Y Combinator Startup Podcast - Max Junestrand: You Need The Willingness To Learn Faster Than Anyone Else

Episode Date: August 29, 2026

Today, more than 3% of the world’s lawyers use Legora, and the company has grown from $1 million to $100 million in ARR since launching in October 2024.At Startup School 2026, Legora co-founder and CEO Max Junestrand shares how they built one of the fastest-growing enterprise software companies in the world, from cold emailing lawyers and moving into a customer’s office to freezing sales for six months to rebuild the product. He explains why building a company is ultimately about people, how to create a culture that wants to win, and why founders have to learn to love the hustle.Transcript: https://www.ycrootaccess.com/p/max-junestrand-you-need-the-willingness

This is a much warmer welcome than what we had coming into Y Combinator the first time. Legora's YC journey started with a rejection, but more on that story later. In YC, they teach you something, and it's called the two-sentence description. It is, describe your company in two sentences. Legora is the agentic operating system for lawyers, and it handles complex legal work from start to finish, so lawyers can achieve more than ever before. And over 3% of all the world's lawyers

are now active users of Ligora. You will learn more about this when you get accepted into YC. When we started looking at the legal industry, it felt like one of the biggest opportunities to apply large language models to solve real problems. And the software that we were up against looked like it had built in the 90s. As software engineers, we have been incredibly spoiled with great software because we love to build for each other and for ourselves.

But in the legal industry, this is what the software used to look like and what we were up against when we started out. Now, Ligora has grown into a global brand putting celebrities like Dude Law at the New York Wall Street, and still, I feel like we are only getting started. My most favorite Slack channel in Ligora is customer love. It is where our customers post things that they sort of truly feel like they couldn't have achieved without our system. And we mine many of our sales calls for quotes like these. for quotes like this.

And I wanted to share just a couple with you because I think at the end of the day, this is what it's all about. A parent asked me at one of the tournaments how I juggle work and all of the golf travel. One word, Lagora. Never has the path between an idea and executed been so short. Never, man.

If Ligora went away tomorrow, I just go back to coaching high school basketball. When Ligora went into YC, we were questioned about the idea of even selling and working in the legal industry. It is such a conservative business that had never been sort of lenient to software before. But from the time that we went into GA of October 24 until the last end of quarter, we've grown from 1 to 100 million in ARR. And starting from just three engineers in Sweden to a company of over 750 people all over the world, this is awesome.

And the fact that we've gotten to do this, starting from Europe, I think just adds another flair in that hat. But the Lagora story almost didn't happen. And it actually didn't start with me. In fact, it started almost like the great beginning of a joke. And so a lawyer, a physicist, an engineer, and a psychologist, back in 2020, before GPT, before AI was cool, started a company called Judilica. And what they observed

was that law school students were going into their internships, basically to summarize court cases. And with the early models from Google called Bert, they were, they were going to be in their internships, with the early models from Google called Burt, they started to explore what this space could be and what was possible to build. My story started in the Swedish archipelago at an island which looks something like this. And I met my two co-founders at a volleyball game.

I think startup founder stories can come from many different places, and this definitely wasn't one high odds of a place to start. But when I met August and Sigge, they showed me a demo of the product they had built. And our group chat actually looked exactly like this. They gave me a demo of the project, and with GPT 3.5, they had built a very simple product that could explain what a stock option agreement really meant. And so we started with that, and I said,

I said, this is a super cool demo, a super cool project, and my co-founder, Seeger said, I'm glad you want to help out. And I ended up helping out a little bit more than just that. When GPT 3.5 came, that was the internet moment of our generation. I dropped out of college. I never finished my master thesis, because the opportunity cost of not building had become too large. But when we started out, it wasn't obvious.

that we were going to be a success. And so to learn about what the legal industry was, what it meant, how lawyers actually worked, we came up with the ingenious plan of cold emailing lawyers on their emails that we could find on their websites and writing to them on LinkedIn asking for a lunch where we could learn more about their different practice areas.

And we offered to pay their hourly fee to have lunch with us. And many of them took us up on that offer, but fortunately for us, many of them didn't make us pay for the hour, and many of them even paid for the lunch. And once we had gotten, you know, our feet under ourselves, we approached one of the largest law firms in the Nordics named Mannheimer Swartling. But just two years before that, their managing partner had gone on TV and said that AI, back when they were starting to use, it was really more artificial than intelligent. And so we had to work really hard to change the perception of what both technology and what AI could be in the area of law.

