Max Junestrand, CEO of Legora

All right. What do you want to talk about? Uh, well, I wanted to start talking about Jude Law. Um, how Jude how does one um how does one grab Jude Law to be um um your profile in advertising? So, has anybody ever looked at advertisement or marketing for a legal technology company and said, "That's [ __ ] sexy." No, it is the most boring, the most bland. It makes like automotive parts look hot. And I think it was after at least one bottle of wine in the office and somebody going, you know, this like AI powered law slogan we have. What if we got like Jude Law to like say it? Hey, I'm AI powered law. and then like you know use the computer a bit and we were like that's a great idea. So we went to an agency and we were like hey can you get in touch with uh with Jude Law and they said absolutely not he's impossible to get and there's this very weird moment in Hollywood right now where a lot of the big actors and screenwriters are anti- AI because they're starting to write a lot of the scripts. They're setting the colors. They're doing cinematography. And so for an actor to go and stand behind an AI company is a quite big stance in the market. And we got into contact with Jude after chasing him for about 6 months and he said absolutely not. But then we were like what is Jude going to buy it after? He is a sophisticated person. So we got on a call and we're like but Jude like just let us show you the product. Like let me show you our customer testimonials. and we sent him some of our videos and we sent him these quotes. We have a customer Slack channel that's called customer love and it's just like this quote from like teams and outlook where lawyers are going I use Lora to review a thousand agreements in one day and I got home to see my family in time for the weekend and we just like plastered a PowerPoint with like so many of these slogans and he was like wow this is amazing I want to like I can get behind this but it's really important for me that I stay Jude law like I don't want to be a person I don't want to be Lora I want to be Jude law and we went well what if we're just like there's a new phase of law and then we ran with it and he said I want to bring my own screenwriter I want to bring my own um cinematographer and he ended up getting a Saturday night live scriptor and the cinematographer of Oenheimer we were like you know we raised a lot of money but you know not that much Um, and you know, they went into the studio and they just like came out with this amazing film. It was so funny. And now the marketing team at Lora have set a really high bar for themselves. So, uh, for the next campaign. So, if anybody's working in marketing, we need your help. Um, I love that. I I saw the video and I was like, "Wow, this is like amazing." And then like as I landed in Stockholm, it was everywhere. So 17 touch points. Yep. And and I'm sure you sent it to all the great lawyers you know. You're like this is so funny. Like you should look at this. And we actually had a lead come in through somebody's mom was like oh was like this Lora thing I've heard about before. Like dude Law and she's like yes. You know so now we have the connection. Um great. Let's talk about something. That was a great opening question. I love it. I love it. Uh let's talk about um the audience here. So a lot of people here are not starting companies. A lot of them are working as companies or working at startups or in school. Uh when you were in school, how were you thinking about the options of what you should be doing with your life? You know, when I was in school, I just tried to do as much as possible. I couldn't like I did a bit of computer science. I went and studied a bit of business. I did Mckenzie. I worked at two other YC startups. I only did one week at the picked with Anton. and Anton then tried to hire me and I said no I'm going to finish my degree. Um and so I felt like I I got to see quite a lot and you know frankly people ask me like did we pick law or did law pick me? I think law picked me and then we just decided to run like hell and we never you know thought about doing something else. How do you think about risk at the time? Like did it seem did that appear risky to you to start something or did it seem like a natural step? Well, it didn't seem that risky to work on something over the summer when I still had my full-time offer at McKenzie in the back of the pocket. Um, and then actually when we got this got accepted into YC was when I called them and I said I'm not coming back. And I'm actually not the only person at Lagora who's done this. It's a group of, you know, 10 15 people who had offers at McKenzie in particular. Even Jake, our CTO, who was also a previous YC founder, um he he had put off his he did an internship and then he kept the offer for six years and they started calling like are you ever coming back and then one time no I'm not coming back. Um tell us about the the YC kind of like the like you got started and then you applied to YC and then what was like just like what do you remember from the the months before YC or the month? So let me paint paint you the timeline here. So, so we started working in the summer of 