How do you scale a global company while transforming an industry as traditional as law? In this episode, Max Junestrand, Co-Founder and CEO of Legora, shares how he’s building the world’s first truly collaborative AI platform for legal services.
Max reflects on his unconventional path from engineer to entrepreneur, what it took to win over law firms as an outsider, and why ambition and adaptability matter more than experience in fast-scaling environments. He also opens up about navigating hypergrowth, hiring with intention, and the cultural values that drive Legora’s mission to reshape how legal work gets done.
Takeaways:
Pioneering Global Expansion: Max's approach to expansion defies conventional paths. Instead of focusing solely on local markets like many Swedish companies, Max boldly decided to expand globally.
The Power of Collaboration: Max stresses the importance of a shared mission between stakeholders and service providers, focusing on delivering unparalleled value and continuous improvement in legal services.
Hiring and Culture Building: Max places a strong emphasis on ambition and cultural fit when hiring, believing these attributes are crucial for scaling a company. He maintains personal involvement in the interview process to ensure new hires align with the company’s high standards and growth trajectory.
Learning and Growing from the YC Experience: Max’s experience with Y Combinator (YC) was transformative. Despite the complexities of maintaining operations during this period, the experience underscored the importance of mentorship and networking.
Pushing the Envelope: Max underscores the importance of maintaining a proactive stance in innovation. By consistently exploring new pathways and pushing boundaries, he ensures the company remains at the forefront of technological advancements.
Quote of the Show:
“ There's a real value in actually being the second mover, and the value comes from two things... You get to see what is the right path and what is the wrong path." - Max Junestrand
Links:
Website: https://legora.com/
Ways to Tune In:
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Apple Podcasts:
Transistor: https://podcast.notanotherceo.com/
#NotAnotherCEO #BusinessSuccess #Legora
Chapters:
00:00 Intro
01:41 Founding and Early Challenges
02:42 Sales Strategy and Growth
06:40 Building a Strong Team
13:55 Global Expansion
29:43 Expanding Beyond Local Markets
31:13 Challenges of Going Global
33:40 Product Development and Iteration
37:08 Competing with Industry Giants
42:43 YC Experience and Early Challenges
49:52 Personal Background and Motivation
1:00:48 Outro
Transcript:
Max: [00:00:00] Now most companies, um, from Sweden that are in our category would kind of say, let's do Sweden. Let's maybe go to Norway, or let's go to Germany if we're feeling adventurous. Or maybe the uk, right? Like, and we just said, you know what? This product scales. It is comparably on the market. Extremely good. So let's just figure out the motion of how to work with clients anywhere, and let's hit the gas.
David: Welcome to not another CEO podcast. I'm your host, David PTUs. Every week we talk to inspiring leaders and get the true stories, the ups and downs, the lessons learned, and come away with actionable advice for our own journeys.
Today's guest is on a mission to revolutionize the way an entire industry works. His company has built the world's first [00:01:00] truly collaborative AI for legal professionals. He's an engineer who's passionate about go to market, a visionary who's also laser focused on execution. His company founded just two years ago is already trusted by some of the biggest law firms in the world, including Goodwin, Proctor, Cleary, Gottlieb, and many more.
It's the fastest growing company we've had on this show. Please welcome founder and CEO of Legora Max, Junestrand.
Max: Thank you so much for having me, David. I'm truly delighted.
David: Thank you for doing this in person also. Yeah, you flew all the way from Sweden for this now
Max: and just for this, I'm in New York more these days.
David: Yeah, it's great. Okay, great. Let's get right to it. First question, what's the one thing that you've done big or small at Lara that's had the biggest impact and you do again, if you're CEO, of another company in the future?
Max: Look, dude, I think when, when we started, um. There were probably 500 other legal AI assistants, uh, that [00:02:00] were started exactly at the same time.
And I think everybody was so incredibly focused on, you know, how do we package these models? How do we bring them into law firms? How we, how do we bring them to lawyers? Um, the thing that we did was we actually brought them, I ran sales for the first year and a half. We brought the company from zero to sort of 2 million in a RR, just on founder-led sales with me and our founding, uh, a to him.
And I think that's something that set us up for success because it allowed us to grow really quickly during Y Combinator, raise our seed drum from Benchmark. Then we got the pre from, from Red Point, and then things just kind of started roll rolling. So that's something that if I started a company again, I would probably look to do the same.
I think doing sales in the, in the beginning, especially when you're new to an industry, actually forces you to build a lot of empathy for the use cases for the users and the problems you're actually solving. Not coming from the legal background. I think that was a necessity for me.
David: And you are an [00:03:00] engineer.
I mean, you started your career as an engineer,
Max: right? I actually went to engineering school and then COVID hit, I got really demotivated with engineering because we were 300 guys in hoodies, just coding from home. Um, so I, I took in parallel the business school, uh, in Stockholm. And it's actually not the same system as it is here in, in the us There's a separate university if you wanna do business or if you wanna do engineering.
So I ended up going to both the schools in parallel and you actually had to hack the admission system a little bit to be able to do that. But it worked out really well because during CVID, um, sometimes I would have overlapping tests that would be exactly the same time in the calendar. So I brought an extra phone and I did, I recorded myself for both the tests and I did, and I just did them both as at the same time.
So, um, it was a lot of fun. And, and coming out of that, I think I was quite prepared both for, you know, the. Having a technical background for what this adventure would mean, but also, you know, a solid business understanding of
David: the thing is, [00:04:00] so when I talk to a lot of technical founders, and especially in the early days, what I find with them is their natural tendency is to go where they're comfortable, which is building the product, which is coding, which is all that.
And even when they have, they know they need to do sell. I mean, you can lit, they will say, I know I need to go sell. They just, but I have to fix this, I have to do this, I have to code. You know. So my question to you is, how did you, did you have to force yourself or that to you? You just knew that that was, was, did someone say that to you?
Or you just knew that that was a thing?
Max: Really, I'm a very introverted guy. Before university, I used to play video games professionally. Like that's my comfort zone. Now, after COVID, and when I was in business school, I think I started to realize the value of socializing, of, uh, working well in a group. I would actually force myself to go to the university every day, sit with new people, get to know them, and kind of, you know, build out a network.
