Building an AI-Native Software Company With Legora CEO Max Junestrand | Ep. 44

Max Junestrand 0:00 I remember doing this interview in Swedish. There's a saying, like, blodsmak, and you know, like, you taste the... like, you taste the blood because you're- you worked so hard.

Jack Altman 0:08 Yeah.

Max Junestrand 0:08 She publishes the article in English.

Jack Altman 0:11 [laughs]

Max Junestrand 0:11 "At Legora, we wake up with a metallic taste of blood in our mouths."

Jack Altman 0:14 [laughs]

Max Junestrand 0:14 And people in the company go, "Holy shit. Is Max a vampire, or does he just floss badly?" Like-

Jack Altman 0:19 [laughs]

Max Junestrand 0:19 ... what's going on?

Jack Altman 0:20 It's not, like, a culture that I think would quite work in San Francisco. Like, I don't know-

Max Junestrand 0:23 No

Jack Altman 0:23 ... if that's something that you can do.

Max Junestrand 0:24 Well, when we open our San Francisco office, they're gonna taste the blood.

Jack Altman 0:28 [laughs]

Max Junestrand 0:28 Yeah. They're gonna taste the blood.

Jack Altman 0:29 I love it.

Jack Altman 0:31 Well, this is gonna be a cool new format. I'm here with my new partner, Chetan and Max. And, uh, Max, you're the founder, CEO of Legora, which is an amazing legal tech company that Chetan sits on the board of. And so I just feel really lucky to be doing this with both of you. So you guys, thank you for, thank you for making this happen.

Max Junestrand 0:48 Thank you so much, Jack. It's great to be here.

Jack Altman 0:49 Okay. So I wanna start with the topic of competition. And Chetan, when you invested in the company, there were already competitors out there. This was, I think... It was only two year- It's crazy because Legora's like-

Max Junestrand 1:00 Yeah. Two years ago

Jack Altman 1:00 ... it's a big company already.

Max Junestrand 1:01 Yeah.

Jack Altman 1:02 But it's-

Max Junestrand 1:02 Almost 400, 400 people

Jack Altman 1:03 ... you know, but this, this, the seed was two years ago. And at the time of the seed, it was an early market, but there were competitors out there. And so I actually wanna start with you, Chetan. Like, what was in your head at the moment you invested? Were you thinking about the landscape around? Like, were you just, "Max is so special that I don't care"? Like, what was going through your head when you did that?

Speaker 1:21 The first meeting that we had was with Max, was with me, Peter, and Max actually in the other room. And interestingly, I had invested in two other legal software companies pre-AI.

Jack Altman 1:35 Oh, wow.

Speaker 1:36 And so there was a shape of the legal market that I intuitively understood because I participated in the market, and so I sort of understood the different kinds of lawyers. Who buys software? Do in-house lawyers buy software? Do law firms buy so- How they... Sort of there was a intuitive understanding that I had. And there's sort of, like, two things that happen when you've, like, sold into an industry before. Either you end up hating it-

Jack Altman 1:58 [laughs]

Speaker 1:59 ... or, or you have some strong bias against it.

Jack Altman 2:00 Totally.

Speaker 2:01 So there was always this idea that there's opportunity for AI in the legal market, and you know, there was a player in the market that had already raised an billion-dollar valuation. And when Max came in to chat with me and Peter, the thing that immediately jumped out was the clarity of thought that Max had on why the general foundation models had a lot of room to grow-

Jack Altman 2:26 Mm

Speaker 2:26 ... in intelligence, and how that was gonna be a huge boon for the legal profession over the next couple years. And so he had this, like, very strong viewpoint that there was something about legal data that the general models were gonna serve-

Jack Altman 2:42 Actually-

Speaker 2:42 ... in a very unique way

Jack Altman 2:43 ... Max, since you're here-

Max Junestrand 2:44 Yeah

Jack Altman 2:44 ... can you, like, explain, like, what was, what, what was that?

Max Junestrand 2:46 Well, so I think it's, it's worth to go back to 2023 and 2024 when I think part of the paradigm was you should train your own models. And, like, the general models aren't great, and fine-tuning is gonna be really important. For two reasons we were like, "Fuck that," right?

Jack Altman 3:02 [laughs]

Max Junestrand 3:03 Um, one, fine-tuning doesn't really seem to work, at least on the scale that we were operating, right? To train the new generational model you have to put-

Jack Altman 3:11 Mm-hmm

Max Junestrand 3:11 ... billions of dollars into it. And secondly, there was so much application that you had to build on top of the models to make them useful in your environment. And back then, I mean, just solving, like, basic data compliance, privacy, and sort of great file uploads, and, like, great parsing and great chunking and all of these things, that was where the value was.

Speaker 3:35 And there was another part of your experience which was that you were actually embedded in a law firm.

Max Junestrand 3:39 Yes.

Speaker 3:39 And so you were studying the shape of, like, what data law firms had in a way that was... You know, Bill talks about this a lot is, like, does an entrepreneur strike you as a, a learn-it-all? And it was clear that the early Legora team, when we invested it was, like, five people, they were just trying to learn everything they could about how the legal profession worked, and they didn't have any bias towards it. And so the other thing Max said, which you should, you should share with everyone, is because they were embedded in a law firm in a windowless conference room [laughs] in Stockholm-

Jack Altman 4:12 Sounds nice.

Speaker 4:13 [laughs] Sounds great

Jack Altman 4:14 [laughs]

Speaker 4:14 Uh, they had a deeper understanding, I think, of like, how a law firm... like, the data model of a law firm-

Jack Altman 4:21 Mm

Speaker 4:21 ... in ways that most of us didn't.

Max Junestrand 4:23 And I mean, just to take it back even further, like, when we started, um, I offered to buy a lot of lawyers lunch on LinkedIn 'cause I wanted to learn. So I would, like, literally cold write them.

Jack Altman 4:35 Mm-hmm.

Max Junestrand 4:35 And I would say, "Hey, I'd love to meet. I'd love to talk about, like, IP law. I'll offer to pay you your hourly fee and lunch." And they were all too nice to, like, make me pay for lunch.

Jack Altman 4:45 [laughs]

Max Junestrand 4:45 And they'd often end up paying for it, right? But that did, as, as Chetan put it, like, I think it allowed us to, uh, work with customers from the very beginning. So the founding team at Legora were all engineers. The first lawyer didn't join until nine months into the journey.

Jack Altman 5:01 When you had a lawyer join, had you already sort of, like, set the plan and the goal for the company? Like, was that done without experts, and was that important to do without experts?

Max Junestrand 5:11 So it's actually funny. I mean, the, the founding... And this is a bit of the Legora untold.

Jack Altman 5:15 Hmm.

Max Junestrand 5:16 Um, like, the-

Jack Altman 5:17 First revealed here.

Max Junestrand 5:17 First reveal

Jack Altman 5:18 Yeah.

Max Junestrand 5:18 The company formation was in 2020, and there were four co-founders.

