Awesome, Max. I'm so fired up that we're getting to do this, man. I can't believe that it hasn't even been a year yet since we had our post-midnight conversation at the train station in New York City. I'm so grateful that this would have never happened. You would have never come to Stockholm.
Has it not? We almost barely did not find a bar. We almost didn't. We tried like two different places.
Thank goodness, but I knew that's when I knew that you were built different. 99 out of 100 founders were going to say, 'Yeah, let's just cancel and reschedule cuz my flight got canceled.' But you said, 'I'm getting on a train. I will see you at the train station at midnight.' And I'm like, 'This is our guy.' And you came.
It was great. Had a good time.
And you guys have accomplished such extraordinary things in the meantime. I can't get over it. You're very famous now in these AI circles. And so I figured today we would spend a lot of time talking mostly about things that actually might help a bunch of listeners, founders in the AI world cuz what you have accomplished now in this very short window of time is truly exceptional. Like crossing 100 million in the shortest time for any B2B software company in history, faster than Anthropic and OpenAI and Cursor and the like, is extraordinary. And particularly the part of it that's exceptional to me is that it's with enterprise. Like some of these other high-flying AI companies that have like a heavy prosumer consumer bottoms-up adoption, but you've managed to do that kind of meteoric growth selling to an enterprise buyer.
With a customer who likes to mark up the contract for sports.
That are not the easiest of buyers, certainly historically. So maybe that we'll start there as your first question. Like when you look back and think about like what did you guys get so right? I don't know if it's on the go-to-market side or something to scale an enterprise B2B business that quickly. Any things that you would share that other, you know, enterprise-focused AI companies could learn from?
Well, obviously we picked great investors. I mean, clearly. But, you know, I think I always treat the sales and distribution as equally important to the tech. And I think we were maybe patient enough to know that we had to get the product right before we really started to push. And then, the way that we built our initial go-to-market team was very, you know, non-traditional.
Yeah, it was very non-traditional.
Almost nobody had a sales background. I don't have a sales background. I'm just saying here. The first guy who joined the team came from McKinsey. And the first sort of, you know, sales guys in the team were very consultative. And we really focused on, you know, how can we make the customer win? And we almost sold them on the, you know, idea of what AI could become in their business rather than, you know, here's feature XYZ.
And we can be a partner to you on that journey. And we've always said, this is not a destination. And, you know, the product that you are buying now might very well not be the product that you have two years from now. But, we are going to work our ass off to keep you at the frontier and build whatever it takes to keep you there.
And so, I think we were selling more than a product. We were selling a partnership and we were selling, frankly, the opportunity of working with us on shaping what that was going to look like. And it's I think a real skill to work with enterprises who end up rooting for you.
Yeah. Right. Like yeah, yeah.
Like they want you to win as much as you want to win.
And then, when we brought in the first layer of management, that was also not traditional sales managers. That was, you know, an ex-founder who had just sold his business for 50 million. Leo. Right? And I asked him, 'Hey, I'm looking for my first sales manager.' He said, 'Oh, I know lots of great people.' And then I said, 'No, I want you.' And he said, 'Absolutely not.' And then, you know, a few dinners later, here we are.
You all have approached everything first principles, think different, and I think that's a great lesson for all the founders. Conventional wisdom doesn't have to rule the day. I love that story about convincing Leo because certainly in the early days getting things start like being an evangelist and a recruiter is one of the most important jobs you have as a founder and as a leader. I remember during my SendGrid days when I was building, I always would say that every year my job was wildly different. Like what the company needed for me was wildly different. Like one year it was product strategy, another was rebuilding the management team, the next was about getting ready for an IPO, and the next was, you know, how do you manage Wall Street analysts? I mean, just every year is wildly different. And for you, that must be like quarterly.
Yeah, it's probably every quarter.
Going at such a pace. Like if you were to reflect back, like what did Legora need you to do best?
Well, you're okay at many things, right? And then you should focus on the things where you strike. I also tell the company that we're going to be a different not only job, but a company every quarter.
Yeah, which has been true.
Yes, and I do think it like forces every function to grow both as a team and as a contributor to that team and to the company. But yeah, if I reflect a little bit on my own role, I think in the very very early days when we just started out like pre-YC, it was a lot about like drumming up the momentum, like getting an initial set of design partners, getting the initial engineers to quit, you know, like great jobs, great jobs, you know, with a mortgage, like, 'Hey, are we going to join, you know, Max and the team? And they have, you know, $300,000 in funding, and you know, if we...'
