# 15 Term Sheets in 7 Days and Choosing Benchmark

Harvey vs Legora: Who Wins Legal and How to Play When You Have $600M Less Funding · Are AI Models Plateauing Today · Building a 9-9-6 Culture From Stockholm with Max Junestrand

20VC · Aug 15, 2025 · 81 min · 16,223 words
Speakers: Harry Stebbings, Max Junestrand
Source: https://www.996.fm/episodes/20vc--ep-55a37e69/

## Cold open

**Harry Stebbings** [0:00]:

This is 20 VC

## Intro

**Harry Stebbings** [0:00]:

with me, Harry Stebbings. Now I can't wait for this show to stay. There is nothing I love more than a European giant being built. Max Junestrand is the cofounder and CEO of Legora, the collaborative AI powering the next generation of lawyers. Now this is an insane story for many reasons. First, Max turned down a multimillion dollar career in gaming to build Legora. Second, he's raised from the best in the business, including Benchmark and IVP to name a few. Also, he's done it from Stockholm. And then third, he scaled the firm with one sixth of the capital of his closest competitor, Harvey, who've raised a reported $800,000,000, while Legora has raised just a 120,000,000. But before we dive into the show today,

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**Harry Stebbings** [0:40]:

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## Conversation

**Harry Stebbings** [3:21]:

Max, dude, listen. I I actually remember messaging you when we were talking about Project Europe, and I was in a car going to a football game, and we were talking about work ethics and work culture. And I was just like, this guy's fucking awesome. I need to make a show happen. So I'm so glad that we made it happen with you in town.

**Max Junestrand** [3:38]:

So am I, Harriet. This is great. I'm really excited to be here.

**Harry Stebbings** [3:41]:

Now I would love to start with a little bit of background because I heard from some of your investors that you were a pro gamer before, but then we were chatting before and you said there's actually a cool story before that that we should start with. And so I'm gonna leave it to you in terms of how you wanna start with those two options. When

**Max Junestrand** [3:56]:

I was six, my dad bought me World of Warcraft, and that was actually how I learned English. That explains a lot. Well, yeah. So from an early age, you start playing this game, and I grew up in a really off city outside of Stockholm. So we were 10 people in my class. I was highly competitive, and I think that space didn't give enough room for that competitiveness. And so you got into video games, started with World of Warcraft and then moved over to Warcraft three, which had this mod called DOTA one. And DOTA one was this amazing game where you jump in five players, you meet five other players, and it was very complex. It was like playing 5D chess in real time. I got so into that that when it was time to pick between should I bet on a career in video games or should I go to university, I had to like make a call. My reasoning was something like, what's the best case scenario with playing this video game? Winning a huge tournament. And the money is good. You make 5 to $10,000,000 if you win the biggest tournament. Were you that good? If I have made it my full time thing, I could have gotten that good. Because I was juggling school on the side, and the people I was competing against were were not. And then I thought, okay, what's the best case with going to university? Probably something like this. And I thought that was a much better outcome. I enrolled in computer science, and I think I very quickly realized that that wasn't like a full time job. So I got a full time job on the side, which was esports betting. So I was building statistical models for DOTA two and Counter Strike based on server feeds. So we got all the data and then we built the odds that determine how you would bet on those games. And then COVID hit. And computer science got so boring because we were like 300 dudes in hoodies not going to university anymore, so nothing happened. And in Swedish college you can't pick your courses. You need to pick a program and then you stick to that program. So if you go to computer science you can never pick any business courses. The business university is separate from the engineering university, so you never mix. And I wanted to do both. So I threw in an application to the computer science university, got enrolled, and then I did the same for the business university by kind of redacting the first application and then calling them and saying, hey, I fucked up. Can you please invite me back in? So then I got enrolled in both universities in parallel so I could finish them both during COVID, which was really easy because you would have these exams that even if they ran across, you could just have two phones and film yourself doing one exam for one of the universities and doing another exam for the other university. I finished one of the degrees. So if my girlfriend's parents ask, I've finished my degree. And if investors ask, I'm a dropout, which I think is great. And then ChatGPT came out and just everything changed.

**Harry Stebbings** [6:36]:

I absolutely love that. Okay. So ChatGPT comes out and everything changes. I do also just wanna pick up on a moment, though, in the pandemic because you met your cofounders at a volleyball pandemic event. Yes. This feels like a paradox, Max.

**Max Junestrand** [6:50]:

Yeah. So we we went out to play volleyball, and you meet people who have a similar interest in machine learning, coding, building things. I think this group in Stockholm is still quite small. So we hit it off and then nothing really came of it. But when GPT came, they gave me a phone call and said, hey, we want to apply to this business accelerator, but we need somebody who went to the business school to be on the paper in order for us to apply. And since I had done the double thing with the computer science university and the business university, you know, they thought of me. I get in, they put me on the paper, and I ask them, why do you want to apply to this business accelerator and not YC? And they're like, oh, what's YC? And I'm like, well, it's basically the business accelerator, but it's for real companies. Did they have the idea for Legora or Layer at the time then? The idea for the business was not a product. It was a problem space. It was the fact that AI and legal is going to be a thing. And they had been playing around with the early BERT models that came out from Google and also a version of them called SWE BERT. That were so incredibly bad frankly. I mean you couldn't really solve anything back then. And so they had built their own document management system. They had built their own editor. They had built like a legal research platform. They had all this code. When I came in, I sort of said, let's just delete all of it, and let's build on GPT, and let's like build a version of it that at the end of the day lawyers are benefiting from.

**Harry Stebbings** [8:15]:

Okay. So that was 2021 with, that was four years ago. Yeah. Okay. And now you look at the models we have today. We're gonna go back to the story, I I wanna finish that. But if that was four years ago, do you think we see the same continued progression rate in model development, or do you think we start to plateau?

**Max Junestrand** [8:32]:

The gap from the BERT models to GPT was the biggest gap ever. And I think the gap since then have been much more incremental. I actually think the biggest things allowing for new products to be built is not the models themselves, but the frameworks around them. Take structured outputs, take tool calling, take MCP servers. Like these are the frameworks now that are forming around the models that allow us to build massively awesome things. So I actually think that the product to model gap today is massive. Where the products are today, I don't think we utilized 20% of what the models can do. We have a huge sort of gap and way to go. And I think we could, just given more time with the models we have today, given no incremental improvement in them, still have years and years and years to build on.

**Harry Stebbings** [9:20]:

Wow. That's so interesting. So essentially, it's like the application layer doesn't fully utilize the model layer capacity. Exactly. What more could the application layer do to utilize that capacity?

**Max Junestrand** [9:28]:

Well, that's what we're figuring out. Right? That's that's why we're working so hard. But I mean, even if you take the o three models. And right now, I think in many ways, we're still working with the models in a sort of single API call manner. We've started playing around with this idea of swarms of LLMs being thrown at a problem.

**Harry Stebbings** [9:46]:

So swarms of LLMs thrown at a problem is when you take a Grok, Anthropic, and OpenAI Well,

**Max Junestrand** [9:51]:

and you throw of doing one API call, you do a 100 or a thousand. And I mean the quality of the output is drastically improved. So if you take something like writing a legal research memo, if you just use one model, one deeper research model or one reasoning model call, you get some output. But if you use a 100 calls and you let them rebuild and and improve what you already have over and over and over again, it gets massively improved. But this takes hours to run, and they're quite expensive. What does that

**Harry Stebbings** [10:19]:

do to cost? It's just quite expensive. Is that double? Is that 10 x? No. It's, I mean, a 100 x. Literally is a 100 x. Yeah. So the unit cost is the same for every increase? Yeah. Basically. Wow. Does that drastically change to an eighteen month time period?

**Max Junestrand** [10:31]:

We will start to see products utilize the models in much more creative ways than what we're seeing today. Today, it's still quite basic. I think the biggest thing that we've done for instance is if you look at a task like due diligence where you need to review hundreds of documents, well instead of throwing the entire document in and asking all the questions at the same time, do everything in parallel. So you'll say, okay, I have a 100 questions I wanna run across this file and I have a 100 files. So effectively we run 10,000 parallel API calls. And of course that scales the cost structure, but I think you could imagine a world where instead of throwing 10,000 API calls, you throw a 100,000 because you run them all 10 times as well. Because the cost of the models in comparison to the hourly billable rate of a great lawyer is still miles and miles apart.

**Harry Stebbings** [11:20]:

Is the winner ultimately the compute provider? When you have a scale of API calls of a 100 x like that, does the model provider ultimately not the model provider. Sorry. The compute provider ultimately be the winner?

**Max Junestrand** [11:32]:

I think you're right in that the model providers are not the winners because that's completely Commoditized. Yeah. It's Is it commoditized today? Yes. Who do you work with? All of them.