In law, you are not paid when things go right, you are punished when things go wrong. And many of the initial AI solutions in the space had required immense amount of training, you had to sort of bring a lot of use cases and examples, just to get very, very little results. And when GPT 3.5 came, that really changed the story. And so with Mannheim and Swartling,

we ended up moving into their offices and working really close with them. And as I said in the beginning, the warm welcome here was quite different from the first time we interact with YC. We applied in May of 2023 with a promise of being able to query all legal documents using large language models. And when we came to our interview, one of the first questions that we got asked was, what type of lawyers are you serving? And not very knowledgeable

about the legal space yet. Our response was, our response was, what do you mean? Are there different type of lawyers? And that did not land very well with the YSE partners at the time. And so I actually remember very painfully that Tom Blomfield started laughing in the interview when we gave that response and we knew that we were cooked. But that also gave us the perseverance and the drive to continue. And so with a lot of letta, the day after we did not work, but the day after that, we got back to building. And two months later, we got accepted under a new name and with a different platform. We had done our homework, we had done the work, and from Sweden, the idea of getting accepted into Y Combinator felt like we were going to Mount Olympus.

we were going to dine with the gods, and we were going to get to work with other startup founders who came from all of the great tech companies that we knew of. And once we got to Y Combinator, we realized that we actually knew a lot more than we thought we did. And this is one of my favorite pictures,

and it is the screenshot I took after we did the video call after our second YCA interview, when we knew the things had gone a lot better than the first time. So after we got accepted into Y Combinator, we moved into this law firm I mentioned earlier, Mannheimer Swartling, was the biggest law firm in the Nordics,

but they had very sort of no real clue about how to work with software and how to work with technology. And we ended up getting a conference room with no real wind where the AC would turn off at about 5pm, but it was really close to the Coke fridge. And so at about 6pm every day, one of the engineers would go up,

grab the door and start waving it back and forth to get more oxygen into the room. And those conference chairs still made an imprint on all of our backs, I think, three years later. And me in the car there with two more screen, with two more screens is when we make the move from the conference room of a law firm to our first real office. And I think one of the key takeaways from this entire experience is that first of, we quickly learned not to take no for an answer, but also the power of simply

reaching out and asking for help. I think one big lesson from these first three years of building Ligora has been that it is very powerful to be a person and to be a company that others want to succeed and that others want to help. And so we came to San Francisco. We got a room at an Airbnb up in Bernal Heights, and we started building. And during YC, we grew from zero to a million dollars in ARR. And we also learned the hard way that working across San Francisco and Europe took a big toll on the team. I couldn't find a picture of this, but I bought an influencer ringlight that I put on my laptop. And the reason I had that ringlight was because I was doing sales calls between 1 a.m. in the morning to 10 a.m. in the morning every single day in San Francisco to Europe. because that was where our initial customer base was.

And after a rocket trajectory during YC, which now two years later is slow compared to what some of the companies are doing, we set off to fundraise. And this was my first time fundraising. I had no idea what to expect, but we had lined up 80 investor meetings in a week and a half, and we had European investors, American investors, and the main takeaway from that experience for me

was that you need to become a really good storyteller in order to drive interest and to get people on your team. It was also a very different experience talking to some of the European investors versus some of the American investors. I feel like in the US, we think more about what can go right rather than what could possibly go wrong. And we ended up working with a venture firm called Benchmark.

This is a picture of Chathan, our partner, when we had signed the term sheet. And I remember negotiating that term sheet on his desk with a computer opened, going on decimals in the Excel to determine the exact number of shares. and they ended up investing 9.51 million dollars. Now, following that investment, Red Point pre-led our series A, just three weeks later, and we started to run into a challenge. We had about $35 million on the bank. We were 10 people in the team, and there was actually a month following that.

that we made more money from interest rates on those 35 million than we did from customers. And that is not a very good sign when you have become a bank. And going into our first board meeting, we had Chathen and we had Red Point, and it was me and my co-founders, and we made a very hard decision, which was to freeze our sales motion.

Because when you work with lawyers, you only really get one chance to get it right. If you show up and the product doesn't work, or if the, you know, sort of lag in the system is too high, or if the system goes down when there's too much traffic on your Azure instance, you are toast. And after that six-month sales freeze was when we really started ripping. And that's where you see that curve from 1 million to 100 million really starting.

And what happened at the start of that was, you know, turning from a small startup looking for PMF to really establishing what our business and what our product was going to be. In the very, very early days at Leia, so even pre-Ligora, The way that we would decide what to build was by voting. We would make democratic votes in the entire team. And for anyone who has built software before, you know that if you have too many chefs in the kitchen, that typically does not make one very good dish.

