Y Combinator Startup Podcast
00:54:58 · Max Junestrand
[00:54:58] S0: Yes. But you need to make sure that you learn because... At part of every mini game. And I think you really need to put the company first Yeah. Way ahead of your own ego in a way. And, you know, I tell this to the executive team, I need to re qualify for the job as CEO of Legora. Every quarter. Right? It's a new company, new challenges, as do they. Like running a sales team when you are 1,000,000 ARR is very different from a 150,000,000 ARR. And I think for myself, if you if you are... If you enjoy that, if you enjoy learning new things, if you enjoy being challenged, if you accept the fact that now my most important job is building out the executive team and I'm going to go do that, you will succeed at it. And then, I think as always, you try to build a good network of people who have done it before. The tough thing is, there's very few people who have done the company this quickly as we are. And even a lot of the executives that we are now bringing on, they come from sauce, and they come from this world of triple triple, double double. If you grow 40% year on year, you are doing fantastic. You're sort of on track, and That's not enough anymore. It's not enough. Like we you know David our CFO joined from Vanta, another YC company. They've been very successful. Yeah. But they've grown from you know 30,000,000 to 300,000,000 in something like four years. And now we're doing it in like one year. And so from 200 people to 1,300 people and we're doing it over four years and we're doing it in one year. So you need to just compress timelines. I think you need to be brutal at saying no to things, and you need to understand yourself where you have the most competitive edge. You When can do the
00:56:58 · Gustaf Alstromer, Max Junestrand
[00:56:58] S1: I landed in Stockholm end of April, all of the ads were basically Legora ads with Jude Law. And I'm curious how you get Jude Law to be the face of the company. And he was like, if you haven't watched... Seen the ads, recommend you go into YouTube and watch the Legora Jude Law ads. [00:57:20] S0: Did you did you fall in love with Law again? [00:57:22] S1: Yeah. I did. [00:57:23] S0: Yeah. You did? Good. [00:57:25] S1: What happened? How did how did you explore that?
00:57:27 · Max Junestrand
[00:57:27] S0: Okay. So the the inside baseball is we had a meeting with one of our marketing agencies and one of their pitches was why don't we redo like very famous legal scenes like... So it's like you can't handle the truth. Yeah. Know, like like why don't we redo like famous legal scenes with lawyers but like with Legora? Yeah. And... Or... But no. The pitch was this. It was actually pretty funny. All of these movies about lawyers, like what if they just had Legora and you know, the movie would be over in like a minute. And so we got to this idea of like working with actors. And then somebody went, well, Legora is like AI powered law. What if we got Jude Law to be like AI powered? And that got us down the track of like, maybe we could get Jude Law. And what's funny in Hollywood right now is it's like pretty anti AI with, you know, writing scripts, you know, using AI in movies, etcetera. And he thought we were completely unserious when we reached out the first time, like some Swedish AI company wants to work with Jude Law to make billboards and a campaign. But then, we were so persistent, and I think one underappreciated form of negotiation is nagging. It's one of the things my dad taught me. And we nagged and nagged and nagged, and he said yes. On one condition, he got to pick his own script writer and cinematographer. And who would have known? He brings an SNL script director and the cinematographer from Oppenheimer to to like light the the scene and like do the whole cinematography. And they basically go into the the set and nobody from Legora is allowed in, and you know, a few hours later, like these magical productions come out.
00:59:20 · Gustaf Alstromer, Max Junestrand
[00:59:20] S1: It's really [00:59:20] S0: good. It's so funny. Yeah. What I think it did for us was it put us in another light where like even people outside of law now know about Legora. Yeah. And that has been really exciting. [00:59:33] S1: Awesome. Thank you so much for coming to Startup School. This is awesome. Thank you, Gustaf. Appreciate it. Thanks, everyone.