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

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I think they 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. And 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-4 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 chat GPT-4 and the partner tries the prompt in the two systems and thinks the GPT-4 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.”
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, even if somebody else got to them first, at this time almost everybody would churn, because the products were so chat GPT-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 they're going to come in and they're going to expect brilliant results. And if they don't get that the first time, they're never opening up your product again.”
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 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 going to sell for the next four months. Because if we sell and we start onboarding all these great attorneys, they're not going to have the best experience. And they're going to think that the product can't solve for the sort of standard things that we talked about in the beginning. Redpoint kind of looked at me and we're like, dude, we just gave you like 25 million. Are you not going to sell? Like, no, we're not going to sell. We're going to wait the summer out. We're going to work really fucking hard. And we're going to onboard the firms and the people we want to work with in September, October. And I think that required a lot of ice in the stomach.”
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 go back the same day. Me and Chathan negotiated the term shit like this in person. And then the same day after we sign, 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 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 want to 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 say, well, we'll do your next round now. And I said, okay, well, give me a price. And they say, all right, we'll do it at 150 or something, which was a 3x from the C-drone. I thought, okay, so it's pretty good. Send me a term sheet. And then we go through some dancing or partnering pitches, yada, yada.”
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 was an easy decision based on the partner. And the reason for it is you're going to do this for a really long time. That's always how I thought about it. I want to 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 got to 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 going to double down you can only date so many funds and partners i guess”
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 there's some stats that like 99% of benchmark companies end up raising a Series B. That's the only stat you need to hear.”
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 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.”
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 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. I wanted to dilute less than 20%. 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 18 or 12 months, we'll get to a revenue stage, which times 20 or times 25 or something validates that valuation, things should take the preempted money.”
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
“Yuri Sagalov, who made the ticket that saved us from not running out of money during YC. And they didn't know this, but they were apparently neighbors.”
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 thought it was going to be a six week process because that's what YC recommend or thought. And then it ended up being like a seven day process.”
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 it's like, look, because if you're going to have all those conversations too early, it's too much context switching. And so it's just nicer to bundle it because then you're in the zone.”
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, they introduced it to a lot of them, but I think it was also a combination of a lot of inbound. Because I think as soon as you announce that you've been exacted into YC, you get 500 inbound VC emails that you need to deal with.”
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 YC advice is you raise sometime 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 going to go and fundraise. I go to SF, I lock 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.”
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 we realize that if we want to 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.”
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
“Now there's a lot of Swedish YC companies. Back then, I think there were maybe five. There hadn't been a Swedish YC company for a really long time. And I used to work at the Pict for a week. I worked there for a week. But between them and us, there were nobody else, I think”
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, it was. I mean, we were a Swedish company by nobody's. And YC put us in the global spotlight. And I think we took every opportunity that that provided for us. We served that wave so incredibly well.”
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 it doesn't look like it's in the middle of the night when we sit through sales calls between 1 a.m. and 10 a.m. every night. And I think we closed our biggest deal at that point. It was like 500k in the middle of the night at 4 a.m. And we managed to do that, or I managed to do it 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 lock 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.”
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 got to accept them 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 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 going to go to YC and we're going to ship and we're going to like sit around the fire and have a beer and go to all these nice sessions and we're going to meet Sam Altman. you know, we're going to 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 farms in the Nordics. And so me and our founding AE to Hin, 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.”
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 talk with a couple of European funds slash angels about taking that 500K and they passed on it. And then, you know, when they wanted to be part of the seed round, they were just too slow”
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
“Do 25, and I think that's what I did. So we got the money and he wired it the same day. That would not have happened in Europe, I think.”
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. 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 500K 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 texture 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 30 minutes. I tried to raise on like a 50 million safe. And he was like, dude, you have 20k MRR. I'm not investing on like a 50 million valuation. And I said, okay, will you?”
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, and then we were going to run out of money basically. So that's why we had the terms sheet from the Swedish VC. So we had an out. But when we got accepted into YC, we realized, okay, this space is going to move quickly. And so we need to scale. And I think I realized quicker than others that, okay, we had Harvey, we had case text, we had... I just went out and I raised a loan against the investment that was going to come in from my combinator. So we raised a loan against the collateral that the money was going to come in, immediately hired four more guys who just strapped in and started coding.”
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
“Goes way better. And we get in, we realize, okay, we need to flip our Swedish company into a Delaware. We had only raised like 50,000 bucks in initial angel money.”
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 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 LLMs 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. 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 going to sell into law firms? And I was just like, yes, it might be contrarian at this point, but it's going to be obvious.”
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 locked in with this firm from August of 2023 until February of 2024. But we get early accepted into YC. So we get 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”
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
“Nerdy, right? And 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 product kind of 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.”
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 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. You had our competitor getting close with A&O. And so we needed kind of the same. And we were based in the Nordics. So Manhemet 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 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.”
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 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 want to look at Leia? And they're like, oh, Leia, oh yeah, you guys are the AI guys, right? And we're like, yeah, that's us. And I show them, you know, watch them play around with it, see what they try to do. And I think very quickly you realized, 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, I 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.”
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 this was back when the early promise of AI started to come into law and everybody completely burned themselves. Because the expectations and the marketing was up here, but 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 going to be a thing and we're going to 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 get 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 5 p.m. 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.”
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, good question. 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 Dannistam. 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, you know, somehow we managed to do it. I go to their offices, we sit down like this for 30 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 going to want to work with. I had done my research. This was pretty 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.”
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
“If you are a big firm today, you make a lot of money, you have innovators' dilemma, then you have companies like Crosby, 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.”
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 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.”
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 so You have 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.”
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 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 want to show you an example here. I realize I just turned off my phone. But I have a couple of stats from a pilot we just ran with a AM law 200 firm. And they have some examples of tasks where they reduced the time required to deliver the work from 10 hours to 15 minutes.”
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. 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 Open AI, 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 billion. 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 to play for 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
“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, while instead of throwing the entire document in and asking all the questions at the same time, you do everything in parallel. So you'll say, okay, I have 100 questions I want to run across this file, and I have 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 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.”
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
“Model well, and you throw instead of doing one API call, you do 100 or 1,000. 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 100 calls and you let them rebuild 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.”
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's what we're figuring out, right? That's why we're working so hard. But I mean, even if you take the 03 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.”
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 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 even utilized 10, 20% of what the models can do. We have a huge sort of gap and way to go. And I think we could just give them more time with the models we have today, given no incremental improvement in them, still have years and years to years to build on.”
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 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 early BERT models that came out from Google and also a version of them called Sui Bert. They 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.”
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 we went out to play volleyball 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, they thought of me. I get in, they put me on the paper. 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.”
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, you never mix. And I wanted to do both. So I threw in an application to the computer science university, get 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 asks, I'm a dropout, which I think is great. And then ChatGPT came out and just everything changed.”
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
“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 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 2 and Counter Strike based on server feeds. So we got all the data. And then we built the odds that determined 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.”
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, 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. And 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 3, which had this mod called Dota 1. And Dota 1 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 five to ten million dollars if you win the biggest tournament.”
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