And that was exactly what was going on. We were working on too many features. We had to rebuild everything for the product launch that we were going to have after the summer. after the sales freeze, and we had to build a platform where it was adaptable to foundations that were constantly changing, both with the underlying models, but also with the frameworks that we were using to build agentic workflows like LangChain, et cetera. And so in October of 2024, we wrote down what we would call the lay-up product manifesto.

This was basically gathering everything we had learned, putting it into one, very simple document that we shared with the entire 25 strong person team back then, and that we would rally the troops around. At the time, we were doing about $1.3 million in annual reoccurring revenue, and many of our competitors were doing 10 times that with products that only had one of these features. And I also think that's a function of having started in Sweden. The market is not big enough to house a real unicorn or a deca horn or something even bigger than that.

And so one of the earliest questions we got from YC was, when will you move to the United States? When will you make the jump? And it was of the back of this product refocus that we were able to not only compete out the competition on product, but build enough momentum to make the jump over to the US and start to compete for. for the biggest logos in our markets. And I think as engineers and as tech people, we often overemphasize the reliance on product and on the tech.

But if there's anything I've learned in these past three years, it's that it's all about the people. And building product is one thing, but building a company is a very different thing. And we made many early mistakes around. this one of the hiring patterns that we had to unlearn was looking for fancy logos on resumes or what we like to call why intercept if you think about somebody's skill curve it might start out really high but if they don't have a good trajectory

upwards they are going to have a really hard time working in a company that is scaling exponentially and so instead we started to to look for people like us who wanted to work insanely hard with a very high growth potential, and we doubled down on that talent over and over again. Our top seller today is 23 years old, and he sold over more than $10 million worth of Ligora. And he had no sales background.

He jumped out of university, and by continuously doubling down on that type of talent, I think we have built a very unique culture at Lagora. And one of those things has been about bringing and building cultural fit. Up until the point where we were around 500 people, I interviewed every single candidate outside of engineering. Now I interview every director in upwards. But what we have done is we have set the cultural foundation in the business

where itself selects for itself. We have three values at Lagora, lean in, fight for excellence, and grow together. And together they make LFG. Let's fucking go. That also sends a signal

to leaders and others who join the company who are coming from more perhaps established backgrounds where joining a company where the very values includes profanity, quickly sort of tells them what this is about. Another very complex cultural thing starting a company in Scandinavia is something called

Janthe Lagen or the law of Jante. This is very foreign to our American friends, but in Swedish culture, this basically means that you should not think that you are somebody or you are not more important than anybody else and your ideas are not better than anybody else's. And I think a part of this humility is good and it supports a culture where the best ideas win

and where people earlier in their career, feel empowered to speak up. But it's very hard to build one of the fastest growing enterprise companies in the world if you think that you aren't somebody, or if you don't think that you are better than anybody else. And so we have had to really create a nice cocktail of U.S., European, and Asian culture, all in one to create a global company that is Ligua today. And so I really think that building a strong company culture is the best guarantee to attract and keep the best people.

Another way that company culture gets expressed at Lagora is through articles like this one that ended up in SIFTED. For us, there is only winning. Everything else is losing in a winner-takes-all market or winner-takes-most market. And the company has to run like there is no place for number two. I think it actually would be fair to say that when Ligora was founded, it really had no reason to exist. We were one of many legal AI companies. But because of this mentality and because of this mentality, and because of not feeling like we're safe,

even though we have achieved extraordinary numbers by any normal measures, we continue acting like professional swimmers who are looking down in our lane while the competition is looking sideways at what we're doing. And at Ligora, we have had to build a culture to really support that ambition. So starting years behind some of our biggest competition

and having to build this intensity in a country where most people want to go for fika at 3 p.m., which means having a cinnamon bun and a coffee, or go home at 5. One of the ways that that has been done is to create cultural values and cultural moments that really... distinguish us from many others.

And so in Swedish, there is a saying, you can wake up with a taste of blood because you're so excited about something. And I was doing an article in Swedish, and I used that saying. And I didn't know that the interviewer was going to release that article in English. And so when this came out, it got lots of fun reactions.

