20VC: Inside Legora: $100M ARR in 18 Months | Jude Law Generated $50M in Sales Pipeline: The Economics Broken Down | Competing Against Harvey, the 800 Pound Gorilla | Why Legora is Undervalued at $5.5BN with Patrick Forquer, CRO @ Legora

How much did the G-dcle cost? - We generated over $50 million a qualified pipe. We had so many leads that we weren't able to follow up with them when I started, we were at 40 people. Today we're over 500. When we get into a deal, we get into a pilot. We convert pilots 78% of the time into a closed one opportunity. Deathmatch on every deal is super competitive. We've got to play defense and offense at the same time, and that's what makes it fun. Every two weeks, we have a new higher class. And at this point, it's between 40 and 50 people joining every two weeks. This market is being made right now. This is one of the hottest markets of all time. Our average attainment last year was 288%. It's more about time than money right now. When you have momentum, when you have an advantage, press the advantage. - This is 20 VC with me, Harry Stabbings. And joining me in the hot seat, we have Patrick Fochua, CRO at LaGoura, the fastest growing enterprise business ever to hit a hundred million in error. And now on track, hit 250 million in error by the end of the year, on parallel gross, which led to a $550 million series D at a $5.5 billion valuation led by Excel. Note 20 VC did participate in this round. And this conversation took many twists and turns, including how a Jude Law advert generated $50 million of pipeline for the company. Get your notebooks out. This is a masterclassing company scaling. But before we dive into the show today, you have the idea, but often with AI tools, you hit a wall. Well, base 44 is where that friction disappears, turning how you talk into how you build. Full stack, web, and mobile apps, sites, or autonomous super agents all built in minutes, not we can spend on damn configuration. Base 44 ships it all out of the box. The back end, the database, the authentication, and the hosting. 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So thank you so much for joining me, dude. Oh, thanks so much for having me. It's awesome to be here. So you were braised for six years. - Yeah. - What was the single biggest sales lesson that you took with you from braised to Lugora? - I think the biggest thing that we did really well at braised that I've sort of taken over is implementation change management. So braises really hard to implement. So you're on a legacy product, you're consolidating. One, two, three, four, five different tools into one tool, implementations take six to 12 months. There's a lot of effort, there's a lot of stakeholder management, technical work streams, all these different things. And for us at Lugora, obviously we have an amazing product, but at the end of the day, our focus and our obsession is around like helping our customers adopt those tools, like Lugora tools into their workflows, which is really hard. So general change management strategies and take all the learnings I took from braised and taking the Lugora is probably the biggest thing. - So I had Matt Fitzpatrick on the show in this morning. I didn't normally send out the schedules 'cause they're just gonna give by the way, so I'd very, very quickly. But like Matt Fitzpatrick, he's like this, CEO of Amizbo, which is a data provider. And he was like, oh, you can't sell into enterprise without FDA use today. - Is that true? And when you reflect back on what works in change management, what's the biggest advice? - Yeah, so there's a couple of things that are still true, and I think some things that are different like in an agentic world. So the things that are still true is you still need a tremendous amount of executive sponsorship and support. The joke we used to make when I worked in consulting was the two things people hate the most are the way things are in change. So you need top down sponsorship, you need bottoms up, sort of champion building, all the sort of normal adoption frameworks that you use in traditional change management. I think the biggest thing with agentic work and why FDAs are required. And we have both four deploy engineers, but we also have four deploy legal engineers who are big law attorneys who understand how individual practice areas work within a law firm as well as how corporate legal departments work within that sort of broader context. And with an agentic tool like LaGoura, you log in and you see the agent, it's like the proverbial blank page. There's no sequential step of things that you click like in SaaS and SaaS, it was like, you used to do things this way and now you do things this way and this is why this is better and this is all those sort of business impact. With an agent it's like, what do you want it to do? And most people don't think about their work in terms of like systems thinking. In terms of what's the goal of what I'm doing, what are the steps I need to take to achieve the goal and what are the tools, skills and resources I need at each step and you know, who's in the loop at each decision making inflection point. You know, it sort of progressed this to achieving the goal. Most businesses don't write things down like that, they don't think like that. And so having these four deploy folks, you can do two things. Integrate LaGoura into sort of the broader tech ecosystem. So we have access to all the various tools and resources that we need to accomplish the goal, but also leveraging these legal engineers to say, hey, we know how X, Y, Z, M and A, workflow works in practice. This is how you do it before agents. This is how you do it in LaGoura. That's the sort of hard yards and where we spend a lot of time. What level of contract do we need to justify an FD model which is more costly, it's human hours upfront, it's margin reduction? What level of ACV do you think's needed? - Well, it's a great question and people keep asking me why we raised so much money and I'm like, lawyers are expensive men. You know, it's like, you know, we can afford to take, you know, to take this sort of human, this very human centric approach right now. But we do it for, you know, pretty much anything and six figures and above. You've got to really lean in and make that, make it happen because otherwise what you do is you sell your end danger of selling software that doesn't get used and are, we're very focused on, again, like I said, adoption frameworks and making sure