Jack Altman 5:25 I didn't know that.

Max Junestrand 5:25 And I was not one of them.

Jack Altman 5:27 Didn't know that either.

Max Junestrand 5:28 Right. They were sort of working on this intersection between AI and law for three years with the early BERT models, and even a Swedish trained version called SweBERT that was impossible to work with. Uh, not only was it not very intelligent, it was also blatantly racist-

Jack Altman 5:43 [laughs]

Max Junestrand 5:43 ... 'cause it had been trained on, like, the Swedish, like, um, [laughs] like, forums. Um-

Jack Altman 5:49 Some racist data there [laughs]

Max Junestrand 5:51 Some racist data there. When the LLMs, like 3.5, came, that was when the moment shifted, right? And so we turned this into a company. Uh, two of the co-founders left. I joined, and then we basically said, like, "We're gonna work in the intersection between AI and law. We don't know what that product is, but we're gonna run like hell in this direction." AndFunny enough, the first lawyer who joined was a sort of soon-to-be customer of ours. So he was the CIO at one of the big firms in Sweden that we wanted to sell into, and he had built an early version of like a GPT plus the document management system. So basically, uh, like an LLM that could rag into the existing precedent and data that the firm was using. And he basically said, "Well, these guys are gonna run faster than me, and if you can't beat them, I might as well join them." And that turned out to be a good decision.

Jack Altman 6:41 Are you surprised by like how strongly the legal market has adopted AI? If I had thought, you know, in twenty twenty-three, let's say, or twenty-four-

Max Junestrand 6:51 Yeah

Jack Altman 6:51 ... like what's gonna really adopt quickly, like I don't know if personally I would've seen it coming that lawyers would be near the top of the list.

Max Junestrand 6:58 Yeah.

Jack Altman 6:59 I don't know. I mean, you've invested in stuff before too, so I guess this is for both of you. But like has it been a surprise over the last two years, the rate of adoption?

Max Junestrand 7:05 Yes, it's been like vivid. But, but second and maybe more importantly, uh, the law firm market is very interesting because it's, it's like this perfect equilibrium with frankly like pretty low differentiation. Like if you need to do a, a VC deal here in the Valley, like you could go to any, you know, the top five firms, and you're gonna get roughly the same thing. If one of them starts leveraging Legora to offer a better service at a better price point faster, all of them have to adopt it. So the equilibrium like shifts down, and then everybody has to move. So what happened in the law firm market was as soon as one big firm in a market, uh, sort of adopted Legora and went public with it, everybody else had to do the same.

Jack Altman 7:47 Mm-hmm.

Max Junestrand 7:48 That's not necessarily the same in the in-house legal sector, right? Like if one big bank starts it, like another big bank doesn't necessarily need it.

Jack Altman 7:55 But was there something about the process of the way work got done or the structure of it that allowed Legora's product to drive so much value so fast in a way that it did force that sort of prisoner's dilemma?

Max Junestrand 8:08 I just think the legal sector was so underserved with great software for such a long time that there was this like a lot of built-up problems that we could easily solve with LLMs, but they were really hard to solve like pre-LLMs.

Speaker 8:22 I also think you guys had a great insight early on, which was that there was like a, a deference and respect to the customers, that lawyers are really smart, they're extremely well educated-

Max Junestrand 8:33 Yeah

Speaker 8:33 ... they're tech-savvy. They're not programmers, but they're very tech forward. They use like the latest software. They use the latest devices. And so they were all gonna be playing with ChatGPT and Claude.

Max Junestrand 8:43 Yeah.

Speaker 8:44 And so if you showed up with a legal AI product, it had to be better than the foundation model.

Max Junestrand 8:49 Yeah.

Speaker 8:50 Otherwise, they were just gonna say, "Why are you deserving of my dollars?"

Max Junestrand 8:53 And Microsoft Copilot rolled out very quickly, like every law firm in the world is a Microsoft shop.

Jack Altman 8:58 Yeah.

Max Junestrand 8:59 Like everybody works with Outlook, uh, Microsoft Word, and, you know, where they store their documents basically.

Jack Altman 9:05 What have you found i- like to the point of you have to be better than the models, if you had to break down like as a vertical AI application, what have been the things that have allowed you to just be so much better than the models that it's worth, you know, the incremental-

Max Junestrand 9:20 Investment. Yeah

Jack Altman 9:21 ... investment?

Max Junestrand 9:22 So I think in the beginning, there was a lot of just foundational problems with the models. Like you had to guardrail them very hard to make them useful. You had to build citations, you had to build good RAG systems, you had to overcome context window problems, and there was a lot of rate limits issues, so you had to like juggle different models for different types of tasks. There was just so many incremental basic things to solve. I think as time has progressed, um, our product has moved further away from what the foundation models are and much more into this enterprise-wide platform where, you know, we're gonna transact billions of dollars of legal work-

Jack Altman 10:01 Mm-hmm

Max Junestrand 10:01 ... on the platform.

Jack Altman 10:01 Mm-hmm.

Max Junestrand 10:02 And we've moved from building a lot of the agent work ourselves, and we sort of let the models rip a little bit more, like OpenClau or Claude Bot or whatever it's called these days, where like with Opus 4.5 and Opus 4.6, uh, there was an extraordinary difference in, in level of intelligence and like instruction following capability. And so I see our job as let's provide the model the right environment and the right tools and skills to leverage, and then let's build a UI and a, and an interface with the rest of the business so that they can all leverage it, uh, comfortably and with a lot of trust. I do think that, you know, the model capability is improving so quickly makes us run faster, 'cause we have to be three standard deviations ahead of any general capability.

Jack Altman 10:50 Yeah.

Max Junestrand 10:50 And that's like a very good motivator.

Speaker 10:52 As an-- as somebody that's invested in a lot of software companies, like one of the unique things about an AI software company is that it's tactically built differently than a traditional software company. And I think it's becoming more known now, but when you guys first started, and you guys built up this org, the way you designed the org made a lot of sense for the product you were building and what you just described, which was like we need to deeply understand model capabilities, and then we need to bring that to our customers in a way that's deeply differentiated. Which as you explained to me meant we need to invest heavily in understanding the models, which then would lead to understanding what to build. But as models got better, your features may not matter in six months.

Max Junestrand 11:36 Yes.

Speaker 11:36 And so talk about how that led to an organization that was heavily technical, heavily engineering and researcher-led, and for as, a company as big as you ha- you are, you have very few product people. The number of product people you have essentially rounds to zero. You have like leaders, you have a couple of leaders, but that's it.