And when we started [00:05:00] the company, given that I didn't have any prior background in the space, I actually reached out to about a hundred lawyers and I said, um, can I pay you for your hourly rate and we'll go have lunch? And of course, they were all, you know, much too nice to, uh, to take their rate and they, you know, most of them would even pay for the lunch because I was in, I was in college still.
Um, but then you force the muscle of reaching out and of being uncomfortable. And I think sales is a lot about being uncomfortable, right? Um, but very quickly I found a lot of enthusiasm in it. And I, I think when I showed up, um, a lot of, you know, managing partners and CIOs would find. This is the first guy who's truly enthusiastic about legal tech that I've met in the last years.
Of course, we need to partner with him and maybe the product isn't there yet, but it's going to, to get there. And I think that slope of change as [00:06:00] well, when you get in the door, you prove yourself and you continue to, that's what's kind of r earned our right to play, um, even at this bigger firms. Right.
David: I think and think the other part of this is that when you do it and people see you doing it, there is no one who can come after in terms of salespeople, in terms of heads of sales, who can say, well, the, you don't know, max, you don't understand what this, you know, the managing director is gonna say.
Like, they can't say that to you.
Max: No, exactly. And I think it's very important that as a leader of a company, you, you know, one, know your strengths, but two, I mean, continue to prove them to the company itself, especially as a young CE. I mean, you're hiring and you're getting people in who have done several journeys and they've taken companies from tens of millions to 500 million a RR or Stewart, uh, who just joined us, our VP marketing.
He did, yeah. Like global product marketing at Klarna, and then it was VP marketing at Tink, sold that for 3 billion. And when he joined, he said, max, this is my [00:07:00] third unicorn, and then I'm done. And I'm, you know, let's go for the journey. Right. And, and, and then to, to be very engaged in sales, but also be very engaged in product and have a deep technical understanding so that you can talk with customers about it.
Mm-hmm. I think gives me a lot of cl
David: Yeah, I love that. How so you get to call a couple million dollars of, of a RR. How do you transition from you doing the sales to hiring a team to do it and having other people?
Max: Yeah, I mean, so look, our founding sales team, um, are all very entrepreneurial and they, they role in Sweden and none of them came from a sales background.
So they were all consultants. They all came from either McKinsey, BC, G, or Axel, who actually is an iOS engineer who just happened to speak Spanish. And so he was responsible for the Spanish market and totally knocked it out the park. So we were able, I think, to kind of set the founding go to market motion.
And then of course now we've sort of [00:08:00] perfected it and, and industrialized it a little bit. So, uh, our first sales managers came in at the beginning of this year and yeah, I mean, we're close to eight x-ing revenue since the start of the year already, so it's been a wild ride.
David: And, and do you, did those, um, founding AEs, did they go with you?
Max: Yes, we, yeah, we, we would take all the meetings together in the beginning, and I think many of them have also made a very fast journey in a year from kind of B-D-R-S-M-B, you know, mid-market enterprise and even strategics, right? Like we're, we're having multiple conversations where. The amount of impact and the size of the deals are, are growing so quickly because of the, uh, sophistication of the tech.
Uh, like when, when GPT came out two and a half years ago in, in November 22, um, to the point now there's been a huge uplift in, in the product quality and what you can [00:09:00] actually achieve. But I still think we're at a point in time where, where the products are and where the model capabilities are. There's a quite big gap.
So there's a million things left to build and we just in time and a lot of focus to go and do it
David: right. And people want to get in. What I hear from when talking to law firms, like they, they know they have to do this. I mean, there's not really a question. I think it's in every industry, bro. I mean, people know they have to do it, and so they're trying to find the person that they wanna partner with to go on that journey.
Max: The person, the company, the tech, the culture, all of it, right? And. I think it's different for every industry in terms of what is really existential. If you look at law firms, I mean, your core delivery is legal services. And so there's a couple of reasons why I think it's existential. Um, the biggest one is just the potential downside of the firm next to you [00:10:00] on the street.
Really figuring it out and you not figuring it out is incredibly detrimental, right? If suddenly your bread and butter is transactional work and due diligences, now it's kind of a low differentiated service most of the time, and the firm next to you starts to offer this at a quicker turnaround, better service, lower price point, and you're not software powered, how do you meet that?
Because you're already running the task at sort of low margin, right? There's no way that you can drop that. And so there's definitely something about. Doing it and implementing it now, but it's also about being ready for when the client appetite changes. And if you look at the way that enterprises think about this, so corporates, like non-law firms, for them, it's not as much of a, a existential question in terms of bringing AI into the legal
David: internal department.
Yeah,
Max: no, but it's a cost [00:11:00] saving mechanism. And it's also a way to set certain pressure on your law firms by saying, Hey, we're already adopting this tech internally. We can already, well, I didn't even think, I didn't think about that. Now how are you working as my trusted advisor to save me money and provide me with the best possible service at your price point?
David: That's even more pressure probably for those 'cause if the clients are going to them and saying, are you not using this? Because we are
Max: of course, and there's a difference sophistication, uh, in enterprises in terms of how they're working with this. But if you look at private equity. Private equity. Private equity is typically quite, uh, sophisticated and they're looking at how they're going to adopt AI across their entire portfolio, you know, not at least internally for their legal services.
David: Wow. Um, one thing when you talk about having that passion, understanding the customer, all of that, I, I have this memory of like, I, I met with a couple, cus these cu I was doing like a hundred customer meetings in a hundred days. [00:12:00] Oh wow. And I was asking them about like a bunch of different products that we were selling and, and thinking about buying.
And yeah. One customer told me, they said, oh, I looked at these two products to do SaaS spend management, which was like, kind of this complimentary space. And I said, and you chose that one. Their product is kind of farther behind the other one, the other one is larger. I'm just curious. And they said, and you know, the company's doing tens of millions of a RR that they, that they, the, the product that they bought it from.
And he said it was because the founder came to the meeting. This is a company doing, you know, tens of millions of a r and the founder came and got me so excited. About the future and about the vision. I know the product doesn't do what the other one does, but I'm gonna buy something not for six months or a year, but most of my contracts are for five, you know, three years, five years, seven years.
And it was a really in, it was just this click for me of, of course I feel that of course as a founder, like it, it's a big difference if I'm in there selling. [00:13:00] But there is something about, I think people, especially with ai, I think they want to partner with the person who's authentically excited about solving their problem.
