He Built A $1.8B AI Company With No Experience | Max Junestrand

Not building an AI, I think, is the biggest career risk, actually, like not being part of an AI company. But also it puts immense pressure on those people who have been working the same way for the last 20, 30 years. That's where the real change is hard. And so I'm seeing a huge transition there, actually. The whole space is going to change because if AI can do something...

It will do it. And what it's doing to the workforce is... Max Unistrand is one of the early pioneers bringing AI into legal work. And now he's revealing how AI is rapidly reshaping the oldest professions and careers. And what you need to do to stay relevant in the... AI will rewire and change the way that knowledge work gets done. And to give you one example, legal work, it's one of the oldest occupations in the world. But what's happening is...

AI is pushing the individuals to, earlier in their career, move up the ladder. So it used to be junior associate, senior associate, partner. But now you're adding a fourth step. to that ladder, which is AI. And I think it's actually highlighting more of the skills around AI. Your intelligence, your problem-solving skills, your charisma with the client, these things start to matter even more.

I would look at recruiting maybe slightly different. I would not be gunning for the underconfident, overachievers, but like the entrepreneurial, problem-solving, curious people. who understand that, yes, this is going to change, but I'm going to change with it. But what happens is if they are not incentivized and they're not encouraged by Hey, Max, welcome to the podcast show. It is so great to have you here.

Thank you so much, Ollie. It's great to be here. So legal AI, you know, is not the most exciting category that every founder thinks about entering into, but you decided to do it. What was that kind of eureka moment for starting Logora? And why do you want to enter this space? Well, I think it's the most exciting vertical. And I think, you know, more people probably should be building in legal AI. Well, look.

My two co-founders started working on the seed that came to Ligora back in 2020. So that was pre-LLMs, I like to say before AI was cool. And it was really hard to build.

frankly anything very useful on the ml models back then and so when gpt came it became this you know paradigm or eureka moment for this industry and suddenly so many problems that we previously couldn't solve became possible and we were very pragmatic about it and said well let's run at the industry let's apply the new capabilities that we had been armed with and go solve problems and

In the very, very early days, we actually embedded with one of the big law firms here in the Nordics, Mannheimer Sartling. And together with them, we sort of went, okay, practice area by practice area, let's go solve real problems. And when people started working with the product, then I think that's the most motivating thing as a founder. You start getting this momentum and you get the feedback from the early users and you start to iterate.

And the more you iterate, the better it becomes and the better the feedback you get. And then we were off to the races. It's incredible. And you know, one stat that I find absolutely amazing about you guys is your error has doubled. It was doubling every quarter.

How are you moving at this speed? Well, Ollie, I tell my team that when they join us from a normal SaaS company, they need to take the idea of... what they could achieve in a year and condense it to a quarter and so i think we've actually been operating at the pace of okay whatever you used to do now you're going to do it four times faster and if the entire company operates like that

then you grow really fast. But also the demand for this new category of products that are coming out is just... astronomical compared to many other things i think we actually have the luxury of not going in and sort of replacing or ripping out an existing system but we're getting to almost innovate and build our category as the underlying technology is developing as well i mean every sort of three to four months we're getting access to a new model

new frameworks, new ways of working with the models or sort of squeezing them for even more juice. And that's allowing us to solve even more things. And so it's almost like this growing, we're getting to grow with our customers. And that is really exciting. what we're also finding is in some of the cases we might land with one specific team like the M&A team or the litigation team in a firm but then very very quickly it spreads because

once they start to have real success stories that they can parade internally, you know, the excitement just kind of like carries it away. And most law firms, I think, have never experienced that kind of, you know. technology rollout. More often than not, it's the case of, you know, we're rolling this out, but nobody wants to use it. And so I think everybody's just at all in what we can do. And then you just run.

It's insane, right? And when I think of it as like paradigm starts, I mean, ChatGBT just turned three years old, right? November the 20th, sorry, November the 30th. You know, we've gone from like generative AI, we've gone to to AI agents, now vibe coding. And now it feels like AI is being adopted across basically every single category. What is the latest happening in legal AI? And have you been just surprised how far?

And quickly, this whole category has basically emerged. Yeah. So, I mean, to tell you the story, most of the products started in the sort of ChatGPT-esque, ChatGPT wrapper. you know, state. I think every five, six months, there's like this new paradigm or new set of features that are sort of expected of our category.