Yeah, right? And so, you know, definitely traded in some personal favors there, I think. And then during YC was when I really honed in on doing sales myself. And so, during the batch we went from, you know, 50,000 of ARR to almost a million in ARR. And, you know, that was partly because during YC you need to show growth. If you want to have a good shot at demo day. And, you know, ultimately that led to our seed round. Then, I think it changed a bit to being a customer success manager. All of the sales that we did obviously led to a lot of customers wanting to come on board. Everybody and training and material and it's kind of like this one-to-many. Remember doing one of my biggest onboardings, like 350 people, the entire firm. And this was back when I'd been, you know, in legal tech for like 9 months. And you start to get asked these really intricate legal questions about M&A and litigation, you know, IP and it I think forces you in a good way to grow really quickly. You got to be a domain expert. You got to learn in a hurry. And then, once we really started scaling, then hiring became, you know, the number one thing for me. And so, we decided to bring in our sort of first set of, you know, head of sales, head of engineering, head of marketing, head of people. And that has just been phenomenal because it's there we went from 4 million to 70 million, right? And then it's just fire fighting and realizing when do you have leverage where, right? Like we've had these moments where, you know, like investor interest bubbles up. Somebody tries to do the round internally and we go, 'Well, let's, you know, go check what the market thinks.' Yep. Then we typically get to add a new great partner. So, we and now, I probably split my time between, you know, recruiting and people, product, sales, and then other.
Amazing. Yeah, no, and it does and it changes. It sounds like it's very different chapters of the company and you just have to keep scaling with it. You've done a remarkable job of doing it.
Thank you. But, I also got to re-qualify for it, right? Like, I have that view of myself.
Amen. I love that. Like, no, but you do it because I tell that to all my team. You set the example for everybody in the company.
I think everyone has to do that. Everyone has to do that. Everyone has to do that.
Yeah, which is amazing. Which is amazing. Now, given everything you're doing and you are managing this rocket ship, how do you take care of yourself? There are people out there listening, I'm sure, that are doing their own version of this and I know having sat in the seat, being a CEO of anything at scale is hard and it's lonely. It takes a lot of time and effort. I know you fly 200 days a year all over the world. Yeah, a lot of different time zones. How do you take care of yourself so that you can be your best self for Legora?
I think it wouldn't be appropriate to answer this question without making a shout-out to my partner, Louisa. I think we do a great job of taking care of each other. She has a very tough job, too. She works in the private equity team at BCG. Yeah. You know, like, sometimes we see each other in the cab home at midnight. And I think we have both adopted a mindset of like, right now is a very special time to be building. So, you know, some things in life just has to take a pause and that's okay. Like, you can prioritize different things at different times in life.
But, you need to have fun and you need to feel like, you know, as long as you have momentum, I feel like it's really easy to continue. I think also recognize, you know, if I'm traveled a lot to like work really, really hard for a long time, you start to feel it. I got actually had a period almost like a year and a half ago. I was working basically non-stop for 3 weeks and I started like losing the feeling in my legs a little bit. I told her and she was like, 'You're packing the bags and we're like going to your like parents and we're not like leaving until we feel better.' And then we did that and you know, disappeared and then we're in good shape again.
I love that answer by the way because I couldn't agree with you more. Having a life partner, somebody to go through it with that is supportive is probably the most important.
And it goes both way. And I think also internally at the company, right? Like I'm not the only person working hard. Many people here are working insanely hard and we need to take care of each other. So I'm really happy to see, you know, we just had a big Legora team do the biggest cycling race in Sweden.
Um and you know, there's like the run club and all these things that are I think good for running the sprint and a marathon distance.
Yeah, stay active. Yeah, yeah. That's awesome. That's awesome. I love it. Um all right, well let's switch gears to the operating side. I'm sure a lot of listeners are interested in understanding like how just the operating rhythm of the business. Like weekly meetings, quarterly meetings. How do you decide who's in the room, who's not in the room? That kind of stuff and how has that changed and evolved over the last.
Has changed over time. I mean look, when back in the very very early days, um, well, we got in a room and you know, the idea back then was we voted on what we should build.
So basically everybody had a vote.
And it was a very shitty idea because.
Yeah, because basically what ended up happening was I would go to everyone before and go, 'You better vote for this cuz this is what the customer wants and I'm the person doing all the customer stuff.'
That's right. I've got the data.
And then everybody would vote the same. So, that was really useless.
Yeah. Um, designed by committee now.
Yeah, and then like I used to have this phase of like lots of one-on-ones. And then I realized that's a very inefficient way of doing work. Now, I kind of operate the leadership team with a lot more transparency. We just adopted this thing in our Slack that we track a leaderboard for who posts the most percentage of their communications in open channels versus DMs.
So, that's like a leaderboard we have.
Way to drive transparency.
Um yes. And so, you want to be high at that leaderboard. Um, and the leadership meeting has developed from, you know, kind of reporting or like informing to more of a decision forum, which I think is like where you want to have it.