Max: And also has a lot of incentive alignment, right? Like, to be very honest, um, the only way our business work is if the law firms that we work with do really well as a consequence of ai. They need to grow, they need to do better so that they can work with us and we can be part of that uplift. Because look, law firms are amazing at legal service delivery, but they're not amazing at building software.
David: Right.
Max: Or at least 99.99% of them. And Leg is not amazing at providing legal services, but we're pretty darn good at building software for it. And so I think this is a very natural mix.
David: So one of the questions as you, you've expanded how, how big now is the team?
Max: Oh, 140. [00:14:00] Yeah.
David: And that's, I mean, from what I understand up
Max: from 50 in this time last year,
David: it's crazy.
Yeah. So you've hired a lot of people. Yeah. You seem to have a very strong view of how the customers should be treated with the product all. How have you been able to scale? Yeah. That quickly. Is it outsourcing to all the managers and saying, Hey, go hire your people. Go do like, 'cause that's what a lot of, at least what I see with the hypergrowth is like, let me hire the manager, the vp, the whatever, and they'll go bring in their team.
Is that how you're doing it that fast? It's for
Max: sure. A little bit of, you know, great people know great people. And so the first thing we ask you is write up the 10 names of the people we should go bring into the business. Right? And if everybody does that, you go very quickly. Um, but the second part is being, uh, personally super engaged in driving our culture, in scanning for what we think is excellence.
And I, I think it was Mark Zuckerberg who's editor in an interview or something, but kinda like hiring for the [00:15:00] Y slope and not the y intercept, right? Mm-hmm. Because you could say, okay, this company's growing incredibly exponentially, and so. You either want somebody with a really high slope, right, who you think is gonna grow with the company exponentially, or you try and pick somebody with a really high y intercept who you think is going to, you know, survive for a while.
But typically that doesn't work. And so even with the managers coming in, I'm quite clear with 'em. I'm like, you know, the company's growing like this. We're maybe here and you're a little bit higher because you, you've done a scale above us. But as we hit your, you know, why intercept? You're gonna have to continue scaling, or, you know, somebody else is gonna have to come and, and road the ship from there.
Um, but I interview everyone. I interview every single, every single candidate and every candidate except for engineering, actually. And the reason why I don't interview in engineering is, um, I actually think I'm probably the, the worst. I mean, one of the reasons why I became CEO was because I was the worst engineer, um, in the founding team.
I, I [00:16:00] think, but, um, no, Jake and, and ciga, my co-founder who run, uh, engineering, um. Uh, Jake is a previous entrepreneur as well. He just sold his YC company. We, we see very clearly kind of eye to eye in terms of what we're looking for, and that also gives us both the time and bandwidth to, to do what we need to do.
David: So you interview anyone other than engineering. Uh, how much time does that? I, I've interviewed a couple CEOs who have said this to me. We've talked about this when we were Yes. Preparing for this. Like, and I wish, I wish I interviewed everyone.
Max: Yeah.
David: Forever actually. We only got to, you know, 400 people or so.
I wish I had interviewed everyone. I, I,
Max: did you see, did you see any, you know, did you know deterioration in quality or, yeah,
David: definitely. Because I think at some point I also believe, well, not, I believe, I know for a fact most people have never been trained how to interview, right? No. [00:17:00] When you put someone into interview.
Yep. The experience they've had is being. Interviewed.
Max: Yes,
David: very. But no one ever taught them how to interview.
Max: No. And I've thought a lot about this 'cause I will have a lot of first time managers that needs to be upstate and how to be
David: a manager. Right. That's how to, um, interview. Right. And even if you haven't been trained as the founder, you, you care so much about the company.
It almost doesn't, like you're not gonna let you radiate.
Max: Exactly. Excitement. Yeah. No, look, I think I spend probably a third of my time on it. Wow. And the, but, but I don't do one hour interviews. Right. I do kind of 20 minutes once. Right. So they're short. They're to the point. Only at the final. Only at only final.
Got it. Got it. I'd say I, I probably accept something like 70%. Got it. So, uh, I'm just kind of like the final filter and then I tend to question, uh, some of the, um, you know, the, the hiring manager or the hiring team, you know, what have we pulled together about this candidate? And then we have a final conversation about it.
And I think it's very important that I speak lost. In those conversations because if I speak [00:18:00] first, then you completely ruin.
David: I love that. I love that, that that is a really important to speak a lot. Yeah,
Max: and I, and I, I learned this because I, I spoke first once and then everybody just said, yeah, yeah, I agree with what Max said.
And, and you can't have that, right? So
David: that was feedback. I got that feedback early in my career where someone said, well, if you speak, you're gonna color the opinions of everyone in the room. And I was like, you know, you don't really, you don't, you actually don't. In the beginning you don't think about that.
But I think for founders, I actually think that's good for not just hiring for almost all things is when you're in the room, let the team.
Max: Yes. And I, it took me a while to realize this, 'cause I, I'm in Sweden, there's a cultural phenomenon or value that's called Young, the login. It means that, uh, you shouldn't think you are something.
It's not very good for building a hyper scaling business, but, but it like, it, it, it enforces this idea that, you [00:19:00] know, your opinion does not carry more weight than anybody else's and so on. And so I, in the beginning, I think I, I, I didn't realize that my words carried more weight in some types of some conversations, but once you've understand that, then you said, we need to adjust your behavior.
David: What is the number one thing you look for when you do that 20 minute interview? What is the number one, either that you look for or the attributes you've noticed makes the person the most successful?
Max: I look for ambition because I think if you're, uh, really ambitious, you figure out things and you can tell if somebody's ambitious in terms of how they talk about things and in terms of how they talk about this opportunity.
Um. So, you know, the first thing I ask is I typically, I just ask them to quickly explain their sort of life story and tell me about some problems that they've solved and why they've made the decision that decisions that they made. And then when we get to the point around, often I interview lawyers, right?
Like I ask them why they [00:20:00] go, why did they go to law school and why did they want to be best at, uh, debating class? And, you know, why did they want to go to that firm and not that firm? And if they just, you know, continue to say, well, I wanted to be at that firm because it's best firm and like, I, I always wanna, you know, be better in, in, in these things.
And I think that's sense, a very, uh, positive signal for the mission that we are on because again, I'm looking for the hyperscalers who are going to be able to come into the organization, be very efficient and scale with the company as it continues to scale. Because every quarter this is a new company and so everybody needs to re-earn the right for their seat,
David: right.