So that started with moving from the chat to what we call tabular review or the grid, where instead of analyzing a couple of documents that you throw into the chat, we're running across. tens of thousands of documents and every row in a big grid represents a document. Then we moved into Word. So we started drafting and reviewing documents inside of Microsoft Word.

And the challenges there is actually not the models themselves, but sort of how to manipulate the Word document in such a way so that all of the edits are being made correctly. There we started with simple use cases like redlining and NDA. But now we're starting to move into the realm of drafting really complex documents based on attached precedent.

previous written documents that the lawyer thinks are sort of the golden standard and the new terms, like the term sheet. And you just sort of attach all of it and you tell Agora to go figure it out. And the models are starting to become so good that they can make, you know. 500 edits and then the lawyer can just sit and track that so what's happening from a a user standpoint is earlier in the careers of these lawyers they're moving into the role of being a reviewer

So it used to be, you know, junior associate, senior associate, partner, and then they review each other's work. But now you're adding a fourth step to that ladder, which is AI. And what's exciting to me is... it's now starting to become almost unethical to not run it via the AI as well, because it's like getting another pair of eyes. And to talk about some of the new tech developments, I mean, MCP is pushing.

the ecosystem forward, because then a system like Legora can connect with other ecosystem players that the law firm is already using. But I'm also really excited about new developments in memory. in mimicking styles, in being able to... You don't love having to instruct the AI the same way every time.

because it doesn't remember your style. So you would love to have the OLLI style and then your firm's style. Maybe it would be Forsyth and Dunestrand, right? And you'd almost want the AI to know what that style is and then mimic that when it writes for you. Isn't it amazing? Before this, three, four years ago, there were some AI legal tools out there, but it's just progressed so much quickly. One thing I've been surprised about is...

Just how accurate some of these AI models are and AI legal work is super good, right?

And it's only going to get better. But then what does this mean for the junior lawyers coming in or the lawyers who are in their first one or two years? Because this whole space is surely going to change. Well, I think you're right. I think the whole space is going to change. I think being a junior engineer looks different today than what it did three years ago.

And if you would take what we have today and sort of go back three years in time, they would, I think many of us would go, holy shit, like that's AGI or, you know, like that's, that's amazing. That's incredibly good. And what it's doing to the workforce is it's. It's pushing the individuals to, earlier in their career, move up the ladder, right? And I think it's actually highlighting more of the skills around AI because...

If AI is going to review the data room and find the change of control clauses, you're no longer just pushing paper. your intelligence, your problem-solving skills, your charisma with the client, these things start to matter even more. And so I actually think that if I was running a law firm, I would look at recruiting maybe slightly different. I would not be gunning for the underconfident, overachievers, but like the entrepreneurial, problem-solving, curious people.

who understand that, yes, this is going to change, but I'm going to change with it. And I think, yes, it has big impacts for the people starting their careers, but also it puts immense pressure on... on the management and the partners who have been working the same way for the last 20 30 years those people that's where the real change is hard because everybody's coming out from university

I mean, they're already pretty savvy with AI. And so we're actually seeing the biggest adoption from that group. But what happens is if they are not incentivized and they're not encouraged by... the partners then it creates a really difficult um sort of organizational change management atmosphere because you're trying to mimic what you're what the seniors are doing because

Of course, those are the people who are deciding whether you get promoted or not. Yeah, I can see that. I can also kind of see when...

If we go back to your early days when you were just launching, finding your first customers, when you went into your first legal firms, were they like, what is this stuff? And how quickly did they actually adopt it? So that's actually a funny question. I think before the summer of 2023, because we launched in May, and I talked with a couple of firms then, the atmosphere was...

This is more artificial than intelligent. And AI is never going to be able to do sophisticated work. And after we worked, and we were coding that entire summer, just building. And when we came out of it, it had changed. I think for two reasons. One, many people got exposed to generative AI via ChatGPT during that summer. having to write a poem for a loved one or a speech. They got exposed to generative AI, so they understood what it was more. But also...