that if we sell you to licenses that you use alternative, you get a lot of value out of it. - We're getting going to like metrics that matter adoption frameworks. - Yeah. - I do just want to ask, on the advice side, there's a lot of operators who are at traditional SaaS companies, traditional enterprise companies and in contemplating, should I move to an AI company that's so much hype, there's so much buzz around them. I don't want to be left behind. Braze is an incredible company, but it's a traditional company. What advice would you have for those operators who are thinking about moving to an AI first company and a next-gen company? - Yeah, for sure. And I've become that person at Braze that people call when they're, oh, you know, I'm thinking about leaving and how do you think about it and that, that, that. So I've had this talk a lot with friends and colleagues and well, the first thing is always, it's what do you want to do? Because I can tell you working in this world is completely insane and unhinged and it's all consuming. So you've really got to want to do it, you've got to want to lean in and it's very different than traditional SaaS. The pace of development, the pace of the market, in terms of the competitive market, competitive dynamics and things like that, it's very different and you've got to really want to come in and build and figure stuff out and do things differently, get a little uncomfortable. If you're okay with that, I'm always encouraging people to make the leap. - What's insane and unhinged? - If you think about the news that comes out every week, the competitive set, the model capabilities, who's buying what? There's so much sort of hype around even in our, even in just our space. Every time we win a deal or lose a deal, there's a PR announcement about it. So the level of pressure, the level of development and then the product development specifically, like the product from LaGora a year ago, I thought was incredible. You know, I think it's really, really, really, I quit my job and joined the company. I was so excited about it. But that versus what we have now is night and day. And so your ability to stay on top of it, to learn, and to like, how that level of deep product expertise is really tough. And you've got to, like I said, you've got to take it very seriously in terms of enablement and education. - I can't remember if it was Logan or Chathen. And so I'm gonna give credit to both of them. - Okay. - But they said that you've been phenomenal in terms of bluntly creating a new playbook for this era. - Yeah. - And I think most challenging with what you said there with the transience of models, competition, you name it, is like your playbook becomes relatively relevant. - Yes. - What remains from traditional SaaS playbooks? - And what's like, that is useless now, get rid. - One area I still like to ground my team in is we wanna be customer obsessed. And you wanna have, there's a guy Brian Walsh of Force Management taught me this phrase, positive business intent. So if you're there and you're showing up and you're genuinely like taking the point of view of, I'm here to help, I'm here to help transform your business and make a big impact and to help you win. I think people can feel that and be prepared, be professional, come with a point of view. Understand their business, do your homework, all the stuff that you would do from a preparatory perspective. Like you still have to do, you still have to prepare and take the point of view of like understanding their business deeply so you can understand the impact that you can make sort of long term. That's still the same. But it braze we never ran pilots in LaGoura. We just, we run pilots all the time as an example. So there's a tremendous amount of education you have to do because as we were talking before the show, I think AI literacy generally in the market, not just within the legal context, but AI literacy generally is very, very low. And even when we're working with firms who have put a ton of investment and enablement into it, the models are developing, the capabilities are developing and staying on top of it is like, is a big challenge. And we view part of our job as being that partner to help you stay up to speed with the cutting edge, technology and everything you can do with it. So that part is quite different. Does the traditional sales playbook work of old in a new AI world? - I think it's a blint. There's certain things you have to throw out. So the traditional SaaS playbook is like, you don't want a demo. For example, the old school SaaS thing is like, the products weren't very good. You know, you want to hold the demo as long as possible. Do discovery, build rapport, do all these things, and then you demo like the second or third meeting. That's what the old school guys would tell you. With LaGoura and with the GenTik tools, you have to still do discovery and still come with the point of view. But you have to use the product to sort of show what the future looks like. And especially if for us in a category creation moment, you're dealing with what they call tradition unrealized pain. We're not typically replacing a tool. Okay, I mean, occasionally what we will be. But more often than that, we're sort of the first tool of its kind and sort of coming into the organization. And so you have to be able to be audible ready to ask questions and then be able to pivot really quickly into building like an GenTik workflow off the cuff as you're talking to someone. That's quite difficult. Can we actually use that as a way of explaining the valuation? Because I think people question the multiple. As we said, it raised a lot of money and at a 5.5 billion, I think it was post, which is public. But people are like, wow, that's what you have to assume a lot. And you gave me an answer before, which I'd love for you to share, 'cause that was a good one. How do you think about that expansion from where we are to where we can be in terms of what LaGoura does? - Yeah, so if you look at the legal tech sort of market, I think it's like 40 billion was the number that I see sort of floating around depends on who you talk to. But legal tech generally is a 40 billion dollar market. So then if you look at us, you look at our competitive said valuation, like that sort of doesn't add up. But then if you look at sort of legal services more broadly, that's a trillion dollar market. And certainly there's a bunch of work within that. That's not work that's done by law