And we also think about it from the way of if it's something that the general AI models will be able to do themselves, it's probably not worth for us to build that, because we can just incorporate it into our product later on.

Yeah. To me, inside Legora, what's happening, is it 9, 9, 6, Monday to Saturday? I've read, like, you make this very clear to people joining. This is not going to be a normal job. You can be on the journey or you can find something else.

Yeah. I don't think it's a normal job.

The hustle mentality.

Yes, we hustle.

We love that. We have to.

You have to.

Yeah.

And but we do it from

a place of excitement and from a place of, wouldn't it be awesome if, you know? And, you know, of course, maybe I feel slightly differently about this than everybody in the company, but I've never felt like I'm going to work and then I'm, like, leaving work.

Like, I don't, you know, my personality is this company now. And I think that happens to a lot of people here, to be honest.

That's awesome.

Because we know that

AI is

the biggest technological shift that probably has ever happened. I think it's much bigger than the .com. I think it's much bigger than mobile. It's much bigger than the cloud. And we're all born kind of perfectly in time to get to build a generational company in this era.

And

we want to savor that. And we don't want to look ourselves in the mirrors a decade from now or two decades from now and go,

we really screwed that up. You know, we had the chance, but we didn't do it. Now, that does not mean that everybody's here, you know, 9, 9, 6, and we don't take care of our families and friends and do things outside of work.

But we are very committed. And we are very mission-driven in that we fundamentally believe that AI will rewire and change how legal work gets done. And it's one of the oldest occupations in the world,right? Like, lawyers have been and are a cornerstone of society.

And now we get to, together with them, shape what the future of this occupation will look like. That's incredibly exciting. Like, that's very rewarding. My favorite Slack channel is the one that we call Customer Love.

Customer Love.

And it's just, you know, it's just, like, love bombed with these anecdotes of, I got this task on my desk Friday 3:00 p.m., and I thought it was going to take the entire weekend to finish. But I was able to do it in three hours, send it over to the client, and get home to see my kids, you know, on the Friday evening.

And, yeah, we almost tear up because, like, you know, that's all the hard work that we put in that gets to that point. And with every rollout that we do, we're seeing higher adoption numbers. Like, in the very early days, you know, 2023, like, the product wasn't there yet.

But now it's like, whoa, this is the most successful tech rollout this firm has ever done. That's awesome, you know? And I feel privileged and

you almost got to, like, pinch yourself a little bit when we have these, like, company-wide town halls, you know, most Mondays. And I look out and at the beginning of this year, we could all fit in the conference room, and now we're like 250 people.

And you go, how in the world do I deserve to, one, work with all these amazingly smart people? And two, how did I manage to convince all of them to come here and do this thing with me? Because it's crazy.

But then, you know, you listen in on an interview and they tell the story from their perspective. And they go, you know, I've never been in an engineering team where we're so focused on delivering value to the client.

We have so many awesome features that we're going to build. And, you know, the clients want to hop on calls with us to, like, get early access. And then, of course, like, the engineering team gets to use AI to be as proficient as possible.

But it's like this, it's just, you got pulled in. It's amazing.

It's amazing. I think, I mean, A, you know, having such a cool team of 250 people and just reflecting, you know, when you're going through YC, you probably never imagined, you know, it's going to get to this stage,right?

No.

I think it'll be helpful.

Actually, to be honest with you, I feel like every quarter that comes, I'm, like, surprised by

how much the business changes. Because I feel like we're a new company every quarter. And I really try to hire for slope and, like,

capacity and potential. Because I know that even if you're coming in at this level and the company is just here now, three months from now, we're going to be here.

Yeah.

And so I need people in the company that are going to be able to scale with the business.

How difficult is that? And it kind of is similar to the question I was going to ask is around, you know, just last year you were going through YC and you're now here. How difficult is it just to keep that momentum insanely fast?

Yeah.

And also, you know, just looking after such a big team, because it just changed. And we're seeing AI changes every single freaking day,right?

Look, I think

you need to plan, but you need to hold those plans very loosely,right? Like, you can have an idea of what the world is going to look like in three months and where we're going to be, who we're going to have hired.

But then you need to be ready to throw that out the window. And I think one of the luxuries that I have is I have very few, you know, preconceptions about what the world or about what a company should look like.