Max Junestrand 12:00 I mean, the founding team, we're, we're three engineers, and so, you know, the, the most natural hires were let's grab all the smart engineers that we know from college, and let's add them into the org. And in the beginning, you know-We had to build our own agent framework because like LangChain and these things that we initially built on, like couldn't get customized to the level that we needed back in 2024. As we understood more about the model capabilities, but also of the problems we wanted to solve, like let's take due diligence as an example. Um, it's really hard to solve a due diligence task in a chat-based format because you need to review hundreds of documents. And hundreds of documents are never going to fit into the context window of a single model call, at least not back then and, you know, probably not now either. So we built this new product that we called Tabular Review, big matrix, where you would throw in, you know, tens of thousands of documents, and you'd throw in all the prompts, and it started running all of them in parallel. And what we basically did was we just said, "Okay, three engineers, you're now on Tabular Review. This is your own company. Run." Over 10% of the EPD org at Legora are ex YC founders. So our head of engineering, Jake, who joined, he was a solo founder in YC. Our VP product, Adrian, was also a legal tech founder in YC and happened to be a both GC and a lawyer. And so as we've progressed, engineering and product has sort of stayed at the core of, of who we are and what we do, and I also think that everything else is sort of an expression of that. Like we can only market what we actually build. We can only sell what we actually build. And product lead compounds.

Speaker 13:31 Mm.

Max Junestrand 13:32 I think as, as you put it in the beginning, we did not show up first. Like Legora was not the first product that many legal teams looked at because there were e-earlier entrants. So we knew that we had to show up and be best, and if you wanna be best, well, then you need to invest in product. You need to invest in engineering, and I think you need to build that culture of like reliability first. We actually had a time period in the company for, for six months where we didn't sell basically because we weren't ready to like hit the gas on onboarding 1,000 lawyers a day and knowing that the product was gonna keep up with that. So we took the early hits of like investing in that.

Speaker 14:11 Talk more about that period, specifically, you know, the seed round you did with us was in March of 2024. The product went to GA October 1st 2024.

Max Junestrand 14:21 Yeah.

Speaker 14:21 And you called me early September 2024 and said, "You need to come to Sweden 'cause all of us need to sit in a room and just talk about where we are and what we need to do to get this thing out in a month." And, you know, we came and we sat, the whole-- literally the whole company, which wasn't that big back then. It was like 10 people.

Max Junestrand 14:41 It was like 20 people.

Speaker 14:41 Yeah. And so it was like the whole company, the founders, chicken wings and beer.

Max Junestrand 14:47 Yeah.

Speaker 14:47 And we [chuckles] and peanuts actually. Those were the three things served.

Max Junestrand 14:50 [chuckles]

Speaker 14:51 And there was like a very open dialogue of like, how do we get this thing out in 30 days? Because at that point, 'cause you were essentially, you know, weren't facing the market test, you were building. There were 10,000 things you could build, and that the sort of like outcome of that discussion was that we're only gonna focus on three use cases.

Max Junestrand 15:10 Yeah. Yeah. That's right.

Speaker 15:11 So talk about like well, one, you know, you calling me to tell me [chuckles] to come to Sweden to have that discussion.

Max Junestrand 15:18 And you actually showing up. [laughs]

Speaker 15:19 Yeah, I did show up. Reflecting on it, that was one of the most important things that, that you did in the company and the founders did in the company was at that moment say, "We have 30 days to go. We're just-

Max Junestrand 15:32 Yeah

Speaker 15:32 ... gonna sprint at these three things, not the 15 things that we could do."

Max Junestrand 15:36 Yeah. So I think there was this feeling of like you got these LLMs, they're so powerful. We learn about all these use cases in the firms and with the clients that we work with. Let's go solve all of them. Like wrong decision. Like you can't solve 15 things at the same time. And so we had to, to kill a few darlings, and we had to like really double down on the stuff that we thought was gonna work. And we looked out on the market, and we basically saw a few things that were really working, like as a paradigm for LLMs in legal. One of them was this big sort of tabular extraction. Another one was embedding it deeply into Word and Outlook. So basically having Legora be accessible wherever the lawyer is already working, and we were still called Leia back then. Like this was very early. We took the entire company. We had like a town hall, and I remember showing some numbers where like a particular company that just had one of these features were doing more revenue than us.

Speaker 16:33 Mm.

Max Junestrand 16:33 We were doing like 1.5 million at the time. That felt very painful 'cause we thought that we, we had a better suite, but, but we didn't have as much revenue because we were based in Sweden, and we were sort of mostly selling to still European firms at the time. So we just said, "Let's do these three things. Let's do them better than anyone else, and it's gonna be worth to buy our suite over anybody else's." And so I wrote this like very short product manifesto, sent it out to the entire company, and we sort of rallied the troops. I think it was off the back of that, that we had our first quarter where we doubled revenue, so we went from like 1.5 to four. We're like, "Oh, this is like ripping, and it's flying off the shelves." And then in Q1, we had another quarter where we doubled, where we went from like four to eight.

Speaker 17:14 Mm.

Max Junestrand 17:15 Like whoa, okay. Now we're talking. And it became time to launch in the US. Uh, we hired Patrick and Evan, who joined from a competitor, and we sort of had our first boots on the ground in the US. And then we felt like, okay, what we have is like a winning formula, so we just need to crunch it out everywhere. And now I think we're at another interesting point in time where we've built all these different tools, but the paradigm from now onwards is humans are, are probably not gonna work with all these tools. Like basically agents will leverage the tools that we built. So I remember early when MCP came, uh, our CTO basically went, "Well, now Legora has two users. It's human users and agent users." And every new feature that we build has to be able to, uh, cater to both. And now we're seeing more people like basically use our agent that uses the tabular grid or like our agent who uses our word editing capabilities than humans actually going and using those features

Max Junestrand 18:16 at all.

Jack Altman 18:16 Chetan made a cool point to me recently, which is that, um, because you ha-- we were talking about how, you know, companies that are pre-AI and companies that are just fully AI-native just have to be built differently in various ways. And the fact that you didn't build a pre-AI company, I think gives you sort of like, you know, this unshackled mind to like you're not even trying to think about some past alternative. You're just like, "Given what's in front of me, what should a company look like?" And you know, you talked about how like having YC founders inside the company has been helpful, and I'm sure there's like a lot there. But I'm curious about like what are like the main tenants that you've observed? You know, 'cause now you've probably hired a lot of people who did, you know, work and build companies pre-AI. What do you think are like the main tenants, ideas, cultural concepts that have been important to you just to like make it work in like a fully AI-native world?

Max Junestrand 19:08 Yeah. So I think this idea that Chetan brought up around, um, like you have to be willing to like kill the stuff that you've done in the past is very important. 'Cause I think in, in more traditional software, you had to build the foundations, and then you build the stuff on top of it, and you sort of kept building the stack. And in that world, it was also very good to have like a technical architecture where one feature would rely on the same microservices as like other features. But the problem is in AI, like maybe that feature now needs to scale really, really quickly, and the cost of writing software is so low that it's basically better to build your own stack for like each thing. And now that we hire, you know, finance professionals or even like lawyers internally to Legora, or we just hired our first like tax person-

Jack Altman 19:55 Mm-hmm

Max Junestrand 19:55 ... I think they come with a set of ideas of like, "Oh, this is how I used to do it in my old company." And everybody's forced to relearn, I think, and also question what their value is on top of the general model capabilities in a way, which this is like very painful.

