All right. What do you want to talk about?
Well, I wanted to start talking about Jude Law. How does one grab Jude Law to be 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 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 cinematographer and he ended up getting a Saturday Night Live scriptor and the cinematographer of Oppenheimer. We were like you know we raised a lot of money but you know not that much. 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, for the next campaign. So, if anybody's working in marketing, we need your help.
I love that. 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 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 Jude Law and she's like yes. You know so now we have the connection.
Great. Let's talk about something. That was a great opening question. I love it. I love it. Let's talk about the audience here. So a lot of people here are not starting companies. A lot of them are working at companies or working at startups or in school. 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 McKinsey. 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. And so I felt like 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 McKinsey in the back of the pocket. 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 Legora who's done this. It's a group of, you know, 10 15 people who had offers at McKinsey in particular. Even Jake, our CTO, who was also a previous YC founder, 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.
Tell us about 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 months before YC or the month?
So let me paint you the timeline here. 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.' And after we got 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 real gulag. It was like a work camp.
Like I hope that MJ is in here to like put that 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 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 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 the US shipping in YC, they came back to take care of the customers because I had to go to YC to do the fundraising. And I think this is a underappreciated part of YC for at least first-time founders with very little network. There's a lot of investor reach and there's a lot of signaling value to be in YC. 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.