firms. For example, but it's more sort of like wrote repeatable document extraction type of work. And that's where we see ourselves really sort of playing in the long term is not just the legal tech market, but there's an element of the services market as well, where there's a high degree of application for LaGoura. - I wanna go to the stall of the funnel, so to speak, because again, this was Chathen, oh, like I can't believe I'm forgetting age, my friend, it's Kayla. I thought, you said it's insane and non-hinges. It's the same for media, by the way. - Yes. - I'm in venture and media, so I'm like double fox. - I know, right. - Yeah, it's the busiest guy in the picture in my ear. - Oh, honestly, it's a savage while I can't wait for him to create an AI Harry. If LaGoura can do that, I'll pay double. But if we saw it at the pipe, what was the biggest lesson in how to construct an effective pipe in an AI world and how that pipe plumb building process is done? - This has been a big point of evolution for us. So for example, we just did a big brand campaign with Jude Law. But before you do something like that, you have to do a ton of work in terms of the plumbing, in terms of what's our inbound lead scoring. How do we do data enrichment? How do we do lead routing and lead scoring from a probabilistic perspective? So there's a ton of infrastructure you have to put in place first before you can really sort of go big from an inbound perspective. So on that basis, we've done a ton of work leading up to that campaign. But even last year of getting our systems in place, getting the territory assignments in place, all of the rules and SLAs around if we get a lead, you have to respond in this amount of time. And even last year, from an SMB perspective, we had so many leads that we weren't able to follow up with them as many as we wanted in a timely way. So the other thing was staffing. We've had to hire a tremendous amount. When I started, we were at 40 people. And we still need more people and more systems to keep up with the demands. - How do you do lead scoring today? Is it simply a size of contract? - Yeah, so right now you look at the size of the firm, you look at the number of attorneys and compliance workers internally, and then you look at where they're located. And you're routed to the right team. - GEO plays a role in that? - Yeah, so we've got teams all over the place. So in Europe, we have pods looking after every major market. And for example, in Germany, we're doing so well that we just opened an office in Munich. So you run the GM model. I'm seeing this more and more. You have like mini CEOs of each country. 11 labs is very much pivoted to that. - Yeah, exactly. So we've got Leo who runs our European business. And then under Leo, we've got a number of folks with from a country perspective and a team behind them to go execute. So we have to be really cognizant of. There's a lot of European data sovereignty, different regulatory compliance things. So we have to have teams are really specialized in that. - I know you go to get a permit to go to the bathroom. I'm sorry. - Exactly, exactly. (laughing) - We gotta do my ETA, on the way. - How you wanna get up to go to the bottom and you need a permit for that to you? - Yeah, that's 25. - I can't say the exact number, but I can tell you it's worth every penny. - Was it? - Yeah. - Because people are gonna watch this. And they're gonna say Harry's an ambassador. It's boys. - I wasn't sure about it. - Yeah. - And so like, tell me it was worth it and I'm thrilled 'cause I want it to be. So last month alone, we generated over $50 million or qualified pipe. And that's not just inbound leads. That's pipe on that we talked to, qualified and moved into like a sales conversation. - Can I be blown up? What was the month's before to give us context on like, is that good or bad? - That was a pretty big jump month over month. I don't know the exact number. I don't wanna miss quote, but, you know, from that perspective, we're seeing a ton of interest in demand. And look, when I started-- - The lawyers give a sh*t about low. - It honestly wasn't even necessarily for the folks, the lawyers in the big markets know about us. It's more for the folks that don't. And we just want that sort of brand awareness 'cause I can tell you, when I started in the U, I was our first U.S. hire, the first office that we had in the U.S. with my apartment in Brooklyn. And we, you know, as I was sort of slowly building out the team over there, no one knew who we were outside of the people sort of in the know in the legal tech community. And so for us, you know, we were laid to a lot of deals. And when we get into a deal, when we get into a pilot, you know, we convert pilots 78% of the time into a closed one opportunity. But the biggest challenge that we had was just not being in the room. And so for us, brand awareness is everything. And the strength of our brand is better than ever. And yeah, you know, the Jew Law campaign wasn't, you know, for everyone, but overall we got really positive feedback. And the biggest thing is just brand awareness for us. - Super interesting times of our own way. You know, I had Nick from "Revoluted on the Show." - Yeah. - And he said one of the biggest lessons that he always had is he always thought "Brown awareness was fluffy bullshit." - Yeah. - And actually, it's one of the most powerful drivers to the business. - And that's one thing that we report on to the board, like Stuart and our marketing team have created a framework for how we score our brand sort of efficacy in different markets. And we track that. We're making big progress and we have a lot more coming. - Can I ask you, in terms of the pilots there, you know, the undeniable truth is you are in a two-sided fight or have we want to say, it's a war, it's you versus Harvey. How do you advise founders? I don't want to make this like legal or a versus Harvey. 