**Harry Stebbings** [11:42]:

Really? And there's not a discernible difference? Not really.

**Max Junestrand** [11:45]:

There's a discernible difference for some types of tasks. And we've realized, okay, Sonnet is better here. Gemini is better here. I think the Gemini deep research one is maybe a bit better than the OpenAI, but then they sort of continue battling that out. So, yeah, I do think that the compute providers are for sure winners, but I also think that there's a huge piece of the cake in the application layer. And in particular, there's a cake in the application layer which is not only on the software side, but on the service side. And here's where the legal market is interesting because legal software market is 20,000,000,000. Legal service market is a trillion. The way you should think about it is not how do you play for the software market. It's how do you work with the best firms in the world

**Harry Stebbings** [12:25]:

to to play for the service market. Well, I think the biggest question with all AI software today is fundamentally, are you able to transition from technology budgets to human labor budgets? If so, my word, we have an exciting future ahead as founders and VCs. Yeah. If not, then it's not as exciting, bluntly. No. My question to you is, you are then partnering with the people you are going to kill.

**Max Junestrand** [12:47]:

No. I don't think about it that way. I think we're partnering with them so that they can win and we can get a piece of their cake too. I wanna show you an example here. I realized I just turned off my phone, but I have a couple of stats from a pilot we just ran with a AM Law two 100 firm. And they have some examples of tasks where they reduced the time required to deliver the work from ten hours to fifteen minutes.

**Harry Stebbings** [13:11]:

Do lawyers want that because they work on a billable hours basis? Do lawyers wanna reduce ten hours to fifteen minutes? Does that not cannibalize their business in terms of the time sheet nature of it? Of course, it does. And so they just then change it to project based finance?

**Max Junestrand** [13:26]:

Yes. Yeah. And so you have a a structure in the largest law firms in the world where they're moving from the billable hour to fixed pricing. And what you have in finance is you take a portion of the transaction value, and we will start to see that happening too in transactional law.

**Harry Stebbings** [13:41]:

That's fascinating. So my takeaway is buy more NVIDIA. Okay. Cool.

**Max Junestrand** [13:47]:

And I think the other way to think about it is you also have the corporates who are trying to figure out how much work they can take in house and how much they can pressure their firms to go AI native. And this is rapidly happening today. If you're a large bank like HSBC, you are paying hundreds and hundreds of millions in legal fees. And you're thinking about how do I work with my law firm to get the most amount of value here. The opportunity for the law firms are massive, but they have to be forward leaning and say, all right, in this new world where there's a new equilibrium and there's a new demand and supply function for our services, we need to get majority market share. And we need to own the conversation. Because right now, I'm finding that it's sometimes quite reactive. What do you mean by that? If you are a big firm today, you make a lot of money, you have innovator's dilemma. Then you have companies like Cursor, UDR and others who are trying to play for the pure service part. Our play is quite different. I think that the law firms and the best attorneys in the world will go software powered, and we help them do that.

**Harry Stebbings** [14:57]:

For me, it's like if you wanna build, like, a $100,000,000,000 business, you have to be software powered. If you wanna build the next generation of Cooley, which is an amazing business, by the way, doing hundreds and 100 but then you do the Crosby. More certainty to a more capped upside, I would say, almost. Kind of interesting. Yeah. Okay. So going back to the story of this. So we meet these two other cofounders at the volleyball event. They've got the idea paradigm of, okay, AI, law, we've got the right time. What happens next? We

**Max Junestrand** [15:24]:

decided to start working on this full time in May 2023. And we set up the initial structure. We raised some angel money, and we say, let's work on this over the summer. Three weeks into it, we see the Casetext acquisition for 650,000,000, and we all think to ourselves, wow. There seems to be some money in Legal Tech. You had this company that had, as some others also did, pre access to GPT-four, which was an incredibly unfair advantage in some ways. But we started in a much smaller market. We started in The Nordics. And I quite quickly realized that nobody was going to take three software guys very seriously in this world of law. And so I basically went to the top three law firms in Nordics and we landed with the biggest, Mannheimer Swartling, and we moved in with their firm.

**Harry Stebbings** [16:16]:

I often listen to podcasts, they say things like you just did there, I'm like, but how? Right. How did you go into, like, the biggest law firm in Sweden Yeah. And let them accept you and welcome you into their office to see how they work? Yeah. Good question.

**Max Junestrand** [16:29]:

And I think it required a bit of skill, but also a quite open mindset from them. So I managed to get a meeting with their managing partner Jan Danestrand. And when I was trying to get the meeting, somebody told me it's harder to break into his calendar than the Fort Knox. But somehow we managed to do it. I go to their offices, we sit down like this for thirty minutes, and I realize we're sort of a pre seed company, we have no product, we have nothing to show for, So I need to make the impression that AI is going to be a very important part of their business and that I'm a guy that he's gonna wanna work with. I had done my research. This was pre deep research from the LLM. So it was actually real journalistic research. And I had seen that he'd had some statements in the past effectively saying that AI is more artificial than intelligent. Tough audience. Tough audience. And this was back when the early promise of AI started to come into law and everybody completely burnt themselves. Because the expectations and the marketing was up here, the delivery was down here. And you effectively had to sit and train the system yourself, which nobody had time for. So we get in and I think the essence of the conversation is something like, dude, I don't know law, you don't know AI, but this is gonna be a thing and we're gonna need each other. And they had an innovation lab. So they had actually put in a structure to welcome companies like this into their space. It wasn't that well structured, but the idea was there. And we got accepted in, I can show you a picture of the room a bit later. It's this really small conference room without any windows, and we were five guys in there. The AC would turn off at 5PM, and we would sit there until midnight for six months. It was really close to the Coca Cola fridge though. So we had all the good benefits of being in a big law firm. I think I started getting almost like this rumor of bringing my laptop with me to the lunch canteen every day. And I'd sit next to somebody new and sort of bother them on the lunch and be like, hey, we're building this demo. You know, do you wanna look at Leia? And they're like, oh, Leia. Oh, yeah. You you guys are the AI guys. Right? And we're like, yeah, that's us. And I show them and you know watch them play around with it, see what they try to do. And I think very quickly you realize, okay these are the sort of buckets of things that people want to do. And I think broadly you can say they wanted to do legal research, they wanted to review contracts, and they wanted to draft things. But people would come in with this expectation of I want the LLM to draft me a 300 page SPA with one prompt. And of course, couldn't do that. So we had to build the staircase of the capabilities of the platform, but also educate the firm and educate the attorneys about what they could expect from a platform like this.

**Harry Stebbings** [19:04]:

From doing this very close integration with your first kind of partner to build product, what are your biggest lessons or advice to founders on building product with customers and when to listen and when not to?

**Max Junestrand** [19:18]:

Yeah. That's the the heart of the question. Right? Because

**Harry Stebbings** [19:20]:

just wanna build a product that's in their paradigm of behavior.

**Max Junestrand** [19:23]:

No. And we didn't. They were in many ways asking for a faster horse, and we wanted to build a car. What I realized was that we needed the brand and we needed to be coupled with a firm that had a very serious position in the market. They are innovative. They are pushing the agenda. And you had our competitor getting close with A and O. And so we needed kind of the same. And we were based in The Nordics, so Mannheim was the firm that we went to. I think when you talk with your customers and you want to understand what are they trying to solve and how are we going to solve for it, you need to realize that there's a huge information gap between they fundamentally, most of them at least 99%, don't fundamentally understand the technology at all. You're just looking at the behavior of what are they trying to do given the tools that you provided them. And then you almost need to come in with this process mindset. I love lawyers, I love attorneys, but they're not that process Right. I spent like eight weeks at McKinsey, not enough to be sort of indoctrinated, but good enough to be dangerous in PowerPoint. And you come in and you look at a process like say a due diligence or writing a submission and you say, okay, this seems to be the core steps. What can AI do today? What can it not do today? And how are we going to engineer the platform in a way so that we can do everything here? I think there's this quote from the guy who built Gmail that's like, your your product can have three features that should be good. That's kind of what we had for a very long time. Three things. We were very good at them, and then you get people to understand what they can actually achieve with them.

**Harry Stebbings** [20:56]:

Okay. So we've partnered with this firm. We're internal. We're in this kind of soulless dark room. You're drinking too much Coke, but staying up till midnight with sugar. Brilliant, brilliant health. When do we decide to go to YC, and why does that decision come about?

**Max Junestrand** [21:11]:

We're locked in with this firm from August 2023 until February 2024. Wow. But we get early accepted into YC. So we got accepted for the winter batch that happens between January and March in 2024, all the way back in August. And I actually had a term sheet from a Swedish VC, which I got the same day as we had our YC interview. And this was our second YC interview because we had totally botched the first one.