We were very hesitant to launch the product before it was great. We actually didn't go into general availability until October 2024. So really just a year and three months ago. And I think that you get one shot when you introduce a new technology to a legal team. So it really has to work and it has to be great.

the the consensus moved from oh you know this is something we'll kind of wait on and see to this is going to be a competitive advantage and if we don't start to one learn this to use it our competitors are and when clients started to ask more and more ollie how are you using ai to deliver me a better and more cost-efficient service If you can't answer that, you look like a clown. Yeah. Right? And so I think it's the job of lawyers to be ahead of their clients.

meaning that they also need to be ahead on AI. You're right. I think it's, I mean, yes, it's just insanely impressive how quickly this category has changed, right, just in the last two or three years.

but also surprising just how quickly it's being adopted within the workforce. How are lawyers using the product or AI in general? And, you know, why did you guys decide to go down the route of actually building the full stack of what lawyers need versus just building one very specific product, which typically is what we've seen in the past with other AI legal tools?

Yeah. So on the first question, Ali, I spent enough time with lawyers to learn to say that it depends. And that's because it looks very different in different practices. If we're looking at M&A versus if we're looking at litigation versus if we're looking at in-house, they're leveraging Ligora in different ways. But there are sort of three overarching categories, reviewing, drafting.

and researching and then these look different depending on what you're trying to achieve and in laguara that sort of works um it sort of works like their daily workspace where they have access to all of these things from a very central you know unit or a cockpit, if you will. And to give you one example, let's say you're running a due diligence on a company in an M&A deal, and you get access to the data room, you need to analyze...

ton of commercial contracts, real estate and lease contracts, loan agreements. I need to make sure that there's no red flags here. It's called a data room because it actually used to be a physical room.

where all of the data was hosted in boxes, right? Then it moved to a virtual data room. So you would go in there, you would have all the files, you would go control F. start to kind of look look for the look for the change control clauses but now in laguara you just stuff in all the agreements you let laguara know these are the things that i'm looking for flag anything for me and then you let it go to work

And it's amazing. It's so incredibly good that when we run benchmarks on the AI system versus what the human would accomplish, many times it's better. And so it will inevitably change the way you think about delivering services. And importantly... I think it will change the way that law firms monetize because you're not only delivering a service anymore, you're actually productizing some of that service.

Because software has never been able to do the things that it can do today. And so it's been very difficult for these organizations to get scale without building out a bigger pyramid. And that's the transition that we want to help them. help them on. It's going to be interesting, right? I mean, when you say that also, lawyers are notoriously known for being super expensive. And if all of a sudden, right, and maybe you've already seen this, you maybe have some insights.

But if a lawyer is drafting an AI agreement, an agreement which is being written by AI, how can he still charge $5,000, $10,000 just for an agreement? Are we going to see a shift in how lawyers charge as well? I'm of the view that if AI can do something, it will do it. If AI can do a piece of work, AI will probably do that piece of work.

The question then becomes, where does it get transacted? Where does that work happen? I think we're not yet at the point, and it's probably quite a way until there, where... where you would just like blindly rely on the ai you'd get the agreement and you go okay perfect like let's go but when the lawyers are in the loop and they're

verifying making sure it's good and they're setting up the system and they're embedding it with their expertise and knowledge in many cases it's the lawyers who know of course like what does the process look like like what do we actually need to do here drafting the agreement yeah that's like that's a small thing it's it's guiding the entire deal to the conclusion because you're buying an outcome right

I think a lot about outcome-based pricing or value-based pricing. So instead of thinking about maybe the billable hour, which is the best way you could sort of measure it before because it was very hard to understand what the value was. If AI is doing more of the work, I think we'll see a larger transition there. And I also think that we'll see a monetization of AI workflows and AI products that the legal service providers would be giving to their clients.

It's good. If you look at a deal, I mean, the way that the bankers get paid is a percentage of the deal. Totally. The way the lawyers get paid are by the hours. Totally. I'm seeing a huge transition there actually already. And AI has been on this almost exponential path of getting better. And I think it's our job to build a legal interpretation of that general increase in intelligence. And as we continue to walk up that path, I think it will just have broader and broader implications.

for the way that you market the firm, for the way that you market your services, and the way that you actually transact and monetize those services. What's just incredible about the whole Agora story is...