'Cause there are a lot of markets where it's Brax versus Ram, or Stripe versus Airwollix, whatever. How do you advise founders when it's one versus the other when you're in that sales process? - At the end of the day, it comes under preparation and execution. And one of the companies I really admire and tried to model after he is ramped, like you said. And we talk a lot about them internally in terms of how they've built the execution layer from a go-to-market perspective. If you've talked to anyone who's engaged with like a ramp sales team, they're always prepared. They don't have to like take things back to get answers. There's a degree of professionalism and preparation that goes into every conversation. And also, so often in go-to-market, people talk about using AI to automate different processes. Like, oh, I want to like, you know, update my opportunity notes or like draft this email. And of course we do all that stuff. But the other thing that people don't think enough about is like, how are you using AI to sort of deliver more, like differentiated from a services and insights perspective? We have a lot of data from like pilot participants. How can we give insights into that data that are going to help the firms and the companies that we work with make decisions around adoption frameworks, ROI and things like that? So what is this thing? If I'm a founder listening to this, what does that actually mean? So we use pilot data to then encourage net new customers. So we say, hey, 84% of people that use this type of email actually convert better. Yeah, exactly. So within a lot of firm context, for example, we'll segment out by practice area. And so let's say that a big firm's got, let's say, 10 practice areas. And then you have, let's say, X number of people within each practice area. We can report out on consumption and usage by practice area. And also we track and create frameworks and use case banks for actual applications and workflows that we're building. So let's say within that example, we've got 10 practice areas. Seven of them, we see really high usage. We're creating and capturing new use cases. We're sharing that back with them on a regular basis. But maybe there's three where we're not. And you can start measuring things like the quality of your work increased. Did you decrease the amount of non-billable work that your associates were doing? Were you able to attract more talent using a tool like LaGorax people get excited about using the latest and greatest in AI? And so if you take that and you played it to the three practice areas where maybe we were not doing as well, we can show them insights as to who's really leaning in and who's not and where we need help from a change management perspective. Totally, yeah. And so one is execution and being prepared. Anything else on how to navigate that? Hey, we're looking at Bryce versus Ram, Paul V. versus LaGorra. Like one of my biggest bits of us found is always be respectful. Notting your competition is not in a sales process. Yeah, it just doesn't come across that well. Salute yourself, don't bash them. Exactly. And we try to stay in our lane and focus on ourselves. No, obviously, as you mentioned, we have one big competitor and they come up on every, it's a death match on every deal. It's super competitive. We have a ton of respect for them. We, you know, it's not like anyone over LaGorra is just like thinking that every deal we're going to as a cake walk. It's the exact opposite. They're very good. They're very, you know, they're very aggressive. And we take them extremely seriously. And so we screen for intelligence, we screen for effort, and we screen for competitiveness. 'Cause at the end of the day, you had a really one-to-one. You got to go out execute, not deliver, and evolve your playbook. We run pilots very differently now than we did a quarter ago in the court before that. That's interesting. How do you run them differently today than you used to? We have a lot more tools. We have a lot more reporting. We have a lot more specialty in terms of implementation change management. So going back to like the firm context as an example, you can't just have like a litigation attorney go talk to an M&A team. You got to have an M&A attorney go talk to an M&A team. And so as we've scaled out from, you know, just me to, you know, a much bigger team in the US right now, we've hired specialists who focus on different areas of the law who can get, again, sort of go in bed with our clients and the folks in pilots and sort of build those book workflows for them. And we're able to do that. We're able to get on site, getting on site, super critical. Because people don't pay attention on Zoom. We all know that, right? And so, on site-- When you say getting on site, what do you mean? You say in the sales process, and it's like, hey, get into their office? Yes. I encourage every GTM and every legal engineer. If you're not in their office by the second or third meeting, something's wrong. Now certainly some companies are especially on the corporate side. Maybe they're hybrid, maybe they're remote. You can't always do it. But in particular for a deal of like really any size, because at the end of the day, for firms, this is sort of a bet the company type decision. Like this is an existential decision making process. And so from that perspective, you're going to bet on the team just as much as you're betting on the product. And so at the end of the day, you're betting on a team that's going to meet you in the future with the solutions and sort of adoption frameworks that are going to help you get there. It is about the decision, because this is like that core investment in an AI technology field. If you look at it from the partnership perspective as a law firm, with that in mind, and with the stickiness that can come, how do we think about giving it away for free and margin reduction in order to have market share again? Yeah, we don't give LaGoura away for free. So we try and have price integrity. We try and be very transparent around what our pricing model is and how we go after things. But in the competitive dynamic, we do face that from various competitors. And the halvee give it away for free. They have. And certainly from our perspective, I always make the joke when I'm talking to folks in a competitive dynamic when you're getting down to the decision making process. You're focusing on the product score, from the pilot, you're focusing on the commercial model, you're focusing on the roadmap. One thing we do is we have what we call the 8 mile talk track. And at the end of 8 mile, or he just sort of says everything that's wrong with him about him and his family, we just sort of say, this is exactly what's going to happen. If you pick us, this is what the counter is going to be. This is what they're going to go to this point. And we have a pretty good point of view on what will happen and it usually does. And so from that perspective, we just try to stay ahead of it. Do people churn when they're embedded in a product? If switching