Uh, one of the question you just said, you hire a lot of lawyers. Can you talk about that? I, I, we didn't, I'm curious about that. What roles are they going into? Uh,
Max: most of our client facing roles, um, both in pre-sales and post-sales are lawyers, right? Yeah. So, well, [00:21:00] so let's say we work with the m and a team at Cleary, if I show up and I, you know, try and teach that session and try and work with them on how they're gonna rethink their m and a processes, I'm gonna sound really stupid because I don't know the m and a lingo.
I don't know the process. I don't know the clients, I don't know the work. So we're privileged that a lot of extremely talented lawyers want a different type of career. They don't want to make partner, they don't want to go in-house. Yeah. Uh, of course, but they wanna work with tech and we give them a huge room and, um, capacity to take everything from.
Initial demos, uh, use case engineering, uh, running pilots to then running the entire deployments. And some of these deployments are huge. I mean, it's basically like coming in as a McKinsey consultant and driving Right. The change management. Management. Yeah,
David: exactly. It must be,
Max: it's massive. I think I, I like to think of it as when [00:22:00] Excel came to auditors.
Yes. And you have to reteach everybody how to work with a computer and how to work with Excel. That's actually kind of similar to the work that we need to do.
David: Right. And so these lawyers are doing, and they must be Excel. I mean, I don't wanna say anything about lawyers, but a lot of 'em don't, you
Max: know? Well, I mean, so look, there's, there's lawyers who are, uh, amazing at, at what they do in their practice, right?
And then there's lawyers who say, well, you know, I used to kind of be a, I used to do a lot of paper pushing, because that's the way this industry is set up, right? As a partner, you don't make money on the hours you bill, you only make money on the hours that the associates underneath you, bill. So you need to put a lot of associates to work in order to make money as a partner.
So when you're an associate, not all of the work is very glamorous. And so I actually think that technology, like Leg Agora makes the work of an associate much more,
David: uh, right, right. And, and, and rewarding and, um, intellectual. Right. I like that. Um, in terms of [00:23:00] the team, is it all between New York and Sweden or?
Max: So we're in, we started in Stockholm. Um, quickly expanded to some other countries in Europe where we have local support. And then our, our second biggest office was in London, and now our third biggest office is here in, in.
David: And is it an in-office culture or is it, because that's all over the place? I mean,
Max: right.
We're fully in office five days a week in all those places. In all the places. We have dinner three days a week in Stockholm, we have dinner five days a week.
David: Wow. And is it hard to hire people with that, or do you find that people want that.
Max: I find that of course, you know, I find that the people who are joining really subscribing to that and there's enough of a talent pool and understanding of the generational opportunity that is building on LLMs at this stage.
That, I mean, the top of funnel to kind of accepting offers is right. Like, like there's, [00:24:00] I I don't think it could be at a more exciting company, frankly. Right? I mean, there, there's like a couple of verticals that have very high degrees of product market fit. You know, take legal, take maybe, you know, vibe coding or, or you know, the cursor, like these types of tools.
Uh, healthcare has some interesting applications as well with companies who are doing incredibly well. But, and, and legal is, you know, one of these, so. The other thing that makes legal very interesting is that there's been such a low degree of digitalization and forever, basically. Right, exactly. And so there's a lot of, you're almost skipping over.
You're like, you're leapfrogging. Exactly. But no, you are really doing that. So you're leapfrogging a lot of the previous efficiency gain or, or, you know, change management. That would've happened into a completely new paradigm. And this is extremely interesting from a product perspective, from how you market, uh, a product like this and how you talk about the incentives because they are also slightly perverse, right?
Right. I mean, you, if you're billing by the hour and you're [00:25:00] saying, Hey, let's try to rework this process with ai, then you might not be billing as many hours. So you gotta rethink the way that your business model works. Well
David: this, this is literally my number one question when we talked, is just, I get that the law firm has to feel like the pressure from everyone else down the street and from the in, in-house.
But you are. Kind of telling them that you're replacing their hours with AI in a lot of ways.
Max: Right. And I think, and I think the way that you should think about this as a partner in a law firm is maybe this is the opportunity to really get scale on my expertise, right? Instead of only being to work with my pyramid of associates, I, I'm now able to do work that I could scale to, you know, hundreds or thousands of clients at the same time.
And you are able to, I mean, effectively [00:26:00] codify your expertise way of doing things and, and truly get software scale on it. 'cause I think if you look at, uh, many financial institutions, the sort of. Uh, quota between people working in with engineering and people working with financial, uh, services. Like they come together, like quantum, you know, they, they build products together, right?
And the same hasn't happened in legal, but it's starting to happen and it's starting to happen quite quick. Um, so I don't think this is a sort of three year thing out. It's rather a six or 12 months
David: actually, now that you just said that. I'm curious, when what you just said makes a lot of sense with the quants and everything, do you think that there will be people, the lara, let's call it, I don't wanna say admin, but admin, are they gonna kind of be that person on the ground taking, you know, 'cause I don't know who that even is.
Is there p people like that in law firms today that are driving the innovation agenda? Yeah, yeah, of course.
Max: Yeah. So the, they have
David: CTOs or, yeah.
Max: Yes. The [00:27:00] big successful law firms have dedicated innovation departments.
David: So that's who you work through essentially. Got it.
Max: So there's a couple of different, you know, it looks different in every firm.
Sometimes you work directly with a partner and you drill very deep, like a top down motion. Sometimes it's, we gotta drive the AI literacy or across the firm, or maybe we gotta do both in parallel. Right? And I think there's something to the point of, you know, everything that AI can do, at some point it will do.
And so as a law firm, you are very incent, or as a law firm partner, you are actually incentivized to want to provide that service to your client. Although you might not make a lot of money on it. Like, let's, let's take a very simple thing, um, uh, a red line of an NDA. Now this is something that law firms typically do for free to private equity companies.
I mean, who, nobody makes the money on redlining an NDA. But the reason why, why you still want to do that and [00:28:00] why you might want to do it with the help of software is you want to. Own or continue to own that client interaction so that when, um, you know, KKR is thinking about, uh, their next big fund or their next big, um, LBO or something, they immediately think of your friend or when shit hits the fan, they come to you to litigate.