One of them was, is Ligora made up of vampires? The second one was, you guys need to floss better. Many good ideas, but this has now turned into the word blood smoke internally, which means that, and we just keep going at it. And I think part of having our HQ in Stockholm has worked to help us keep this. Everybody globally from the company makes their onboarding in Stockholm, which is a lot nicer in summer than in the winter. but that has created the same vibe in any Legora office, regardless of where you walk in all over the world. And I think one great example of this was we had a very big law firm in the US

that our competition was working with, but that law firm had a specific problem around being able to draft certain types of documents based on incoming term sheet. And our competition had promised that they were going to solve that problem for them, and they hadn't. And so one of our US-based engineers, legal engineers, lawyers, learned about this use case, got on a flight to Stockholm, spent a week with our engineers, solved the problem in Sweden, and then went back to the US and delivered it to the customer. And I think that Swedish base has become one of Ligora's real, superpowers. And so to round things off before we jump into the Q&A, I'm sharing this stage this weekend

with people who have built things at a scale that I haven't yet gotten close to. And so I will leave many of the big lessons for them. But what I can tell you is that three years in is a little bit smaller than that. Most of what actually mattered in the company and in Lagora so far, did not revolve around signing a big client or closing a new round of financing or open a new big office in Manhattan. It happened in, you know, a windowless room without much oxygen or on a call on our way to the airport, a Slack channel at 2 a.m., trying to fix a bug before a big presentation on Monday. And nobody puts that in a pitch deck, but that is what makes the company. And you shouldn't wait around for those big moments.

You have to love the hustle. And I think if I can leave you with anything, it's that even though we started in a small law firm in Sweden, I was born in the Swedish archipelago with a class of 10 other people, I thought I had a big plan for my life, and I was going to go to McKinsey after school. But when GPT 3.5 dropped, in our knees, we truly made that into our thing and we captured what I believe to be our

generation's internet moment. And so you can just do things. Legora and myself is living proof of that. So with that, we're going to jump to Q&A and I want to invite a very good friend, our partner from Y Combinator, Gustav Omstermere. Gustav, we're really becoming professionals at this now. This is not the first time doing this. No, it's great. It's good to see you. Good to see you. Thanks for the talk. That was awesome. Really good. Thank you. And always thank you for coming back and speaking to YC and to two founders here at startup school. Of course.

I want to ask the first question which is one that I've gotten from a lot of founders who ask about you which is you guys are three founders or were three founders who were not lawyers. Yeah. And you started the best legal AI company. in the world. Does domain expertise not matter that much anymore? So there's actually a story of a Swedish VC who was very bullish on doing the precede of Leia. Yeah. But they ended up not doing it because we did not have any lawyers in the team. And I met them at the airport. I met one of the partners from there at the airport quite recently. And they were very, very bitter. And Leia or Lagora turned out to be the lesson for them that perhaps

domain expertise is not what you need to succeed. I think that you need a willingness to learn about the market, which we did very, very early by exposing ourselves and spending lots of time with lawyers, like as much as we possibly could. But I don't think you need domain expertise. Probably dependent on the market that you're going after. Maybe if you're billing in quantum computing or in Fusion,

that's a good idea. but legal was easy enough for us to pick up as we went along. I spoke to some founders yesterday, and we spoke about sort of like the next categories where the LMs are not sufficiently good yet, but it will be, and it made me think of what you just said when you were playing around with Bard in the early days. What would you, what gave you the confidence

to build an illegal AI product on a model that wasn't good enough? It was like good, but not good. enough and there's many other founders probably in this audience who are thinking about the same problem but in a different domain maybe like I don't know mechanical design or some some other part of somewhere with the models are just not good enough so I think the sort of tribal knowledge when we got started was that you have to fine-tune a model right in 2023 2022 that was really like the name of the game yeah I even remember it was Bloomberg who spent you know

millions and millions and millions of dollars billing like a Bloomberg law model. Our view was partly because we didn't have enough money and partly because we truly believe that to be right. The models will keep improving. I'm sure Sam is going to come up on stage and say that later today.

And so by just betting that the models will keep improving and what you should be focused on is how can you deliver that, the value that the models generally, to your market, that was the crux for us. Even with the first generation of chat GPT, that was unusable in law, partly because the model wasn't good enough,

but partly because it actually didn't support private conversations, European data hosting. I remember the first sales I ever did, we basically said, we are like chat GPT, but we are compliant in Europe. That was the pitch. That was not a very strong pitch. And clearly, chatyp D would figure out how to do that later on.

But at the time, it was good enough. And so I think we recognize that you don't have to build for the world over here. You need to build for the world today and maybe like one step ahead. And it's kind of like this ladder where you should maximize the opportunity now, make sure that you get really good relationships with your customers, and so that you can also have that conversation with them. Because if everybody is betting on this exponential uplift in model capability, the Lagora platform will continue delivering more and more value.

