a16z Podcast - Building a Team at AI Speed | Harvey’s Maggie Landers

Episode Date: September 27, 2026

a16z’s Katie Kirsch sits down with Harvey VP of Talent Maggie Landers to discuss what happens inside a company growing at AI speed, and how you preserve culture while adding more than 1,000 employees in a year.Maggie explains why Harvey prioritizes progress over perfection, how its values of simplicity, decisiveness, and “job’s not finished” shape the way people work, and why moving quickly requires giving employees significant trust and autonomy. For people accustomed to being the “A student,” that can mean learning to experiment, make mistakes, and course-correct quickly.They also get into how Harvey identifies people who can thrive in that environment, what changes when most of your company is relatively new, the role its founders play in maintaining culture, and why judgment becomes increasingly important when employees are given the freedom to move fast.Resources:Follow Maggie Landers on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/maggiecohenlandersFollow Katie Kirsch on X: https://x.com/katiekirsch Stay Updated:Find a16z on YouTube: YouTubeFind a16z on XFind a16z on LinkedInListen to the a16z Show on SpotifyListen to the a16z Show on Apple PodcastsFollow our host: https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Transforming the legal industry is very different than trying to transform customer support or build an AI harness or create a model. You're going to do more in a month at Harvey than you would in a quarter somewhere else. There's a lot of experimentation, so you're going to fail more than you're necessarily going to get it right. And so I think the emphasis is on both failing fast and correcting to make something or build something that has never been built before. It's like nothing inspires people more than actually seeing their impact in the world and knowing that even being part of a really large organization, they still feel like everything they're doing is working towards a much bigger vision. The right sort of mentality for Harvey is that passion to be part of creating it. What about the legal industry gets you so fired up?

I think that... What happens when you add more than 1,000 employees in a year, but still want to operate like a startup? A16Z's Katie Kirsch sits down with Harvey VP of talent. Maggie Landers to discuss how the company is approaching hiring and culture as it scales. Maggie explains Harvey's focus on progress over perfection, giving employees the autonomy to move quickly, make mistakes, and learn. They also discuss what Harvey looks for in new hires, and why succeeding in a fast-moving environment requires comfort with ambiguity and strong judgment. Welcome to the A16B podcast. Today, we're joined by Maggie Landers, who's the VP of Talent

at Harvey. I'm so excited. I'm excited. Harvey's valuation has been skyrocketing in the past year from $3 billion last February of 2025 to $5 billion in June, $8 billion in October, $11 billion this past March of 26. And you've been at Harvey for you just hit your one year mark. Is that right? Yes. I'm a little over one year. It's been insane, not just the valuation, but the company growth. The customer growth or our growth, I think our product growth. But I would say that we don't take any of it for granted. I don't think there's anyone internally who feels like we've fully made it or actualized our potential. It definitely still feels like a startup. We just celebrated our fourth birthday as a company. Congratulations. Happy birthday, Harvey.

Yes, happy birthday, Harvey. But, yeah, I don't think there's any part of us that feels that we are anywhere close to the company we aspire to build. Yeah. Are you celebrating wins in any way or it's just hard work, pedals to the metal? I would say we definitely are. I think we celebrate in big ways. I think we celebrate in small ways. I think that whether it's sort of our global go-to-market company sort of wins channel where folks are constantly sort of celebrating the accomplishments and sharing kudos, I think we come together as a company for celebrations like this anniversary. product launches, milestones, but we also have a job's not finished culture. It's one of our core values. And so I would say the celebration is always an acknowledgement of the great work

that we've done, but then also we're thinking about what we need to do next. And I think that's just a very kind of core fundamental part of what Harvey is about. I do think the team, team likes to have fun and there's a lot of humor in everything, kind of injected in everything that we do. But we're always thinking ahead. And I think you mentioned earlier, so are you employee number, is it 340? I'm somewhere in the 300s. Yeah. I'm somewhere in the 300s. And yeah, we've added over a thousand employees since I've joined and will likely be about 2,000 employees before the end of this calendar year, which is insane. Oh.

More than 70% of the company started after January 1st of this year. Wow. What does that feel like on the inside? Is so many new faces? Are you all in person? Yeah, what's it like? A lot of new faces. Those onboarding classes just feel big.

