Scaling Europe
00:28:54 · Dimitris Samouris
[00:28:54] S1: Oh, for sure. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. They... So it's gone through two waves. The first wave was when we started going to market. Mhmm. So this is like May June of twenty three, when... It's so easy to build on top of a third party API nowadays and you have... Remember like consulting firms are full of like very smart people that are really into tech. Not not all of them, but there's a portion of them that are like quite ambitious in what they want to do as early adopters. And so they'd say, like, we should absolutely build this. It's so and they built they built first versions of them. They built POCs that were successful, and they proved out the use case. There's a big difference between building out a POC or something that can be helpful on a single engagement or a pilot and then scaling that to a reliable enterprise solution that thousands of your staff can use every day. And by the way, the tech is not the hard part, not even close. The hard part is the change management. Do I have someone who is going to train these people? Do I have 20 fourseven global customer support? Is the product getting better over time? Those are the things that they found it difficult to continue to progress on past the POC. So there's been a huge wave of experimentation. That was phase one where they they tried and then a few of them continued to invest, but most kind of gave up after they went through that that cycle. Phase two has been Claude Claude code specifically. Yeah. And here you had a bunch of senior partners that got stuck in and were like, wow, like I can build tools by myself. I don't even need to go to the internal build team now and have them prioritize me versus other stuff that they're working on. Like, I myself can build stuff. And that fueled a second wave of like, well, why do we want to work with external vendors? Like, we can just vibe code everything now. And I think the market is now again coming out of that phase because there's a huge difference between a vibe coded app and again production level software that crucially answers one question and there are very few customers that have gotten to this stage yet, which is how do I turn my firm into a machine that gets better over time? So this is a fundamental machine learning system question. Right? Like Yeah.
00:31:17 · Dimitris Samouris
Every subsequent interaction, every ride that Waymo goes on or Tesla goes on feeds data that makes the next version of the So next model even how does my firm get better with every subsequent diligence that I do? Those are like system level questions at a vibe coded app that two partners use are never going to be able to to address. So it's a constant, you know, up and down. And I think to be successful is... In our shoes is to work with them. Like, I think a lot of startups get very frustrated when customers tell them, oh, we're gonna build this on our own. One of the things that we've done with a number of them, by the way, is I had my cofounder write a memo. All of the things that we solved when building expert call workflow software. It's two pages of every technical problem. We give them the answer Seb. It's not like I'm not trying to hire this. Like, this is what you need to solve. Yeah. Take it. Good luck. And that actually has shifted the conversation a lot of times where people realize, okay, like, these guys have been working on this for a long time and there's a lot that we would have to deal with that we frankly don't really want to deal with. And so that that changes the frame of the conversation. So my advice to other startups in this space is like, help help your customers. They're working through some very existential questions and just because the answer is no now does not mean that it's no no later. And if you stay with them along that journey, you you earn a lot of goodwill.
00:32:51 · Sebastian Johnson, Dimitris Samouris
[00:32:51] S0: Is is that the biggest pushback you get from customers that we'll try and build our own, or what are the other reasons they might [00:32:56] S1: say no? Overwhelmingly, when we get pushback is is why can't I build this on on my own? That is no longer the case so much with senior AI stakeholders who have after two cycles realized that there's lot more to this, but individual partners or individual like consultants who are like, I can vibe code this, like, why am I paying you guys extra? But it... It's gotten much easier over time. Now I think people realize the role that startups can play in this space. [00:33:23] S0: Do you see a lot of similarities between yourself and the industry that you're working or selling to to the legal industry that we've seen with Harvey and Legora? [00:33:33] S1: Absolutely. With the caveat that legal tech has been the category for fifteen plus years. I diligence legal tech [00:33:43] S0: Mhmm. [00:33:44] S1: Businesses. By the way, one of the the most interesting components of that was we'd always come back to the same question, which is you're trying to sell efficiency to a market that doesn't want it. I'm a partner that makes money off of a billable hour. Yeah. What good does it do me if you make me 20% better? And so law is furthest along this journey of like, okay. We need to transition to output based pricing, and you see some of these, like, AI native law firms like Crosby out there [00:34:13] S0: Mhmm.
00:34:13 · Sebastian Johnson, Dimitris Samouris
[00:34:13] S0: Mhmm. [00:34:13] S1: That are really pushing the envelope in terms of what it means to deliver with a fixed price and let let them figure it out on on the back end. But they've had discovery tools and time management tools and search tools for a decade plus. And so I think law firms were in this very interesting space where when when Harvey and Legora came around, they were much better tech buyers, and they knew exactly how to run a POC, and they'd worked with startups in the past, and that adoption took off a lot faster than in consulting and private equity where no one had built software for this industry, to date. And so they're they're a little bit further behind on that curve. [00:34:50] S0: And do think that presents an interesting advantage or... It almost means that the the market there hasn't existed five years ago, but it's potentially a much bigger market or a faster growing market than maybe legal tech?
00:34:50 · Sebastian Johnson, Dimitris Samouris
[00:34:50] S0: And do think that presents an interesting advantage or... It almost means that the the market there hasn't existed five years ago, but it's potentially a much bigger market or a faster growing market than maybe legal tech? [00:35:01] S1: Faster growing? I don't know about bigger. I think the legal market is is bigger than than consulting. It makes it harder for startups who have to go through this journey of, like, educating consulting firms or PE firms as to why they shouldn't build on their own. So I think what the interesting thing if I look at law is there are very few law firms outside of maybe Kirkland and Ellis is a good counterpoint because they've decided to... I mean, they're huge. Right? And they have a lot of resources at their disposal. You don't really get... And in banking as well, you don't really get a lot of people saying, hey, we're gonna build all of this stuff on our own. I feel like they have gone through those cycles and in previous years, whereas in consulting there's much more of an impetus behind let's build because they haven't had that experience beforehand where they've realized that, like, there's a reason why you use a software vendor to do things that are outside your core competency. [00:36:05] S0: And I remember speaking to some of those legal tech firms who say that there's a... It's an interesting go to market model in the sense that they can almost... Because you have these brands that are international but also quite localized. [00:36:15] S1: Yeah.
00:36:15 · Dimitris Samouris, Sebastian Johnson
[00:36:15] S1: Yeah. [00:36:15] S0: Do you have a similar go to market motion? Do you see... You know, do you try and sell to maybe one local firm and hope that they take you international? [00:36:22] S1: Yes. That has over and again been the best way to go about this. People will value recommendations from their peers, orders of magnitude more than any piece of evidence or marketing collateral you can put in front of them. So the strategy has very much been get in where you can, do a really good job for that team, and every single time they have made introductions to their to their colleagues. It also helps, by the way, like, consulting is a very natural viral loop when you sell software into it because you get restaffed every couple of weeks in CDD or every couple of months in larger strategy engagement. So like if Seb likes the product, the next time he works on a case with an entirely new set of people, he is gonna bring it with them and they're going to learn how to use Junior and so on and so on. So we didn't spend a single dollar on marketing up until this summer. Wow. And the reason for that was because we didn't need to. Like we we did really good on a pilot and then you'd see these adoption loops like where people would just... It would go viral because people would just share it amongst themselves. [00:37:35] S0: That's amazing. Yeah. It's it's like the dream go to market motion.