Like, I'm kind of getting to shape it as we go. And then you mix that in with folks in the team who have seen scale and they've seen what great looks like. Like, Patrick in the US who runs our global go-to-market team, he's seen what the 20 million to 500 million ARR scale looks like.

I'm just telling him to do it in a quarter of the time,right? And so everybody needs to challenge themselves.

No pressure, Patrick.

Yeah. Because, like, we're, yeah, no pressure, Patrick. You know, he knows. And that's what you sign up for. And you sign up

for personal growth, for a group of friends and like-minded people who all want to do really hard things. And I think one of the key learnings for me as we've gone through this scale is we can, like,

we've done so from a very, like, pure place of values. Like, we've raised, you know, hundreds of millions, but we're very resourceful. We still do demos every other week where all the engineering, all the engineering teams get to demo what they built in the last two weeks for the entire company.

I still start my board meetings with product and engineering. That's what's come first. Because we are a tech company and everybody needs to care about the company, but everybody needs to care about the product. Because that is the representation of our values and what we are.

I remember in the beginning, people like to say that they thought Leia brought Scandinavian design to legal tech. I'm not sure if that's a positive or a negative, but we liked it.

Take it. Yeah, I like it.

We took it. And

it's just really fun. Like, everybody, you know, if you go to, if you wake up and you're like, OK, we have all these challenges, but we know we can solve them, and it's really fun, then suddenly you, like, the pains of scaling sort of, yeah, they're there, but they're small in comparison.

Okay, thanks.

In comparison to how fun we're having. Yeah.

That's amazing. You know, a lot of our audience love this. They love the whole YC community and kind of, you know, the YC offering. And we're big fans too. How was your experience going through YC? And was it always obvious that Legora, Leia at the time, was going to become just this mighty company?

So I had a very unusual Y Combinator experience because I went there and then very quickly I decided to go back to Europe because I couldn't do sales between, like, 1:00 a.m. and 10:00 a.m. San Francisco time back to Sweden and back to the Nordics.

I tried for a couple of days. I actually bought this ring light that I put on my laptop, like an influencer, so it wouldn't look like it was in the middle of the night when I was doing these calls.

But my sleep pattern got so screwed up that it was just really, really hard to do it.

And

maybe it's not, you know, in my place to say whether it was clear that Legora was going to be an outlier company back then. But I think if you ask a couple of the other, you know, companies in the batch, and if you ask the partners, they probably would have said so.

That's awesome.

And I think the reason why was we came to YC with a very, very clear idea of what we were going to do, what we were going to build, who we were going to serve, and how we were going to do it.

And we were, like, full execution mode. And

I think we, and, you know, I regret this to some extent, we did not take part in a lot of the social activities. We did not hang out with a lot of the other founders. We did not make a ton of friends.

But we scaled from, like, zero to a million in revenue.

And I think you hired some of them,right? I read that. And one thing I love about the hiring culture with you guys is you hire entrepreneurial people, ex-founders, which not many scale-ups do properly enough of.

No. So we actually have six, no, yeah, six YC founders, CEOs in the company.

Wow. That's cool.

So our CTO is a previous YC founder.

Yeah.

Our VP product, she was a previous YC founder. Stian, who runs some of the most important parts of our product, previous YC founder. Dee, who just joined, she's joining in New York, actually, to lead our forward deployed software motion.

And it's just awesome because I need everybody in the business to act like company owners. And the company is becoming so big now that there's almost, you know, sub-companies in the company. And so if everybody runs with that level of ownership and that level of caring, then we're going to do really amazing.

And I actually remember, so when I interviewed, or I grabbed a coffee

with Leo, who runs our European and EMEA commercial group, and he had sold his previous business. He was the CEO and founder there, sold it for, like, 50 million. And I got introduced to him and I said, Leo, I'm looking for our first sales manager.

And he said, oh, yeah, sure. Like, I know a lot of great people you could go for. And I was like, no, Leo, I want you. And he was like, no, no, no, no, no, no. And I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Let me tell you about the company. And now he's joined and the team is, you know, I think I gave him a number and he did 5X that number in the year,right? And the team has scaled tremendously fast.

And I've had something like 200 travel days this year. And it's very easy for me to travel knowing that I can rely on other, you know, owners and executives and people in the business to keep, not only keep the lights on, but set the pace, set the culture, hire the best people.

It's amazing.