They're growing, yeah. They're growing for sure. I would say it still feels like Harvey. and I can explain what that means, but I do think that we've done a good job of understanding kind of what makes somebody successful at Harvey and looking for a lot of those sort of characteristics when we go to market and we bring new people on board.

I also think that we have pretty good kind of self-selection in that I think folks know that Harvey is a really ambitious company, and that we are looking to be generational in what we build. And I think that also attracts folks who are very sort of, for the most part, intrinsically motivated and want to do something super fulfilling. But at the same time, it creates a ton of unique challenges. When the majority of folks on board are relatively new under one year, tenure, I think you have this unique dynamic where, especially on the,

recruiting side. I see situations where a recruiter and a hiring manager and a leader are all relatively new and kind of actively working together to try to figure out how to run the process effectively, what the right fit for the role is going to be, and in many cases leaving behind what worked at their old company and in real time trying to figure out what is going to work at Harvey. The beauty of working at a company like Harvey, both sort of AI native and frankly, a place that values kind of progress over perfection and wants to move quickly is that it almost doesn't matter what you did three years ago or five years ago or how you did it. I think it's more important that you're sort of like actively collaborating and working to figure out what is going to make sense in this new world. And at this moment in time, we're genuinely trying to transform how the legal industry works and operates and do something unprecedented. And so everyone's experimenting and trying to figure it out for the first time, whether you're a tenured employee or not.

It sounds like exciting, but also overwhelming and that you've got completely new faces, now training other completely new faces. But you mentioned, I love what you said about, Harvey still feels like it's Harvey. It does. Yeah. Yeah, tell me more about that. I think that Harvey is unique in certain ways. I think our pace is pretty unique. We move very quickly. If you come from an environment that you thought moved quickly, you join Harvey and you're like, wow. Harvey moves fast. Yeah, you're going to do more in a month at Harvey than you would in a quarter somewhere else. I'll do more in a year than you probably would. over a few years elsewhere. So you actually have a lot of reps quickly in terms of trying to figure things out and figure out what works. I think that most folks at Harvey have been successful

in whatever it is that they were doing previously, whether they were practicing law in a more sort of traditional environment, if they worked at a tech company previously, if they came from school or an academic program. And I think that there's a big, of kind of ridding yourself of needing to be an A student when you join Harvey, where most people probably were A students and super successful at whatever it was that they were doing previously

because what we're trying to do is, A, like, pretty brand new, and B, there's a lot of experimentation. So you're going to fail more than you're necessarily going to get it right. And so I think the emphasis is on both failing fast, and correcting experimentation, and also kind of putting that ego aside for kind of the greater good of figuring out, okay, how do we all work together to make something or build something that has never been built before? Yeah, I like this piece around like progress over perfection, especially when you're talking about A-plus students who were used to distinguishing between right and wrong and knowing what it takes to do something well. And they're being thrown

into an environment that's growing so fast, they have to almost rewrite the rules as they go. For sure. I also think that what we have to offer is this opportunity to learn and to grow and do something really meaningful. A lot of people before they join, whether they're working parents like I am,

if they're sort of concerned about this, like they've heard that it's an intense culture. I think folks have questions about sort of how Harvey might impact their lifestyle. What's it going to be like? Is it really cut the road? Is it really intense? And the reality is I have seen more sort of true collaboration and teamwork at Harvey than I would have ever imagined, probably more so anywhere that I've ever kind of worked. People are really looking to support their colleagues. is a big emphasis on us sort of winning as a team. And I also believe that what we're doing and the impact each individual is able to have creates this sort of career fulfillment that makes the effort required to put in worth it. I think that there is nothing worse. I can't imagine there would be anything worse than working really hard and knowing it doesn't

matter if you show up or not, like if that work doesn't actually matter if it's not going to contribute, if it's not going to make a difference. And so what we have to offer is this opportunity to really come in, even as we're growing so quickly and know that every single person we bring in is so kind of critical in our ability to get to the next level. And we give folks a lot of agency. So you're not going to be held back. You're going to be able to sort of run and do things, which I think makes it kind of balances out that, yes, it's a lot of. Yes, it's a lot of intense and yes, it moves fast, but at the same time, you're going to get a lot of feedback, you know, both feedback in the traditional sense, but also just feedback from like an impact