isn't frequent and it's supremely sticky, if I'm mass in your Patrick, easy one, I'd just say, let's just give it away for free to everyone for the first year. Let's just get everyone for free on it and get them as embedded as usual. We'll tell all of our masters that our model march is going to say, there's no revenue. Yeah. But Nashia, we're going to be at a billion five in revenue. Well, there's one way to look at it. But the way I think about it is, first of all, if a company's not spending any money on a product as a matter, then they're not going to put the resources and attention into it that they need to. And we really need our customers to lean in and want to change. Because at the end of the day, we can have the best team that we want. We can have the best team focused on all the right things. But if the customers aren't leaning in, then it's going to be tough. And so I think from going to zero is not helpful in that. And that's sort of dynamic. But I see what you're saying. And we do try to be easy to work with. And so from that perspective, we're trying to be as flexible as we can be. It's a very interesting behavioral economic study, which is they give away yoga class for free in a park. And it had a 52% attendance rate. And then they charge $35. And it had a 92% attendance rate. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. It's a people commit to what they pay for. Exactly. And you have to have value. You place value on your partners. And we find that's to be true. Well, I interviewed Winston-Harvey. And I thought it was very small. One of the GTM approaches, which is using P, is this kind of expand funnel into the clients that they have in law. How do you think about that? Yeah, that's definitely an angle. And certainly within the sort of legal services ecosystem more broadly, you look at the influence in decision making, on tooling, for example. It's like if you're selling to a corporate, they're going to ask all their law firm panel, what tools are they using. If you're selling to a law firm, they're going to ask their big corporate clients and the tools they're using. And certainly private equity-- That's the power. Does the P-fums have the power of the law firms? What does the law firms have the power of the P? I think it depends on the firm and depends on the P company, for sure. But there's definitely a lot of interconnectivity. And one of the most fun things about selling into this market is that every deal is very different. Soindell law firm, there's a lot of personalities. Stakeholder management is very different from firm to firm. So there's innovation teams. There's knowledge management, but there's also partners. And the degree to which partners want to lean in and get involved in there's AI committees. And there's all these subcommittees and all these different things. So it's very intricate, the decision-making processes. And one client of a firm might have an outsized voice at the table for or against you as an example. You have to be very mindful of that. That sort of map is very complex. There's many different clients' processes. Biggest lessons are advice on lead scoring. Going back to that. And then you see people doing way wrong lessons. The one thing they remain true is that the longer you let a lead sit, the worse the conversion rate is. And so we just try to optimize for the highest intent signal with the fastest response time. And so we automate a lot of that from sending out the calendar invite for the initial call on the right system with the right person. We just try and be as fast and as accurate as possible at that. I don't think we have any-- The two days, exactly, I can deal. When you see it in two weeks, it's like, I have to do it. Yeah, yeah. And if you miss something or something gets dropped, and this happens to everyone, then your chances of converting that go way down. And that's remains true. And I don't think we have any big insights on that. We have that cool. You're advising me. I'm an early stage founder. I have biggest advice on sales qualification. The hard questions to ask. What not to ask the way to do it. For us, it's a couple things. Going back to the pilot example. One thing that we've learned is we've had some firms who say, how we have this really honoris, InfoSec process. So we want to do a pilot, but we don't want to go through InfoSec. So we're just going to do it on test documents. Or like publicly available things. That's a recipe for, again, low engagement, low excitement, and just generally doesn't work out well. You've got to have a little bit of give-get. There is a little bit of pain on the front end of identifying the use cases that you want to test, identifying the stakeholders that you want to be involved in the pilot to go through. Yeah, some pretty, as you can imagine, working with the Lloyd and these big law firms and UI, the InfoSec process is non-trivial. So if you can get buy-in on identifying the successful criteria for the pilot, who's going to be involved, what use cases we're going to test, what metrics are involved, and you can go through that initial sort of painful period, then you know you've got something there. How do you bring in people with true buying power? I imagine they're not always on the first course. How do you make that transition of like, I'm so pleased, Pat, that you're excited about LaGora. Can we please try and get your boss in now because I want to progress this? I have to say, one of the things about LaGora that's like floored me, a braze we had this problem. So a braze the executive buyer was the CMO and getting access to a CMO was so hard and we would get it done very, very rarely and we always sort of been over backwards to get this done. With LaGora, because there's so much chatter in the market about AI and the firms and corporates both want to unhook. understand what others are doing, we actually get access to power pretty easily. And people want to learn, because on a lot from side, they're getting asked by their clients, how are you using AI? And what tools are you using? And like what are the use cases? And where are we going to see this value in our bill, for example? And on the corporate side, they're getting a ton of pressure from the board and the CEO of like, hey, go figure this shit out. Like, you know, we need to optimize like xyz process and AI everything. And so we get access to senior stakeholders who want to like lean in and learn from us, but I think typically, if you don't