Max, thank you so much for doing this.
You're a busy person. Harder to catch than hypersonic rockets.
I thought that it was going to be less busy over time because the company would grow and we'd have more talented people in the business. That's still true, but it hasn't become less busy.
Well, listen, I mean, I think there is one thing I remember vividly. You said in one of the first board meetings, you actually told your board members they should stop selling for the first six months.
What happened there? Because you had just raised significant funding. So, what was happening in that room?
So, we heard a lot of bubbles and noise from the market that the products available at the time weren't landing well. And I think a reason for that is that the models were really in their infancy and you had to build a lot of surrounding infrastructure to make them work for legal. And I thought if we go to a partner at a very prestigious firm and they go into the product and they try a prompt and it doesn't work, we lose all of the trust immediately.
And so we made the decision that we were going to build until we were capable of onboarding a thousand lawyers a day. And so between basically May of 2024 and October, we just decided not to sell anything at all. And we got away with it a little bit because it was summertime in Europe and we said, 'Oh, you know, the team is away for holidays. Let's onboard you in September.' And instead of taking vacation, we all coded and we fixed all the problems and we got to a place both with the product and with the customer success team to actually be able to onboard 1,000 clients a day. And then since then we basically doubled revenue every single quarter.
Crazy. But when you actually double click on what you really did there, you made a decision to be a product-led company, right? Is that what this is?
Yeah. And I think there are some decisions that are really hard in the moment and then you realize, wow, it was definitely the right decision. And that's one of those. And I think it goes back to at least our market, which is if you try it and it doesn't work, you burn the bridge. Like you burn your shot. So you really only get one chance. And when you only get one chance, you better make sure it works.
Yeah. Interesting. What else would you say you believed early on in the journey of Legora that others didn't believe?
Well, if you zoom back to the very, very early days, we were very anti-training models, and we believed — which was actually contrarian in 2023 — that all of the value was going to be built into the application layer for application companies, and that trying to fine-tune GPT-3 or 3.5 was just a total waste of time. And other providers and other builders didn't believe that. So that was a decision early on which we've had to continuously re-evaluate, and I think that thinking is still evolving as we go into mid-2026 and onwards.
You once said there's only winning, everything else is losing. What does winning actually mean in an infinite game of building a company?
Well, isn't there like a saying that winning isn't everything, it's the only thing?
Definitely something you would say.
That's the mindset at Legora, and I think it's maybe a little bit non-European in a way, and especially for a Swedish-founded company to be walking around saying things like that. But, you know, we all know this: software outcomes are distributed very disproportionately. It's a power law, and whoever becomes number one gets, you know, 90% market share, and number two gets to share the remaining 10% with another nine players.
If you're going to work this hard at building something, I think you have to be set on becoming number one. And I think that sort of goes for all teams: it goes for our marketing, it goes for the product, it goes for the sales team, it goes for the operations teams. And if everyone strives to be their best, then the company strives to be its best. And I think that many companies founded in Europe also get to a certain level and then they feel like they're done, or, you know, they've accomplished so much and they're maybe the biggest tech company in their respective country. But then when you start to compare that internationally, you realize you're a big fish in a small pond, but you're still a pretty small fish. And when Paul Graham was in Stockholm last time, he said that Legora is like — do you know the Swedish Fish, the candy? He said that we're big Swedish Fish. And that's what we strive for.
Yeah. I mean, I think there are a few threads in there. I think one is the European mindset of humility and like just trying to put your heads down and not sound as though you want to be too ambitious. I think that's one. The second thing is local versus global optima. I'd love to double click on that, and in your case it has a very specific nuance. But walk me through a little bit this whole notion of your understanding as to why Swedish, and in general but also Europeans more broadly, are so shy about being ambitious and being bold.
Well, in Sweden, there's something called Jante law, or the Law of Jante, which basically translates to: you shouldn't think that you are something, and you shouldn't stick your head out and be overly ambitious, or you should really live with a lot of humbleness.