perspective in seeing whatever it is that you build or that you launch or that you market or that you sell kind of get out into the world. And those reps happen quickly. Yeah, it's amazing. It's like nothing inspires people more than actually seeing their impact totally in the world and knowing that even being part of a really large organization, they still feel like everything they're doing is working towards a much bigger vision. There is nobody. I would be hard-pressed to find anybody at Harvey

who feels like they're part of a machine that could be running without them in the same way. I think everybody feels deeply connected to whatever it is that they're working on and knows that they have an opportunity to make a real, impact on whatever, whatever that is. It's amazing.

You know, I often think that the culture of a company comes from, I mean, initially, the founders. And obviously, Harvey has, is so much bigger than just the founders today, but there's still a massive part of what Harvey is. And, you know, Winston and Gabriel only started Harvey in 2022, which was four years ago. And now we're talking about hiring 600 people by the end of this year. You know, I'm curious when you think about their leadership style, you know, what does that look like? What kinds of leaders are they? And how do they show up in the company to help create that culture for everyone? I think they definitely set the tone. They're both incredibly brilliant and driven and motivated, which I think you expect from founders.

What I would say is unique about Winston and Gabe is this quality to be both sort of very, like operate at a very high level, strategic future facing altitude and then get super into the details and be able to do both. they are very involved in the day to day. Very. Harvey is not a place where in order to present something to the executive team or to the founders,

you're submitting a deck and waiting to get on some calendar to present to the exec team eight weeks out and have it be sort of reviewed and buttoned up. You can Slack when Sinner gave and get a response immediately. Amazing, yeah. That attitude and I think the accessibility and frankly the fact that they are still so in the details shapes, I think, the broader sort of executive team ethos. So as we've added to the executive team and we have some incredible new leaders on the team, Rachel Hepworth is running marketing, Anique Drumwright on the product side, Brooks Evans is our new CSO.

we have brought in some incredible experienced leaders, Katie Burke, COO, my boss, amazing. These folks all have that really, really unique combination of strategic vision, but real day-to-day involvement and execution. So learning from folks who have both the vision and that sort of detailed understanding of how to run, you know, how to build a product or how to market a product or how to, you know, build world class security into everything we do is super unique. And I think people, a lot of people join to work for one of these leaders because it's essentially a master class in how to do something. some of these jobs, not just as figureheads, but as true collaborators. Yeah. I'm imagining like Winston and Gabe, you know, they're walking around the office, you know, looking over to people, you know, what are you working on? You know, that's like the kind of curious mentality. Do I have the right vision? Yeah, like help me picture what it's like.

Totally sitting with new hires at lunch, introducing themselves. They also do founder AMAs, which I think is great. We actually have our interns host these, which is amazing, seeing them sort of up in front at the company asking Gabe and Winston everybody's questions that they might be, might be too shy to ask in person. Yeah. They have a great dynamic. I think co-founders tend to have a bit of a ying and yang. Mm-hmm.

And I would describe them as kind of having sort of a ying and yang vibe. But they speak so openly about. how they see the company evolving, how they see the space evolving. People feel very close to them because I think they understand what their thought process is because they share it. When something's happening in the market, it's not unusual for Winston to put a memo together quickly with all of his thoughts and put it in the company general channel. And everyone can just read what he thinks is going to happen, why he thinks it's going to happen, what his take on something is. After every quarter, he'll put together a quarterly memo for the whole team on what he thinks worked and didn't, et cetera. And so I think sharing that as broadly as we do, it's pretty open.

I mean, the company is very open in terms of what the leaders share. We post board decks for the whole company to review after board meetings so they can see what's been shared in those board meetings and host AMAs in Slack so that people can ask questions or get clarification. I do think that keeps folks very connected to the leaders as we scale globally, as we add so many folks. It gives you a chance to kind of get inside their brains a little bit. Yeah. Love that. What's a recent story or a fun fact? Something that the founders recently shared that people were amused by or that stands out for you.