Yep. Who are you gonna call? You remember the, the people that you send all those NDAs to, right? Yep. And, you know, they're also the best litigators. Perfect. Let's go work with 'em. Right. Like it's, it's sort of, 'cause the other, the other alternative is they just take that work internally.
David: Right,
Max: right. And then there's the zero margin on it.
David: Right.
Max: And frankly, if you're running an in-house team, uh, you already have a lot of people on your staff. You already have a lot of different software. Like ideally you just wanna get the job done. And so if you can pay a small premium for it, I think you're very happy to do it.
David: So one of the things that I notice, and even when you talk about where your offices are, you've gotten [00:29:00] global.
I'd say faster than most companies at your age or even actually stage of revenue, right? You've gone global. Yeah. Was that, let's say you tripped into that because you started in Stockholm, then moved into other markets in Europe, or was that a purposeful like we are gonna 'cause 'cause it is early.
Max: Yeah. Um, and we're actually, we've just set up our office in Australia and we're set and we're setting up in India as well.
Um, so one thing that you learn very quickly if you build a B2B enterprise business in Sweden is that you're not going to build a hundred billion dollar business in Sweden. You need to go outside of your market. So you actually train the muscle of going to a new market very fast. Now most companies, um, from Sweden that are in our category would kind of say, let's do Sweden.
Let's maybe go [00:30:00] to Norway or let's go to Germany if we're feeling adventurous. Or maybe the uk, right? Like, and we just said, you know what? This product scales, it is comparably on the market extremely good. So let's just figure out the motion of how to work with clients anywhere and let's hit the gas.
Because this is not a market where you kind of lock yourself in your room, you build for two years and then you come up with the best product. But it's this continuous iteration together with clients. And so the reason why I really like, you know, our, our sort of key word here, which is collaborative is not only because the platform itself is collaborative between law firms and clients, but we as a company feel very collaboratively about our work with the firms because again, we only win if they win.
So we're incredibly incentivized to not only make leg gura land extremely well in these firms and for their [00:31:00] lawyers to get success, but also to continue developing it in a, in a rate and in a, in a direction that is aligned with where they want to go.
David: I like that. Um,
I know that it's been successful for you, what has been the biggest challenging part of, of specifically of going global so quickly? Like is that, is it localization? I, I, I talked to someone from a kind of customer support AI tool and they were saying the localization in some languages can be a little bit challenging if it's very specific.
Is it localization? Is it your time having to fly all over the world? I was
Max: gonna say, I'm definitely working up my frequent flyer miles. Um, but, but I think the, the product itself scaled very well and almost every lawyer works in English, which is, uh. Uh, they have local work in local language, but every lawyer speaks English.
Right? And so the platform [00:32:00] can be in English, right? So that's very helpful. Um, some, one, one pretty challenging thing was actually negotiating with, I think we negotiated with Microsoft, Google, and AWS for certain exemptions under German, uh, criminal law. That was a challenge. I think it was the smallest company ever to get exemptions from the standard terms with those enterprise agreements.
But, but, but look, I think the hardest thing is the focus, right? Uh, as a company, as a startup, you have a limited amount of focus and you need to spend it very wisely. When you say, let's go serve clients in the Nordics, in Spain, in France, in Italy, in India, in Australia, right? Everywhere. All at once. It's, uh.
Hard to keep focus, but I think we've done a really good job of it. And I think, and it's not
David: some vibe coding PLG thing that people are coming in and there's no PLGI mean, you have to go, you, not you, but people have to go there. Yes. Spend the time with the law firm. So that's, that's the, we're
Max: enterprise.
Yeah. [00:33:00] And I also think if you look at the legal, you know, industry, the enterprise or big law market has an incredible, um, opportunity to leverage, you know, their precedents, their ways of working to actually become very software enabled. And they have the innovation and, and, and the personnel working with that.
If you look in the mid market or, or even, you know, small law, it's a little trickier. It's, it's more, you know, a mom and pop shop is going to have a more difficult time, I think because there the, they need to do a lot of heavy lifting themselves.
David: Do you only go after the larger law firms or? No, but
Max: that's a majority of our market.
Right.
David: Um. Let's talk about the product in terms of your involvement with the product. You mentioned that you have your co-founders who are really deep in the engineering piece, and, and how involved are you on the product side and how fast? I talked to [00:34:00] a guy who used to work with me and he, he went to a company, an AI first company, one of these engineering, you know, vibe, coding things.
And he said the speed that things are changing is literally, he's like, I, one week we launched something, we shut it down and launched a new thing the next week. That was like, you know, how do you, how, how do you stay on top of that? How do you evolve that fast as, and I would say in your case, as with engineers, it's one thing, but here we're talking about law firms, like how do you do that?
Max: The appetite for quickly throwing things around in the UI is not very large. Exactly right. You, you, you, you sort of, you inform the CIOs and the admin. Next week we'll have an update. It's gonna change a little bit, but don't worry, it's for the better. Right? It's a, it's a different motion. Um, so I'm very involved.
I believe that our success is very tied to having the best product on the market [00:35:00] because everybody can go and hire a big sales team, but not everybody's gonna bring the best product to the market. And the product has to your point, very quickly evolved. And we've made some poor bets, but a lot of the right bets.
And I think in our industry it's also a little bit of seeing what's working generally in the AI space. So what's working in the engineer, like take cursor, our word add in, which is an integration into Microsoft Word, where you can converse with Lara. And Lara makes edits directly in the word canvas is very similar to how Cursor works.
We're, we're borrowing, you know? Yeah. We're borrowing the experience and, and, um, you know, you know, good minds think about, oh, the only thing is great minds still. I mean, to some extent this kind, remember bringing a lot of good things together. Um, we ship on a weekly, um, sprint cadence, which means, you know, every Thursday we sit down with all [00:36:00] the, all the lead engineers, all the PMs, and we say, this is what we have going on.
This is what the big clients are asking for. What are we gonna build? Let's ship it and let's ship it at a quality which is very high, because with engineers, I think maybe your, your acceptance of, you know, slight errors or, you know, slightly buggy experiences, that tolerance is a little bit higher than what you have in our world.
Hmm. If a law firm partner comes in and the stuff doesn't work. They'll see you. Just kidding. Well, you know, they're gonna quote the SA and be like, Hey guys. No, but you know, they, they, they, they're not gonna, their patience is not, their patience isn't there and they might not even give it a second chance.