have that access early to your question, what we try to do is we try to focus on the highest value, use cases and highest value, in fact, as quickly as possible. So you want to grab attention really fast, and lucky for us, the LaGuard products awesome. So coming in with the perspective on the company and the role based on the ICP that you're talking to, talking about some of the high value use cases that we have, learning about what's most important to them, and then showing them how we'd solve that quickly. They're like, wow, I want to show this to my boss. And that's generally a framework that's been successful. - I come from an industry that is traditionally called cheap like, because of following others. I don't understand why anyone would attribute that to us. To what extent is legal a cheap like industry where it's like, oh, Clifford Chans, Slaughter and May, you name it, use x. To what extent do they follow others? - There's certainly an aspect of a flight to safety during these sort of categorical moments, 'cause this is all new. This sort of general understanding of how agents work and how AI works and how to think about use case design is still being developed and the executive buyers at the firms and at the companies generally aren't as up to speed on that. Some of them are, but broadly, probably not. And so there is this flight to safety. And I think generally people want to feel like, you never got fired for hiring IBM. And at the end of the day, there is an aspect, there is definitely an element of that. - Don't feel both you and Harvey at IBM at this stage. - I was gonna say, last year, we were, the new intern, we were trying to make our name and we were, you know, - You were on IBM. - We were definitely not last year. I think at this point, working with the firms that we work with, having deva boys and linklators and other big firms, advocating for us really goes a long way. And I think we have that stamp now, but that's been a journey that we've been on. - You've got 20 of 100 AMNOR and Harvey got 40 or 60. - I don't know their numbers. - I think they said 50 of AMNOR. - Yeah, 50. - Does that mean we're fighting over the next 30? What does that mean we're fighting for each others, can it be? - Both, for sure. - I mean, they know who we work with, we know who they work with, we're both trying to get in. We're very aware that they know who our customers are, we know who there is, are we both going aggressively after it and also scaling up quickly to go after the next 50 or whatever the number is. So we've got to play defense and offense at the same time and that's what makes it fun. - Got the old Saswell feels quite nice. - Yeah, I jumped at that. - Exactly. It's like 30% growth, you know. - Deep pay attention to social. 'Cause for VCs, they're like, you saw it last week, the VCs, like pool Graham, - Yeah. - and then Matt Miller tweets back and I was saying anything about either and Vigilai, like them both immensely. But like, does it impact team? - I don't know how much it impacts the team. We definitely hear about it. When PG tweeted that, my phone blew up, shout out to him by the way, that was awesome. What a hair, I do my shulse everyone. I think I'll have to my own haul. - Yeah, even in Scandinavia. But I try not to think about it too much and obviously we've got Chateau and others really advocating for us in the public sphere. We really appreciate that. But I leave that stuff to them. I'm not on Twitter. - Do you bring VCs in to help you win deals? - Definitely. - That's interesting. - 100%. I mean, the cool thing about the space that we're occupying is because the VCs themselves, like if you think about iconic, general catalyst, Bessamer, they have huge legal networks themselves. They're big spenders on legal services more broadly. And so they definitely have big networks and are advocating for us whenever they have the opportunity. And certainly, our competition do the same thing and that's definitely an element of these sort of opportunities. - I always tell founders that I went with easy-alcap table to weapon. - Yeah. - Like, absolutely. - Exactly. What do Harvey do better than you stay? - That's a hard one. And I don't want to give, I don't know if I want to, you know, give an inch at all. But I mean, certainly the strength of their brand is something that is hard to deny. They've done a great job. They were the first entry and they've sort of built this amazing brand and you know, Kudos to them. - When we said earlier about kind of the playbooks, again, going back to something that Chathan said, he said, you know, training in particular is something where we've done incredibly well. - Yes. - I'm ramping people. What's the biggest lesson on how to do training while? 'Cause it's not easy, actually. - Well, and this is another thing from a, as a leader that's very different than the SaaS environment. - How so? 'Cause it's what talent development will maybe be the same. - Well, yes, but in the SaaS world, it's much more predictable and on this like very sort of clear, slow operating model. So you had quarterly releases with some monthly sort of shipping in between. Ahead of the quarterly release, you've got all this documentation. You do a big certification. Like you go through all these programs. With LaGora, we do big, huge product things like every week and the team has to stay on top of that. And there's no way you could do, you know, a global certification program for every big future we launch in real time all the time. And so we have to do a lot at a team level, regional level, and we do a lot async with video content. You know, we use notion really heavily. The product team is really in bed with the individual sales and legal engineering teams and engagement folks to make sure that, you know, we're all up to speed, but you can't do it all centrally. You have to really distribute through both async video and notion content as well as like team level enablement. So we activate on our product as in that way. - Can I, I don't know about being too specific. How does that let them like sales training then? Like first week, what do I get? I get like a notion link and like a load of video libraries. - No, so this is actually something we've really elevated and something I'm really proud of. So when I first joined, Vilgot told me to go to Best Buy and buy an Apple computer and then I went and had a couple videos of Max doing a demo. Now, every two weeks, we have a new hire class. We send everyone a Stockholm, do an immersive five days. And this is not like something where you're just gonna go, do a couple of video things and then go like walk around Stockholm, like this is intense, immersive. We expect GTMs and LEDs to come out of that week to be ready to go. From a ramp perspective, it's a straight line up. Like we expect people, we expect to drop people in and see them be very productive very quickly. - When you say ready to go, you mean they are ready to sit on cools on their own with clients? - Yes, it's quick. - It's very quick. Yeah, I had a guy do in his second week do a demo with one of the biggest companies in the world and he killed it. - I mean, obviously I joined because, yeah. - The company was. - The company was. - Now that she decided to sit down. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - So I was sort of there for guidance, but we expect productivity to happen very quickly. So we do an immersive first week. - What does that mean in immersive? I'm sorry to be specific, but there's so many founds that listen that she would notes. - Yeah. - What does an immersive first week mean? - So we have a cross functional sort of education program focused on everything from, this is our sales stages. This is our opportunity cycle. This is entry and exit criteria. We do a full day of demo work. We have a huge library, yes, of like, going in sort of video content from a demo perspective, but we also do a lot of role plays. We do, and we do a lot of education on the market generally. Because we hire a lot of lawyers. We also hire a lot of technologists. So the lawyers, you have to sort of train up on like how the tech stuff sort of works. And then the technologies, you have to train up on the sort of subject matter, subject matter expertise from a legal services perspective. So we have a ton of content on industry, education, product education, competitive landscape, the competitive landscape has mentioned changes every week. So we have to update all the product information, the new product information. So we just have basically a university style four day program where every department comes and enables the new hires on that particular program and how we operate. We have all that available for them in the new hire sort of notion. And then all the reps have their own personalized ramp page where we track all the metrics that we're looking at from a ramp perspective. - All of the 40 to 50, how many do you think make it? - That's a good question. When we move on from sales folks, we do it typically within the first quarter. And we actually have really high retention rates relative to the market. What are the signs that someone's not gonna make it? - We score demo quality using AI, we use GONG. And then you can create like a scoring mechanism for how the call went. They just got, how was the discovery framework? What was the demo flow, et cetera? And then when we get a red flag on that, our team goes in and like our enablement team goes in and sort of looks at the call and does like a playback with that person. So if you look at call quality scoring, plus opportunity development from a pipeline perspective, you can see pretty quickly who's tracking. We know what good looks like and we know what good doesn't look like. And you can see pretty quickly within about 45 days. - So is it bullshit then the traditional notion that well, you know enterprise is really difficult to understand whether someone's a good sales rep because the sales cycle's a long. - From a traditional SaaS perspective that might still be true with us, even our enterprise folks, when they come in, they're gonna be buried in deals within 60 days. Like our best people are closing deals typically within 90 days, even on an enterprise team. So from that perspective, because we're very hot right now, this market is being made right now. And so from an opportunity point of view, it's not like you have to go take your territory list, get your beauty, go do some account-based marketing, get the initial meetings. That's like sort of traditional. I've ran cold territories before. I've managed teams that have done that in a SaaS perspective. This isn't that. When we drop GTMs into their book, they're into typically something like five pilots within their first quarter. And so we're asking people to get very productive very quickly because this is not something where we can go do a bunch of handholding for a long period of time. And we have so much inbound and so much interest that you know quickly because the volume of opportunities that they're working is much higher than it would be in a traditional SaaS environment. Would you rather hire someone who has experienced selling to law firms or someone who has experienced selling this size of deal? I would rather have someone who has this size of deal. Really? Because legal tech traditionally, we're selling much bigger deals than traditional legal tech companies. We pay CVs like $2.50, $500. Around that, it depends on the segment. But yeah, roughly. But we're doing a lot of seven big, high seven figure deals. And a lot of legal tech companies were more niche. And so the ACVs and ARRs were not what ours are. We have hired some folks from legal tech and some have done really well, but they're not used to sending, you know, a million dollar proposal across the line. And I'd much rather have someone who is really strong in understanding sort of organizational dynamics and change management and was really confident in sending large proposals and like being able to work that sort of angle. What was the hardest deal to win? And why do you think you won it when you reflect on it? Like a win post-mortem? So I'm thinking about, I don't know if I want to say the name, but it's a big, big global law firm that we won. How big was it? It sort of medium seven figure deal. For us, it was hyper-hyper competitive. It was global. So we were using the full force of our global team in the US, Europe, and the UK and Australia. So we had all four regions activated working this in a from a pilot perspective. It was very close. There was influence on both sides. Do you know when it's close? Yes. How? And it came down to, it came down to, this is how we knew how close it was. It came down to executive presentation of our CEO and their CEO in front of their executive panel. And that's how they ended up making the decision. And we won. Well, I would be nervous if I was back. You would be like, you want to be on form. You