2023 and there was like an early applicant program for the winter batch. It was like an AI what you Yeah. Like an early applicant. It was perfect timing like your batch was probably the not the peak but it was the first best AI batch. Yeah. And so we got like an early application in and you know hopefully you guys saw some change between the delta between our first interview and then three months later. And when we got accepted, I remember you calling me and going, "Hey, are you going to move to San Francisco?" And that's a trick question. Everyone say yes and then you don't have to move. So I was like, "Yes, Gustav. Yes, Gustav. I'm going to move. I'm still in Stockholm." Um, and after we got uh accepted, I think that bought us time. So we got the offer in August and we were like, "Wow, this is really great." Now we have time before YC to like really work on the product, like really get everything in order and we didn't know what to expect of YC at all. I had actually expected a lot more companies to have figured things out. I expected coming into YC with you know lots of other really smart and good companies that were already doing tons of revenue and that knew what they were doing and it was you know quite the opposite actually like a lot of people were still searching we realized that we had amongst the highest revenue in the batch and we were coming in with such FOMO like three college dropouts from Sweden and we were like we're going to meet these PhDs from like MIT and Google and da da da and we just came in with I think a lot of confidence but also with imposter syndrome and when we became part of the batch we actually took our company with us. So we were about 10 people in the company at the time and all of the engineers came to us to live in the Airbnb and so we were [ __ ] grinding and it was so it was like a like a real goolog. It was like a work camp. Like I I hope that MJ is in here to like put that in in writing. But like we worked so [ __ ] hard and we bought this really shitty food and like me and the other sales guy to him. We bought this ring like these lights to put on our laptops because we were doing sales calls between 1:00 a.m. and 10:00 a.m. every day and then we tried to sleep for a few hours and then we'd go to IC. I think the thing that we had which a lot of other companies didn't we already knew what we were going to do. It was pretty clear to us at the time and so I decided to move back to Sweden. I uh bunkered in a conference room and I just started selling and I was running around Stockholm with my little briefcase and I think people were flabbergasted by the fact that somebody was so excited about legal technology because these uh chief innovation officers, these knowledge managers, these legal partners had never seen somebody be excited about selling them technology ever. They're used to these really tired salespeople and our product was frankly not that great, but they wanted to work with me and they wanted to work with us. And half of them probably thought I was on cocaine. Like they were I was like, "This is the [ __ ] future and you have to work with us and we're going to make you win. And by the way, the biggest firm in the Nordics already work with us. So if you don't, you're kind of a loser." And they were like, "Okay, I get it. I have to get on the train. And then we made a very tactical hot swap. So the team that was in uh in the US shipping in YC, they came back to take care of the customers because I had to go to YC to do the fundrais. And I think this is a underappreciated part of YC for at least firsttime founders with very little network. Uh there's a lot of investor reach and there's a lot of signaling value to be incy. You basically get a lot of investor inbound building up to demo day and then you just schedule everything. So you have like 80 meetings in a week and you just like start to crunch it out. And I have found that one of my real skills and strength is when it counts I [ __ ] deliver. And so, you know, I got put in these investor conversations. I remember we did a practice round. We didn't. Yes. I was pretty shitty. Like we were Yeah. He's like, "Yeah, you were tired. Tired and unprepared. We were tired, unprepared, bad. And I don't You guys didn't You guys gave some feedback, but you were probably like they're screwed." And then we got into the into when like scared lag like it mattered and we [ __ ] smashed it. And I remember going to the Benchmark office and Benchmark is one of these like legendary VC firms. And I sat down with Peter Fenton and with Chathan who's now on our board and we did a 30inut pitch. They loved it. And I walked out and Peter Fenton turned to Chaon and said, "The guy is perfect. The only problem is that he's from [ __ ] Sweden." And I'll tell you what, I don't think that's going to be a problem anymore. We are [ __ ] show them and then it's like then it's like a domino like the next thing, you know, leads to the next thing and you get put in these environments where you need to show up. You need to find a way to keep energy as you go along. This is hard because as you start racking up notes from investors, you start reading into the notes and thinking they