You know, in Germany, a similar thing. Our chancellor once said, like I think 30 years ago, 'Whoever has a vision should go see a doctor.' Why is that?
Well, I don't know why that is, but it is that way. And so you grow up in that. And I think that breaking out of that bubble for us also meant going to, for instance, Y Combinator, right? Like we went to San Francisco and we saw how grand other companies were thinking, but with very little substance. And I actually felt that we came to YC with a lot of substance. And then we understood, okay, if you're going to truly make it, you have to go much bigger. And we then took a very active decision of still building from Sweden.
Why was that? Why didn't you stay?
Well, so our thinking was: if we're going to win, we have to do it in a different way. Like we can't just be the 15th legal AI company in San Francisco. That's not going to work — or maybe it will work, but we have zero competitive advantage being in San Francisco and we didn't have working visas. And so we went back to Sweden; we already had our customers in the Nordics.
And then we expanded very, very rapidly. And I actually think that the go-to-market learning and the product localization of going from Sweden to the Nordics, to Germany, to France, to Spain, then to the UK, and then to the US taught us a lot about how to grow internationally, and that has now been a muscle that we really flex as we've recently opened our offices in Singapore and in Japan. And I think this is a very global market that we're playing in, and I think that a lot of these AI companies are actually much more internationalizable, sort of able to go international, than the previous SaaS world.
I think that I have a theory as well, but why do you think that is? Is it purely technological and sort of like the modular underpinning of scale, or is there also just a new playbook that AI gives you in terms of the actual sort of internationalization?
I think that there are only a few breakout companies in every category, right? And those breakout companies end up growing exponentially faster than the rest. And so it becomes very clear as to who are the haves and maybe the have-nots. And you compound. And so, you know, the biggest firm in Korea wants to work with the best global player, not the best Korean player, because the best Korean player is very, very, very tiny compared to the best global player. And at least in law, they all work with each other. So by working with the best firm in France, you get to work with the best firm in Germany, and then you get to work with the best firm in Australia because they all do cross-border transactions. And our customers really love to spend time with each other. So there's a lot of gossiping.
That's a good one. But maybe think about your own journey: you're just kind of on the exponential, and you've consistently just beaten every metric you ever set for yourself. What is the team and the dynamic and the sort of acceleration you're looking for internally as your north star to get there?
So, we like to think of ourselves as professional swimmers, and you swim faster when you look down in the water, not when you're looking sideways at what the competition is doing. And I actually feel like we're so confident in our own product roadmap and the way that we work with our customers that other companies are looking at what we're doing and taking inspiration, which I think there's nothing wrong with — great artists steal. But when we wake up and we think about what are we going to do today that we didn't have time to do yesterday, I think a lot of that actually boils down to how you deliver customer value. And for our users, many of them have never experienced delightful software ever, and software in legal has been very clunky. It looks like it was built in Windows 95. And for the first time ever, all of these fragmented tools and capabilities are being compressed into a single platform like Legora, and that is just delivering so much value that optimizing and iterating on that cycle is how you get further.
And I think it's very easy to over-index on, oh, we're in this land grab and we're just going to push really hard on sales because that's going to get us where we want to be. And I think we're in a very long marathon and we're coming up on mile two maybe, but there's still, you know, 40 miles to run — or 24 miles if you're American. And I think that focus is what defines a company. And if you look at all of the great software companies of the last generations, I think the product obsession is what really permeates through many of those journeys.
I think from our point of view, there's actually also a different story to this. You would say, or you might argue, that there's a second-mover advantage in many markets. So if you think about Anthropic and OpenAI, or you look at Brex and Ramp, we saw a second-mover advantage with Ramp, and we see the same thing with you. How would you look at that whole second-mover advantage? Is there an advantage of having a primed and more informed market and talent base? Is there any of that that you are interpreting?
I don't think that there is a huge second-mover advantage. I mean, I think if we had had early access to the GPT models and we were based in San Francisco, we would have maybe gone further, right? I think that ultimately very few people have an outlier impact on the world around them. And I think that we've just done a very strong job of accumulating lots of those people in the Legora party tent. And, you know, certainly you can see what's working and what's not working. You can maybe be a little bit more patient on certain things.