Jack Altman 20:12 Totally. Brett, Brett Taylor talked about this on this podcast too. Basically, that like people are gonna build something, and six months later we might just kill that thing, and everybody needs to be comfortable with that-

Max Junestrand 20:21 Yep

Jack Altman 20:21 ... which I think historically would be a lot of painful internal conversations. Like do you have to change? Is that like a different culture for people too?

Max Junestrand 20:28 I think it's a different culture completely. I mean, I think the culture is you don't maximize for your function, like you maximize for the company always. And I'm very upfront with every exec who joins Legora that in a way, like you're joining with an expiration date, and you have to continuously prove that you like scale out of that in a way. Because the company is scaling so exponentially, I don't know if it was Mark Zuckerberg or somebody talked about like let's hire people with high y slopes and not like high y intercepts. I think about that a lot, mostly because I've had to do that, right? Like I did not join or start Legora with a lot of experience, but I've proven that at every new point in time I've scaled with the business, and so other people in Legora needs to do the same, and I think that goes for every function. And, you know, I think a, an engineering team that's shipping the amount that we do previously had to be like five hundred people, and now we can get away with being fifty. And I think there's even a question of like, do we need to be more than a hundred engineers, or is the bottleneck here really knowing what to build and building it in the right way, and designing an experience that works for, you know, hundreds of thousands of people that we now have on the platform? I think the paradigm is like shifting all the time. What's nice about our work is that engineering is sort of a, a roadmap of what's going to happen in other industries too. Like I think the general models have come the furthest in coding, but also those organizations are very quick to adopt and shift. And so like engineering orgs are today looking slightly different, and I think we can expect the same in, in, you know, legal organizations.

Speaker 22:15 Two things you brought up that you should-- it'd be great if you could dive into. One is Legora doesn't really have a long-term roadmap. Like you guys-

Max Junestrand 22:24 Oh, no. [laughs]

Speaker 22:24 ... react and build today.

Max Junestrand 22:27 Yes.

Speaker 22:27 And you know, when you first got started, you had this like nearly weekly cadence where that's how long you would roadmap to. And these days it feels like you almost roadmap on a daily cadence. And so like things change tomorrow, like you wake up, but it's like, we have to do something different. Talk about that lack of roadmap, and then also the other thing that you've invested heavily in is just understanding model capability and the sort of proprietary eval infrastructure you've built, where we've had these conversations with the foundation model companies of how you're able to identify latent model capabilities that they themselves are not aware of.

Max Junestrand 23:06 I mean, on roadmap, like way back, every new model just like unlocked new things, right? And when we got early access to GPT, like 4.5, and you just realize that, holy shit, like now it can finally draft like an end-to-end thing, and we don't need like all these harnesses and like things around it. That's amazing. Like let's unleash it in a way that that works. Now-

Speaker 23:28 By the way, y-to do that, you need sort of like a low ego organization-

Max Junestrand 23:32 Totally.

Jack Altman 23:32 Oh, yeah

Speaker 23:32 ... 'cause you build all this E-IP and all this software-

Max Junestrand 23:35 And it just tells it.

Jack Altman 23:35 Yeah

Speaker 23:35 ... and you're like, "Okay, now the model can do it."

Jack Altman 23:37 Yeah.

Speaker 23:38 Delete it all.

Jack Altman 23:38 You, you worked really hard for six months.

Max Junestrand 23:40 Yeah.

Jack Altman 23:40 We're deleting everything.

Speaker 23:41 Yeah.

Max Junestrand 23:41 Yeah.

Speaker 23:42 It's incredible.

Max Junestrand 23:42 Yeah. But I think a lot of the things that we have built, we know that we're gonna delete someday.

Jack Altman 23:47 And I guess you kinda need people to opt into that at the front end for that culture to really work.

Max Junestrand 23:51 We've also talked about it as like if we were-- if we're here today, and we start building for the future that's over here, like that's too far out. Like our customers are not gonna adopt that. They don't understand it yet. So we need to take them on the journey, and we need to take them on the path of being successful, which I think every iteration like cycle now is shorter. Like back in twenty twenty-three, twenty twenty-four, I think it was like slightly longer, like you'd have a quarter or two quarters because the models weren't moving that fast. Every upgrade was pretty incremental. But now it like flipped. Opus 4.6 flipped, uh, in capabilities, so now we have to revisit a lot of the things that we built.

Jack Altman 24:28 Do you know what the next flip you're waiting for is? Like is there a thing that you-

Max Junestrand 24:31 So actually I don't think... So, so it was funny, I was at the customer advisory board at Anthropic yesterday, which is I'm wearing my, my like Dario shirt here.

Jack Altman 24:39 You look like Dario.

Max Junestrand 24:39 Thank you.

Jack Altman 24:40 [laughs]

Max Junestrand 24:40 Most of that conversation was about-The models are now intelligent enough where they're no longer the bottleneck. The bottleneck is all of the software around putting the models in an environment where they can execute and do work, and humans can review that work in like a trustworthy way. They're seeing that across basically every single vertical and every single company. So I don't really think that we're waiting for new model capabilities anymore. There's like nice things to have, like it's nice to have better context windows. It, uh, allows us to, you know, do less garbage and context management. Or, or like when you overflow the context in, in memory and so on, you have to like deal with it to refresh it. So there's nice to haves, but I think we're at a point now where we just have so much building in front of us in, in terms of bringing the model capabilities into our world that that's where all of our focus is. I think on, on sort of discovering what the models can do, we thought very early on that evals were going to be important, and both building up like an exercise of building new evals, but also building out evals for all the use cases that we wanna cover for. Because in the beginning, it was a lot of like, "Oh, how's good is-- how good is Sonnet? How good is Gemini? How good is GPT?" And so we had to test them on the different evals, and a lot of our customers, um, actually contributed this. So they would give us, uh, manual tasks that they used to do, and they'd tell us, "Here's the evals, and we're gonna call you when we can get to 100% on these evals." And I actually remember it was a funds related use case, an LPA, um, key term review report that a Danish law firm was spending like three, three days on, basically. Like an associate would spend three days putting together that report. In summer of 2024, we had like 60% accuracy on that task. By the end of that summer, we had 100% accuracy. And once you got to 100% accuracy, I mean, that task is done. Like it's, it's over. I've adopted this mentality internally that if AI can do something, it will do it. And so our product, like we think a lot about solving legal tasks end to end, and once a task is conquered, it's done. Like we just like strike it out. And we're on this path of solving more and more complex tasks. Like you start with NDAs, but at some point you get to full on share purchase agreements, which are very complex. But we're gonna get there. I think the question for, for these organizations who are maybe more traditional and trying to keep up with the pace of AI is: How do you do that while at the same time do your normal job, right? I think a lot of the organizations that we work with really struggle with keeping up with the technology uplift, even like our developments. And so we're, you know, we're struggling by getting all the latest models, and then we're turning that into product, and they have to adopt it, and then their customers, and

Max Junestrand 27:36 it's... Yeah.