**Harry Stebbings** [21:41]:

Why? What happened?

**Max Junestrand** [21:42]:

I think in essence, we came in with a very limited understanding of our problem space. And we needed the sort of two to three months of grinding and doing the foundational work to be ready to explain what we wanted to build. Because we just said, oh, legal and LLM seems like a good area. Let's go build here. And I think the YC partners were quite unimpressed by that. And I frankly think that they've also burnt themselves in the legal tech space many, many times. That's true. So Gustav, our partner from YC, even after our final interview, he called me and he was like, Max, are you really sure you're gonna sell into law firms? And I was just like, yes. It might be contrarian at this point, but it's gonna be obvious. And

**Harry Stebbings** [22:27]:

so on the second interview, it

**Max Junestrand** [22:28]:

goes

**Harry Stebbings** [22:29]:

well and you get in?

**Max Junestrand** [22:29]:

It goes way better, yeah. And we get in, we realize, okay, we need to flip our Swedish company into a Delaware. We had only raised like $50,000 in initial angel money.

**Harry Stebbings** [22:41]:

Uncap to all like

**Max Junestrand** [22:42]:

Yeah. And then we were gonna run out of money basically. But so that's why we had the term sheet from the Swedish VC. So we had an out. But when we got accepted into YC, we realized, okay, this space is gonna move quickly and so we need to scale. And I think I realized quicker than others that, okay, we had Harvey, we had Casetext, we had a few other companies who thought that legal tech was gonna be a big thing. And so if you wanna play here, you gotta go fast. And that meant that instead of waiting the three months to kind of flip our Swedish company into a Delaware, I just went out and I raised a loan against the investment that was going to come in from Y Combinator. So we raised a loan against the collateral that the money was gonna come in, immediately hired four more guys who just strapped in and started coding.

**Harry Stebbings** [23:31]:

Woah. Wait a minute. So Jeanette told me about this from GC, and she she said, though, that you raised this. So you went out to, like, a loan provider? No. We got it from some family and friends. Okay. So you had a family and friends that said, hey. I've got 200 k coming in from YC. Yeah.

**Max Junestrand** [23:44]:

And we need a loan today. And I'm not sure if I said this publicly, but we were also going to run out of money during the YC batch because we were running so aggressively. You know, a lot of the early pilots and client relationships were like, oh, you know, test the product for free. So we didn't get paid in the beginning. And then Yuri Sagalov, who's now the, I think, head of early stage at GC, he did a 500 k safe on us in February or January, the same day I landed in SF. And I think this is an important difference between Europe and The States. Because I land in SF completely jet lagged. I text Yuri, and I'm like, hey. Are you around? He's like, yeah. Let's go grab a coffee. So we go for a coffee. We chat for thirty minutes. I tried to raise on like a 50,000,000 safe. And he was like, dude, you have 20 k MRR. I'm not investing on like a 50,000,000 valuation. And I said, okay. Will you do 25? And I think that's what he did. So we got the money and he wired it the same day. That would not have happened in Europe, I think.

**Harry Stebbings** [24:46]:

What?

**Max Junestrand** [24:46]:

The speed of his decision? Yeah. I talked with a couple of European funds slash angels about taking that 500 ks they passed on it. And then, you know, when they wanted to be part of the seed round, you know, they were just too slow.

**Harry Stebbings** [25:00]:

Oh, that pains me so much. I actually wrote the other day on social that venture capital in Europe was running at two point o on the treadmill. If you know treadmills, two point o is, like, fucking pathetic. Yeah. What is it? 20 is the most Yeah. That's more farrow speed. But I had two companies that basically for six months had not been able to raise in Europe. Right. And then in The US, they got a £30,000,000 term sheet and a £12,000,000 term sheet within seventy two hours of landing. Yeah. Okay. So we land there. We get the 500 k safe. Thank god we're not gonna run out of money. Run out of money. Okay. And so now we're in YC?

**Max Junestrand** [25:34]:

We're in YC. I think we had one of the more unique YC experiences. I heard there were loads of great YC stories. So we got accepted back in August, and YC for us at this point is like this mythical creature, like this Mount Of Olympus that you only get to go to if you're like the creme de la creme. And we got so excited. We booked this like really nice Airbnb, which turned out to be not as nice in person, but it looked really nice on the pictures. It had this little campfire and we said, oh, we're gonna like go to YC and we're gonna ship and we're gonna like sit around the fire and like have a beer and go to all these nice sessions and we're gonna meet Sam Altman. We're gonna do all these things. And we get to YC and I'm just completely locked in on sales and growing the business because we had started getting the initial traction from all the big firms in The Nordics. And so me and our founding AE, we effectively buy these ring lights to put on our laptops. It's like the influencer, like almost like these lights, like the influencer things you can put on your laptop. So it doesn't look like it's in the middle of the night when we sit through sales calls between 1AM and 10AM every night. And I think we closed our biggest deal at that point. It was like 500 k in the middle of the night at 4AM. And we managed to do that or I managed to do it for for about a week. And then I just said, Guys, I'm out. Like, I'm going back to Stockholm. I'm locking myself in the law firm again because we couldn't afford office space back then. So I locked myself in the firm, just did all these conversations. I was running around the city with my little briefcase. Then to him came back at some point too.

**Harry Stebbings** [27:06]:

So for the actual program, you weren't in Silicon I

**Max Junestrand** [27:10]:

was not

**Harry Stebbings** [27:10]:

there. Did you miss out by not being there? Yes. Of

**Max Junestrand** [27:13]:

course. Everybody else made a lot of good friends. I missed out on that. But I think I thought like, my reasoning was Gotta close deals. Yeah. Yeah.

**Harry Stebbings** [27:20]:

I get that.

**Max Junestrand** [27:21]:

Yeah. And maybe that comes back to the whole, you know

**Harry Stebbings** [27:24]:

Do you think it was worth it doing YC then?

**Max Junestrand** [27:26]:

Yes. It was. I mean, we were a Swedish company by nobodies, and YC put us in the global spotlight. And I think we took every opportunity that that provided for us. We surfed that wave so incredibly well.

**Harry Stebbings** [27:43]:

When you think to that sorry. I love that. I think in clips. Yeah. Challenge of being in my brain is every conversation you have, you think in social media clips. Right. Imagine going on a date with me. It's shit. You're like, clip, clip, clip. But my question to you there is you said you really took advantage of that global spotlight that YC brought. What did you do, for example, to take advantage of it? I'm thinking of Bessemer's. It's just a norm.

**Max Junestrand** [28:09]:

Now there's a lot of Swedish YC companies. Mhmm. Back then, I think there were maybe five. Like, there hadn't been a Swedish YC company for a really long time, and I used to work at Depict for a week. I worked there for a week. But between them and us,

**Harry Stebbings** [28:24]:

there were nobody else, I think. I'm gonna start a fund called just Depict Ventures, and anyone that comes out of it just gets an automatic term sheet. That's not a bad idea. We'll do the same with Legora at some

**Max Junestrand** [28:32]:

point. Yeah. Please. I'll I'll fund it. Yeah. And I think we realized that if we wanna play in the global space, we need to be known in The US, and YC put us on the map. And so by being in YC, we raised money from Benchmark, who we would have not been introduced to if we weren't in YC.

**Harry Stebbings** [28:49]:

Okay. So take me to that. So we go through the batch. We close deals in Sweden. And then it comes to demo day.

**Max Junestrand** [28:56]:

I mean, the YC advice is you raise some time four or five weeks before demo day because it's become so competitive. That's when we make the switch. I'm in Stockholm. My team is in SF, and then we switch. So I tell them, you need to come home and you need to take care of the customers because I'm gonna go and fundraise. I go to SF. I locked myself in this nice Airbnb that we've had. And I think it went something like, I arrive on a Tuesday. On the Wednesday, I sit down with Gustav, and he tells me, Max, I think you guys should go and raise like a bigger round. You guys are doing really well. What revenues are you at now? We're, like, 1,000,000 ARR. Wow. So we went from Shit. 200 k MRR to almost 1,000,000 of ARR. So 200 k to a million? Yeah. Basically. Got you. Okay. Fuck. That's amazing. And then you talk to all these funds. You get to know them. Did YC introduce you to all of them? No. They introduced you to a lot of them, but I think it was also a combination of a lot of inbound.

**Unknown** [29:52]:

Mhmm.

**Max Junestrand** [29:52]:

Because I think as soon as you announce that you've been accepted into YC, you get 500 inbound, you know, VC emails that you need to deal with. That's amazing. I think I set up this filter that would, like, auto reply, hey. I'm heads down. I'll see you in, like, end of March.