You guys only went through YC, went to 24 last year, doubling ARR every quarter, raised a couple hundred million dollars. How difficult is it? to now you're on this rocket ship. There are probably so many products you want to launch. How do you manage the role of expectations with the clients versus trying to ship as many products as you can and being the number one player in this category?

because that's what every founder wants to build right so interestingly the expectations of our clients is that we are going to ship a lot of new features So they are buying Legora, I mean, very much for what it is today, but also very much for what we're doing. They are not just picking a vendor and they're saying, oh, we bought some AI. Let's do a press release. We're done. No, no, no, no, no. This is a decade long journey and investment in the firms.

the people in the processes, in the clients. And we're here to make those firms that we work with and those in-house teams win. It's our job to make them successful.

Ligore is only successful if they are successful. And I think in LegalTech, there has never been... a team as ambitious and focused as legora ever before actually in the entire world because never before has this many talented people been focused on just solving the problems of lawyers and never before have we had access to such great tech to actually um make those dreams and those and those ideas into reality and so

When we think about the suite that Liguori is becoming, I feel like we have done 0 to 1. And now we need to do 1 to 10. And then we're going to do 10 to 100. And the clients want to walk with us on that path. And so when they call and say, hey, wouldn't it be really cool if you could email a task to Legora? Because I'm on my phone all the time. I'm on Outlook.

And then Legora emails you back with a response. We go, yeah, that'd be great. Let's build it. And a month later, we roll out the feature. And so it's very, very iterative and it's iterative and collaborative with our clients because they are the best legal service providers in the world, the best law firms in the world.

They're the best lawyers in the world. We are the best software developers for them in the world. And so we're saying, okay, if we bring you the software and you continue what you're doing, then together we're going to be even more successful. Because they are companies, startups, venture-backed companies who are trying to go after the service and the software, right? Like they're building the full stack.

And that's very different to our model. We want to build the operating system for the law firms and for the in-house teams so that they can do the work. We want to empower the lawyers to be even better. And what's difficult is the prioritization because there's so many things we want to build and there's so many things we're being asked to build that you got to sit down and then you need to take some hard decisions.

What will deliver the most value to all of our collective clients? And what can we build now that will be sort of compounded? compound the value of our platform. And we also think about it from the way of if it's something that the general AI models will be able to do themselves. It's probably not worth for us to build that because we can just incorporate it into our product later on. To me, inside Logora, what's happening?

Is it 996 Monday to Saturday? I've read you make this very clear to people joining. This is not going to be a normal job. You can be on the journey or you can find something else. Yeah, I don't think it's a normal job. The hustle mentality. Yes, we hustle. We have to. You have to. But we do it from a... from a place of excitement and from a place of wouldn't it be awesome if you know and

Of course, maybe I feel slightly differently about this than everybody in the company, but I've never felt like I'm going to work and then I'm leaving work. My personality is this company now. I think that happens to a lot of people here, to be honest. Because we know that AI is the biggest technological shift.

that probably has ever happened. I think it's much bigger than the .com. I think it's much bigger than mobile. It's much bigger than the cloud. And we're all born kind of perfectly in time. to get to build a generational company in this era and we want to savor that and we We don't want to look ourselves in the mirrors a decade from now or two decades from now and go, we really screwed that up. We had the chance, but we didn't do it.

That does not mean that everybody is here, you know, 996, and we don't take care of our families and friends and do things outside of work. But we are very committed. And we are very mission-driven in that we fundamentally believe that AI will rewire and change how legal work gets done. It's one of the oldest occupations in the world, right? Like lawyers have been and are a cornerstone of society. And now we get to, together with them.

shape what the future of this occupation will look like. That's incredibly exciting. That's very rewarding. My favorite Slack channel is the one that we call Customer Love. And it's just like love-bombed with these anecdotes of, I got this task on my desk Friday, 3 p.m. and I thought it was going to take the entire weekend to finish. But I was able to do it in three hours, send it over to the client, and go home to see my kids on the Friday evening.

We almost tear up because that's all the hard work that we put in that gets to that point. And with every rollout that we do, we're seeing higher adoption numbers. In the very early days... you know 2023 like the product wasn't there yet but now it's like whoa this is the most successful tech rollout this firm has ever done that's awesome you know

And I feel privileged and you almost got to like pinch yourself a little bit when we have this like company-wide town halls most Mondays. And I look out. And at the beginning of this year, we could all fit in the conference room. And now we're like 250 people. And you go, how in the world?

do I deserve to, one, work with all these amazingly smart people, and to how did I manage to convince all of them to come here and do this thing with me? Because it's crazy. But then, you know, you listen in on an interview and... and they tell the story from their perspective and they go you know i've never been in an engineering team where we're so focused on delivering value to the client we have so many awesome features that we're going to build

And the clients want to hop on calls with us to get early access. And then, of course, the engineering team gets to use AI to be as proficient as possible. But it's like this, it's just, you get pulled in.