Hmm. So there's no appetite for that. There's no tolerance. And this means that everything we build has to be correct. And when your space is moving a hundred miles an hour, if you gotta make a product u-turn, that is incredibly costly. So we take a lot of, [00:37:00] um, we don't take a lot of time, but we take a lot of, uh, intellectual energy to making sure that we make the right decisions.
David: One of the things I like about you, the company, from the people I've met at the company, is this, um, you know, you have a competitor who is larger, uh, who raised I a a lot of money, um, have been doing it longer, but you're. From what I gather growing. I don't, I don't want to make assumptions on speed of growth and everything, but point is, well, the
Max: percentage growth is definitely higher.
Yeah, of course, of course. Percentage. Yeah. And, and, um, I would say in the most recent, you know, ad deals that we go up on, we tend to do incredibly well.
David: So my question is, how, how do you do that? Because that is, that can be, I think for people, I talk to founders who, you know, especially when you're looking from the outside and you see the big fundraise and the [00:38:00] this and the billboards, and it can be as a f as a founder can be scary, to be honest.
And I've been through that and you're like, they're gonna crush us. Like they're, you know, and you kind of go into your shell or your team starts getting, how do you, how do you fight that battle? And you've been fighting from what I gather very well.
Max: I actually think that, um, I. Yeah, no one in our team feels that way, but there might be some people in the opposing team feeling that way.
Um, you know, you remember Alta Vista, but most people just remember Google. Um, MySpace was pretty big, but turns out that Facebook was a much bigger company. And so I think there's a, there's a real value in actually being the second mover, and the value comes from two things, right? You, you get to see, um, what is the right path and what is the wrong path.
I'll give you a very clear example. Turns out fine tuning models and spending a lot of money on that was not the right move, right? Working directly with the latest open [00:39:00] AI models, latest philanthropic models, latest Google models or Gemini models, that was the right choice. That's what we did from day one.
And so we didn't, you know, go down that route. Very expensive, time consuming, you know, route. And now we're in this great place where I think the products become. Better as a consequence of competition in the market. And I think it's allowing our product team and engineering team to really shine. Like what I'm most proud of is that we've given the Lara engineers and product and designers a chance to bring their product or our product into the biggest accounts, right?
Like we, we got the sales motion down to the point where we are in every conversation, you know, there's no firm that doesn't consider us. It's no longer this, um, oh, I won't get fired for buying IBM. Right? Right. Like, that was definitely the case a year ago, but it's no longer the case now. And if [00:40:00] you zoom out, so if you, if you take a snapshot Yeah, then maybe like, you know, our companies are, are pretty similar in terms of when we go up against each other.
But if you zoom out, you see our curve and it's very exponential. But if you're a company that started a year and a half earlier, especially with the, how should you put it? Unfair advantages of getting access to, you know, GPD four right before the public release. Right. I don't think most know that. I didn't know.
I didn't know. Oh, so this is, yeah, so, um, the, well, Tex and, and Harvey, um, got access to GPD four before the public release. And so like there was a lot of, uh, you things being built that, you know, where we didn't even know that you could be building things. 'cause we were three guys in Stockholm and we weren't plugged into sf.
And so I think there's also a real story here where, you know, we serve the European continent extremely well. And now with me moving here, like we're spending, you know, more and more of our time in [00:41:00] the us, um, there's a question of, you know, you want to get the best product, you wanna partner with the best team, and at the end of the day, you just want your firm and your clients to do really well as a consequence of this technology.
I think we've done an incredible job delivering on that promise. And so your
David: team is kind of motivated by Oh, we are like, kind of
Max: insanely motivated. Again, the main thing I look for is ambition. Right?
David: Right, right.
Max: I love that. And we celebrate every win. We, um, grieve every loss and we get even more motivated by it.
And I think back when we were three guys in Stockholm and our, our first angel check was 50 k, and I think the other companies had raised, you know, 20 million, 50 million. And we said, you know what? We're gonna go compete with those guys. That was a hard that it, it was hard to invest back then. Right Now, now it's very
David: different.
Max: And to be honest, it's also becoming a little bit [00:42:00] of like a two horse race, right. Like there is,
David: I mean, you're, it's an entire industry, right? I mean it's, yeah. But,
Max: but it's also like there's no third company. There's no, there's no contend right? There's no third contender. Right, right. Like we've successfully, or, or, you know, unsuccessfully, depending on how you view it, put a lid on the market where there's basically no third company getting amazing funding Right.
From tier one funds. Right. And so we're, uh, competing for, or, you know, trying to prove our value in every deal. And I don't really see any firm, not AB testing us.
David: Um, only a couple more questions and I wanna go to your background, but one of the questions, um, you mentioned yc. Um, I've had a couple of YC companies.
Um, I'm curious your take on. The value of that, um, experience. I, I have never been through it, never [00:43:00] applied to it. Obviously know a lot of people haven't, haven't gotten in. Um, but I'm curious from your perspective, that YC experience,
Max: I had a very, um, untraditional YC experience. Um, so when we, we got accepted really early on into the winter batch all the way back in August.
So we were one of the early applicants. And the reason why we got in that early was because we had a competing term sheet and we basically got an interview with yc, I think even took up the actual paper on the on, yeah. On the video call. And I said, Gustav, you know, we have a term sheet, a competing term sheet here for twice the valuation that you guys are gonna come in on now, do you wanna do this or not?
And they said, you know, let's do it right. And so we accept that offer. We basically lock in for the next sort of six months and. I don't know if I said this publicly before, but we, um, we were a Swedish corporation and we had to flip to become a Delaware, and that process was gonna take like two and a [00:44:00] half months or something.
And we, we were, I, I couldn't wait to get the money because I wanted to hire four more engineers to go faster. So actually took out a loan against the YC money that was gonna come in later. A personal loan? No, a company loan. A company loan, which was, um, I think very rare for the time. Right. That is very rare.
And then we went so aggressively that we were going to run outta money during Y Combinator. And so, uh, Ys, one of the first angels came in with a 500 K check and like, you know, made, made it possible for us to, to go out the, the yc uh, batch. And then we raised our, our seed from benchmark, but I only spent, I think five days in SF for Y Combinator.