**Harry Stebbings** [30:09]:

I get those responses. Yeah. And I'm like, dude, I'm a podcaster. All good. Yeah. I hate VCs too. That's always my comeback. Like, no worries. I'm not a VC.

**Max Junestrand** [30:16]:

Yeah. And I think it's it's like because if you're gonna have all those conversations too early, it's too much context switching. Yeah. And so it's just nicer to bundle it because then you're in the zone. So you bundled

**Harry Stebbings** [30:26]:

the fundraise into like a ten day process.

**Max Junestrand** [30:29]:

And I thought it was gonna be a six week process because that's what YC recommend or thought, and then it ended up being like a seven day process. Okay. Who introduced you to Chetan? Yuri Sagalov, who who made the ticket that saved us from not running out of money during YC. And they didn't know this, but they're apparently, like, neighbors.

**Harry Stebbings** [30:46]:

Wow. I did not know this. Chetan literally just responded to our tweet. And so it was a 10,500,000 around there Yes. And Chetan led that. Yes. And then that your Jack Altmans came in that time too. No. Jack Altman came in the round after. Ah, got you. Okay. So we raised 10.5 then. Dude, that's a lot of money then. Yeah. It was a lot of money. What was the price? I think we did it at 50 something. It's, like, chunky. When you reflect on that, how do you advise founders on the right amount to raise and also the right price to raise at?

**Max Junestrand** [31:16]:

I think you think about it in terms of how much money do you need to get to the next stage, and then you optimize for dilution.

**Unknown** [31:21]:

Uh-huh.

**Max Junestrand** [31:21]:

Like, I wanted to dilute less than 20%.

**Unknown** [31:24]:

Mhmm.

**Max Junestrand** [31:24]:

That was my goal. You might say, okay, our threshold is 25% or it's something else. And then you say, okay, how much money do I need to get to the next point or to turn profitable? That's how much money you should raise. And when you do it preemptively, I think you could almost think about it in a way where the valuations are high when you preempt your round. Right? But you think about it within eighteen or twelve months, we'll get to a revenue stage which times 20 or times 25 or something validates that valuation.

**Harry Stebbings** [31:49]:

Then you should take the preempted money. When you look at y c companies now raising with 10% dilution in rounds, do you wish you'd done that? I know it sounds obvious. No.

**Max Junestrand** [31:58]:

Because I don't think I would have gotten Benchmark at a 10% dilution. And I think the VC that you get in the beginning, at least as a first time founder, is quite important because you don't want to get people in your corner who are going to get you off track.

**Harry Stebbings** [32:14]:

The world of YC opens up a huge amount to you. Does the world of Benchmark open up? How much does their brand play a role in validating you? I think there's some

**Max Junestrand** [32:23]:

stats that, like, 99% of Benchmark companies end up raising a series b. That's the only stat you need to hear.

**Harry Stebbings** [32:30]:

Okay. I I totally agree with you, and you're absolutely right. They also had the highest hit rate of $5,000,000,000 companies. Yeah. An incredible stat that Cole Rotman did this analysis. Okay. And so we raised that money. How many term sheets did we have? Like, 15,

**Max Junestrand** [32:44]:

I think.

**Harry Stebbings** [32:45]:

Was it an easy decision?

**Max Junestrand** [32:46]:

It was an easy decision based on the partner. And the reason for it is you're gonna do this for a really long time. That's always how I thought about it. I wanna make the decisions now that I'm going to be happy with a decade from now if I'm still in my shoes. I think then you gotta pick on who do I have chemistry with, who do I think is going to be in this for the long run together with me, and who, when you call unintroduced references, say, In thick or thin, this guy had my back and would in an instant fly to whatever country or Help me close this deal. Or When we didn't hit this quarter, they put in even more money because they said, We're gonna double down. You can only date so many funds and partners, I guess.

**Harry Stebbings** [33:34]:

Okay. So we raise the 10 and a half from Benchmark. Does it. Fantastic. What happens then? Now YC's over. We've got the 10 and a half. The whole team's back in Stockholm.

**Max Junestrand** [33:44]:

Yeah. I go back the same day. Me and negotiated the term sheet like this in person. And then the same day after we signed, he's like, oh, so when are you going back to Stockholm? And I'm like, oh, I guess tonight? And he's like, yeah. Sounds good. So we go back to Stockholm, and we lock in. We have the money, we start scaling, then we preempt our a round. So we were chased by a couple of the funds who were interested in our seed round and said, hey, we keep hearing that you guys are doing really well. We'd love to lead your next round. And then I joined a firm for standard catch up call, and they're like, we wanna do your a round. Name your price. And I just go, well, you know what? Like, I have enough money. I don't need any more right now. And they said, well, we'll do your next round now. And I said, okay. Well, give me a price. And they say, alright. We'll do it at $1.50 or something, which was a 3 x from the Sidron. And I thought, okay. Sounds pretty good. Just send me a term sheet. And then we go through some dancing or partner pitches, yada yada.

**Harry Stebbings** [34:47]:

Was Chetan happy about this? Yeah. I think he was pretty happy about it. But, like, I would not have been happy if I was on your cap table already. If I was Chetan, I would not have been happy. Because I think for you to suddenly ingest $25,000,000 when you just rose 10 and a half, which is a lot for a seed round, respectfully as a first time founder, and you come across much older, you're 23, 24 at this point. 25.

**Max Junestrand** [35:06]:

Oh, yeah, 24 back then. Yeah.

**Harry Stebbings** [35:08]:

Yeah. It is really hard to not get distracted, to remain focused, and be laser, laser focused on the right things when suddenly you now have $35,000,000.

**Max Junestrand** [35:18]:

I agree. So I'll tell you what happened in our first board meeting. I turned to Redpoint and to Benchmark, And I said, we're not gonna sell for the next four months because if we sell and we start onboarding all these great attorneys, they're not gonna have the best experience. And they're going to think that the product can't solve for the sort of standard of things that we talked about in the beginning. Redpoint kinda looked at me and like, dude, we just gave you, like, 25,000,000. Are you not gonna sell? Like, no. We're not gonna sell. We're gonna wait the summer out. We're gonna work really fucking hard, and we're going to onboard, you know, the firms and the people we wanna work with in September, October. And I think that required a lot of ice in the stomach.

**Harry Stebbings** [35:58]:

How do you think about that in terms of if you don't gobble up those firms Mhmm. Someone else will. But if you gobble them up and give them a bad experience Yeah. It's very difficult to get back.

**Max Junestrand** [36:10]:

Yeah. Yeah. One shot. If you mess it up, they're churning.

**Harry Stebbings** [36:14]:

But you don't wanna let someone else get them first.

**Max Junestrand** [36:17]:

Well, even if somebody else got to them first, at this time, almost everybody would churn because the products were so chattypt esque, and they required so much sophistication from the attorney or the lawyer to get value out of. And that's the gap that we had to close. You're serving somebody who's quite untechnical and they're really short for time. So So they're gonna come in and they're gonna expect brilliant results. And if they don't get that the first time, they're never opening up your product

**Harry Stebbings** [36:47]:

again. What were the advantages and disadvantages of being second in timing to Harvey? I think they

**Max Junestrand** [36:53]:

made a lot of fundamental errors around, for instance, fine tuning and spending time on the wrong things. Whereas because we came afterwards, we had to catch up on product. So we were only thinking about the application layer. There were frankly a lot of firms who had piloted them back then who had an awful experience and who thought GPT-four was better. And so that's kind of the point that I'm talking about because if you're coming in with a product and you're charging 10x the price of ChatGPT-four and the partner tries the prompt in the two systems and thinks the GPT-four is better, you're churning and you burn your one shot. Now I think both them and us have gotten to the brand level where you might get a second shot and you can come back and say, well, you know, our product has improved by so much and we have all these new features that you need to try it again. But we only had one shot really. And so I took that very seriously. What strategic mistakes did they make that you learnt from? I think they've done a lot of things great. But I think they came in and set the expectations really high. And they weren't able to deliver on that in terms of product back then. And this allowed us to come in and say, we're maybe somewhere in between here and here's what we can do today. Here's what we think we can do tomorrow, And I promise you, we're gonna deliver on this. And then we onboard then. At some point, we had almost like a two to one in terms of our CS and post sales team in comparison to our new sales team, which was, you know, a very unstandardized thing for a SaaS company like this. But we had almost lawyers who were forward deployed working with our customers on getting them from we have no idea what AI can do for us to holy shit, we just delivered this project with a twice as fast turnaround at the same quality because we managed to, you know, work with AI in a in a smart way.