I think that we have built 1% of all the software that we will build over the company's history. And probably the product will look very different from what it does today a few years down the line. Yeah. A lot of news on my business. this week or last two weeks. It's going to be like a great episode for whoever makes the documentary. I'm hoping that some ways we're making a documentary right now about everything that's going on. I'm not sure if someone is, but I hope they are.

Open Weids Mall is very much the topic right now. And when we spoke on stage a couple of months ago, you talked about that you're not attached to one specific model. You can work with many different models. models, have you updated your view based on this week? But like, how do you think about, so like I'm sure there was a moment like a year and a half ago when it seemed like it was just one or two models

that were really sufficient to do the power of Ligora, and now they seem like a lot more. Yes, which I think will be great. And I mean, clearly there will be applications of different models in different use cases. And so if you take customer support, you're optimizing for, you know, speed of turnaround, latency to the customer, and cost on solving a particular ticket.

I think Finn used to charge like $1 per solved customer ticket. In law, you actually want the most amount of intelligence quite often, because the fraction of a token spend or software spend compared to human expertise applied to the problem is really tiny. If you're solving, you know, complex litigation, you're going to want to throw the most brain that you can on that problem. And so we have really sort of two different camps. Like one group of our users are asking for the ability to loop really complex models

just to work on problems for a long period of time, like racking up big LLM costs. And another group of our users are saying, you know, can we get access to open source? You know, that is going to be cheaper on our consumption. And I think the answer is like somewhere in between. I think ultimately one of the core IPs and muscles that I encourage as many of you as possible to build is the ability to eval new models and to eval new use cases. Because that is the superpower that then allows you to route things effectively.

we did a lot of that early on because we hired a lot of lawyers into Lagora and we made part of their job customer facing but part of their job was also to build out use cases that we would throw our evals on and the frontier of like you know cost intelligence and where that sort of frontier lies you know yet to be seen I think there's also a compute problem where when we lock in based contracts with the labs and with our compute providers that is actually a huge thing we cannot have our system go down yeah when you know a number of percentage points of all the lawyers in the world are working with it and their

clients rely on it and are there specific benchmarks you look at for how yeah I'm sure you are well we look at the Lagora bench so we actually announced and released that on Friday last week and it has been That has been worked for the past three years, and we've kept that internal up until Friday. And the reason for that was it was basically open AI or the anthropic models. And so it wasn't like that interesting to publish benchmarks

on, and we would only make those two models available in our system, and the user could pick. Now, the smorgasbord of available options is a lot larger. And actually, we found, to our surprise, that SpaceX and GROC, was one of the best performance models, especially given the cost, on our benchmarks. And we don't even have a, have them on our data processing agreement. And so we actually can't yet offer them to our customers, but now we will start to.

And do you see your customers having strong opinions about which models they want to use, or is it sort of like they just want the best, whatever is the best? Some of them have a, they have a strong, especially like banks, you know, big law firms, have a, they don't want Chinese models. Yeah, makes sense. So I want to go back to just a little bit earlier, like when you decided you want to build a startup, a lot of people in the audience here.

I've had two dinners in the last two days with attendees at startup school. We talked about when should you start a startup? People are working at DeepMind, people are working at internships or jobs right now. Often you're one or two years into it. What would you say was the trigger for you? To say, I'm just going to do this

to not do McKinsey or the other options that you had? So my dad had two companies during the dot-com boom, both of which went to zero after raising too much venture capital. Has he been a good mentor for you? Yes, absolutely. How often do you speak about Ligora? Oh, we speak probably every day or every other day. About Ligora?

Yeah, about lots of stuff. I used to, now I'm like too tired to walk home often, so I have like take the train or like take a cab, but I used to walk home then I would call him and that would be a lot of fun. And sometimes we call him Senior Advisor. We have actually, one of our biggest customer pitches, we were stretched for resources,

so he came in and did the PowerPoint for that client. He knew everything at this point. Yeah, yeah, he knows most of it. So he had two companies in the dot-com, both went to zero, and then he had a boat business in the archipelago when I grew up. And so I've always been surrounded by entrepreneurship. And I always felt like I wanted to prove myself in that arena. I'm very competitive.

I used to play video games. I used to play Dota 2 more than I went to school. And then I think building a company is like the optimal, like it's the biggest arena that you can enter. And you'll either leave victorious or you'll leave defeated or you'll be okay. And I was very decided in that I should probably learn more about the world, which I thought McKinsey was going to be a great place to start at,

which I still think it is. I think it really teaches you how to work. You learn work ethic there. But I did an internship, and so I think I got a bit of that even during my studies. And then we had this, like, pivotal moment with GPT. And so we were talking about this, like, you weren't as excited about investing a few years back, like pre-LLMs, because there wasn't a lot of... There wasn't a lot of going on. Like, like, I think that the last year or two before COVID, it was not a lot of new ideas.