So we went there, we did the initial, uh, you know, uh, offsite and then I was taking sales calls between. 10:00 AM no 1:00 AM and 10:00 AM San Francisco time with this influencer ring light on my laptop so it wouldn't look like it [00:45:00] was in the middle of the night. And I just couldn't do it. Like I couldn't do it for more than like three or four days.
And then I said, guys, I'm going back. Like somebody needs to make sure that this, you know, our customers continue to thrive and that we continue getting new customers. So I went back to Sweden, locked in for a month and a half, just worked with our clients and we grow revenue from, I think 10 KMR to almost like a million a RR.
And then I was almost having a conversation like this with our, uh, YC partner Gustav, and he said, max, I think you're ready to, to raise a bigger round than what most YC companies do. He said, oh, that's great. Uh, and I think he said that on a Thursday or something. And we went out on, on the fri on, on the Monday after.
David: And why did you want to be in YC so bad? Yeah, because that, that you had another term sheet.
Max: I think for us, the main value came from this was a Swedish vc and we wanted to get into the American market. Yeah. [00:46:00] And frankly, the value has been awesome. Uh, they're super supportive. They, you know, Gary, John Levy, Gustav, they're all amazing.
And we, we still work with them quite tightly actually. Um, I, I'm not sure if that they recent, recently became a client as well and their, their legal team. Uh, and we, I think continue to, um, get a lot of benefit of being surrounded by AI companies who are doing things in different verticals. So we get to pick the best from, oh, what's happening in, in sort of, you know, deep coding territory, what's happening in insurers, what's happening in.
There's a few other legal tech companies, what's happening in, you know, banking and then you see all these things, you get inspired and then you continue to, you know, build on what you're doing.
David: What is the biggest challenge you have faced? It's not been a long time, um, that you said you started the company.
What is the biggest challenge you faced and [00:47:00] how have you overcome that?
Max: I think the biggest, um, challenge or, you know, decision that we had to take was following our series A from RedPoint. This was in 24. In May. We had our first kind of real board meeting, and this is the first board meeting I've ever attended.
Right. So I'm like, oh, you know, board meeting, very exciting. You, you prepare a little bit. We, we come to this place, um, and we talk about what's going on. And one of the main problems at the time, and this was yeah, April, may 24, was the. Product and the reliability and scalability and the dependency on only working with Azure on OpenAI wasn't working for us.
Uh, we would get very slow responses from their API. Uh, they pulled a lot of compute to train new models, and so the, the entire setup, yeah. That was wild. I didn't know that. Oh, yeah. It was like our, our system was like a typewriter. Yeah. It [00:48:00] was crazy. So we, and we were only working with the European servers at the time for compliance reasons and so, yeah.
You know, just a lot of problems. And we said, you know what? Europe is gonna go on on vacation for, you know, July, June, July, August. So we might as well take this time to really refine the product, solve our problems, and when we come back from summer, let's, you know, hit the ground running. So I told the board we're not gonna sell for the next four months.
We're gonna hold off by onboarding all our clients and all the new people who wanted in. And people were knocking at the door, we said, oh no, we're so busy. Um, we'll, we'll schedule the onboarding in September. Right? Like, we're not gonna do a good deployment now in summer anyways. And I think Red Point, who had just put in 25 million after meeting me for two times, they were feeling like, Ooh, sorry.
You know, this is spice spicy. Uh, but turns out it was the right decision and [00:49:00] we onboarded, you know, I think like a thousand lawyers a day back in uh, September and October then that, that year. And so now having done, I think a lot of the foundational work in getting stuff right has allowed us to scale again much faster than some of the other companies in our industry.
David: I think that decision, there are many companies that could do, would have benefited. Yeah. You like doing that? And the problem is going into the meeting, the board meeting and saying that is like borderline crazy, you know, like, especially for the first board meeting. But it's, but that's where the tech debt starts, right?
I mean, that's where it starts in the beginning. And I'm also,
Max: you know, I'm thankful that they thought it was a reasonably fine, fine idea.
David: Wow. Um, alright, I wanna transition to your background. So tell me a little bit about your, like, upbringing. Did you always know that you wanted to be an [00:50:00] entrepreneur?
Did you always know that you were going to do this? Or tell me a little bit, where are you from originally? Yeah. Gimme the whole background. So
Max: I born in Stockholm, uh, grew up in the Archipelago, a little bit south, south of there. My, the reason why we moved to the Archipelago was my dad had two businesses during the.com era.
Um, one very similar to Salono and one one very similar to Klar. Uh,
David: really back
Max: then. Back then, obviously none of them became Clarno Zalando. Um, and I think he actually said something along the lines, so I took too much money from venture capitalists and I didn't want to have anything more to do with him, and I look at where I am.
Um, so he bought a boating business together with my mom, um, and they said, let's move out to the Dr. Pego. We want to move up from the city. So that's where I grew up. Very small community. We were 10 people in my, in my class, which, um, didn't leave a lot of room for a [00:51:00] competition, you could put it that way.
And I'm a very competitive guy. And so naturally I started playing a lot of video games. I think I started playing World of Warcraft when I was five or six. And then, you know, I went on from there to kind of play StarCraft and Warcraft and Here's of New Earth and then Doda two. Um, and that was really fun and.
After that time, the decision for me came, which was like, do you want to go to university or do you want to continue with, uh, video games as a professional career? Because I was, I was playing a lot. I was playing 10, 12 hours a day like that. Um, and then I think I had a conversation with my dad, which was, in the best case scenario of playing video games.
What happens? You win a big tournament, you win 5 million bucks. It's really fun. And that's it. The best case scenario with going to university, kinda something like this, right? And I thought that was a much more, um, energizing path. And so went down that route. And [00:52:00] I, in parallel with the two universities, I, I had the, the fortune to work in a vc.
I worked at McKinsey, I worked at two other Y Combinator startups, and I think that entire ecosystem for sure had a lot of influence in terms of, you know. Wanting to become an entrepreneur, wanting to build something. But it was really the paradigm shift in the LLMs that said, you know, here's the opportunity.
Now's the time. Just go for it.
David: What does your dad think now?
Max: He is, uh, he's the best. Um, he's very supportive. He's probably, he could have senior, your advisor in his LinkedIn on Lara, I think. Um, no, but, but he is, uh, yeah, I, my biggest idol. And uh,
David: do you think that watching him growing up, 'cause you didn't see the.com
Max: no.