Jack Altman 27:36 This is a question I think for both of you. As I'm listening to you talk, I'm sort of like, you know, I can sort of see the, you know, the hill climb that you're on where you've like attacked, you know, one part of it and the next one's coming, and the next one's coming. And, you know, one of the things I'm thinking about is for, let's say, a new startup in legal, what would the right strategy be for them? Like how do you possibly get into the mix fast enough for all of these things? And then-

Max Junestrand 27:59 Exit to Legora.

Jack Altman 28:00 Exit to sell to Legora, that's a good one. How urgent is it to grow really big, really fast for Legora, given all of the dynamics around? Chetan, I'm curious like how you think about this. Like is it the same urgency as always, or do any of these dynamics mean that like getting to real scale is more urgent here than other places?

Speaker 28:20 We can go back to sort of launch day, October 2024. So when, when they launched, you know, roughly the ARR of the business was rounded to a million dollars. If you just go back into that moment, you know, there was this exercise of should we make a budget? And, you know, what, what we all decided around the table was there was no reason to make a budget because we don't know anything about the market. We don't know if people even like our product. We had instincts, but like we just needed to go literally as fast as we could to get the product as in many hands as we could, because ultimately the whole theory of the company didn't work until we got product feedback. And so that was literally the aim. The aim was like, get this out as quickly as possible into as many hands as possible. And I think one of the things that Max did, again, this is like it's cliché to say it's first principles thinking, but it is 'cause it's like the team was unbiased by how to build a software company. And so one of the things that you learned in SaaS was the way you do pilots is like you would go in, do like a time trial pilot where you would like give them access to the application, and the minute the a- the trial was done, you would turn it off, and then, then they would have to make a purchasing decision.

Jack Altman 29:39 Mm-hmm.

Speaker 29:40 A big thing that happened with Legora is they would go put Legora into your organization, and whatever you put into Legora, they would like leave behind even if you didn't want it.

Jack Altman 29:51 Mm.

Speaker 29:52 And so there was this idea that like, hey, you adopted AI, you did stuff with AI, you built some practices, but you're not like, whatever skills you built or whatever IP you built, it's kinda yours. And like we, we can leave that behind. It's not a big deal. It's like it's your skills, it's your things that you've learned. And then Max went around and, and just gave people like 30-day pilot, 60-day pilot, whatever they wanted, 90-day pilots.

Max Junestrand 30:14 Yeah, and they would run these competitive pilots, right? So they would say, "Okay, there's a couple of companies on the market. We're gonna wanna A/B test all of them," because it's really hard to pick just, you know, based on the feature set on your website. And in those pilots, I think we did an extraordinarily good job of delivering value. And so when the sort of 30 days were up, like if we shut it down, it would be a riot.

Jack Altman 30:39 Mm.

Max Junestrand 30:40 Right? Like people would roar, and they'd be like, "We've never seen software adoption like this in a legal organization, um, we need this and we, you know, we need it now." And in those pilots, we would demonstrate much better than any other company, um, the value that the product and the service around the product could bring. So we hired all these lawyers, um, who are now called legal engineersIt's a great term, I think. Forward deployed legal engineers.

Jack Altman 31:05 I was just gonna say, what about FDLE?

Max Junestrand 31:06 FDLE.

Jack Altman 31:07 Yeah.

Max Junestrand 31:07 That's right, FDLE. And they're amazing. Like, they're the most tech-savvy lawyers in different organizations who don't wanna make partner, 'cause, like, you know, that's one type of life.

Jack Altman 31:17 Yeah.

Max Junestrand 31:17 And they wanna work in a tech company. And now they get to work with their practice that they're amazing at and technology, and then they get to work with the best legal organizations in, in the world and, like, driving that change.

Jack Altman 31:28 And I would think once you're embedded in these organizations, uh, it's gotta be sticky.

Max Junestrand 31:32 I think Legora is very sticky. We've ripped out our competition at many, uh, organizations-

Jack Altman 31:36 What creates stick-

Max Junestrand 31:37 ... at this point

Jack Altman 31:37 ... what creates stickiness?

Max Junestrand 31:38 So the stickiness is the, uh, use cases and the cadence and, you know, if you've invested time in building up a workflow that, like, works for you, why would you wanna switch?

Jack Altman 31:49 So is it that? Is it-

Max Junestrand 31:50 Is it... It's usage stickiness.

Jack Altman 31:52 It's not data.

Max Junestrand 31:53 Not-- No, not yet, and not, not any real technical implementation, which is great, because, uh, our competition has been deployed in a lot of places that sees no real usage or very simple use cases, which means that we can go there, show them, and display clearly in a pilot that we deliver much, much better, and then we can easily swap it.

Jack Altman 32:16 Mm.

Max Junestrand 32:16 So we actually have a dedicated, like, migration team moving deployments over to Legora.

Speaker 32:21 And I think 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, which was, like, if a customer wanted to buy a certain way, wanted to do a pilot, whatever.

Jack Altman 32:40 Mm-hmm.

Speaker 32:41 Just don't add friction. That was actually the key unlock, which was like, there was this idea of let's just go get this in everybody's hands and not to have any bias. And so one of my favorite stories about Max is that he came to San Francisco to sell a bunch of clients, and then, you know, he texted me and he was like, "Are you free for dinner?" So we met for dinner, and then he asked for a ride to the airport, and I casually asked, "Where are you going?" Expecting, to say, Seattle or LA or something. And he was like, "I'm going to New Delhi."

Jack Altman 33:10 [chuckles]

Speaker 33:10 [laughs] And I was like, "Why are you going to New Delhi?" And he goes like, "Well, like, one of the largest firms in India wants to buy, so I figured I'd, like, go give it to them."

Jack Altman 33:18 That's crazy.

Speaker 33:19 And so you know this. In SaaS, it was like, no, like, do the west regional-

Jack Altman 33:25 Yeah

Speaker 33:25 ... then do, like, the east regional-

Jack Altman 33:27 Yeah

Speaker 33:27 ... then do, like, Western Europe, and then eventually hire an APAC head, and then it-

Jack Altman 33:32 Yeah

Speaker 33:32 ... and then it was like this thing.

Jack Altman 33:33 Yeah.

Speaker 33:34 And because this company didn't-

Jack Altman 33:35 And by the way, there's gonna be like a year of engineering work to be even kind of ready to-

Speaker 33:40 100%

Jack Altman 33:40 ... serve India, yeah.

Speaker 33:41 And because, like, 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-

Jack Altman 33:49 Mm-hmm

Speaker 33:50 ... early. Like, one quarter into, like, selling the product. So Max got on a flight, went to India, and a customer in India bought. So it was one of those things where, like, because they didn't have the patterns-

Jack Altman 34:03 Mm-hmm

Speaker 34:04 ... they were able to get big globally in parallel.