Right. And I remember sitting down pre-GPT, like, here are all the start ideas I can think of. Most of them were pretty boring. I don't think most of them would have worked out. Yep, yep. And then, like, small companies got a really big advantage versus big companies. And, I mean, I think you saw this in just, like, the way that Microsoft would build co-pilot. It didn't work for a really long time.

And I remember when that came out, and we were like, oh, my God, like, we're so screwed. You know, every lawyer already works in the Word and Outlook, and now they're just going to use co-pilot, but turns out, like, it didn't work. And the ability for us then to still build a lot of value was huge. I think now reflecting back on that, you learn so much by having to figure it out. And I really think that the amount of things you learn is a function of the amount of discomfort that you are willing to endure. When we started Ligora, I was super introverted. you know, really didn't feel comfortable talking to customers.

I wanted to code as much as possible. You know, when you have to go separate ways with an employee for the first time, like all of this is just so hard, but you realize that startups is one of the places where you can learn the most in a short amount of time. I think, you know, if I were to build a company again or join a company, I still feel like I learned a lot working at other startups. I actually worked at the WIC startups before starting my own.

And then I would say you should think really deeply about who you started with and the problem space. And I think we picked a space more than we picked a problem, which I think is like two different ways of going about it. it was completely obvious that legal and AI was going to be a thing. Yep. How it was going to be a thing was like very uncertain. And so we just said, let's march in this general direction and then we'll figure it out. That's one way of doing it. I guess the other way of doing it is like you find a specific problem,

you solve that very clearly, you generate ROI and then you expand from that. Yeah. You mentioned earlier, well, I know that you are extremely competitive. How is that expressed inside Lagora? How does the Lagora employee know that Max is a very competitive CEO? I think everybody at Lagora is like it. I think it's self-selects. How is it expressed?

Is it like a Friday meeting? Here's our goals and like? Well, yes. So we do, everybody knows every, every monthly goal. I think setting quarterly goals is like a little bit tricky. Is that how it was from the very beginning, which is three of you guys? No, then it was no goals. Then it was just like every day you like try to max it.

the outcome. Okay. And then we got, you know, when you're 750 people, you need to plan a little bit better and like have some better internal communication. Actually, communication is like the thing that really breaks when you scale. Yes. I think a lot of people have talked about that already. But no, we, you really feel this like drive from engineering that they want to build the best product and the best feature.

and the best feature. And if you compare our tabular review versus the other alternatives in the market, like it's really sort of you stack rank it. And we have lots of people on vacation now in Stockholm because it's July. And most of them have, most of the engineers who are on vacation are like more productive than they have ever been because they're like taking a bit of time off. But then they also get to code now on problems that they like, want to beat and they want to win.

And it's a team sport. And I think you can be competitive, but be in a team way. And so you really need to solidify this like winning or losing together strategy, I think. And when we get a big win, like that is really celebrated. And when we have a loss, we really like mourn it together. And then we immediately make a plan of like, how can we flip it? Or like, how can we make a land?

and like turn it around. And I feel like people are in solution mode rather than like blame mode. And I think that has been a big, you know, momentum driver for us. But also we've been in like chasing, right? Like they were other legal AI companies that were bigger than us when we started. And so we always felt at least in the beginning like we were chasing. now we are much bigger. Let's say you are the biggest one at some point very soon.

Yes. Is that going to impact your motivation or your competitiveness? So I think at that time, so that's interesting. I thought a lot about what happens at that moment. Yeah. I think we need to either pick out another enemy and go like, okay, we have to be bigger than them now. Or we have to like really find this way of being better than ourselves yesterday.

And I think that having competitors is a good thing. You should not be overly focused on what they're doing, but it's definitely like a carrot, I think. And it's an easy thing to rally around. Because what you don't want is you don't want a lot of side-questing. You want everybody focused on the same thing. So one question I got from the audience is, how do you become more ambitious?

And when I ask this question, I'm thinking of a company I'm working with right now, who is like, oh, we want to do this country in Europe, and then we're going to do this other country in Europe, and then maybe next year will be the US. You guys did a lot of countries in Europe, just during the batch, and then like... And now we're at like 50 countries.

And now you're everywhere, and you scale up really quickly. And is that ambition, or is that the product was working? No, it's definitely ambition. Yeah. I think it's like... How does someone learn that, or how does someone become more ambitious? Is that possible? Yeah, I think it's possible.