But in our market especially, brand and trust is so important that it's actually a real advantage to be the bigger player. Which is — we have a saying at Legora, which is GBF. And somebody was asking me in an onboarding why we're all talking about our gay best friend, but it's not gay best friend, it's Get Big Fast. And that's how we think about both recruiting and growing in the company, but also as we think about the product and the breadth of that product. And, you know, working with the largest enterprise users in the world — the big banks, the insurance companies, the pharmaceutical companies, the big law firms — these are enormous enterprises. And when you start to serve a really large American bank on, you know, billions of dollars of legal work, that is just a different scale, and you have to be big in order to serve that because they're also trusting you with their most sensitive data. You know, these are the contracts and the obligations and the transactions and the litigation cases that determine the outcomes of real companies and of people's lives. And so we have to treat a lot of that with respect and be careful around it. And I think that's why you're not going to see a long tail of hundreds of successful legal technology companies. You're going to see quite few that make it to that very top level.
But hasn't the customer sentiment also changed since the beginning, where it used to be like, hey, you're billing per hour, therefore there was more reluctance to use AI, and then there came a moment in time, I believe, where customers were actually saying like, hey dear law firm, if you don't use AI, I stop using you. Did you experience some of that in your growth?
Yeah. I mean, I think these products were very early in '23 and maybe the first half of '24 where they were close to unusable. It took more effort to work with them than to work without them. And if you feel a need to test and to double-check every single output from an AI, then it's not really driving you efficiency. It's actually like taking efficiency. Yeah.
But then we crossed the chasm, and both the models, but maybe more importantly the products around the models became so good that it became undeniably effective to work with them. And now we're at a point where I think it would almost be unethical to not have an AI or a system like Legora even double-check the work before it gets sent out to the stakeholder. And that is obviously a very big change in operating cadence, in operating model for many of these legal service providers. And that's also a change that I'm finding it important to be part of, because we're not just giving them a tool and saying good luck, have fun. We're really partnering with them on the journey from, you know, no AI to augmented AI to then automating things fully with AI.
When do you foresee this next step of fully agentic AI in legal?
I think we're already there. Especially following our big announcement in June with the new agents and what that unlocks for us — it was a complete re-architecture of the system with the new Opus and DP models. And what we're doing is we're allowing that model, in the harness we built, lots more degrees of freedom. So it's allowed to reason over thousands or tens of thousands of documents. It's allowed to use tools independently to solve problems. It iterates its plan very clearly with the user.
And we actually tried this internally. We just bought another company and had Legora connected to the virtual data room, and then had it produce a first pass of the due diligence report and of any outstanding documents or information that we maybe should be requesting from that company. And it was frighteningly good.
Amazing. And so you said, obviously big matters, enterprise as a category. I mean, you're one of the fastest-growing enterprise sales companies out there in history, I guess, in terms of time.
Yeah, we just beat the record for 150 million.
Amazing. So out of all the insane metrics you have, which one matters most to you? Like where are you spending most of your focus and time?
Oh, my favorite metric is time spent actively working with Legora in the product per active user. So that's about an hour and a half today.
So that's about user love.
Yeah, it's an hour and a half per day. It takes quite a lot, and it's growing. And I think that also tells a story: you don't just upload stuff into Legora, run a prompt and then move on with your life. You're actually working on a consecutive basis inside of the product, and that's where your work happens. And I think that's a very fun data point to be optimizing because, as you say, it's about customer love, but it's also about customer value. Because you're so busy that if you choose to spend time in a product, then that must deliver you a lot of value.
Yeah. You know, you're very — you're probably one of the most intense people I've met, and I think people that walk away from...
In a great way, in the best way. And you leave this deep impression on people to root for you. We just discussed this earlier. Why is that? Like I've never had anybody like you where people come up to me afterwards and say, I just want to help this guy. Why is that? What do you do to them?