I don't know if there's a single anecdote. I think that it's pretty normal to hear that. speak about stakes that they've made, things that they look back on, that they think we should have done completely differently, times maybe where as a company we got lucky, but it was not on purpose or times where, you know, we made the wrong call. There's a lot of, I guess, vulnerability, for lack of a better word, transparency in terms of how they think things are going do, there's no mystery. And I think that all the leaders sort of share that mentality. There's no mystery in terms of where we think we are nailing it, where we need to put in

more work or more reps, what we haven't figured out yet. And there's a lot of just kind of openness at the company level. And I don't think that people could be as impactful if there was that people know what we're all kind of working toward. That sounds like Harvey's, you know, Harvey's culture is open and transparent and vulnerable and supportive and low ego. It's got all these like amazing qualities. And, you know, obviously not every company is right for everyone. You know, it's clear why people would want to join Harvey. I'm curious, you know, why would people leave or why do you tend to see people not be as good?

of a fit for Harvey? Harvey is entering teenage years. I would describe it as such because we are not this teeny tiny startup that hasn't found product market fit. And we're also not this fully actualized sort of old, longstanding mega public company. And I think that there are a lot of people who either prefer this sort of structure and stability and pace of one of those massive companies. And I also think that there are people who want to be at really, really early startups where maybe they haven't found product market fit. Maybe the role is undefined. Maybe you're kind of figuring out what to work on, working across everything. We're just not at that phase anymore. So I think that given that we're that in-between, which frankly I love and I know a lot of people

love where you've got this vision and strategy and leadership team that folks can learn a ton from, but you also aren't this big sort of behemoth that's working as a machine, that's not for everybody. Some people want more structure, some people want less structure, and I think that's okay. Our goal, especially on my team, as a recruiting team, is to make sure the resort matches the brochure. We want people to basically get as close to life within Harvey during that interview process as possible for them to be able to make the call. Does this feel right? Does this feel exciting? Does this feel like, you know, this is the kind of work I want to do. This is the work that gets me excited. Yeah. And if not, I think that's, we're doing our job also by showcasing, I think, what the role entails with a company is about and knowing that people are going to self-select in. They're going to self-select out.

Yeah. But yeah, I think that this, the industry and the stage and the size and the way of working is not for everyone. Yeah. Yeah, like how you described it as kind of, you're in this in-between period. And so you're looking for other, for people who are down for that ride of taking a company from its teenage years all the way into adulthood. and who kind of passed the point where everything is scrapping undefined, but not yet at the point where there's systems for everything. And so people who are willing to and excited about, you know,

creating those more scalable systems. Totally. That's absolutely right. And I also think that AI application layer companies in general are trying to transform industries. I think that we attract folks who have a certain customer centricity and an interest and a desire to sort of genuinely sort of reshape something like the legal industry. It is very tangible.

We are very close to our customers. We start up every all hands with sort of a customer testimonial. it doesn't matter what team you're on. You're very, very connected to what our customers are trying to do. And we have so many lawyers or folks who are no longer practicing law, but once we're within Harvey and all sorts of roles. Of course, we have an internal legal team, but we also have applied legal researchers who sit in product.

We have legal innovation partners who sort of liaise with various, you know, CIOs and the innovation community. We have our legal engineers and legal engineering product specialists who sit on the sales team. And so there's this like deep admiration and respect for the legal industry, for, you know, these law firms, for these in-house legal teams, what they're trying to do. and the folks at Harvey are genuinely looking to be part of transforming all of it. And I think that there are a lot of companies that, whether they're focused more on sort of the other layers of the stack, maybe purely, you know, building models themselves or, you know, infrastructure companies, et cetera, that have very cool technology but don't necessarily touch the customer in the same way. I think it takes a certain person to be, I think certain folks are motivated to work on these customer problems.