I actually think the best way to become more ambitious is to have a peer group of other very ambitious people. So in like my final years of like high school, I was pretty lazy. I was playing a lot of video games. I was, you know, I had a pretty easy time in school, and I didn't work that hard. And I didn't know how much. big the world was like outside of my sphere and the first two years in college was the same

yeah and then i made like a new friend group of um very ambitious people and that made it click for me i went from doing like zero internships to doing eight jobs in one year and i actually think that's like one of the best parts about YC. And you think PG talked about that in one of the essays, which is like you come here and then you just realize that like, wow, every peer, like everybody's really ambitious, and so you become more ambitious together. Yeah.

And I think now we are like that inside of Ligora. Yeah. Because I don't feel like I'm the boss. I feel like I'm a peer in the team that is running the company. And, you know, our. CFO sometimes challenges our marketing team to be more ambitious. And like a CFO maybe typically wouldn't care about that. But we're all just like so forward leaning and it's just so fun.

And then you really get to assemble this like group across the entire company. It's not just at the top right. It's like everywhere. And then you get to watch your creation like spiral and become more and more and more and more ambitious. And that is really fun. I also think you need to have like big idols and big companies ahead of you. I mean, in the beginning, who was your idol? Also, we would look at Spotify and Klarna as these are the biggest success tech stories from Stockholm that have, you know, ever happened.

And then we realized, wow, we have a bigger market cap than Kvarna. And that was like kind of a weird moment. Yeah, yeah. Because we feel like we have done zero to one. Yeah. And one to 10 and then 10 to 100 still remains. It's in front of us. And so, yeah.

Would you say, so people in the audience here are wondering, what skills are either more valuable to have now as you're in school or you're graduating from school versus not more valuable? Like basically, is the skills that you need to start a company, or skills that you need to get into like, your career, are they changing in a very short amount of time now? I think storytelling is, at least for the CEO,

I had completely underappreciated how important and how good of a skill that would be, because what ends up happening is you need to sell the company to yourself. Like working this hard if you don't believe in your own story is really hard. you need to sell employees. Now we are hiring people, you know, we are competing with the labs for talent. And, you know, we need to sell the story

of how working at Lagora is going to be better than working at Anthropic. You need to sell the story to investors. You need to sell the story to customers. And I think that in college or in high school or wherever that is, spending time to learn that is useful. I don't know how to learn it.

I actually don't know how I learned it unless I just had a lot of exposure. Yeah. I always like stories. I like video games. I enjoy a good story. But I think that is like the most important. And then maybe the other really important thing.

Technical skills. Okay. Well, I'll say one more before we go to technical skills. I used to be a really bad teammate and a really bad collaborator. So I played volleyball for a long time growing up. And I would be the type of person on the team who, when my teammate missed the serve, I would yell at them and go, you fucking suck.

Like, how could you miss that serve? And that was very, that doesn't get you invited to play the next game. Yeah. And makes sense. You know, it doesn't invite a followership. and it doesn't invite like a good vibe. So in high school, I like really understood that and had to pivot that way of working. I think technical skills.

I think that the sort of the velocity and your ability to iterate on customer feedback still is probably the most important skill to get started. Even now when we're bigger, very often we will hear about a particular type of problem, a customer is having in a customer call, I will dump that in the product channel, and I'll go, how quickly can we turn this around and delight the customer? And that's like a bit strange to do at a thousand person company scale,

but still how we do it. You need to make sure that you don't overly zigzag and that you continue building towards the right vision. But I still think that your ability as a smaller company to be fast versus your incumbent competition is the superpower. And when you have a superpower, you need to lean into that.

And that's still true for me. Like, I should be doing the things that I'm uniquely good at. And other people in the company do the things that they're uniquely good at. I think also technical skills... Maybe they're different these days.

Because it means something else. Yes, but it still means being able to build systems at scale. Just because you can produce a lot of code with AI, it's not a excuse for not being a very good software engineer. And I still think we need many good software engineers. We are hiring a hundred of them at the GORA. What's the most interesting problems that people get to work on when they join a GOR? Oh, one of the most interesting problems right now, is one of the most interesting problems right now is this transition from reactive agents to proactive agents.

So what's an example? So for the last three years of working with the product, you will give Ligora a prompt or a set of instructions, and it's going to go off and do that thing. Now, we are basically connecting Ligora to different pieces of context, and when it gets a trigger, it will start to do something. That means that if the sales team gets a contract, it will get routed to a Ligora agent,

the Lagora agent will start working on it in parallel. If it needs to escalate to a lawyer, it will. Otherwise, it might just execute the contract. Or you connect the entire data room to a Lagora agent, and the agent automatically starts organizing that data room and produce the due diligence report. It's having the agent do things without you telling it what it should do.