Jack Altman 34:07 You know what I also wonder on this? We talked about this a little bit, that, like, um, being a Europe-based company means that you are multinational from the beginning.

Max Junestrand 34:16 You have to.

Jack Altman 34:16 And I think this-- I'm sure some of this is pre-AI, and I think it... I mean, a lot of it is. I also think there's a thing where, like, if you started in Europe, you've already learned how to sell to 10 countries, and you know that there's differences in the way that the cultures work and the way they purchase software and what the rules are and the regulations and these things.

Max Junestrand 34:36 Yeah.

Jack Altman 34:37 And so I'm curious if you thought about that when you invested and you're like, "Well, actually, maybe coming to the US will be easier one day." I'm curious your experience on that.

Max Junestrand 34:43 Yeah.

Jack Altman 34:43 But, like-

Max Junestrand 34:44 I mean, Y Combinator weren't particularly excited about backing a company in Sweden.

Jack Altman 34:48 [laughs] Yeah.

Max Junestrand 34:49 Um, I remember the first interview with Gustav, and he, and he's Swedish, like, a Swedish partner at YC, and he goes, uh, "So you're gonna move to the States, right?" And I go, "Yes, yes, of course."

Jack Altman 34:58 [laughs]

Max Junestrand 34:58 Like, that, that's the cue to say yes-

Jack Altman 35:00 Yeah

Max Junestrand 35:00 ... so you get the invite to go to YC.

Jack Altman 35:02 You're like, "No, I'm good," in Sweden.

Max Junestrand 35:03 And [laughs] yeah.

Jack Altman 35:04 You guys are opening in Sweden. Now open in YC.

Max Junestrand 35:06 And then, and then I came to YC, and I left three days later 'cause I had so much business going on in Sweden and I couldn't do work between 1:00 AM and 10:00 AM. Like, that was just impossible. But, you know, yeah, like, the Swedish legal market is smaller than Kirkland & Ellis.

Jack Altman 35:21 [laughs]

Max Junestrand 35:21 So of course you have to expand.

Jack Altman 35:23 Yeah.

Max Junestrand 35:23 And naturally, we went to Finland.

Jack Altman 35:25 [laughs]

Max Junestrand 35:25 And then we went to Denmark. Then I was like, "Well, I think we got the hang of it." And the most important thing was, like, the first customer we got, um, Mannheimer Swartling, the big firm in Sweden, uh, their managing partner had such a good relationship with the other firms in other non-competitive countries that he would just introduce me, and I would fly down and I'd say the same thing as I told him, like, "AI's gonna change the world, um, you're gonna need a partner. I'm here. Let's work." You know, that sort of made it, made it all, all start. But then the, the move to the UK and the US was, like, when we really started ripping.

Jack Altman 36:01 How different was coming to the US versus going to Finland?

Max Junestrand 36:03 Not at all. I, I had a rule. So 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, like, actually made it work. And my rule was, if we can serve two of the biggest clients in the world or in the US, uh, from Stockholm, then we're ready, and then we'll open an office here.

Jack Altman 36:23 Mm.

Max Junestrand 36:24 So Cleary Gottlieb, like, amazing Wall Street firm, and Goodwin & Proctor, and we served them both. We won their business in competitive pilots, and we could serve them from Sweden. Like, we did a lot of flights back and forth. Um, but after they signed, we said, "Okay, amazing. Now we're ready. Let's open an office here."

Speaker 36:43 So one thing about the market structure of legal that we knew about here at Benchmark ahead of investing is that legal has this unique market feature that it's a services industry. And in services industries, technology adoption is slow at first and then rapid later. So if you just look at any marketplace idea in a services area, it's like the marketplacesAre usually like supply constrained and then the minute supply unlocks, all of the supply comes online into the market-

Jack Altman 37:17 Mm-hmm

Speaker 37:18 ... and then you become demand constrained. And so if you study marketplaces, and especially marketplaces around services, this is something that you just like fundamentally learn as like one of the rules of marketplaces. And so in legal, the market structure is such that like the initial adoption will be very slow and hard, but once it unlocks it like really unlocks. There's some kind of like exponential viral coefficient that happens there. That's one part about the legal industry that's really interesting, and then how it overlays into software in legal is that if you look at the most successful legal software companies, they were all started in Europe, pre-AI too-

Jack Altman 37:55 Huh

Speaker 37:55 ... by the way. I had a hypothesis that part of the reason why you get that way is that you're used to selling the multi-geography and multi-rule systems from day zero. So for example, Legora sold to a Swedish firm-

Jack Altman 38:09 Yeah, that makes sense

Speaker 38:10 ... and a Spanish firm and a Finnish firm, and so yes, there are like laws at the European Union level-

Jack Altman 38:15 Yeah, but like from the beginning-

Speaker 38:16 Yeah

Jack Altman 38:16 ... you're like, "This needs to work for many people."

Speaker 38:18 That's right. And if you start in the US, what you end up designing is that there's the federal-

Jack Altman 38:24 Mm-hmm

Speaker 38:24 ... legal system, there's a state legal system, and then there's regional, but it's not as bifurcated as like literally different countries.

Jack Altman 38:32 And different languages.

Speaker 38:33 And different languages. And so you build all this stuff on day zero that you don't if you start in San Francisco. And one of the interesting things that Max showed us in the prototype in the first meeting is he had multi-language support already built and he had like multi-legal framework support already built.

Jack Altman 38:52 I remember. I demoed Sweden and Spain.

Speaker 38:55 That's right, and that was like remarkably impressive because it was, it was a company with five people thinking global scale.

Jack Altman 39:04 Yeah.

Speaker 39:04 Because they were forced to-

Jack Altman 39:05 Yeah

Speaker 39:05 ... 'cause they couldn't serve the Stockholm legal market. [laughs]

Jack Altman 39:08 Totally.

Speaker 39:09 Those two things just meant from they launched the product, they got a bunch of people to sign, then immediately it was like, "Let's go get the two big firms in every geography-

Jack Altman 39:18 Yeah

Speaker 39:18 ... 'cause we have to."

Jack Altman 39:19 And it was global from day one.

Max Junestrand 39:20 And now, I mean, Legora I think has become a, a hub in, like a technology hub in Europe. Like, people from Germany, from the Netherlands, from Spain, from Italy, they're all moving to Stockholm, even in the winter to come and work with us.

Speaker 39:35 So talk about, talk about the culture part of it, which I think stands out a lot.

Max Junestrand 39:39 Yeah.

Speaker 39:39 And so it's hard to describe to people what it's like to visit the Legora office.

Jack Altman 39:42 I mean, when you came back from the Legora visit recently, you were like, "Oh my God, they are so good," like, "Something's going on there that I haven't seen before."

Speaker 39:50 Right.

Jack Altman 39:50 It sounded different. I don't know if it's Legora specific or if it's like something that is, you know, happens in Sweden that can't happen in America, but like you were affected by it.