It's amazing. It's amazing. I think, I mean, having such a cool team of 250 people and just reflecting when you're going through YZ, you probably never imagined it was going to get to this stage right. no to be honest with you i feel like every quarter that comes i'm like surprised by how much the business changes because i feel like we're a new company every quarter

And I really try to hire for slope and capacity and potential. Because I know that even if you're coming in at this level and the company is just here now. three months from now we're going to be here yeah and so i need people in the in the company that are going to be able to scale with the business how difficult is that and it kind of is uh it's similar to the question i was going to ask is around you know

Just last year, you were going through YC and you're now here. How difficult is it just to keep that momentum insanely fast and also just looking after such a big team? Because it just changed. And we've seen AI changes every single freaking day, right? Look, I think you need to plan. But you need to hold those plans very loosely. You can have an idea of what the world is going to look like in three months and where we're going to be, who we're going to have hired.

But then you need to be ready to throw that out the window. And I think one of the luxuries that I have is I have very few, you know, preconceptions about what the world... or about what a company should look like. I'm kind of getting to shape it as we go. And then you mix that in with folks in the team who have seen scale.

and they've seen what great looks like like patrick in the us who runs our our our global go-to-market team he's seen what the 20 million to 500 million arr scale looks like i'm just telling him to do it in a quarter of the time right and so everybody needs to challenge their pressure yeah because like we're yeah no pressure patrick um you know he knows

And that's what you sign up for. And you sign up for personal growth, for... a group of friends and and like-minded people who all want to do really hard things and i think One of the key learnings for me as we've gone through this scale is we've done so from a very pure place of values.

We've raised hundreds of millions, but we're very resourceful. We still do demos every other week where all the engineering teams get to demo. what they built in the last two weeks for the entire company. I still start my board meetings with product and engineering. That's what's come first because we are a tech company.

Everybody needs to care about the company, but everybody needs to care about the product because that is the representation of our values and what we are. I remember in the beginning, people like to say that... uh, they thought Leia, uh, brought Scandinavian design to legal tech. I'm not sure if that's a positive or a negative, but we like it. Yeah, I like it. We took it. Um, and

It's just really fun. Like everybody, you know, if you go to, if you, if you, if you wake up and you're like, okay, we have all these challenges, but we know we can solve them and it's really fun. Then. Suddenly, the pains of scaling, yeah, they're there, but they're small in comparison to how fun we're having. That's amazing.

A lot of our audience love this. They love the whole YC community and the YC offering. And we're big fans too. How was your experience going through YC? Was it always obvious that Legoria at the time was going to become just this mighty company? So I had a very unusual why culminator experience because i went there and then very quickly i decided to go back to europe because i couldn't do

sales between like 1am and 10am San Francisco time back to Sweden and back to the Nordics. I tried for a couple of days. I actually bought this ring light.

that I put on my laptop, like an influencer. So it wouldn't look like it was in the middle of the night when I was doing these calls. But my sleep pattern got so screwed up that it was just really, really... hard to do it um and maybe it's not you know in my place to say whether it was clear that lagora was going to be an outlier company back then

But I think if you ask a couple of the other companies in the batch, and if you ask the partners, they probably would have said so. That's awesome. And I think the reason why was... we came to yc with a very very clear idea of what we were going to do while we were going to build who we were going to serve and how we were going to do it and we were like full execution mode. And I think we, and I regret this to some extent, we did not take part in a lot of the social activities. We did not.

hang out with a lot of the other founders. We did not make a ton of friends. But we scaled from like zero to a million in revenue. I think you hired some of them, right? I read that...

One thing I love about the hiring culture with you guys is you hire entrepreneurial people, ex-founders, which not many scale-ups do probably enough of. No. So we actually have... six no yeah six yc founders ceos in the company wow that's cool so our cto is is a previous yc founder yeah our vp product previous YC founder, Stian, who runs some of the most important parts of our product, previous YC founder, Dee, who just joined.