And that for us is the unlock of how does one lawyer produce the outcomes of a team of 10 lawyers with the help of Ligora. Yeah. I think that's very interesting. Those have some very interesting problems just from like a scale perspective, right? Like we're spending millions and millions and millions of dollars on OCR and like, you know, document parsing and these are like real engineering problems to go solve at a bigger scale. Got it.

Um, and you grew from zero to 100 million in 18 months in April. Um, keep growing at a crazy rate. Yes. Your job has changed quite a lot in 18 months. Yes. We talked earlier about you now interviewing, like, exec teams, sort of like, we had this talk from the founder of Dropbox.

I said, why I see it, like, a couple years ago, we talked about the mini games that you play. You've done a lot of mini games in 18 months, and now you're at the mini game on, like, building out or hiring people to run your team. What's, that sounds hard, and this is not something you've done before? Like, how...

Well, it's definitely not something I've done before. How do you learn something like that, it seems extremely important to hire the right executive? In a way, I think most of the work up until that point makes you qualified for that thing. You get to the next minigame by basically seeing the last one. Yes, but you need to make sure that you learn part of every minigame.

And I think you really need to put the company first way ahead of your own ego in a way and you know I tell this to the executive team I need to re-qualify for the job as CEO of Lagora every quarter right it's a new company new challenges as do they like running a sales team when you are one million ARR is very different from 150 million ARR and I think for myself if you like if you are if you enjoy that if you enjoy learning new things if you enjoy being challenged if you accept the fact that now my most important job is building out the executive team and i'm going to go do that you will succeed at it and then i think as always you try to build a good network of people

who have done it before the tough thing is there's very few people who have done the company this quickly as we are. And even a lot of the executives that we are now bringing on, they come from sauce. And they come from this world of triple, triple, double, double. If you grow 40% year on year, you are doing fantastic. You're sort of on track. And that's not enough anymore.

It's not enough. Like we, David, our CFO, joined from Banta, another YC company. They've been very successful. But they've grown from 30 million to 300,000. to 300 million in something like four years. And now we're doing it in like one year. And so from 200 people to 1,300 people, and we're doing over four years,

and we're doing it in one year. And so you need to just compress timelines. I think you need to be brutal at saying no to things. And you need to understand yourself where you have the most competitive edge. And where you do the most. When I landed in Stockholm in end of April, all of the ads were basically,

Ligora ads with Jude Law. And I'm curious how you get Jude Law to be the face of the company. And if you haven't seen the ads, I'd recommend you go into YouTube and watching the Ligora Jude Law ads. Did you fall in love with law again? Yeah, I did. Yeah, it did. Good.

What happened? How did you score that? OK, so the inside baseball is we had a meeting with one of our marketing agents. is and one of their pitches was, why don't we redo, like, very famous legal scenes? Like, you can't handle the truth? Yeah. Like, why don't we redo, like, famous legal scenes with lawyers, but, like, with Ligora?

Yeah. And, or, no, the pitch was this. It was actually pretty funny. All of these movies about lawyers, like, what if they just had Ligora? And, you know, the movie would be over in, like, a minute. And so we got to this idea of, like, working with actors. And then somebody went, well, Legore is like AI-powered law. What if we got Jude Law to be like AI-powered?

And that got us down the track of like, huh, maybe we could get Jude Law. And what's funny in Hollywood right now is it's like pretty anti-AI with, you know, writing scripts, you know, using AI in movies, et cetera. And he thought we were completely unsurious when we reached out the first time. Like some Swedish AI company wants to work with Jude Law to make billboards in the campaign. But then we were so persistent. And I think one underappreciated form of negotiation

is nagging. It's one of the things my dad taught me. And we nagged and nagged and nagged. And he said, yes. On one condition, he got to pick his own scriptwriter and cinematographer. And who would have known? He brings an SNL script director.

and the cinematographer from Oppenheimer to light the scene and do the whole cinematography. And they basically go into the set. Nobody from Ligora is allowed in. And a few hours later, these magical productions come out. It's really good. It's so funny. And what I think it did for us was it put us in another light

where even people outside of law now know about Ligora. And that has been really excited. Awesome. Thank you so much for coming to ZypSchool. This is awesome. Thank you, Gassar. Thanks having me. Thanks, everyone.