Y Combinator Startup Podcast
00:43:39 · Gustaf Alstromer, Max Junestrand
[00:43:39] S1: Yep. [00:43:39] S0: And then we immediately make a plan of like how can we flip it? Or like how can we make a land and like turn it around? And I feel like people are in solution mode rather than like blame mode. And I think that has been a big momentum driver for us, but also we've been in chasing. There were other legal AI companies that were bigger than us when we started. And so we always felt, at least in the beginning, like we were chasing. Now we are much bigger and... [00:44:17] S1: Let's say you are the biggest one at some point very soon. [00:44:19] S0: Yes. [00:44:20] S1: Is is that gonna impact your motivation or your... So I think that [00:44:24] S0: it... So that's interesting. I I thought a lot about like what happens at that moment. Yeah. I think we need to either pick out another enemy and go like, okay. We have to be bigger than them now. Or we have to like really find this way of being better than ourselves yesterday. And I think that having competitors is a good thing. You should not be overly focused on what they're doing, but it's definitely like a carrot, I think. And it's a it's a easy thing to like rally around. Mhmm. Because what you don't want is you don't want a lot of side questing. [00:45:00] S1: Yep. [00:45:01] S0: You want everybody focused on the same thing.
00:45:01 · Max Junestrand, Gustaf Alstromer
[00:45:01] S0: You want everybody focused on the same thing. [00:45:04] S1: So one question I got from the audience is how do you become more ambitious? And when I asked this question, I'm thinking of a company I'm working with right now who is like, oh, we wanna do this country in Europe, then we're gonna do this other country in Europe. Then maybe next year, we'll do US. You guys did a lot of countries in Europe just during the batch and then like... [00:45:21] S0: And now we're at like 50 countries. [00:45:23] S1: And now you're everywhere and you scale up really quickly. Yeah. And is that ambition or is that the product was working or is... [00:45:28] S0: No. It's definitely ambition. [00:45:30] S1: Yeah. [00:45:30] S0: I mean, I think it's like... [00:45:31] S1: How does someone learn that or how does someone become more ambitious? Is that possible?
00:45:31 · Gustaf Alstromer, Max Junestrand
[00:45:31] S1: How does someone learn that or how does someone become more ambitious? Is that possible? [00:45:37] S0: 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. So in like my final years high school I was pretty lazy. I was playing a lot of video games. I You know, had a pretty easy time in school and I didn't work that hard. I didn't know how big the world was like outside of my sphere. And the first two years in college was the same. And then I made like a new friend group of very ambitious people. And that made it click for me. I went from doing like zero internships to doing eight jobs in one year. And I actually think that's like one of the best parts about YC. And think P. J. Talked about that in one of the essays, is like you come here and then you just realize that like wow, every peer, like everybody's really ambitious, and so you become more ambitious together. Yeah. And I think now we are like that inside of Legora. [00:46:58] S1: Yeah. [00:46:58] S0: Because I don't feel like I'm the boss. I feel like I'm a peer in the team that is running the company. Mhmm. And you know our CFO sometimes challenges our marketing team to be more ambitious. And you know like a CFO maybe typically wouldn't care about that. Yeah. But we're all just like so forward leaning and it's just so fun. And then you really get to assemble this like group across the entire company. It's not just at the top right? It's like everywhere. [00:47:29] S1: Yeah.
00:47:29 · Gustaf Alstromer, Max Junestrand
[00:47:29] S1: Yeah. [00:47:30] S0: And then you get to watch your creation like spiral and become more and more and more and more ambitious, and that is really fun. I also think you need to have like big idols Yeah. And big companies ahead of you. I mean, in the beginning... [00:47:44] S1: Who was who was your idol? [00:47:46] S0: Well, we would look at Spotify and Klarna now. Yeah. As these are the biggest success tech stories from Stockholm that have, you know, ever happened. And then we realized, wow, have a bigger market cap than Kvaer now. And that was like kind of a weird moment. [00:48:00] S1: Yeah. Yeah. [00:48:01] S0: Because we feel like we have done zero to one. Yeah. And one to 10 and then 10 to 100 still remains. [00:48:14] S1: Yeah. [00:48:14] S0: It's in front of us. And so... Yeah. [00:48:18] S1: Would you say... So 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. Like, basically, is the skills that you need to start a company or skills that you need to get into, like your career, have they... Are they changing in a very short amount of time now?
00:48:18 · Gustaf Alstromer, Max Junestrand
[00:48:18] S1: Would you say... So 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. Like, basically, is the skills that you need to start a company or skills that you need to get into, like your career, have they... Are they changing in a very short amount of time now? [00:48:41] S0: I I think storytelling is, at least for the CEO Yeah. 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. Yeah. Like working this hard if you don't believe in your own story is really hard. You need to sell employees. Like now we are hiring people, you know, we are competing with the labs for talent. And, you know, we need to sell the story of how working at Legora is gonna be better than working at Anthropic. You need to sell the story to investors. You need to sell the story to customers. And 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. Yeah. I always like like stories. I like video games. I like... I enjoy a good story. But I think that is like the most important skill. And and then maybe the other really [00:49:58] S1: Technical important skills. Okay.
00:49:58 · Gustaf Alstromer, Max Junestrand
[00:49:58] S1: Technical important skills. Okay. [00:50:01] S0: Well, I'll I'll I'll say one more before we go to technical I used to be a really bad teammate and a really bad collaborator. So I 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. Like, how could you miss that serve? And that was very... That doesn't get you invited to play the next game. Yeah. [00:50:32] S1: Makes sense. [00:50:33] S0: You know, it it it doesn't it doesn't invite a followership, and it doesn't invite, like, a good vibe. Yeah. So in high school, I, like, really understood that and had to pivot that way of working. I think technical skills. I think that the sort of the velocity and your ability to iterate on customer feedback still is probably the most important skill to get started. Yeah. Even now when we're bigger, very often we will hear about a particular type of problem a customer is 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? Yep. And that's like a bit strange to do at a thousand person company scale. [00:51:26] S1: Yep.