**Harry Stebbings** [38:39]:

I spoke to someone before the show, and I said, yeah. Legora are taking loads of clients from Harvey. And they said, yeah. But, dude, they are price cutting the shit out of Harvey. And I was like That's not true. Not true? No. But the other thing is happening. It's the other way around. What do you do when that happens? Like, they have so much money. They can afford to give it away for free. Of course. They can have a It's like the Uber area. 693,000,000 delta between you guys. They could buy a small country. Yeah. What do you do when your competitor has so much more money?

**Max Junestrand** [39:13]:

Well, it's like the Uber and Lyft situation a little bit. Right? If you just pour money into it in that world, but that's when you have a very low differentiated product. Now I'm building Legora in a way where even if Harvey is free, a firm will choose to work with us because that's how much better I wanna be in terms of our product and our service offering and where we take our clients and the work we do for them. And so then it doesn't matter how much money you raise. How far do you think you are away from that? Quite a bit. Yeah.

**Harry Stebbings** [39:41]:

But every day we get closer to it. Do you worry about the brand that they've built from being first and also just raising so much? They have a lot of brand through fundraise. Not really.

**Max Junestrand** [39:52]:

I think we're in all the conversations now. I think it's a two horse race to some extent, for sure. And I think they've done some things incredibly well. I think we've done some stuff really well as well. And I think the most impressive part is probably how we've sort of more than caught up with a fraction of the funding and

**Harry Stebbings** [40:10]:

just being super focused on that. Totally agree. As I said, the delta between you and funding is, like, enormous. Going back to that, so the board meeting, every board member's going, fuck. We just gave this Swedish guy a huge amount of money, and he's now not gonna sell. So then it's September, October, I guess. Summer's gone through.

**Max Junestrand** [40:29]:

And we're onboarding everyone. And I think we're at this point where I tell the product team and the engineering team, we need to be in a spot where we could onboard a thousand lawyers a day in the platform, and nothing can break. And we do it. And since then, well, it's been an exponential journey upwards.

**Harry Stebbings** [40:46]:

Okay. So September, though, we're really starting to sell. Yes. And I spoke to Logan Bartlett before the show. And he said, Max became one of the best enterprise sellers that I've worked with. Ask him how. How did you become so good at enterprise sales, and what would you advise founders who are maybe more engineering and product slanted on becoming good at enterprise sales? Well,

**Max Junestrand** [41:07]:

I'm an engineer. Yeah. And so I'll start with that. I didn't go through the sales school. Oh, dude. You're a peak

**Harry Stebbings** [41:11]:

nerd. Yeah. I'm peak nerd. Pro pro gamer engineer.

**Max Junestrand** [41:14]:

Yeah. And I think there's one interesting dynamic in the legal world, which is these firms are not spending the company's money. They're spending their own money. Because every year the firms split the profit. And so they're asking themselves, should we invest now at this level to reap x rewards? And is that better than buying a nice summer house or something like this? Like, a bit exaggerated, but that's the thinking. And so I think immediately I came in with this idea that you will not bluff these people. They're super smart, they're super hard workers, and they get their business. And so I came in with very open cards and said, here's where the tech is, Here's what I think we've done well. Here's what we're going to do. Here's what I think that would lead to for your firm if we partner. And I think that's a very compelling story and a very compelling pitch, and I think we've more than followed through on that. But I mean, the the many of the early firms, this is a bet. It's a bet to say, okay, we think these guys are gonna figure it out and so we wanna be part of that. And now we've been able to pay them back with, I think, a lot of very promising and excellent results.

**Harry Stebbings** [42:30]:

You said earlier about allowing people to test product for free Mhmm. And also the challenging situation it puts you in financially. For other founders who are aware that they need customer feedback, they need usage to understand more, do you recommend product usage for free, or does it make it more challenging? Of course it makes it

**Max Junestrand** [42:45]:

more challenging. The market dynamics for us is that firms are piloting different softwares and they're stacking it against each other. I mean, one way you can view this is every firm that we work with have selected us out of a portion of different products or a bundle of different products because they get to test everything. Of course, ideally, I mean, you have this idea and I think YC said it first, you you gotta go sell and then you build it and you sort of, you know, iterate quickly and so on. One thing I did, and this is maybe a separate on like on a tangent, I reached out to like a 100 attorneys when we started out and I said, Could I pay you your hourly rate for a lunch with me? Of course, they wouldn't take my money because they were so nice. And they'd say, oh no wait, you don't have to pay me $500 to have lunch with me. But then I just ask them all these things. And I think by doing that, like you gotta be in this learning mindset of okay, you wanna soak up as much information and as much things as possible. I love that. Yeah, it was a smart move. I'm happy I did it. Yeah. Because I think if you open with that and you say, hey, I'm going to respect your time so much that I'm willing to pay for it. And, you know, 90% of them also paid for the lunch because, you know, they had money and I didn't. So but I think if you come in with that level of enthusiasm, nobody in our space had met somebody who was as enthusiastic about selling legal tech as me, and they just thought that was infectious.

**Harry Stebbings** [44:07]:

Do you think we do cold emailing badly, Sig? I think outbound is done so badly. People always ask me, dude, how did you get the guests that you get on the show? Yeah. I'm like, honestly, in a world, especially now where you have deep research, you can find incredible bits of information that are so personal. Yep. If you got a note from a young 18 year old engineer that said, oh my god. I heard you on 20 VC. I love DOTA two. It was my start and really was insightful about the way that they positioned it in a short, you would respond. Of course, I would. So you agree that it's just done badly?

**Max Junestrand** [44:41]:

I agree that it's typically done badly. And I also think that there's other venues of reaching out. The good thing about attorneys is that they all have their phone numbers on their websites. So you would call them? No. I would text them. What would But that's you more personal. I would say in Swedish, hey, my name is Max. I'm working on this legal plus AI project. You wouldn't say company, say project because that's more interesting. And I'd say, I'm trying to learn more about the space. I went to these universities because they would know them. I would love to sort of pick your brain on x area that I saw that they were an expert in. Would you be willing to grab lunch with me? I would even pay you your hourly rate because I'm so interested in what you do. And 90% response says, Hey, Max, that sounds wonderful. I'm really busy, but how about we do it in three weeks at this place? And they'd also take you to somewhere nice. Lawyers wanna go and have a nice lunch. And so you get a good lunch and you get to learn more about the industry.

**Harry Stebbings** [45:42]:

I love that. That is fucking amazing.

**Max Junestrand** [45:44]:

And I think their core skill that I'm not sure if it's something I developed or had was this I think I'm I'm easy to help.

**Harry Stebbings** [45:53]:

I'm very coachable. What do you think you do that makes you coachable, that makes people want to help you? I think I'm the same, but I have a strategic way of doing it.

**Max Junestrand** [46:02]:

Okay. I'm I'm not sure if I've thought about it that deeply. I'm very appreciative. I think I'm quite loosely held in a lot of my opinions, which makes possible to switch my framework quickly, and then people see that they have an effect. And then I think you try to pay it back, and then that creates a very good loop.

**Harry Stebbings** [46:18]:

So I found that, Blunty, someone is giving help, they need to feel like you're the subordinate, that you are in some ways beneath them. So I would always start with this position of almost vulnerability. It helps in creating that subordination role, and then I will be incredibly effusive in terms of, one, compliments. Yeah. It makes them again elevated. Great. And then two, like, help me understand.

**Unknown** [46:42]:

Keep

**Harry Stebbings** [46:42]:

me why. Yeah. Exactly. And I yeah. I think that's a good summary of Super, super.

**Max Junestrand** [46:47]:

I love that. And even in sales, you can do it A 100%. To maybe tie it back to to some comparison between us and Harvey or and Winston. Like, I came in with the attitude of legal NAI is standing in front of the most exciting time that it's ever been in. There's the most amount of opportunities. We don't know exactly where it's gonna land, but together, you and I, Harry, can figure it out. And I think that positioning is very compelling. And it's not this way of coming in and saying, hey. It's my way or the highway. Pay us a million bucks or we're going to the next firm.

**Harry Stebbings** [47:23]:

You said there about kind of the exciting time with the conjunction of legal and AI. You also said about messaging the lawyers and saying about a specific segment of the market where they work, which you wanna talk to about. When I did our show recently with Jason and Rory, don't know if you heard it, we spent quite a lot of time on the legal space. Yep. And we said actually that the biggest mistakes I've made in investing is when you think that the market 's much bigger than it is, and you kind of it slowly gets more and more carved up. And suddenly, you know, we're in Solve, which is patents. You then have other players attacking different verticals, and slowly the market fragments away. Yeah. And what seemed like a $50,000,000,000 market or whatever it is Mhmm. Suddenly is a lot smaller because of the fragmentation. I worry about that here. I don't understand Harvey being a $5,000,000,000 company and seeing the upside to 20 given that fragmentation.

