Y Combinator Startup Podcast
00:48:18 · Gustaf Alstromer, Max Junestrand
[00:48:18] S1: Would you say... So so people in the audience here are wondering what skills are either more valuable to have now as you're in school or you're graduating from school versus not that more valuable. Like, basically, is the skills that you need to start a company or skills that you need to get into, like your career, have they... Are they changing in a very short amount of time now? [00:48:41] S0: I I think storytelling is, at least for the CEO Yeah. I had completely underappreciated how important and how good of a skill that would be. Because what ends up happening is you need to sell the company to yourself. Yeah. Like working this hard if you don't believe in your own story is really hard. You need to sell employees. Like now we are hiring people, you know, we are competing with the labs for talent. And, you know, we need to sell the story of how working at Legora is gonna be better than working at Anthropic. You need to sell the story to investors. You need to sell the story to customers. And I think that in college or in high school or wherever that is, spending time to learn that is useful. I don't know how to learn it. I actually don't know how I learned it unless I just had a lot of exposure. Yeah. I always like like stories. I like video games. I like... I enjoy a good story. But I think that is like the most important skill. And and then maybe the other really [00:49:58] S1: Technical important skills. Okay.
00:49:58 · Gustaf Alstromer, Max Junestrand
[00:49:58] S1: Technical important skills. Okay. [00:50:01] S0: Well, I'll I'll I'll say one more before we go to technical I used to be a really bad teammate and a really bad collaborator. So I I played volleyball for a long time growing up. I would be the type of person on the team who... When my teammate missed the serve, I would yell at them and go, you fucking suck. Like, how could you miss that serve? And that was very... That doesn't get you invited to play the next game. Yeah. [00:50:32] S1: Makes sense. [00:50:33] S0: You know, it it it doesn't it doesn't invite a followership, and it doesn't invite, like, a good vibe. Yeah. So in high school, I, like, really understood that and had to pivot that way of working. I think technical skills. I think that the sort of the velocity and your ability to iterate on customer feedback still is probably the most important skill to get started. Yeah. Even now when we're bigger, very often we will hear about a particular type of problem a customer is having in a customer call. I will dump that in the product channel and I'll go, how quickly can we turn this around and delight the customer? Yep. And that's like a bit strange to do at a thousand person company scale. [00:51:26] S1: Yep.
00:51:26 · Gustaf Alstromer, Max Junestrand
[00:51:26] S1: Yep. [00:51:26] S0: But still how we do it. And you need to make sure that you don't overly like zigzag, and that you continue building towards like the right vision. Mhmm. But I still think that the your ability as a smaller company to be fast versus your incumbent competition is the superpower. And when you have a superpower, need to lean into that. And that's still true for for me. Like I should be doing the things that I'm uniquely good at and other people in the company do the things that they're uniquely good at. I think also technical skills... [00:52:04] S1: Maybe they're different these days. They can just mean something else. [00:52:06] S0: Yes. But it still means, you know, being able to build systems at scale. Right? Like, just because you can produce a lot of code with AI Yeah. Is not a excuse for not being a very good software engineer. Right. [00:52:22] S1: Right. [00:52:22] S0: And I still think we need many good software engineers. We are hiring a 100 of them at Legora. [00:52:29] S1: What's the most interesting problems that people get to work on when they join a Legora?
00:52:29 · Gustaf Alstromer, Max Junestrand
[00:52:29] S1: What's the most interesting problems that people get to work on when they join a Legora? [00:52:34] S0: Oh, one of the most interesting problems right now is this transition from reactive agents to proactive agents. What's an example? So for the last three years of working with the product, you know, you will give Legora a prompt or a set of instructions, and it's going to go off and do that thing. Now, we are basically connecting Legora to different pieces of context, and when it gets a trigger, it will start to do something. That means that if the sales team gets a contract, it will get routed to a Legora agent, the Legora agent will start working on it in parallel, you know, if it needs to escalate to a lawyer, will, otherwise it might just execute the contract. Or you connect the entire data room to a Legora agent, and the agent automatically starts organizing that data room and produce the due diligence report. It's the agent do things without you telling it what it should do. Yep. And that for us is the unlock of how does one lawyer produce the outcomes of a team of 10 lawyers with the help of Legora. Yep. I think that's very interesting. We also have some very interesting problems just from like scale perspective. Right? Like we're spending millions and millions and millions of dollars on OCR and like, you know, document parsing. And these are like real engineering problems to go solve at a bigger scale.
00:52:34 · Max Junestrand, Gustaf Alstromer
[00:52:34] S0: Oh, one of the most interesting problems right now is this transition from reactive agents to proactive agents. What's an example? So for the last three years of working with the product, you know, you will give Legora a prompt or a set of instructions, and it's going to go off and do that thing. Now, we are basically connecting Legora to different pieces of context, and when it gets a trigger, it will start to do something. That means that if the sales team gets a contract, it will get routed to a Legora agent, the Legora agent will start working on it in parallel, you know, if it needs to escalate to a lawyer, will, otherwise it might just execute the contract. Or you connect the entire data room to a Legora agent, and the agent automatically starts organizing that data room and produce the due diligence report. It's the agent do things without you telling it what it should do. Yep. And that for us is the unlock of how does one lawyer produce the outcomes of a team of 10 lawyers with the help of Legora. Yep. I think that's very interesting. We also have some very interesting problems just from like scale perspective. Right? Like we're spending millions and millions and millions of dollars on OCR and like, you know, document parsing. And these are like real engineering problems to go solve at a bigger scale. [00:54:00] S1: Got it. And you grew from zero to 100,000,000 ARR in eighteen months in April. Keep growing at a crazy rate. Yes. Your job has changed quite a lot in eighteen months. [00:54:13] S0: Yes.
00:54:13 · Max Junestrand, Gustaf Alstromer
[00:54:13] S0: Yes. [00:54:14] S1: We talked earlier about you now interviewing, like, exec teams. Like, sort of like... We had this talk from the founder of Dropbox at YCEA, like, a couple years ago. We talked about the minigames that you played. You've done a lot of minigames in eighteen months, and now you're at the minigame of, like, building out or hiring people to run your team. How... [00:54:30] S0: What's Yeah. [00:54:32] S1: Sounds hard, and is that... This is not something you've done before? Like, how [00:54:36] S0: Well, it's definitely not something I've done before. [00:54:38] S1: But but How you learn something like that that it seems extremely important to hire the right executive? [00:54:44] S0: In a way, I think most of the work up until that point makes you qualified for that thing. Right. If you've... [00:54:56] S1: You get to next mini game by basically seeing the last one.