must be right, I must be wrong. And you get a little bit sadder for every meeting. It's hard to keep your momentum and your energy up. But you have to because investors, they can see that. They can they can smell it that you are not confident in your own company. And in order to get anyone else to be confident that you're going to succeed, you have to be confident yourself. And I think you had that naturally. Yeah, I can I think I can on on the go create that. And you know, one one of the other things is that some companies will work out and some companies will not. And that's okay. And you know, we have thought a lot about what we want to do in the long term with Lora. Um we have decided that this is our lives work and I've decided that personally. This is my company. And so when you've decided that your the amount that you care and your ambition I feel like creeps up and so you know one day would love to erase that legal in front of legal tech Lora and you know I think one of the best companies in the world is Google because of their um their breadth like they created such a good business in advertisement and search that they got the opportunity to do self-driving cars. within the same umbrella, Alphabet. Like, that's [ __ ] cool. And Facebook was so successful that I mean, they're kind of fumbling the ball a bit. But, you know, at least they like tried to go do meta and it was like a cool idea. Um, I used to build video games for for the VR headset and I remember being very nauseous when I had to game test all of them myself. Um, and that's what we want to do with Lagora. We want to create from Europe. I mean, the largest tech company we have is SAP. like [ __ ] SAP, are you serious? And now I think there's a unique moment in time where the leverage and and shift can happen. And I tell this to law firms all the time. You know, if you're ranked number 150 in the US, AI is your [ __ ] ticket to go from 150 to 10, right? And I think this is our opportunity as well from this part of the world. Um, technology is democratizing access to technology, access to talent. And the only thing we need is the ambition. And at Lora, we actually did the math. 15% of our entire engineering and product organization are XYZ founders. And so we're just a group of people that I think have all, you know, like locked arms and we're like together, you know, apes together strong. You know what I mean? Yeah. That's like Lora. And now we get to build something truly truly massive together which I'm um you know equally excited about with the organization and the team that we're building as much about as the product. We do say every startup is a series of mini games and once you won your miniame you're on to the next one and now you are winning a mini game. You won multiple ones but you're on to the next one. Maybe that's about to start now. Yes. But I also remember in October of 2024 was when we went into full like general availability. We were like 30 people in the company and I had a slide and we had three core features. We had our our agent in our assistant. We had this big thing called tabular review and then we had a word addin and we wrote a three-paged word document that was our product manifesto and it basically said we're going to be the best in the chat. we're going to be best on this table thing and we're going to be the best in word and there just happened to be one company that only focused on building this word addin and one company who only focused on building this tabular review thing and then of course you had chach for the assistant and we said if we can be the best at all these three and bundle them we will win but the problem was we were doing 1 million ARR the company that was only focused on the table thing they were doing almost 50 they were doing 50 times our revenue venue focused on one single thing and we had the other stuff as well and now we just enormously surpassed them and we've turned so many other clients. So I think it's also to be um to be mentioned that it's easy to overfocus on the like here and now and you do need a even in this like very fastm moving shortterm world you need to have a slightly longer horizon strategy of how you're going to win. Uh Pidge had a fun uh advice at the office that we should write a sci-fi novel about you know what a lawyer 10 years from now and how they will work because at the end of the day it's that future we are building for and when others are opportunistic like we will dig into the ground to the ground and like keep grinding it out. Where is Lora today? Um you passed 100 million in ARR and I don't even know how many people that work at the company. So things are going well. Things are going [ __ ] great. Um we this time last year we were 40 people. We're now close to 500 spread all the way from San Francisco to Chicago to Texas to New York, London, Stockholm, Germany, India, Australia. We are going global. Uh because turns out lawyers work the same way all over the world give or take. And the energy and the feeling in the company is that, you know, we've we're about to hit base camp and now the real climb is about to begin. We have sort of proven it to ourselves that we could do this part of the