Uncapped with Jack Altman
· Max Junestrand, Jack Altman
[00:00:00] S1: They would run these competitive pilots. They would say, “Okay, there’s a couple of companies on the market. We’re going to want to A/B test all of them because it’s really hard to pick based on the feature set on your website. In those pilots, I think we did an extraordinarily good job of delivering value. When the 30 days were up, if we shut it down, it would be a riot. People would roar and they’d be like, “We’ve never seen software adoption like this in a legal organization. We need this and we need it now.” In those pilots, we would demonstrate much better than any other company the value that the product and the service around the product could bring. We hired all these lawyers, who are now called legal engineers. It’s a great term, forward-deployed legal engineers. [00:00:00] S0: I was just going to say, what about FDLE? [00:00:00] S1: That’s right, FDLE. They’re amazing. They’re the most tech-savvy lawyers in different organizations who don’t want to make partner, because that’s one type of life. They want to work in a tech company and now they get to work with their practice that they’re amazing at, and technology. Then they get to work with the best legal organizations in the world and drive that change. [00:00:00] S0: I would think once you’re embedded in these organizations, it’s got to be sticky. [00:00:00] S1: I think Legora is very sticky. We’ve ripped out our competition at many organizations at this point. [00:00:00] S0: What creates stickiness?
· Jack Altman, Max Junestrand
[00:00:00] S0: What creates stickiness? [00:00:00] S1: The stickiness is the use cases and the cadence. If you’ve invested time in building up a workflow that works for you, why would you want to switch? It’s usage stickiness. [00:00:00] S0: It’s not data. [00:00:00] S1: No, not yet. Not any real technical implementation, which is great, because our competition has been deployed in a lot of places with no real usage or very simple use cases. That means that we can go there, show them, and display clearly in a pilot that we deliver much better, and then we can easily swap it. So we actually have a dedicated migration team moving deployments over to Legora.
· Max Junestrand, Chetan Puttagunta, Jack Altman
[00:00:00] S1: No, not yet. Not any real technical implementation, which is great, because our competition has been deployed in a lot of places with no real usage or very simple use cases. That means that we can go there, show them, and display clearly in a pilot that we deliver much better, and then we can easily swap it. So we actually have a dedicated migration team moving deployments over to Legora. [00:00:00] S2: This is where we often talked about not only product engineering velocity—which came naturally to the founders here because they were engineers—but also this idea of velocity of customer interaction. If a customer wanted to buy a certain way, wanted to do a pilot, whatever, just don’t add friction. That was actually the key unlock. There was this idea of, let’s just go get this in everybody’s hands and not have any bias. One of my favorite stories about Max is that he came to San Francisco to sell a bunch of clients and then he texted me and was like, “Are you free for dinner?” So we met for dinner and then he asked for a ride to the airport. I casually asked, “Where are you going?” expecting him to say Seattle or LA or something. He was like, “I’m going to New Delhi.” I was like, “Why are you going to New Delhi?” He was like, “Well, one of the largest firms in India wants to buy. So I figured I’d go give it to them.” [00:00:00] S0: That’s crazy. [00:00:00] S2: You know this. In SaaS it was like, “No, do the West regional, then do the East regional, then do Western Europe, and then eventually hire an APAC head.” It was this whole thing.
· Chetan Puttagunta, Jack Altman, Max Junestrand
[00:00:00] S2: You know this. In SaaS it was like, “No, do the West regional, then do the East regional, then do Western Europe, and then eventually hire an APAC head.” It was this whole thing. [00:00:00] S0: And by the way, there’s going to be a year of engineering work to be even ready to serve India. [00:00:00] S2: 100%. And because this company and this team had never built a pre-AI software company, they didn’t know they weren’t supposed to go sell in India early, one quarter into selling the product. So Max got on a flight, went to India, and a customer in India bought. It was one of those things where because they didn’t have the patterns, they were able to get big globally in parallel. [00:00:00] S0: I also wonder about this. We talked about this a little bit. Being a Europe-based company means that you are multinational from the beginning. [00:00:00] S1: You have to be. [00:00:00] S0: I think some of this is pre-AI, a lot of it is. But I also think there’s a thing where if you started in Europe, you’ve already learned how to sell to ten countries. You know that there’s differences in the way the cultures work and the way they purchase software and what the rules and regulations are. I’m curious if you thought about that when you invested, that actually, maybe coming to the US will be easier one day. And I’m curious about your experience on that.
· Jack Altman, Max Junestrand
[00:00:00] S0: I think some of this is pre-AI, a lot of it is. But I also think there’s a thing where if you started in Europe, you’ve already learned how to sell to ten countries. You know that there’s differences in the way the cultures work and the way they purchase software and what the rules and regulations are. I’m curious if you thought about that when you invested, that actually, maybe coming to the US will be easier one day. And I’m curious about your experience on that. [00:00:00] S1: Y Combinator weren’t particularly excited about backing a company in Sweden. I remember the first interview with Gustaf—he’s a Swedish partner at YC—and he goes, “So you’re going to move to the States, right?” And I go, “Yes, of course.” That’s the cue to say yes so that you get the invite to go to YC. [00:00:00] S0: Now I’m going to Sweden. “You guys are opening in Sweden, YC, right?”
· Jack Altman, Max Junestrand
[00:00:00] S0: Now I’m going to Sweden. “You guys are opening in Sweden, YC, right?” [00:00:00] S1: I came to YC and I left three days later because I had so much business going on in Sweden and I couldn’t do work between 1:00 AM and 10:00 AM. That was just impossible. But the Swedish legal market is smaller than Kirkland & Ellis. So of course you have to expand. Naturally we went to Finland and then we went to Denmark. Then I was like, I think we got the hang of it. The most important thing was that the first customer we got, Mannheimer Swartling—the big firm in Sweden—their managing partner has such a good relationship with the other firms in other non-competitive countries that he would just introduce me. I would fly down and say the same thing I told him: “AI is going to change the world, you’re going to need a partner, I’m here, let’s work.” That sort of made it all start. But then the move to the UK and the US was when we really started ripping. [00:00:00] S0: How different was coming to the US versus going to Finland?