So, I think it's in this Steve Jobs biography where he calls — I can't remember if it's HP or Dell or Intel or one of these companies — and he's like 12 or something, and I think he asks if he can get some computer parts, and he finds the phone number in the phone book and calls the number, or if he gets a summer internship or something. But I read that and I was like, wow, you can actually just ask people for help, and it actually feels really good to help other people. And that goes back even to how we started Legora. So I would reach out to partners on LinkedIn and ask them if we could have lunch because I wanted to learn more about litigation or about banking finance or about M&A. And I would offer them to pay their hourly fee to have lunch with me. No one ever took me up on actually having me pay for it, and more often than not, they would pay for lunch because I didn't have a lot of money.
And I think that if you show enthusiasm and you do it from a very honest place, that just feels great. And it takes a village. Like this is not a one-man band. There's, you know, 750 people standing behind me at Legora today, but even behind them we have over 100,000 lawyers working with the product and giving feedback and giving us suggestions, and investors and partners. It's everyone coming together to change our industry. And I think when you do it from that place rather than, oh, we're just here to build a big company, that is a lot more fun.
And it invites excitement and ambition and a sort of belief in that technology is a real force for good. And that has never happened in this world before. I think engineers are very good at doing that amongst each other, but the legal profession has never experienced this movement that we're creating.
I think a movement in general is so important, like creating a movement around your mission. When you think about your abilities that are not technical or people-related, but really come down to storytelling — I think you're an extremely good storyteller and you have a great sense of aesthetics and brand. Where does that come from and how do you think you're actively managing those two dimensions? Because they're not qualified as major focus areas for founders on the outside, but you are very honed in on those two. What happened there?
So I actually think the brand question — we got a lot of positive feedback around the way that Legora is perceived. And here in London recently we built our own pub called The Red Line, which is a pun on The Red Lion, which is like the most typical bar in London. And we just made it a pop-up; we built it for 48 hours around one of the big legal tech events here, and we had almost 300 people come through over those 48 hours and have a pint with us.
And that doesn't come from me. But what comes from me is the investment in that we take it really seriously. And even in the very, very beginning, it was my co-founder August who spent a lot of time thinking about what the Legora brand was going to look like and how it should feel. And I understand the importance of it, but I don't for a second believe that I have the skills to articulate it. And so I actually think my superpower there is finding the people who are much stronger than I am in terms of executing what that would look like. And even the Dude Law campaign — we recently looked at it. It had 70 million views.
For, you know, a commercial for a legal technology tool, which would never have happened before. And it even went outside of the normal law circles into sort of tech more broadly. And again, that doesn't come from me, but that comes from me saying yes, go do it. And I think marketing especially, you're not bold enough unless 30% of the stuff you try fails. Like you have to be okay with some error rate there because otherwise you're not pushing it far enough.
I think storytelling is always something I was excited about. I love playing video games. I love watching movies. I used to like write when I was younger. And so I really put a lot of value in the fact that you need to align everyone, and you need to explain clearly what mission you have and your reason to exist, and that has to be easy to understand from the customers, from partners, from investors. You know, it's a lot about pattern matching. And I worked in VC for about 6 months, and it was very clear when I met founders who were good storytellers and who were poor storytellers. And if you leave a meeting with a founder and you have more questions about what they do than like, oh, I want to support this person and I want to be part of their mission, then you failed. And so I think...
I didn't know you worked in VC. When did that happen?
Yeah, I did. Autumn of 2022.
Interesting. And then you started right after.
Yeah. Then I did a sabbatical in the US, and I got really bored after about a month and a half, and then we started the war.
Interesting. I mean, I agree on storytelling. It's like, I think it's one of the most underappreciated skills for leaders in general.
No, I think it's super important. And I think it's hard to teach, or at least most people don't emphasize it enough. But it's the job all the time. It's to investors, it's to customers, it's to employees, it's to partners, it's to yourself even. And unless you can get behind that, I think it's very hard to go far.