journey, but nobody is content. We wake up, we're excited, we're going hard. And I think one of the things that is that is very clear is that Lorra is run by a lot of founders in the entire company. And so there's like a lot of this founder mode energy and different product departments are basically run by ex CEOs and so they're all just running at full speed ahead. And the things that I'm most excited for is actually the change that happened over Christmas. So I think everybody here felt like a big step change in the u intelligence of the and the capabilities of the models and what that has unlocked for us in the product and the approach that we had for a really long time was about how do we augment the lawyer and the work that they're doing? How do we help them in their like individual task? But now because of the capabilities of the agents and the harness that we have built for our type of tasks, the content that we now have access to, all the different tools and the trust that we have within these large enterprises where we can access all of their documents, all of their emails, like now we can build really powerful um proactive agents in a way. And so, you know, instead of opening your email inbox and it's sort of like super messy and if you're a law firm partner, you have, you know, 500 geared up from from just yesterday, like Lora will have taken that looking in the looked in the context of all the matters that are happening. It will have done work on your behalf and we're starting to actually move into a world where one of our main bottlenecks is evaltoend work products because we're no longer just working with an individual task. We're really looking at the sort of what's an example? An example would be a a large M&A transaction where there's like many different steps. You can break down the steps and take the due diligence part for instance where you get the entire data room and then you well for often it's like completely unstructured. So the Lora agent now has access to tools where it can manipulate the file tree. So you can just tell it like hey structure the data room here's our template folder structure. and it's just like bipop, you know, let me go do it. And then you tell it, okay, it's this type of company. Here's the type of diligence uh questions that we want to run through. Let me know if any content is missing. And then Leguar starts to do the thing. And some of these tasks take 20 minutes, 30 minutes. They take a long time to run. And so now the lawyer or the legal professional is moving from like working with it um in real time to very much like working with cursor or clar code like you're giving broader instructions and then you're having the agents go out and do work in parallel and I think that has been a very exciting movement for us. I feel like we're also trailing like six months behind code. So code will always be at the frontier because it's naturally a lot easier. It's binary. It's um the context problem is a lot easier. The models have been trained on it sort of out of the box and so it's very easy for us to see where the future is headed within our domain just looking at that. Got it. Um thank you. The question that a lot of people have are talking about is when I was in YC um the question we always got is what if Google does this? And it was a valid question at the time because they were actually pretty good. Uh now over the next 15 years they didn't do that very much like they actually did not execute on almost anything of the new internal products that new products that they started and eventually started sort of somewhat laughing at the question maybe not in AI but on the other topics we were kind of laughing at the question. Um you're getting the question or other founders here are going to think about what is open AI going to do? What is entropic going to do? Um and um curious mostly what you have for a founder who's worried about that. Yeah. Like what do you tell them? So I would view it very much you you we've actually seen this play out one time before with um databases and infrastructure and AWS and I think you can look at companies like MongoDB and you know how did they position themselves against AWS and what did they build which wasn't natural for a bigger platform like AWS to build um and I think the real question is like what is your mode when the models continue to get smarter, right? I think that's the sort of real underlying question here. It's not like is Anthropic going to do it? Is OpenAI going to do it? It's like what's defensible in your business assuming a continuous uh either exponential or linear increase in the model intelligence. Cuz if we all think about a world where the model is so good that it on the fly writes all the code, gets all the data, figures out all the print, like everything to solve a task, then we should all go have a pin colada instead. And so I don't just like I naturally don't think that's going to be the end state. And so what we think a lot about is what are the uh inputs and outputs? What what is the proprietary data? What are the workflow modes? What is the behavior that we're teaching our users? And I think for Lorraa, we understood that we had to get big