You know, it's when a company grows so quickly is incredible to see. But also, you know, that whole fundraising process, which they go through, it's hopefully eventually worth it,right? And if everyone's talking about it, roughly just over $260 million raised, basically in the last two years.

So many founders out there now are trying to raise as much as they can, as quickly as they can. What is the best way for founders to fundraise today and to, you know, have the process so tight-knit that it avoids distractions?

The best way to fundraise is to build a really good company and build a really good business.

That's the obvious question.

And then you have to just come knocking on your door and they say, hey, we want to invest. And you go, OK, what are you willing to pay?

Give me 50 million.

And they say, we'll pay this. And you go, that sounds a bit low. And then they say, well, OK, we're willing to pay that. You go, OK, sounds aboutright. And then you do the deal and you get back to business.

Simple,right?

I think in total, like, total, all aggregated, I've spent less than one month fundraising or in an investor conversation.

Wow. OK, that's quite unusual.

Across every round. Like, our Series B happened in a week. Our Series A happened in 48 hours. Our Series C was, like, a week and a half.

So yeah.

What? This is not normal. OK, so basically a couple of weeks.

I've never had to put together a pitch deck.

Per raise. Wow. I think you're the first company, Max, that I've ever met that hasn't had to put a pitch deck together and fundraise in under a few weeks.

You know, when I do those things, I pull up the dashboards and I talk about the company and I don't have time to design a deck. And, you know, the team doesn't have time to do that either. They're busy running the business.

And maybe you'll pull up, you know, one of the board decks and talk a little bit about what's going on. But

I think it's been pretty clear from the outset, like, what, like, it's pretty clear what we're doing. Legal AI for lawyers and we're killing it. And so if that thesis is interesting, then, you know, you can come to Stockholm and you can grab dinner with me.

Yeah, we should grab dinner when I know it's called Stockholm.

Yeah, that'd be great.

But, you know, now you're kind of on this orchestra. The day-to-day has probably changed for you a lot. How do you spend your time today? And, you know, constant challenges that are always coming up. OK, you've got a great team, but how do you overcome them from a personal standpoint?

So I think the biggest challenges that I've had personally is making the move from, like, executing to delegating and setting kind of clear expectations and goals in a structured way. And I feel like I've done that move over the last sort of three to six months pretty well.

And I still talk to the entire team like I did when we were 40. Like, I'm pretty low bullshit. It's like, here's where we are in the world. Here's how I see things. This is what I think we need to do.

Let's go do it. And everybody's like, sounds good. Let's go do it. And I think that has aligned, like, generally the company is very aligned. I'm like, OK, what do we need to do here? I think the other thing that, you know, me personally that I've had to do is you need to

let go of some of your own self-image and just accept the fact that you can do things. Like, I met Macron two weeks ago in Berlin and I did a speech, you know, to the leaders of the free world.

And that's maybe not something I would have imagined myself doing two years back when we were, or a year back when we were at YC. But

it went great. And I wasn't very nervous. It felt really good. And I think you just sort of go into this mindset where you're, OK, if this is what the company needs, then this is what we're going to do.

We are locked in on what we're trying to achieve here and what we're building and who we're building it for. And once you, like, allow yourself to fully commit to that, a lot of

movement in the world and, like, other distractions, they sort of fall away a little bit. For me, it's very easy to just do what we need to do.

You know what's been really cool as well is seeing the flourishing Swedish Nordic ecosystem. I mean, there's you guys, there's Lovable, Sana Labs, obviously slightly more legacy companies like Spotify, Klarna.

Yeah.

It's incredible to see Sweden kind of all of a sudden, like, I'm from the UK originally,right? So I'm like, wow, Sweden is really there. What's happening and, you know, what do you think is, why is now a huge moment for?

Ollie, the weather isn't very good this summer here, so there's a, you know.

It's horrible. I was living there in the winter.

It's just to stay inside and get work done. But I also think that we, you know, one of the reasons why I think there's this new boom is, of course, because there's a lot of talented people coming from these other, you know, bigger companies ready to build again.

But also, you know, you learn how to work with a computer very early on. There's a great social security and safety net. We have some, like, we don't have a lot of respect for authority, I think, generally. And so just because some people in the US are doing it doesn't mean you can't beat them.

Right?

What's the game plan? Are you guys going to start expanding all across the world?

