Uncapped with Jack Altman
· 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?
· Jack Altman, Max Junestrand
[00:00:00] S0: How different was coming to the US versus going to Finland? [00:00:00] S1: I had a rule. There’s actually a few Swedish companies that tried to go to the US but did so unsuccessfully. Like Klarna, they tried many times before they actually made it work. My rule was, if we can serve two of the biggest clients in the US from Stockholm, then we’re ready, and then we’ll open an office here. So Cleary Gottlieb—amazing Wall Street firm—and Goodwin Procter, we served them both. We won their business in competitive pilots, and we could serve them from Sweden. We did a lot of flights back and forth. But after they signed, we said, “Okay, amazing. Now we’re ready. Let’s open an office here.”