David: Companies. Yeah. [00:53:00]
Max: I mean, look, a bo a boating business is a very different thing, but is is very entrepreneurial. Right. And, um, I think the most impactful thing he did, I'm getting very personal, but, um, he. Took out or carved out an incredible amount of time to spend with me. And so I was com I was competing in maths, I was playing the piano, I was doing all these things because he, um, not pushed me, but encouraged me to do it.
And when I was like one or two, like he would just sit and do puzzles with me all the time. Like you kind of, you know, I'm very similar to him now. The way, the way that I'm maybe not so similar is I'm, um, a bit more, uh, risk taking. Right. Or maybe, you know, extroverted. Right. Which I think you need to be, if you're gonna make it in what we're currently doing.
A hundred
David: percent.
Max: Um, but he is a programmer. He is, yeah. So he is. Yeah. He is fabulous.
David: It's amazing. [00:54:00] Um, yeah, I grew up, my dad had a bunch of companies that he started small companies and he would take me to work with him. And that was how I. And he would put me in the meeting with a notepad and say, take notes, you know?
And I was like eight years old and, you know, and, and, uh, so yeah. Um, do you have, other than your dad, do you have a kind of a mentor or someone that, you know, has been through this journey that's kind of there helping you through the journey?
Max: Sure. I am, I'm actually quite close with our board members. Um, and one of our early angel investors, um, Eric, um, I used to, he used to be my boss actually.
Um, and then I told him, Hey, I'm quitting because I wanna do this legal tech thing. If you want, you can be our first angel investor. And he said, I'd love to do it, uh, I'll take all of it. And I said, no, you, no, you can't take all of it. Uh, you need to bring in somebody who [00:55:00] knows law and somebody who knows ai.
So he did that and, and we stayed very close during, um. Still, but especially in the beginning as we were think figuring things out, he actually made the first customer introduction that led to, you know, our first main client, which then led to yc and then, you know, the domino continues. So
David: what is, what, what drives you at your core?
Is it the competitive kind of nature? Is it to build a company that changes the world? Is it like what, at the core, what does that
Max: drives you? I think it's a couple of things. Um, one, yes, I'm very competitive. I hate losing. I can tell, uh, I hate losing more than, I like winning way more. Um, and I'm, I'm driven by this idea that whenever we feel like Lara, you know, has become what it should become, [00:56:00] we'll everyone, our customers, our investors.
Maybe most importantly, our employees and, and the team look back and all just unanimously say, you know, Lara was the best thing for me. I'm, I'm so proud of the work we did there. I, I remember how fucking hard we worked, but man, that was the best. If everybody looks back at it that way, regardless of the outcome, then I am happy with it.
Now I'm definitely taking this company public, right? And I'm like here for the, for the home run from, from the perspective of how do you maximize the impact you can have. Um, and I think that again just requires, uh, an insane level of ambition. Um, there's, particularly in our industry, there's been a tendency of legal tech companies selling pretty early.
Yeah. Yeah. And exiting [00:57:00] to companies like Thomson Reuters. Yeah. Uh, Leta, um. Lexi Ns and the companies that have done that, their products, they never, they never grow. They become cash cows. The roadmaps start saying years instead of saying weeks. And that has a little bit poisoned the well when it comes to working with vendors and partners in the legal industry because people are, people are upset that, you know, I put so much time, I put so much effort, so much energy into this product and into this team.
And then they just sold for 20 million to this, one of these m and a shops. Right? And we've said very from the very beginning that that's not a route for us. That's not why we're here. We're, this is a generational, uh, opportunity and technological shift that we get to be a part of and that we wanna bring our clients along on.
So it's a very different attitude, I think. Hmm.
David: [00:58:00] Knowing everything you know today, um, and having the experience that you've had, what is the one piece of advice you would give yourself before you started your career?
Max: I think it would be to, you know, rely more and share the burden of what we're going through with, uh, the team and the people closest to me.
Um, because I think it's very easy to see yourself as, of course I'm, I'm the main accountable person as the CEO of the company, but we're all in it together and our tendency to solve the difficult problems together is much greater than just myself. And I think as the company has now very quickly scaled, my ability to delegate and my ability to work with the team has multiplied by several times.
And I think that's something that, had I done that earlier, it could have been even better.
David: I think that may, that's, I love that [00:59:00] advice. I've been through that. I had a board member who told me he's sat on multiple public company boards, everything. And I was taking, I had 12 direct reports and I was doing, and I remember having a meeting with him, he looked to me and he said, Dave, you're not getting a medal of honor.
No.
Max: And I think for doing a, and I had like 25 at some point, and it just, well, wasn't sustainable. And you know, it turns out you're just a ship manager, right? Nobody has clear directives from you. You
David: can't think about anything other than dealing with demand, you know, so that, that is, that is great. I actually think for, for first time founders, that advice, it can unlock so much if you, I believe not just, I believe just sharing, being transparent with the whole company.
You tell people what's going wrong and people will raise their hand and be like, no, I know how to fix that. Yeah. We had that.
Max: We had, and we had that happen on, uh, I remember it was a, a, a Friday, a couple of, of months or weeks back where. You know, let, we, we see a feature in the market and we [01:00:00] say, Hey, we really wanna have this as well.
Can we launch it next week? And this was on Friday afternoon. I call our head of engineering and I say, Jake, uh, do you think this is possible? And he said, wait a minute. Uh, puts a question in Slack in the dev, like at all me and, and the CTO cigar staying, uh, in the weekend, in the office over the weekend to build this thing.
Does anybody wanna join? And, you know, 10, 15 people immediately I'm doing my part. Like, yeah, hell yeah. And then, you know, everybody came together, they built a feature. Um, we got the marketing done on the Tuesday, and we launched it the next, the next day. So if the company is in it to win it, then everybody has a very founder esque mentality about it, which I think is awesome.
Love, love that story.
David: Love that story. Good way to end. Max, thank you so much for doing this with me. I enjoyed it. I'm happy we did it in person. Um, and I know you're gonna, I mean, you're on an amazing, uh, trend line, just that keep the, uh. It's the stamina to keep that energy up yourself and for your team.
You [01:01:00] know, if you have that, you're gonna crush it. So thank you.
Max: Thanks, David. This was amazing.
David: That's a wrap for this week's episode of Not another CEO O podcast. Thanks for joining. For show notes and more, please visit not another ceo podcast.com. We'll see you next week.