And that might look different at different places. Is that what in part inspired you to join Harvey? Or actually tell me about the story of you first hearing about Harvey and deciding to join? I had been at my previous company for almost a decade. And I had gotten a call from a recruiter. he kind of laughed and basically said, I have the perfect role for you for two reasons. One being Tady, my boss, being probably one of the most sort of inspiring leaders in the people space. She's now taken on the CFO role at Harvey, but I knew that her scope was very big and she was

working across many different priorities and that I could learn a ton from her, not just in the recruiting her HR space, but just about business. in general. And the other piece was what Harvey was doing in the legal industry, but also in AI. I felt like it was a massive, a massive opportunity. And frankly, we have a very market motion and we are super customer-centric. And AI transformation is more than just building a great product, but we have essentially this like heavy people motion where for all of our customers, we have essentially an army of go-to-market resources for them, both pre-sale and post-sale. And we had plans to get to 16 markets in a year. So the growth that was going to be required

to sort of actualize our potential and essentially give our customers the attention they needed created a very unique recruiting challenge in terms of how quickly we were going to have to hyper-scale across so many different markets and do it with a level of quality and care while maintaining a really high bar. So the opportunity for impact in my role in particular was pretty unique.

I knew what the growth plans were. The growth plans expanded quickly after I started. And I definitely wasn't sure it was possible. I wasn't sure we could pull it off. And I think that that's sort of the story of Harvey. You join and you're being asked to do something that you don't actually know is maybe, whether or not it's like maybe possible or possible in that amount of time or possible at the level or quality and execution that you think you should be able to operate. But then you just do it. You just do it.

we have a funny saying on our the new media team at A16D we always say, you can just do things. And you just got to do it. Someone's got to do it. And you just had to get in there, roll up your sleeves,

and figure it out. It sounds like that's what the role was, you know. Like Maggie, we think you can do it. For sure. And also, we're going to help you do it. So that was a big part of it too. I think that in a head of recruiting role

or a head of talent role, it's important. how the leaders look at the function. It's important that they actually believe that it matters to go out to market and hire some of the best people in the industry. It's important that they believe that part of their job is doing that. It's not another team's job to just go out and bring folks in. And also, they were willing to resource it and staff it. I mean, that is a very important component of, I think, asking people to push themselves is to give them the resources and the support.

And we do that across the board. So my team went from, I want to say, about 16 to 80 folks in a year in order to support that growth. But if you look across other teams, whether it's engineering teams or product teams or marketing teams, I think that they would all agree that they're being given, you know, all the tools that they need in order to do what they need to do and build something great for our customers. And you're hiring hundreds of people right now. We are. What, how does that work? What teams are you hiring for?

What roles? I want to hear about the interview process. Yeah. We have over 400 jobs open right now, so I won't go into the specific roles. But we are hiring across every team. We are hiring pretty much across every region. We have added many new regions.

We will continue to add some new regions. I won't share any today. But stay tuned. Stay tuned. The interview process definitely differs by team. The engineering loop looks very different than the SDR loop, as you would expect. I would say that the commonalities across the processes and different regions, we have a values interview for all candidates when they come on site. The values interview is structured around our three values.

So simplicity, decisiveness, and jobs not finished. It's an opportunity both to understand how people have worked in the past, but also give candidates the chance to, like, dig in and dive into our values and ask questions about what they mean and how they show up. And frankly, as we talked before about self-selection, think about, is this the kind of environment where I want to work? And how they might approach scenarios that come up with those values. in mind. Can you give me like a quick one liner on each of these values and what you look for?

Absolutely. So for decisiveness, Winston loves to say we don't take the square root of the weather. What does that mean? What it basically means is we want to move fast. We'd rather make mistakes and learn than overanalyze and spend all this time pontificating on how is this going to go or what do you think of this thing or that thing. It's almost about. just being willing to build and put things out into the world and then react really quickly. And so that is, I think, sort of the underlying value or mentality that drives our pace. You can't operate at the pace we do and be completely afraid to make a mistake. You can't move at our pace and get, you know, 300 people to weigh in on every decision that you want to make.

It's not a consensus-driven place. It's really about people being able to take ownership and leverage and make those decisions and move forward and be able to own when they were the wrong decisions. But also understand that if we don't act, we're never going to move things forward. Simplicity, again, I think is one of the reasons why we are able to move fast, right? It goes hand in hand with the decisiveness, but let's not overbuild. Let's put something out into the world. Let's get feedback. Let's go from there. Let's make this simple.