Speaker 39:58 It's true. Initially, even in the group of five or in that group of 10 in September of 2024, or group of 15, however the, however big the company was, there was like a, a common thread amongst everybody. They were like deeply technical, deeply intense, and a desire to win, and they were like gl- thinking globally from like day zero. And because they were in Stockholm, they also decided to recruit all over Europe from day zero to bring people to St- the Stockholm office. And so what ended up happening is I think you end up becoming a magnet for anybody that wants to build at the forefront of AI with a level of intensity and determination and this idea of like wanting to win.

Jack Altman 40:40 But so like what did it feel like to you? On your recent trip there was like 300 people in there. Like-

Speaker 40:43 Yeah

Jack Altman 40:43 ... what did that feel like?

Speaker 40:44 The level of engagement and buy-in to the company mission was truly unique, and I think the company has done a great job with this idea of building for the company. And I really do think building an AI company is like a real test in ego.

Jack Altman 41:05 Mm.

Speaker 41:05 It's like you literally can't have an ego because you have to have this idea that AI's just gonna do this.

Jack Altman 41:12 It's gonna be better than us at everything at some point.

Speaker 41:14 And they're gonna... It's just gonna do this. The foundation model will do this capability, and I'm like puzzling through this, and it's really hard, and it's an amazing feature, and, you know, we have these high bars of quality and polish, so we're gonna like ship fast, work really hard, build this amazing feature, and it's gonna disappear within 12 weeks, requires an extreme amount of buy-in and an extreme amount of humility that like we're just riding this massive wave, and we don't know where it's taking us, but like every day we solve today's problems, and we don't worry about tomorrow 'cause it's a different world. There's a different type of energy, buy-in, cadence that comes with that culture, and I think that it's really interesting. The disadvantage of Stockholm has now become Legora's advantage of being in Stockholm, which is that their talent population that they, that they get to hire from is not just in Stockholm. It's all over Europe, and now it's like all over the world.

Max Junestrand 42:12 Yeah.

Speaker 42:12 Because anybody that has that attitude is welcome to come join Stockholm.

Max Junestrand 42:16 I think our competition is, you know, has remote days, like three days in office, everybody leaves at 6:00. Like, from, from very early on like we served dinner at 8:00 every day. A lot of people in, in our region are sort of tired about like all these big American winners, and we know that we have the talent and the grit and the, uh, prerequisites to build a generational company. Like, yeah, we had to go to the US to raise money because we wanna work with the best VCs in the world, but, like, there is a, a, a level of like, "We can also do it," right? And w- we have Spotify just down the street.

Jack Altman 43:00 How are you gonna get this level of fervor in the US?

Max Junestrand 43:03 I think we have. I think we have a very unique culture in our New York office.

Jack Altman 43:06 Is it different, or is it-

Max Junestrand 43:07 It's very different.

Jack Altman 43:08 How is it different?

Max Junestrand 43:08 Like people... Well, it's not different from Stockholm.

Jack Altman 43:10 Oh, okay. But it's, there's-

Max Junestrand 43:11 We seeded it with, uh, you know-

Jack Altman 43:13 Yeah

Max Junestrand 43:13 ... the culture carriers from Sweden that came to New York. And I spent-

Speaker 43:16 I think tactically this was a really cool thing they did, which was I think like you should tactically talk about how you make everybody interview in Stockholm.

Max Junestrand 43:25 Yeah.

Speaker 43:26 And then they have to onboard in Stockholm.

Max Junestrand 43:27 Everybody onboards in Stockholm.

Jack Altman 43:28 Oh, wow.

Max Junestrand 43:28 Two weeks.

Jack Altman 43:28 So you live in New York, you're gonna join the New York office, you're going to Stockholm.

Max Junestrand 43:31 Onboard in Stockholm. Yep. People who join in Sydney-

Jack Altman 43:34 Mm-hmm

Max Junestrand 43:34 ... have to go on a 24-hour flight-

Speaker 43:36 [laughs]

Max Junestrand 43:36 ... to onboard in Stockholm.

Speaker 43:37 So you can't onboard anywhere else but Stockholm.

Max Junestrand 43:40 Yeah.

Speaker 43:40 And then when they first opened the first n- international office, which was New York, and actually London too you did this with-

Max Junestrand 43:46 Yeah

Speaker 43:46 ... which is like people that were based in Stockholm moved

Max Junestrand 43:51 Yes, seated

Speaker 43:52 ... to those offices-

Max Junestrand 43:53 Yes

Speaker 43:53 ... to set a cadence.

Max Junestrand 43:54 Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 43:55 It was just like, it's all gonna be the same as Stockholm.

Max Junestrand 43:57 And, and like the Germans who join Legora, like they have to move to Stockholm, and they'll work here a year, and then they can move back to open the, the German office.

Speaker 44:05 Yeah.

Max Junestrand 44:05 Like, you have to get it right.

Speaker 44:06 It's a fascinating thing where, you know, I've been part of many companies that have many offices, and every office tends to take its own character. And I remember the founders of Legora saying, "We want every office to feel the same," which was itself a different way of thinking.

Max Junestrand 44:23 Mm-hmm.

Speaker 44:24 Every time Max has had me visit the company, I visit during dinner time, which is 8:00 PM. Like, that's when they have guests is, like, 8:00 PM, and that's been the case in every office. And so that's another, like, thing that happened at this company, and it, it's interesting to me that it continues to scale. Which is, like, you can continue to onboard in Stockholm because, like, every-- The 400 people that joined before you onboard in Stockholm.

Max Junestrand 44:51 Yeah.

Speaker 44:52 So you should, too.

Max Junestrand 44:53 I mean, the only reason why we have that rule was because I did an internship at McKinsey, and we'd have dinner at 8:00. So I was like, "I guess that's how you do things." [laughs]

Speaker 45:01 [laughs]

Jack Altman 45:01 Totally. It's also, like, um, in some ways doing, doing the US office in New York, obviously, it's not like it's some outsider city. But from a tech perspective, there's a lot of people in New York like, "I wanna work at, like, a great tech company."

Speaker 45:12 Yeah.

Jack Altman 45:13 And, you know, it's, you-- there's obviously been more there than in Stockholm, but it's still different than San Francisco. And so I think you could probably bring some of that cultural thing there as a result of that too.

Max Junestrand 45:21 Yeah. Now we just opened in Houston, and we're opening in Chicago.

Jack Altman 45:24 Yeah.

Max Junestrand 45:24 It's all the big legal hubs. Is this correct? Did you do a reference with Daniel Ek?

Speaker 45:29 Yes.

Max Junestrand 45:29 Uh, yeah. And I, I think I heard this from you. You asked him about, like, what is the culture at Leia, and I think he said something like, "They're pretty intense." [laughs]

Speaker 45:38 That's right.

Max Junestrand 45:38 We were very upfront with that, even in interviews, and not intense to the point where it's, like, not fun. But, um, w- like, coming-- like, showing up as number-- like, being number two in this space is, like, not a outcome worth fighting for. Like, then we might as well go do something else. Like, we're only gonna play here to win.