She's joining in New York, actually, to lead our forward deployed software motion. And it's just awesome because I need... everybody in the business to to act like company owners and the company is becoming so big now that there's almost you know sub companies in the company and so if everybody runs with that level of ownership and that level of of caring then we're gonna do really amazing um and i actually remember so so when i when i interviewed um

I grabbed a coffee with Leo, who runs our European and EMEA commercial group. And he had sold his previous business. He was the CEO and founder there, sold it for like 50 million. And I got introduced to him and I said, Leo, I'm looking for our first sales manager. And he said, oh, yeah, sure. I know a lot of great people you could go for. And I was like, no, Leo, I want you.

And he was like, no, no, no, no, no. And I was like, yeah, let me tell you about the company. And now he's joined and the team is, you know, I think I gave him a number and he did 5x that number in the year, right? And the team has scaled tremendously fast. And I've had something like 200 travel days this year. And it's very easy for me to travel. knowing that I can rely on other owners and executives and people in the business to not only keep the lights on, but set the pace, set the culture.

hire the best people. It's amazing. You know, it's when a company grows so quickly, it's incredible to see. But also, you know, that whole fundraising process which they go through, it's... hopefully eventually worth it, right? And if you're open to talking about it, roughly just over $260 million raised basically in the last two years.

So many founders out there now are trying to raise as much as they can as quickly as they can. What is the best way for founders to fundraise today and to, you know, have the process so tight knit?

that it avoids distractions best way to fundraise is to build a really good company and build a really good business that's the obvious question i'm knocking on your door and they say hey we want to invest and you go okay what are you willing to pay and they say we'll pay this and you go that sounds a bit low And then they say, well, okay, we're willing to pay that. Okay, sounds about right. And then you do the deal and you get back to business. Simple, right? I think in total.

like total, all aggregated, I've spent less than one month fundraising or in investor conversations. Okay, that's quite unusual. Across every round. Like our series B happened in a week. Our series A happened in 48 hours. Our series C was like a week and a half. So yeah. What? This is not normal. I've never had to put together a pitch deck. Wow. I think you're the first company, Max, that I've ever met that hasn't had to put a...

Pitch Deck together and fundraisers in under a few weeks. You know, when I do those things, I pull up the dashboards and I talk about the company and I don't have time to design a deck. And the team doesn't have time to do that either. They're busy running the business. And maybe you'll pull up one of the board decks and talk a little bit about what's going on.

I think it's been pretty clear from the outset. It's pretty clear what we're doing. Legally, poor lawyers, and we're killing it. And so if that thesis is interesting, then... You know, you can come to Stockholm and you can grab dinner with me. Yeah, we should grab dinner when I know it's going to Stockholm.

But now you're kind of on this rocket ship. The day-to-day has probably changed for you a lot. How do you spend your time today and constant challenges that are always coming up? okay, you've got a great team, but how do you overcome them from a personal standpoint? So I think the biggest... Challenges that I've had personally is making the move from like executing to delegating and setting kind of clear expectations and goals.

in a structured way. And I feel like I've done that move over the last three to six months pretty well. And I still talk to the entire team.

Like I did when we were 40. Like, I'm pretty low bullshit. It's like, here's where we are in the world. Here's how I see things. This is what I think we need to do. Let's go do it. And everybody's like... sounds good let's go do it and i think that has aligned like generally the company is very aligned on like okay what do we need to do here i think the other thing that that you know me personally that I've had to do is you need to let go of some of your own self image.

And just accept the fact that you can do things. I met Macron two weeks ago in Berlin. And I did a speech to the leaders of the free world. And that's maybe not something I would have imagined myself doing two years back or a year back when we were at YC, but it went great. And I wasn't very nervous. It felt really good. And I think you just sort of go into this mindset where you're, okay, if this is what the company needs.

then this is what we're going to do. We are locked in on what we're trying to achieve here and what we're building and who we're building it for. And once you're like... allow yourself to fully commit to that a lot of movement in the world and like other distractions they sort of fall away a little bit um for me it's very easy to just

do what we need to do. What's been really cool as well is seeing the flourishing Swedish Nordisk ecosystem. I mean, as you guys... There's Lovable, Sana Labs, obviously slightly more legacy companies like Spotify, Klarna. It's incredible to see Sweden all of a sudden. I'm from the UK originally, right? So I'm like, wow, Sweden is really there.

What's happening and what do you think is, why is now a huge moment for... Only the weather isn't very good this time of year. It's horrible. I was living there in the winter. But I also think that... One of the reasons why I think there's this new boom is, of course, because there's a lot of talented people coming from these other bigger companies ready to build again. But also...