I think that those two in conjunction with this sort of jobs not finished, mentality, which is really about the fact that kind of not just the work is never done, but that we have a sense of humility and openness to the ways that it could be done better or could have been done better. I think those three things hand in hand create that environment I was describing to you about sort of the straight-A student giving up some of the perfectionist tendencies ultimately for the satisfaction of being able to have this massive impact on the industry and frankly drive their career forward incredibly quickly.

It also creates a real culture of discourse. I think that the ability to speak openly about mistakes, the ability to put things out in front of people before. they're completely perfect. The ability to make a decision without all the necessary information, just doing the best that you can, is this sort of like hotbed for gross and learning. It's not a place about sort of posturing and sharing, you know,

all the things that you've done right. So, yeah, I think for folks who genuinely want to, kind of go through this crash course of essentially like learning and growing and getting all this feedback and building a bunch of stuff and seeing what works and seeing what doesn't work and doing it with other people who are also just like kind of in the same boat it's it's pretty amazing yeah sounds like a very like iterative let's experiment let's just see how it goes you know there's only it goes back to what you said about you can't take the square root of weather. You just need to run with it, break it down, make decisions, learn by doing. Yeah, most companies move out of that phase really quickly.

And they're very afraid to make mistakes. And they slow things down and create a bunch of friction so that people can't move so fast. And I would say that we don't operate out of fear. Winston said recently in one of our co-founder AMAs, that the thing that he wants to hold on to most as we grow is trust. And the trust that we have for our employees and frankly, the agency that we give folks to just run and execute without a lot of the policing and without a lot of the friction is what continues to allow us to hire the amazing folks that we do. And we, as quickly as we do and experiment the way that we do. And so people forget that we're only four years old,

but we still have held onto that trust. We still allow folks to have that level of agency and autonomy and the values enable it. They allow you to move quickly. They allow you to make mistakes. and without that, you know, I think that we would not be seeing the success that we have. Yeah. I love that. It all comes down to trust. I have maybe one or two last questions. Yeah. So one, you mentioned the team is opening up new locations. I won't pry.

Yeah. We'll have to wait to get the reveal on where you're opening up. But you already have offices here in San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Dallas, London, Dublin, Paris, Madrid, Milan, and many more. more. Correct. Which is crazy. Sydney, Singapore, yep. I missed a few. Sydney, Singapore. It's a wild. I probably missed a few, too, but yes. Are all the offices different? Have you been to all of them? You're based in San Francisco? What is that often? You know, give me a sense of just the different locations and what that's looked like for your team. I have not been to all of the offices. I plan to get to a few more this fall, but I've spent a lot of time. I'm based in our San Francisco office. I've spent a lot of time in our New York office. I've spent a lot of time in our New York office as well. I've been out to our London office. I would say that we do a great job of having

sort of a core Harvey brand and vibe, but also each office feels distinct for that market. And not every office has a like the same mix of functions. So EPD, which is our engineering product and design team went from one location just in San Francisco about 18 months ago to four locations. So San Francisco, Toronto, New York, and Bangaluru, India are sort of the home of our four EPD hubs. And those offices have that mix of EPD and go to market. A lot of the other global offices start out with our legal engineering function, some of our go-to-market function, and because lawyers practice law differently in different parts of the world and speak different languages, and as I mentioned, we do so much to sort of help our customers not just

implement Harvey, but truly transform their organizations. We want to make sure that the folks that are on the ground. in those regions, understand how law is practiced there. You know, they have experience working within that jurisdiction and speak the language, et cetera. And so a lot of our growth has been around providing our customers with this amazing experience. And they take that knowledge and sort of the local nuances. And that definitely shapes sort of the differences in how the offices.

feel. But we have a great, we have a great workplace team. We have a great real estate team. And we tend to find the right spots. We tend to find great locations. We have beautiful spaces. And it's also important, I think, for our customers to know that, you know, they can come visit us and spend time with employees in like a beautiful space, typically near. where a lot of law firms work, but there's more that we're going to continue to do and build out so that our customers can access us wherever they need to. And are there certain locations where you're hiring more aggressively than others, or is it pretty spread across the board? It's spread across the board. We tend to swarm new markets and do events and kind of go that extra mile early on. when we're entering a new place to sort of deep dive with the talent there and sort of understand

the landscape. But the founding teams are super important. I think we put these strong founding teams in place and then through referrals and great sort of leaders there, they tend to have this sort of flywheel effect in bringing a lot of a lot of great folks in. And you're based in the San Francisco office. Tell me about the San Francisco office. What is like, do you work in Then they're like five days a week. Is the team pretty hybrid? What is the most like? We have a hybrid, we have a hybrid three day a week policy.