Jack Altman 45:58 You think number one and number two will just be vastly different outcomes?

Max Junestrand 46:01 Oh, yeah, completely. And it doesn't actually matter if that's the case or not, but that's the way I meant-

Jack Altman 46:06 Gives you the right mind- gives you the right mindset.

Max Junestrand 46:07 Yeah.

Jack Altman 46:07 Yeah.

Max Junestrand 46:08 Like, I think everybody's dialed into that. And, and I m- I remember doing this interview in Swedish, and there's, there's a saying, um, that you, like, uh, like, blodsmak, and you, like, you taste the, like, you taste the blood, um, um, uh, because you, you worked so hard.

Jack Altman 46:23 Yeah.

Max Junestrand 46:23 And I basically told her in Swedish that, "Yeah, you know, sometimes I, I wake up and, you know..." It, it's a Swedish saying, so it made sense.

Jack Altman 46:29 Yeah, yeah. You just wake up-

Max Junestrand 46:29 But yeah, I'm like so tired

Jack Altman 46:30 ... I have some coffee, I taste some blood.

Max Junestrand 46:32 You know? Yeah. [laughs]

Jack Altman 46:33 And then I, then I go to the office.

Max Junestrand 46:33 And then, and then, and then she publishes the article in English.

Jack Altman 46:37 [laughs] Yeah.

Max Junestrand 46:37 And the saying doesn't make any sense in English.

Jack Altman 46:39 It's like Max's blood thirsty. [laughs]

Max Junestrand 46:40 So it's like-- no, it's like, "The Legora founders make-- wake up-- At Legora, we wake up with a metallic taste of blood in our mouths."

Jack Altman 46:47 [laughs]

Max Junestrand 46:47 And people in the company go, "Holy shit. Is Max a vampire, or does he just floss badly?" Like, "What's going on?"

Jack Altman 46:53 And what do you-- and what do you-- how do you feel about that now?

Max Junestrand 46:54 Now it's become this thing. Like, the Americans are #blodsmak. Like, it's-- everybody's in on it.

Jack Altman 47:00 It's a-

Max Junestrand 47:00 It's amazing

Jack Altman 47:00 ... it's a cult- I mean, it, it, it's-- I can, like, feel the energy of it. It's not, like, a culture that I think would quite work in San Francisco.

Max Junestrand 47:07 No.

Jack Altman 47:07 Like, I don't know if that's something that you can do uniquely as pretty well.

Max Junestrand 47:09 Well, when we open our San Francisco office-

Jack Altman 47:12 There will be blodsmak

Max Junestrand 47:12 ... they're gonna taste the blood.

Jack Altman 47:13 [laughs]

Max Junestrand 47:13 Yeah, they're gonna taste the blood.

Jack Altman 47:14 I

Jack Altman 47:15 love it. All right, my last question is you just raised a big round.

Max Junestrand 47:18 Yeah.

Jack Altman 47:18 Which is awesome. Congrats. What does this mean for the future? What's coming?

Max Junestrand 47:22 Well, maybe first off, just to give you a bit of insight into the round. Like, every round at Legora since Chetan has been a preempted round. I don't think I've ever actually gone out to, like, fundraise since, since-

Jack Altman 47:34 [laughs]

Max Junestrand 47:35 ... you did a round. Yeah, it's been, it's been very pleasant.

Jack Altman 47:36 It's good.

Max Junestrand 47:36 It's been very pleasant. We actually also have a history of taking the, uh, like, lowest term sheets.

Jack Altman 47:42 Yeah.

Max Junestrand 47:42 Um, I remember taking-- Like, we were actually-- So this is funny. Like, we were negotiating the number of shares that Chetan was gonna buy on Excel in front of us, and he goes, "I've never, ever bought a company where I didn't get 20%." And I go, "Well, I'm never gonna dilute-

Jack Altman 47:59 [laughs]

Max Junestrand 47:59 ... more than 17.5." And we sort of look at each other and go, "Well, I guess we're in a, in a bit of a stalemate here."

Jack Altman 48:05 [laughs]

Max Junestrand 48:05 It was like the immovable object [laughs] meets, meets the force. And so we, like, just put it on Excel, and we write down the exact number of shares, and we start going decimal by decimal-

Jack Altman 48:16 [laughs] Wow

Max Junestrand 48:16 ... until we're both-

Jack Altman 48:18 That's, that's such le- that is so legal coded.

Max Junestrand 48:20 Yeah.

Jack Altman 48:21 Like, just the nerdy Excel.

Max Junestrand 48:22 It's-- it was wild.

Jack Altman 48:23 It's perfect.

Max Junestrand 48:24 So you end up investing, like, 9.521.

Jack Altman 48:27 [laughs] It's true.

Max Junestrand 48:28 And we're both equally unhappy or happy.

Jack Altman 48:30 It's great.

Max Junestrand 48:30 I think we were both happy.

Jack Altman 48:31 Yeah.

Max Junestrand 48:31 It's a beautiful story.

Jack Altman 48:32 Of course.

Max Junestrand 48:32 We were both happy. But the Series D has been really great because it's the first time I've, I've done it, uh, together with, with, uh, someone else. So David, our CFO, who just joined from Vanta, he's an absolute monster. It was funny. We had our, our company-wide, uh, kickoff, and you get to, like, pick the song you wanna walk out to. And he goes, "Max, I want Monster by Kanye West."

Jack Altman 48:55 [laughs]

Max Junestrand 48:56 And I go, "Okay, dude."

Jack Altman 48:58 [laughs]

Max Junestrand 48:58 And it's like, the lights drop, and I'm like, "I have a big surprise for you, everyone." Like, "David is joining us as CFO." And, like, the speakers just explode-

Jack Altman 49:07 Wow

Max Junestrand 49:07 ... with this, like-- And I don't know if you heard the song.

Jack Altman 49:09 Yeah.

Speaker 49:09 Yeah, of course.

Max Junestrand 49:10 And it's like, starts, and everyone's like, "Holy shit, what's going on?" And he, like, comes up on stage, and he's just, like, so much energy. And in the references, people refer to him as a CFO. And I was like, "That's amazing." So he and I did the round. It was super fun. It was the first time we went out to actually do a fundraise. We had a, we had a deck this time, and it was w- wildly oversubscribed.

Jack Altman 49:32 Great.

Max Junestrand 49:32 I think we ended up having, like, 1.5 billion in demand for the round.

Jack Altman 49:37 That's a lot.

Max Junestrand 49:37 It was crazy, but we're super thrilled about Accel coming in and leading it. Some great participation from Menlo and Bain. You know, we're-

Jack Altman 49:45 Well, it's awesome

Max Junestrand 49:46 ... thrilled.

Jack Altman 49:46 It's a huge testament to what you've done and, um, super exciting, and I think you're, you're just getting started. So Max, thank you for doing this. Chetan, thank you as well, and really enjoyed it.

Speaker 49:54 It's great. Thank you so much, Jack. [outro music]