Y Combinator Startup Podcast
00:51:26 · Gustaf Alstromer, Max Junestrand
[00:51:26] S1: Yep. [00:51:26] S0: But still how we do it. And you need to make sure that you don't overly like zigzag, and that you continue building towards like the right vision. Mhmm. But I still think that the your ability as a smaller company to be fast versus your incumbent competition is the superpower. And when you have a superpower, need to lean into that. And that's still true for for me. Like I should be doing the things that I'm uniquely good at and other people in the company do the things that they're uniquely good at. I think also technical skills... [00:52:04] S1: Maybe they're different these days. They can just mean something else. [00:52:06] S0: Yes. But it still means, you know, being able to build systems at scale. Right? Like, just because you can produce a lot of code with AI Yeah. Is not a excuse for not being a very good software engineer. Right. [00:52:22] S1: Right. [00:52:22] S0: And I still think we need many good software engineers. We are hiring a 100 of them at Legora. [00:52:29] S1: What's the most interesting problems that people get to work on when they join a Legora?
00:52:29 · Gustaf Alstromer, Max Junestrand
[00:52:29] S1: What's the most interesting problems that people get to work on when they join a Legora? [00:52:34] S0: Oh, one of the most interesting problems right now is this transition from reactive agents to proactive agents. What's an example? So for the last three years of working with the product, you know, you will give Legora a prompt or a set of instructions, and it's going to go off and do that thing. Now, we are basically connecting Legora to different pieces of context, and when it gets a trigger, it will start to do something. That means that if the sales team gets a contract, it will get routed to a Legora agent, the Legora agent will start working on it in parallel, you know, if it needs to escalate to a lawyer, will, otherwise it might just execute the contract. Or you connect the entire data room to a Legora agent, and the agent automatically starts organizing that data room and produce the due diligence report. It's the agent do things without you telling it what it should do. Yep. And that for us is the unlock of how does one lawyer produce the outcomes of a team of 10 lawyers with the help of Legora. Yep. I think that's very interesting. We also have some very interesting problems just from like scale perspective. Right? Like we're spending millions and millions and millions of dollars on OCR and like, you know, document parsing. And these are like real engineering problems to go solve at a bigger scale.
00:52:34 · Max Junestrand, Gustaf Alstromer
[00:52:34] S0: Oh, one of the most interesting problems right now is this transition from reactive agents to proactive agents. What's an example? So for the last three years of working with the product, you know, you will give Legora a prompt or a set of instructions, and it's going to go off and do that thing. Now, we are basically connecting Legora to different pieces of context, and when it gets a trigger, it will start to do something. That means that if the sales team gets a contract, it will get routed to a Legora agent, the Legora agent will start working on it in parallel, you know, if it needs to escalate to a lawyer, will, otherwise it might just execute the contract. Or you connect the entire data room to a Legora agent, and the agent automatically starts organizing that data room and produce the due diligence report. It's the agent do things without you telling it what it should do. Yep. And that for us is the unlock of how does one lawyer produce the outcomes of a team of 10 lawyers with the help of Legora. Yep. I think that's very interesting. We also have some very interesting problems just from like scale perspective. Right? Like we're spending millions and millions and millions of dollars on OCR and like, you know, document parsing. And these are like real engineering problems to go solve at a bigger scale. [00:54:00] S1: Got it. And you grew from zero to 100,000,000 ARR in eighteen months in April. Keep growing at a crazy rate. Yes. Your job has changed quite a lot in eighteen months. [00:54:13] S0: Yes.
00:54:13 · Max Junestrand, Gustaf Alstromer
[00:54:13] S0: Yes. [00:54:14] S1: We talked earlier about you now interviewing, like, exec teams. Like, sort of like... We had this talk from the founder of Dropbox at YCEA, like, a couple years ago. We talked about the minigames that you played. You've done a lot of minigames in eighteen months, and now you're at the minigame of, like, building out or hiring people to run your team. How... [00:54:30] S0: What's Yeah. [00:54:32] S1: Sounds hard, and is that... This is not something you've done before? Like, how [00:54:36] S0: Well, it's definitely not something I've done before. [00:54:38] S1: But but How you learn something like that that it seems extremely important to hire the right executive? [00:54:44] S0: In a way, I think most of the work up until that point makes you qualified for that thing. Right. If you've... [00:54:56] S1: You get to next mini game by basically seeing the last one.
00:54:58 · Max Junestrand
[00:54:58] S0: Yes. But you need to make sure that you learn because... At part of every mini game. And I think you really need to put the company first Yeah. Way ahead of your own ego in a way. And, you know, I tell this to the executive team, I need to re qualify for the job as CEO of Legora. Every quarter. Right? It's a new company, new challenges, as do they. Like running a sales team when you are 1,000,000 ARR is very different from a 150,000,000 ARR. And I think for myself, if you if you are... If you enjoy that, if you enjoy learning new things, if you enjoy being challenged, if you accept the fact that now my most important job is building out the executive team and I'm going to go do that, you will succeed at it. And then, I think as always, you try to build a good network of people who have done it before. The tough thing is, there's very few people who have done the company this quickly as we are. And even a lot of the executives that we are now bringing on, they come from sauce, and they come from this world of triple triple, double double. If you grow 40% year on year, you are doing fantastic. You're sort of on track, and That's not enough anymore. It's not enough. Like we you know David our CFO joined from Vanta, another YC company. They've been very successful. Yeah. But they've grown from you know 30,000,000 to 300,000,000 in something like four years. And now we're doing it in like one year. And so from 200 people to 1,300 people and we're doing it over four years and we're doing it in one year. So you need to just compress timelines. I think you need to be brutal at saying no to things, and you need to understand yourself where you have the most competitive edge. You When can do the
00:56:58 · Gustaf Alstromer, Max Junestrand
[00:56:58] S1: I landed in Stockholm end of April, all of the ads were basically Legora ads with Jude Law. And I'm curious how you get Jude Law to be the face of the company. And he was like, if you haven't watched... Seen the ads, recommend you go into YouTube and watch the Legora Jude Law ads. [00:57:20] S0: Did you did you fall in love with Law again? [00:57:22] S1: Yeah. I did. [00:57:23] S0: Yeah. You did? Good. [00:57:25] S1: What happened? How did how did you explore that?