Well, we have a really big office in New York and a big office in Denver. And

it's important for us to meet our customers where they are, where they're at. They're used to doing business in person. We do business in person. They want to get onboarded with the product at the office. We'll show up at the office.

And

law has a lot of culture embedded into it as well. And it's very language and jurisdictional specific. And so you've got to show up, got to know your stuff, need to be able to meet the clients where they are.

And we have something like six, seven offices now all over the world. And

I don't see us slowing that down.

Well, it's going to be amazing,right? I think just seeing how quickly AI has changed just in the last three years. Looking at the next thousand days, what do you think is going to happen?

With AI or with Legora?

With AI.

So I actually spend very little of my time focusing on things that I'm, like, uncertain of because we'll get to react it when we know,right? And we have such great relationships with Anthropic, with OpenAI, with Google that we get to see what's coming out before it comes out,right?

So we can know how to plan for it. I think, again, what I've been excited about for the last year is what I'm continuing to be excited about, which is throwing these agents or LLMs with, you know, the ability to run tool calling, have memory, and do almost autonomous tasks on our behalf.

That's still what I'm sort of most excited about. And every month we continue to move a little bit closer to where that's possible. It's possible already for simple tasks. It gets difficult when it's very difficult, like, long-running tasks.

Because if you're, like, 3% off in every step and you have to do 100 steps, suddenly you're very off.

Yeah.

Or you can be very off. And so more, you know, robust frameworks and

tooling around those types of things is probably what I'm most excited about. And also what I really hope, you know, the focus will go into in the next 1,000 days.

If you went building Legora and in this AI category, any other ideas you were kind of thinking about or ideas you've been you would like to maybe start one day?

Well, not building an AIright now or not joining a company like Legora that's building an AI, I think, is the biggest risk. Like, that would actually, it's the biggest career risk, actually, like, not being part of an AI company.

I agree.

And I just, you know, it's really fun. So I think for myself, I'm quite excited about physical robots. I just think that's, like, an exciting and cool thing.

Cool. You mean, like, physical robots as in delivery, having a robot in your kitchen?

Yeah, like, figure, like, these robots that you have, humanoids.

Yeah.

I think that's pretty exciting.

It's insane,right?

Yeah, yeah. I like the idea of that. And it feels like there's a lot of difficult problems there to solve. And I think it's inevitable that it's going to happen.

Robots. You know, I was just saying SF.

If I can't work in AI, otherwise I'd work in AI.

Yeah. AI and robots, they kind of go hand in hand. You know, when I was, I was just in SF not so long ago and for the first time really saw these, you know, Waymos going around.

They're amazing.

And I showed my mom and dad and they're like, what? What is happening?

It's like one of the coolest tech demos ever when you're getting robots.

Incredible. Incredible.

And it's just like, I mean, this whole category is kind of moving so quickly. I think maybe for our parents' generation, they maybe don't all completely understand it like mine. But for the ones coming through, you know, some founders even say today, I don't want to start an AI company because I'm too late.

I think we're just getting going though. We're kind of at that just day one still. Completely. We've done zero to one.

Yeah. It's going to be really exciting. Legora, you know, what an amazing ride you guys have just been on. Really just in two years since, you know, Jan kind of went to 24 when you went through YC. Looking at the next, you know, the big audacious goal, obviously become the number one company in AI for legal.

But what is that, you know, core mission and how are you going to stick to it?

Well, as I said before, you know, we're convinced that AI is going to fundamentally rewire and impact the way that knowledge work gets done and more particularly in legal. And

lawyers really deserve delightful software that augments, empowers, and enables them to do more, not something that gets in the way. And we have so many lawyers in the company and they're amazing. Most of them we call legal engineers, actually.

Sometimes they refer to themselves as recovering lawyers. And I want to remove that word, recovering. I don't think you need to recover from having worked in law because software is going to help you do so much more with less.

That's our mission.

Amazing. Max, this has been amazing. Thank you so much. Really excited to obviously see where Legora goes next. And thank you for sharing your journey. It's just like, it's almost like just mind-blowing just to see,right, how quickly a company has scaled in just two years.

Before AI existed, it would normally take a company of this scale maybe five, ten years. You guys have really done it in two. So congrats. I'm really excited to see where you guys go next.

Thank you so much, Ollie. It was lovely to chat.