**Max Junestrand** [48:11]:

The other way of looking at it is these models will continue to improve. You might not need to build as much to verticalize them. So I had the benefit of spending time with restructuring lawyers and with patent lawyers and with competition lawyers and data protection lawyers and litigators. And yes, everything looks quite differently, and especially in house, right? That's the other side of this coin. But there might be enough in common to build a single platform that assists the attorney in doing lot of that work. And the other thing that I think is quite interesting is as these frameworks around the agents are improving, you'll effectively have agents going out and running other pieces of software. So take an example like translations. You have translation companies like DeepL and others who are brilliant companies, but they're a very very narrow use case. And then you might have something like redlining or you might have something like comparing documents. All these things are very different things, and what you can do is you can put an agent on top of it that can run structured tool calling. So you just go to Legora and say, hey, please help me translate this document, and it will throw the document to the correct API and retrieve back the results. And And so what you effectively get is you get like this universal interface to a lot more functionality, which if you're a senior partner at x firm in The States, you might use three apps on your phone. And so in your work, you're using Microsoft Word, you're using Outlook, and you use your document management system. If you wanna add a fourth product to that bucket or to that list, I think it has to be able to do a lot of things because you're not gonna go and learn 20 different tools. Do you agree that everything has a price? No. Because if you told me, Max, I'd give you $10,000,000,000, but you'll die in twenty four hours, I wouldn't take it. So it doesn't it doesn't have a price. It's priceless. Can I buy Legora for $5,000,000,000 today? No. 10? I'm having too much fun. It doesn't have a price. Now it's part of my life, and

**Harry Stebbings** [50:09]:

I think that's priceless. It's it's hard when a company becomes such an intrinsic part of your identity. Yeah. It is. Yeah. It's like a relationship. Yeah. Almost harder. Yeah. I can shed a relationship easier. Okay. So I wanna go back to this. We become this fucking amazing enterprise seller that we are, and the company progresses, hiring progresses. Actually, that's an interesting one on the hiring side. What are your biggest lessons on hiring, again, first time founder, on what it took to hire such a crack team? What worked and what didn't?

**Max Junestrand** [50:39]:

Yeah. I think it's easy to repeat what, you know, I've heard other people say in the past, but you haven't internalized it until you went into the traps yourself. What traps did you go into? Yeah. So, you know, you hire you try and hire for y intercept and not slope, And I burnt myself there a couple of times. I think when it comes to building a culture that ships or say sells or builds and, you know, markets, you want people that you almost need to go to them and be like, dude, you need to go home, you need to sleep, and you need to come back tomorrow and we'll continue. I think we managed to do that, but it's difficult when you need to scale headcount so quickly because we very quickly became a global company. We have operations in The States, in London, in Stockholm, but we also have sort of hubs in Finland, Germany, Spain, France with people who are working on the ground with our clients. And now we just opened up in Australia as well. What happens is when you're not there, how are people treating the work? Like that's the thing you need to optimize for. And I think I made the mistake of bringing in some execs with the idea of, oh, just repeat what you did in your old company, and that's not gonna work because none of them have worked in an AI company that is going 10 x year over year. Did you move fast enough to change it? Yes. You

**Harry Stebbings** [52:01]:

did? Yes. That's hard. Super hard. Some of the hardest conversations in you know, I've ever had. So knowing what you know now, you would not have hired for the blue blazer wearing. You would have hired for slope. Anything else?

**Max Junestrand** [52:15]:

The curiosity combined with ambition is like the two values that I've over time converged towards, especially in engineering and in product because there's so many product directors at Klarna or at Spotify or these companies that have made it that they're not incentivized to be curious in a way. They're kind of incentivized to keep the company on the track it is. Whereas in this native AI world, you need to be ultra curious. You need to have every LLM on your phone and you need to work with voice mode and you need to test daily everything that's coming out because our iteration cycles are not quarters, they're weeks or days. I think you can test for that. And I think we've started testing for it more and more and more. How do you test for it? Well, you just ask them. You know, pull up your phone and show me, you know, all the things that you're currently curious about. And then I ask them, what was the last time you nerded into something and tell me about that? And sometimes people go, oh, I'm gonna tell you about this book I'm reading about x y z, and you just see it in their eyes. They're like intellectually and emotionally engaged. And then what happens is as they come into the company and you sort of form them in the onboarding, they get the same spark in their eyes about Legora and about what we're building and about the next feature and about solving that problem for that client. When you build a team like that, you come in and it doesn't feel like work to people. It feels like we're on this mission. It's a little bit like a cult, but I think you need to build a cultish culture when you're scaling this fast.

**Harry Stebbings** [53:50]:

How do you build a cultish culture? You know, I I got killed, and I think we actually messaged about it. But I got killed for saying about, if you want to be a top 1% founder, you need to work seven days a week. And the valley has turned up the intensity on work ethic, and everyone killed me for it. But I find life very funny. Everyone always recommends the book The Courage to be Disliked. Mhmm. And then when you actually gain that courage, they will shoot you. So my question to you is, do you agree with nine nine six mentality, and how would you reflect on what I just said? Yeah.

**Max Junestrand** [54:22]:

I mean, the short answer is yes, because we did it for a while, and we we did it with large team buy in. If you tie it back to our space, our view of it is there's clearly going to be a couple of very valuable businesses in our area. And if we're playing to be number one, we're gonna need to outwork, out deliver, out care our competitors. And you can do that through different ways than just pure hours, but I think it's part of that function, of course. Like if you work ten hours a day and I work eight, I mean, at some point you're gonna have achieved a lot more unless I'm very productive in my hours and I need time to reset. And I think their people can be quite different. I think it's different if you're building high complexity systems where you need to think deeply about directionally where you're going or if you're sitting and answering emails. So there's different work for different places.

**Harry Stebbings** [55:17]:

Do you worry that Europe had such a viscerally negative response to the nine nine six vibe.

**Max Junestrand** [55:23]:

But it's like yeah. Yeah. Like, people are are vocally against it, but then you still have people in my team who are I need to tell them on a Saturday at 10PM to go home. Do you? Yeah.

**Harry Stebbings** [55:35]:

Do you do anything to inspire that?

**Max Junestrand** [55:37]:

Of course, I do. When I think about leadership, especially as a young founder, although I think I I I did a a lot in the years that I've had. I'm young in age, and I think the only way to do that is, like, through, like, leading by example. And here my cofounder, Sigge, our CTO, mean, he sets the pace for the team. When I'm out traveling, he's in the office. He's coding. He's building and sets the pace. You have the the best people of our of our growth team that when you look in the CRM, you see who's doing what, and that sets the pace. And if you hire for people who want to be winners and who want to grow and who want to be part of building something very generational, I think they all understand that that comes with some level of sacrifice.

**Harry Stebbings** [56:21]:

The pace to win, it's hard to win in The US, period. It's hard to win in The US even more so if you're a European company. Mhmm. What do you think you did so effectively to gain ground in The US where so many European companies before have not?

**Max Junestrand** [56:35]:

So we had this idea that, okay, we need to be able to serve a couple of very large clients and partners in The States from Europe. And if we can do that, and if we prove that we win in these AB tests, then we have enough proof points to go and set up a business. And then we started recruiting the team on the ground. What we've done is we've sent, I mean, some of the best people in the team, when we opened the London office, they went here. They moved here. And we're doing the same for The States now. What you do is you send a very clear signal that like, hey, if you're the top performing team member and you wanna go from Stockholm to New York, there's a path here. And that creates a culture again in that part of the office or that part of the world that again, like they're an extension of the core team and they're there to win and they have their own mission. I think what we also managed to do was we sort of got the word out in a good way. And I think it was Redpoint who helped us get the Nasdaq thing. And that sends a pretty clear signal that, like, oh, these guys are here to play. They're not here to be the European winner.

**Harry Stebbings** [57:36]:

So what would you advise then founders? I meet so many founders who are pre seed seed in Europe, and they're like, everyone's telling me that I have to be in The US. What do you say to them? Well, I don't think you have to be in The States. I'm not in The States yet.

**Max Junestrand** [57:48]:

I'm well, I'm on a plane maybe mostly, but you gotta figure out, like, where you're strong. And where we were strong was we got the buy in from a couple of very influential clients in The States who said, we've had the taste of the things around the table. We prefer the taste of Legora, and we're gonna double down on them as a partner. And then we said, okay, with this amount of traction, we're going to invest in also building up an office. And so what I've done from an enterprise perspective is you go for like a top 10 logo. And if you get them, then you say, okay, let's build an office here. Like, let's invest more. And we've had a very top down motion. Our first partner was the biggest firm in The Nordics, and then we've done that in every new country, basically.