You learn how to work with a computer very early on. There's a great social security and safety net. We don't have a lot of respect for authority, I think, generally. Just because some people in the US are doing it doesn't mean you can't beat them. What's the game plan? Are you guys going to start expanding all across the world? Well, we have a really big office in New York. Yeah.

and a and a big office in denver and we it's important for us to meet our customers where they are where they're at um they're used to doing business in person we do business in person um They want to get onboarded with the product at the office, will show up at the office. And law has a lot of culture embedded into it as well.

And it's very language and jurisdictional specific. And so you've got to show up. You've got to know your stuff. You need to be able to meet the clients where they are. And we have something like... six, seven offices now all over the world. And I don't see us slowing that down. Well, it's going to be amazing, right? I think just seeing how quickly AI has changed just in the last three years.

Looking at the next thousand days, what do you think is going to happen? With AI or with Legora? With AI. So... I actually spend very little of my time focusing on things that I'm uncertain of, because we'll get to react to it when we know, right? And we have such great relationships with Anthropic, with OpenAI.

with Google that we get to see what's coming out before it comes out. So we can know how to plan for it. I think, again, what I've been excited about for the last year is... what I'm continuing to be excited about, which is throwing these agents or LLMs with the ability to run tool calling, have memory, and do almost autonomous tasks on our behalf.

That's still what I'm most excited about. And every month, we continue to move a little bit closer to where that's possible. It's possible already for simple tasks. It gets difficult when... It's very long-running tasks. Because if you're 3% off in every step, and you have to do 100 step, suddenly you're very off. Or you can be very off. And so more robust frameworks and tooling around those types of things is probably what I'm most excited about. And also what I really hope.

you know, the focus will go into in the next 1000 days. If you weren't building Legora and in this AI category, any other ideas you were kind of thinking about or ideas you've been, you would like to maybe start one day?

Well, not building an AI right now or not joining a company like Legora that's building an AI, I think is the biggest risk. It's the biggest career risk, actually, not being part of an AI company. I agree. And it's really fun. i think for myself i'm i'm i'm quite excited about physical robots um i just think that's like an exciting and cool thing you mean like physical robots as in

delivery, having a robot in your kitchen. These robots that you have, humanoids. Yeah. I think that's pretty exciting. It's insane, right? Yeah. I like the idea of that. And it feels like there's a lot of difficult problems there to solve. And I think it's inevitable that it's going to happen. Robots. You know, I was just saying SF. In fact, I'm working in AI. Otherwise, I'd work in AI.

AI and robots, they kind of go hand in hand. I was just in SF not so long ago and for the first time really saw these Waymos going around. They're amazing. I showed my mom and dad and they're like, what? It's one of the coolest tech demos ever. Incredible. Incredible. Yeah, and it's just like, I mean, this whole category is kind of moving so quickly. I think maybe for our parents' generation, they maybe don't all completely understand it, like mine. But for the ones coming through...

Some founders even say today, I don't want to sell an AI company because I'm too late. I think we're just getting going, though. We're kind of at that, just day one still. We've done zero to one. It's going to be really exciting. LaGuardia, what an amazing ride you guys have just been on. Really just in two years since Jan kind of went to 24 when you went through YC.

Looking at the next, the big audacious goal, obviously you've become the number one company in AI for legal, but what is that core mission and how are you going to stick to it? Well, as I said before, we're convinced that AI is going to fundamentally rewire and impact the way that knowledge work gets done, and more particularly in legal. Lawyers really deserve delightful software that augments, empowers and enables them to do more, not something that gets in the way.

We have so many lawyers in the company, and they're amazing. Most of them we call legal engineers, actually. Sometimes they refer to themselves as recovering lawyers. And I want to remove that word. I don't think you need to recover from having worked in law because software is going to help you do so much more with less. That's our mission. Amazing.

Max, this has been amazing. Thank you so much. Really excited, obviously, to see where Logroco is next. And thank you for sharing your journey. It's almost like just mind-blowing just to see how quickly a company has scaled in just two years. Before AI existed, it would normally take a company at this scale maybe five, ten years. You guys have really done it in two. So congrats. I'm really excited to see where you guys go next. Thank you so much, Oli. It was lovely to chat.