YouSaid · the spoken record

Max Junestrand

lines on the record: 94
first: 2025-08-15
most recent: 2025-08-15
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“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 in 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 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.”
2025-08-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 well-paid people working on it.”
2025-08-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. But so an interesting part of being 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.”
2025-08-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think I'd invest in open AI. Oh, actually, we use mostly Sonic 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 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 going to win that game.”
2025-08-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, so somebody who just does the model takes llama or meta. They're doing the model, right? And they're kind of distributing it.”
2025-08-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 going to pay for it. I think in that future, you need to bundle in that no firm is going to pay for somebody to go through that education.”
2025-08-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 kind of looks all right 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, Bert, joined from v7. 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 want to 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.”
2025-08-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's too easy now to 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 got to 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.”
2025-08-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2025-08-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I look a little bit at what they're doing, but I'm not 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.”
2025-08-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, don't think 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 going to 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 want to 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 A-B tests or things like this. And so we're just going to keep doubling down on our strengths. I frankly feel like we're crushing it and the velocity has never been higher.”
2025-08-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the hardest thing for me has been to move from an IC to a manager. Because you are used to having to do a lot of things yourself, even 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 going to be around for two months. Now the difference with the company is it's going to be around for years or decades. You need to flip your mindset because if you do the work today, like, yeah, you might save 15 minutes, but you actually need to make the team grow to handle this stuff.”
2025-08-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 going 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 got to 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.”
2025-08-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, yes, that's a good example. So when people start, I give them the same advice that I was given at McKinsey, which is like, take five to 15 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 Norgian 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 spend 12 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 want to be in this situation that really helps. I think to give you an example of something that I maybe don't”
2025-08-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I mean, there's been loads of times. I can give you some fun examples. 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 climb up the largest piece of cloth and try to do a big spin going down. And I would just completely fall and hurt myself. And in school, I would, instead of studying, go to the class or to the test and basically think like, oh, I'm so good. I'm just going to nail it. And you do that a couple of times and then you learn, okay, like I need to study for.”
2025-08-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 skate to where the puck is going. In that world, they are looking at software 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.”
2025-08-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 want to 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 want to 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 going to be around. You can tell them, yeah, we have a lot of cash, but the external signaling of it also helps.”
2025-08-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I also think it's like how do you build a very cash efficient business? I think here it definitely helps to be a European company. I mean, you have access to raise money in the States 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 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 when 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 to give you an example, like, yeah, since we did the row like a month and a half ago, we've doubled revenue.”
2025-08-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, everybody who 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, whereas 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 word chest to compete.”
2025-08-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2025-08-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think I had some catch ups, and then again, very similar to how the preempted A round happened, somebody threw a term sheet. And then it's like, oh, I guess we're doing this.”
2025-08-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 want to be big enough to be in all of the rooms and you want to 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 iconic and GC have some very core strengths.”
2025-08-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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.”
2025-08-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think you have to be in the States. I'm not in the States yet. Well, I'm on a plane, maybe, mostly, but you got to figure out 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 a taste of the things around the table. We prefer the taste of Legora. And we're going to 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. Or 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.”
2025-08-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That sounds a pretty clear signal that, like, oh, these guys are here to play. They're not here to be the European winner.”
2025-08-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 A-B 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 want to 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.”
2025-08-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of course, I do. When I think about leadership, especially as a young founder, although I think I did a lot in the years that I've had, I'm young in age. And I think the only way to do that is through leading by example. And here my co-founder, Siga, our CTO. I 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 best people 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.”
2025-08-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it's like, yeah, like people are vocally against it, but then you still have people in my team who are, I need to tell them on a Saturday at 10 p.m. to go home.”
2025-08-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, the short answer is yes, because we did it for a while and we did it with large team buy-in. If you type 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 going to 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 10 hours a day and I work eight, I mean, at some point, you're going to have achieved a lot more unless I'm very productive in my hours and I need time to reset. And I think there are 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.”
2025-08-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You just ask them, you know, pull up your phone and show me 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 going to 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 cult-ish culture when you're scaling this fast.”
2025-08-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2025-08-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of bringing in Samics with the idea of, oh, just repeat what you did in your old company. And that's not going to work because none of them have worked in an AI company that is going 10x year over year.”
2025-08-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So, you know, 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 sells or builds and 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. Now we just opened up in Australia as well. What happens is when you're not there, how are people treating the work? That's the thing you need to optimize for. And I think I made the mistake.”
2025-08-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think it's easy to repeat what I've heard other people say in the past, but you hadn't internalized it until you went into the traps yourself.”
2025-08-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, because if you told me Max, I'd give you $10 billion, but you'll die in 24 hours. I wouldn't take it. So it doesn't have a price. It's priceless.”
2025-08-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 Leguara 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 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 want to 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 going to go and learn 20 different tools.”
2025-08-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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? Like 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 a 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.”
2025-08-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe tie it back to some comparison between us and Harvey or 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 going to 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.”
2025-08-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, 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 it 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.”
2025-08-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think their core skill that I'm not sure if something I developed or had was this, I think I'm easy to help. I'm very coachable.”
2025-08-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would text That's more personal. I would say in Swedish, hey, my name is Max. I am 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.”
2025-08-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That it's typically done badly. And I also think that there's other venues of reaching out. The good thing about return is that they all have their phone numbers on their websites.”
2025-08-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 90% of them also paid for the lunch because they had money and I didn't. 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.”
2025-08-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Course, it makes it 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 Weissy said it first, like, you know, you got to 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 like on a tangent, I reached out to like 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 way, you don't have to pay me 500 bucks to have lunch with me. But then I just ask them all these things. And I think by doing that, like you got to be in this learning mindset of, okay, you want to soak up as much information as much things as possible.”
2025-08-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Story and a very compelling pitch. And I think we've more than followed through on that. But I mean, many of the early firms, this is a bet. It's a bet to say, okay, we think these guys are going to figure it out. And so we want to 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.”
2025-08-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Your pete nerd. Yes, I pick 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? 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 competitive.”
2025-08-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 on the platform. And nothing can break and we do it. And since then, well, it's been an exponential journey upwards.”
2025-08-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not really. 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 more than caught up with a fraction of the funding and just being super focused on that.”
2025-08-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 want to 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.”
2025-08-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, well, 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 going to 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 a very unstandardized thing for a sales 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 work with AI in a smart way.”
2025-08-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source