But I would say people are in typically more than that. It is very much tarot versus stick when it comes to that hybrid in office policy. We are not a place that has to do policing in terms of how many days a week have you come in. We have an energy, and I can speak for the San Francisco office. There is a buzz, for sure, in the office. People are there. They're collaborating. It's a beautiful space to work in. There's always something going on. You're running into somebody in the hall. You're asking a question. Somebody's like, oh, I forgot to tell you this thing or that thing. You get a lot done. I think you learn from your team members. As I mentioned, so many people are new. And most people are frankly

onboarding or ramping in some way. And so being able to sit next to somebody who's maybe six months ahead of you or four weeks ahead of you and ask questions is so important. I actually see people who tend to come in sort of more than those three days because they'd rather be in the office than working from home. Anything you want candidates to know? If you actually take a step back, transforming the legal industry is very different than trying to transform customer support or build an AI harness or create a model, even though we're now building some of our own models. But understanding what we are truly trying to achieve and how that is going to make your

job different than working at Anthropic or at OpenAI or at 11 labs or at Sierra, I think is super important because it will be different. And so I think taking the time to actually think about that, what is unique about this industry, what is unique about the way laws practice, how long it's been practiced for, the security requirements, you know, when we think about the fact that law is essentially like the basis of civilization as we as we know it and our aspirations to essentially transform this whole space. Taking the time to think about it does, I believe, help folks start to differentiate some of these opportunities. So what I feel like I'm hearing is the thing you love to hear most from candidates is what about the legal industry gets you so fired up? I think

that's a big part of it. I also think that people are attracted to growth companies and they should be because it opens up a lot of opportunities. When a company is growing, you just get more at-bats than if a company is shrinking or remaining flat. I think that what people should understand is that we are still a startup as well. And so what you're getting sort of while you're getting all these up, like while you're going to have all these at-bats, I think that, you know, people sometimes ask for processes that don't exist yet. And the right sort of mentality, I think, for Harvey is that passion to, like, be part of creating

it. And the ability to work through some of the, what might be seen. as noise and not get frustrated, but frankly, get, like, energized by it. You can call it chaos. You can call it, you know, opportunities. I think that thinking about the kind of environment that you'd be, you know, excited to be a part of is super important. I think that there has to be a little bit of this sort of adventure. kind of maverick attitude. I think that like sort of managing the ambiguity is so, so kind of key and critical to being

successful at Harvey. Yeah, you want, it sounds like you're looking for people you can pull into the trenches with you and who are excited to find their way through and that have a lot of resources and a lot of momentum behind them, but there's still these big questions that your company is asking and that you're looking for people who are. eager to roll their sleeves to help you answer them. Absolutely. Judgment's an important one as well, and it's hard because it's hard to assess and it's hard to measure.

But I also think that when you're given agency and autonomy and opportunity for impact and you're going to get a lot of at-bats because we do move relatively quickly, you have to have that sort of spighty sense, right? You have to have good judgment. You have to have that, like, voice in the back of your head that's saying, hey, before I, like, press send on this thing, is there somebody who I should have, like, run through this with? Or, and it's not 10 people, right? It's like that perfect balance of, I'm not going to go out and ask for 20 people's feedback on this. But, like, who is the right person who should have seen this before I press send? Or is there, like, one spot check I want to do here before pushing this live.

I think, again, hard to assess and hard to put your finger on it. But having that judgment in an environment that does move really quickly where there is a lot of agency and autonomy is kind of a critical part of success and also being able to maintain that trust. Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z podcast. If you like this episode, be sure to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or review, and share it with your friends and family. For more episodes, go to YouTube, Apple Podcast, and Spotify. Follow us on X at A16Z and subscribe to our Substack at A16Z.com. Thanks again for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode. As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only.

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