**Harry Stebbings** [58:34]:

Totally get you, and I like that. Can I ask, what did you do that you wish you hadn't done?

**Max Junestrand** [58:40]:

I'm actually quite happy with a lot of the results that I have in my hand of how we've done things. And most of the things that I regret would have been very hard to know beforehand. But I think one of the things that I'm that I wish I hadn't had done is I wish I did a better job of juggling the intensity of the work and everything outside of it. You're so in it to win it in terms of how you build the business. And on a personal level, that requires a lot of sacrifice. And I probably have like 50 unresponded texts on my phone from friends and people who I used to be very close with that I haven't had the capacity to pick up. And they understand, but I wish I did a better job, especially as we started out, like, juggling those two things.

**Harry Stebbings** [59:29]:

Do you think it would have been possible, though? I'm not sure. That's my point. Yeah. That's hard. I completely get you. Okay. And so sorry. Going back, we have you said Red Point, they're building, you know, doing helping you with the billboard. Sales is ripping. Company in US now as well. And then it comes to another round, and it comes Well, so now we're in 2025. Now we're in 2025. And I think we're around a 120 people. I remember messaging you before the round came out, and you were like, yeah. We've got loads of cash, and, like, everything's good. And I was like, oh, would you would you do something now? And you're like, no. We've loads of cash. I Yeah. Hadn't I hadn't planned to do it. It kinda happened. That's on me then. That's bad of me because I kinda just took you forward. I was like, okay. Yeah. And so what happens then? Because you're 7,000,000 of ARR at the time.

**Max Junestrand** [60:13]:

Yeah. Something like that. And we're obviously scaling really fast. We don't necessarily need the money, but to your point about being seen as large, you wanna be big enough to be in all of the rooms. And you wanna be considered in every possible deal, and you want to have all the exposure that you can get, especially if it's on good terms. Again, like the thing that I always try and optimize for is, of course, the sort of structure of the round, but also who am I now getting as a close ally of the company that will help me win and achieve the mission that we're on. I think both ICONIQ and GC have some very core strengths. So they just, like, approach you Well, I think I had some catch ups. And then, again, very similar to to how the preempted A round happened, somebody threw a term sheet. And then it's like, oh, I guess we're doing this. Who threw the term sheet? I think it was GC who threw the first one. Love it. Well done, Jeanette. Yeah. Okay. So she throws the term sheet. It was funny timing as well with with Yuri going on GC full time.

**Harry Stebbings** [61:15]:

Oh, yeah.

**Max Junestrand** [61:16]:

Did you

**Harry Stebbings** [61:17]:

negotiate price? Yeah. We did. And so then you raise I think it was 80,000,000. We raised 80,000,000 on 675. 80,000,000 on 675. That is not much dilution. And so my question is, if I'm them, I'm getting, like, six and a half percent each. Mhmm. It's not a huge amount.

**Max Junestrand** [61:33]:

Well, I've always said, and this is how I talk to people who are joining the company, you'd much rather own a small portion of something that becomes very, very, very large than the opposite. Right? And I think when I look at it, this space again, when you think about the software market versus the service market.

**Harry Stebbings** [61:49]:

Did they want to work together? Because if I'm them Yeah. Respectfully, both ICONIQ and GC can ride an $80,000,000 show. I'd just say, you don't need the other one. Get them out. I'll take the full 12 and a half percent, whatever it is that I you mean, everybody who

**Max Junestrand** [62:02]:

participated in the round wanted more, which I think is a very positive thing. And if everybody leaves the table a little bit unhappy, including me, then we've landed in a good space. When I think about fundraising, it's how can we spend as little time fundraising as possible and as much time as possible building the business. There is only in the last month in my world a lot of things are happening. There is definitely something true to the fact that you need a war chest to compete. Do you need a lot more money? Because Now? Yeah. No. I mean, out of the 35 that we raised, I think we we had only spent 5 or 6.

**Harry Stebbings** [62:39]:

Now you're sitting on a 110,000,000? Yeah. Basically. So there's nothing that you would do with more money? No. So I'm I'm sorry. What are Harvey doing then with so much more money? Great question. May maybe it's

**Max Junestrand** [62:50]:

expensive. I have no idea.

**Harry Stebbings** [62:52]:

That's extraordinary.

**Max Junestrand** [62:54]:

Yeah. Well, I also think it's like how how do you build a very cash efficient business? I think here definitely helps to be a European company. I mean, you have access to raise money in in The States, and and you get to build a business here. And I think we also built it in a very sound way with good margins and a way to scale it from here. There's going to come a time when Harvey and us have a little bit, like, put a lid on the horizontal legal tech play, if you will. If you think about the earlier talk track about how do you go very deep on certain verticals, it's good to have cash. And I also think that there's something around you start running a little bit on the treadmill and you need to keep the public perception. Although I don't necessarily care for it, the market cares for it. And so funding announcements are a way to boost things. And I mean, just just to give you an example, like, yeah, since we did the round, like, a month and a half ago, we've doubled revenue, more than doubled revenue. And I think last month, like, we added more than a million of ARR a week.

**Harry Stebbings** [63:53]:

Why is that? Is that because of the visibility? Is that because of the confidence that the funding around in beauty?

**Max Junestrand** [63:58]:

Well, I think it's look. Again, like, these partners who are running these law firms, they're amazing business people. They think about who do I wanna work with, who's going to put me in the best position to become an AI native or an AI first legal service provider. And you wanna bet on the horse who you think is going to be your best long term partner. There's nothing as impactful as being able to say, hey, we just went out and raised all this new money, and now we have runway for years and years and years. So we're gonna be around. You can tell them, yeah, we have a lot of cash, but, you know, the external signaling of it also helps.

**Harry Stebbings** [64:34]:

When you think about lawyers as customers, I always have this perception that they're incredibly sticky. You need to get them first because they don't change software very often.

**Max Junestrand** [64:44]:

I don't agree at all. And I found that their level of knowledge for these systems is increasing probably faster than we can build. So they've gone from, oh, AI seems to be this thing and we just need to check the box and then we'll kind of forget about it to, okay, I think my industry is headed in a way where software is going to be an integral part of our entire service offering. Now we need to fundamentally rethink our processes, some of our pricing and how we, to give you a Swedish sort of hockey reference, scale to where the puck is going. In that world, they are looking at software and as their partners in that world very critically. And I frankly think that so far, none of the products are super sticky. They're quite easy to interchange, which has been very effective for us because we've done a lot of rip and replace.

**Harry Stebbings** [65:41]:

We mentioned ambition before. I actually remember an old Swedish girlfriend of mine Mhmm. She's gonna get me in trouble, telling me about a Swedish word, which basically means you don't want to be different from anyone else. It's good to be like Oh, Jan Telagen. Yes. Yes. This. And I was, like, very perturbed by it. It seemed damaging to me that we should all try and be in this middle ground.

**Max Junestrand** [66:04]:

Well, it effectively means you shouldn't think that you are something.

**Harry Stebbings** [66:08]:

Do you agree with me in thinking that's terrible and we should change that in Europe?

**Max Junestrand** [66:12]:

Well, I think it would have been impossible to build Legora if I did not have a strike of over confidence. Did you ever have a time when you were too confident? Oh, I mean, there's been loads of times. I can give you some some fun examples. Mean, I mean, I went to circus class when I was a kid. I thought I was really, really great. And so I would try to, you know, climb up the largest piece of cloth and try to do like a big spin going down. And I would just like completely fall and and, you know, hurt myself. And in school, would, instead of studying, go to the class or to the test and basically think like, oh, I'm so good. I'm just gonna nail it. And you do that a couple of times, and then you learn, okay. Like, I need to I need to study for Have you done it with Legora? No. I don't think so. I think we've followed through on almost every single promise that we've done.

**Harry Stebbings** [67:02]:

What really upsets you with the team? What I mean by that is, like, I don't like sloppiness. I can take lots

**Max Junestrand** [67:09]:

Yes. Of That's a good example. So when people start, I I give them the same advice that I was given at McKinsey, which is, like, take five to fifteen minutes and look through the work before you send it out. Because if I find errors, I'm going to need to look through all of it. And I had this happen to myself when I was in VC. So I used to work at Nordhagen VC. I had spent, like, six days building this monster Excel model, and there was one number wrong on the first page, which was just like a super sloppy, dumb mistake. And I sent it out to the partner, and they find a mistake, and then they spent twelve hours going through the entire thing. Everything else was correct. But, yeah, that's something that I think if you tell people upfront about it, you should think about this because, you know, we don't wanna be in this situation that really helps. I think to give you an example of something that I maybe don't necessarily agree with, it's probably the idea that I need to remind the team often of how big the opportunity is. And I think that maybe comes a little bit from the Jan Telagen thing. But, like, yes, they're big comparable companies close to us, Klarna, Spotify, King, many others. But sometimes people underestimate how big this actually is. And you just need to be like, here are the numbers. Like, you imagine how big this is and the impact that we're having? We now have tens of thousands of lawyers logging into the platform every single day. And if something is wrong on the login screen, all of them are gonna sort of suffer from it. So the stuff we do now needs to be at a completely different level from what it was a year ago. And we're at this very exponential growth journey, which also means that you need to be on this exponential growth journey. Because you don't want to be in a situation where the company is growing like this and you grow linearly because at some point there's going to be a very big delta and it's going to be very hard to motivate. You get a lot of early talent in and you gotta be pretty upfront with them and say, hey, this is the company's track. I'm betting on you to like grow this quickly with me. And that's maybe something that I've been surprised about personally. If I look back a year ago, I wouldn't say I'm a different person, but the amount of personal growth you've had to endure as a consequence of the company's growth is insane. What was the hardest bit to grow into? I think the hardest thing for me has been to move from like an IC to a manager. Why? Because you are used to having to do a lot of things yourself, even in in school. If you're in a group project, if the group members are not that great, it's more effective to do the work yourself than trying to inspire them and trying to delegate to them to do great work. Because you're working under a very short transactional period where the group project is just gonna be around for two months. Now the difference with the company is it's gonna be around for years or decades. You need to flip your mindset because if you do the work today, like, yeah, you might save fifteen minutes, but you actually need to make the team grow to handle this stuff.

**Harry Stebbings** [70:11]:

Before we move into a quick fire, when you speak to anyone related to Harvey, they say Harvey is just much bigger.

**Unknown** [70:18]:

And

**Harry Stebbings** [70:19]:

Harvey is at 90 to a 100,000,000, and you're at whatever, sixteen, seventeen. And that's a big difference. It's 2020% of the size. How do you respond to think about that in a world that's moving so fast and all about being the biggest and the fastest?

**Max Junestrand** [70:33]:

I actually don't think, like, a company here is our biggest competitor. I think about it as the biggest competitor is like non adoption and like moving the conversation forward. I think there's gonna be built multiple massive businesses in this space. Again, like the amount of penetration in the market is still in the low single percentiles versus what it can become. I actually view it mostly as like a blue ocean scenario. Now do I absolutely wanna, you know, beat the other companies to become the biggest? For sure. That's what we're playing for. That's why we're working so hard. But I don't necessarily think about it in that way. And when I get to talk with people who are associated with that business, we're very conscious of the fact that this is what we do well. This is why we're winning AB tests or things like this. And so we're just gonna keep doubling down on our strengths. I frankly feel like we're crushing it and the velocity has never been higher. Yes, I look a little bit at what they're doing, but I'm not like looking like this, like I'm cheating on a test. I care much more about doing our things well than trying to copy what they're doing.

**Harry Stebbings** [71:39]:

I always say the most important thing in life is to row your own race because you can always make yourself feel shit or amazing by looking at someone else. Yeah. Exactly. Listen. I wanna do a quick fire round, my friend. So I say a short statement. What's the most underrated skill for founders in 2025?

**Max Junestrand** [71:53]:

I think that it is the ability to correctly prioritize when the opportunity set is so massive. Because right now, and especially with LLMs, you could go and build almost anything. You need to be very careful about what you pick. And the ability to differentiate between what is a good opportunity and what is a good feature or what is a good thing to go after versus this is what everybody else seems to be doing, I think that's frankly the biggest strength.

**Harry Stebbings** [72:20]:

How would you advise then a young engineering minded founder today wanting to do a company on a good versus a bad pick? It's too easy

**Max Junestrand** [72:29]:

now to, like, try and sell something before you've built it. So what I did was I went deep on my industry because I didn't know enough about it. And I think it's the same thing again. Like you gotta go super, super deep on the problem space that you want to work in. And then I think now the cost of building software has gone down so incredibly quick that you can prototype something pretty quickly and get to a stage where you actually have an MEP. That's mostly what we use the sort of LLMs for internally when you just think about the software side. It's not about building the super scalable infrastructure. It's about how do we prototype this thing pretty quickly, get it out to a couple of clients, and then iterate from there.

**Harry Stebbings** [73:09]:

With such ease of prototyping, will we skip the design

**Max Junestrand** [73:12]:

stage? No. I think you need to think about how you design an entire experience that makes sense. Because otherwise, what you'll end up with is like a Frankenstein monster where, yes, every individual page kinda looks alright and, like, makes sense, but then nobody has thought about the entire experience because the entire experience requires an eye of design. There's a huge difference in Legora's UX and UI since our head of design, Bird, joined from v seven. And I mean, he came in and just immediately sort of took responsibility for the end to end product and combined that with the brand. Remember, we went through a rebranding from Leia to Legora. You wanna design the product in a way that takes those things into consideration as well. And that, I think, requires much more than just prototyping something in an LLM builder.

**Harry Stebbings** [74:02]:

In ten years' time, what job will sound as strange as Facts Operator does today?

**Max Junestrand** [74:06]:

Young corporate lawyer sitting in the data room pressing control f to find clauses.

**Harry Stebbings** [74:14]:

Do you not need that training to create a pipeline of future partners?

**Max Junestrand** [74:18]:

I don't think you need the training of doing those specific work tasks. I think you need the training on the process and the value you're delivering to the end client and how every piece fits together. But I don't think you need to do the work of learning exactly how everything is phrased because I think here we're going to rely on AI systems to help us. And I mean it's a similar parallel to engineering. Like I don't think you need to understand exactly how every piece of row works if you understand how the system works. Because I don't think they're gonna pay for it. I think in that future, you need to bundle in that no firm is going to pay for somebody to run go through that education.

**Harry Stebbings** [75:03]:

What have you changed your mind on in the last twenty four months? So I actually disagree with something that you said earlier. Okay. I do think there's immense value in the model layer, and I think specifically in OpenAI.

**Max Junestrand** [75:14]:

But OpenAI is not a model company. They're a they're a platform company. They're a software

**Harry Stebbings** [75:19]:

company. How would you differentiate between a model company and a platform company then?

**Max Junestrand** [75:23]:

Well, so somebody who just does the model, take LLM or Meta. They're doing the model, right, and they're kind of distributing it. And you have Anthropic, Gemini, and OpenAI all playing for the horizontal platform of the AI powered workspace for general productivity. And I mean, they're much more about providing good software than good models.

**Harry Stebbings** [75:44]:

Would you rather invest in OpenAI at 300 or Anthropic at 60? I think I'd invest in OpenAI.

**Max Junestrand** [75:51]:

Well, actually, use mostly Sonnet models, so maybe I'd say Anthropic. But ChatGPT has much better distribution than Claude, Although I think that some of the Anthropic models are more interesting, especially on like the Claude code. I think it's different for different things. Now I think the majority bucket here is in the general productivity for the general consumer, and I think OpenAI is gonna win that game.

**Harry Stebbings** [76:14]:

And the question is how big is that game?

**Max Junestrand** [76:16]:

Yes. But so an interesting part of being like an application builder is the floor is always ChatGPT. And so ChatGPT is improving quite quickly. Like the platform ChatGPT and the product ChatGPT is coming better, which requires us to be even better than that. How do you analyze Zuck's talent grab? Seems expensive. But hey, look, I recognize the things that I know and what I don't know. What I'm extremely nerdy about is how you bring the best application layer based on these models for legal work. And what I don't necessarily understand is how you build the best foundational models and win that game because there's a lot of, you know, well paid people working on it.

**Harry Stebbings** [76:57]:

What's the final one? What's the single best piece of advice you've been given in the journey that you think about most often?

**Max Junestrand** [77:03]:

I think about the fact that if you want to be a leader that inspires people, you need to do so by doing. And I think at the beginning, I did that by carrying the highest quota myself. And then I did it by working hardest on identifying where the product is working and where it isn't working and on pushing our marketing things to be even better. And it's like when when you're so deep in the founder mode of, like, everything that's going on, people see that. And if they see that you care, they care.

**Harry Stebbings** [77:35]:

Listen, Max, I so enjoyed getting to know you before this. I've so enjoyed doing this with you. It's why I have such a great job, I think. But you've been fantastic. So thank you so much for joining me, man. Thank you, Harry. This is awesome. Now I want these shows to be the best shows they can be for you. So let me know what you think. You can let me know on Twitter at Harry Stebbings, or you can email me Harry@20vc.com. Likewise, it'd make such a difference if you left a review or left a comment. Really does help. But before we leave you today,

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**Harry Stebbings** [78:04]:

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