sleep well overnight before. Honestly, the biggest thing we have going for us is that we have Max and no one else does. And so we feel he inspires a lot of confidence. Is that very rare to have CEO to see a bake off? It is, I mean, in my career, yes. But in terms of the LaGora experience, no. Because again, these are such important decisions. If you're a top law firm, I didn't think it feels unreasonable. No, you want to know who you're betting on. And you want to have a deep level of understanding of who they are with the vision for the company is. Does that align with your vision? Does it align with your values? The product strategy and execution. People really want to get in and get into the nitty gritty and understand not just Max, myself, the team more broadly. The chops of the folks are going to be delivering the services. Like they look at all of that. It's a really fine-tooth comb that they go through the stuff with. OK, dude, everyone has a flip side. Tame me to a deal you lost. When you look back on it, was supposed to mold them? Like, what more could we have done? I'm thinking about one right now. And as always, within a prize, it goes back to multi-threading and who you get to and who you don't. And so within a law firm context in particular, the decision making is sometimes opaque. And there's oftentimes there's these panels. And sometimes, let's say there's five people in a panel. Sometimes you get to meet all five people. Sometimes you meet four to five. Sometimes you meet one in terms of one-to-one engagement and relationship. And there was one key member of the panel that we never got time with and weren't able to build a relationship with and they did. And oftentimes with panel making decisions, sort of the loudest voice gets what they want. And we weren't able to get that. So that was really painful. Is the days of state buying dinners over or actually not? It's not like it used to be. I mean, back in the early days, when I was first, I graduated college in 2008. And that was still in the era where steak lunch, steak dinner, a lot of entertainment and sales. I mean, it's definitely evolved. I think more so these days, people want to do activities, get out and maybe not go to a steak dinner or do something a little more fun. Oh god, it reminds me of my mini-goal dates. Yeah, well, not quite like that. But I mean, relationships are still really important. And certainly for us, there's so many conferences and so many events. And any chance we have to sort of show up and show up. And that was because in like traditional tech, I think that's been a realization that I'm most helpful for all business, that actually being a brand logo on viral podcast clips is the new gold. Yes. And like having a banner in a conference that no one really wants to go to, not so much traditional tech, is that not the case in legal? Legal tech right now is having this like Renaissance. There's so many new players, there's so much money coming in. But going back to the conference point, you can waste money on conferences. And you can make money on conferences. And it sort of depends. And so we've got a pretty good playbook for that. What did you spend money on that was an absolute banger, and you learned something from that that I should know? When they go really well, these sort of fireside chat type executive dinners. So we hosted one, some of our investors, their offices at zero bond in New York. And like everyone was, one thing is true is like everyone still wants to go to like a fancy restaurant and here's someone smart to speak. And so we still find that these sort of thought leadership, AI thought leadership dinners are super effective. And they cost a lot of money. And you have to get some talent in the room from a thought leader point of view. And they'll have them do like a fireside chat with Max. That's highly, highly effective. And something that we do very often and really well. One of these spent money on, and you're like, guys, I can't believe we fucking spent money on this. Going back to the conference thing, I think we averaged a conference a week last year. We showed up at every conference you could think of. And some of them, we repeated this year. And some of them were like, we're never doing that again. (laughs) I love that. Speaking of, we said that would you rather have like someone who's versed in law or someone who's versed in the ill size? When we think about incentivizing teams, I think sales compactures are really hard to get my head around. Traditional SaaS, going back to traditional versus New World, 4XOT, good. Then I have Becca from Clay, who's like, it's six to seven X. And then I have my dear friend Carlos from 11 Labs, who went very viral saying 20X. And then I'm like, oh my God, I feel like such an insignificant human. (laughs) I heard that 20X number. I got so many, I mean, I obviously, I follow the show. You're so many things, every single thing. I've got so many things. All my friends who are in this business were like, wait, what's your multiple? Did you hear this guy? (laughs) I don't know about that. Yeah, I feel a little bit bad for the rest of the CRs. Like, how do you think about effective sales comp setting today? So, well, just to start it off the top, ours right now depends on the segment in the region, but ours right now are between sort of eight and 12X, is where we sort of landed, but we don't just take a multiple and apply that to the sort of competitive market OTE. You've got to really take like a bottoms-up approach to it and look at all of the metrics we were just talking about before. So look at ramp time, productivity per head, AR per head, pipe evolution within certain territories. We did a bottoms-up approach of that last year and we got to those sort of range, but we also had a year or last year where we absolutely blew out every metric that we put in front of the team. So, you know, I don't know how effectively we're doing that, but that's how we're doing it right now. But using eights, 12X today is where you sit, which is good. Yeah. What percent of people should hit that? Wow. So is that an effective attainment setting? Yeah, that was a job I made. Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, when I started, again, it just going back for context, like we were three and a half million and Chaitan and the red point guys were like, can we do 25? And that felt, I remember giving, we raised our series B and I remember giving a big like Rara, we had everyone to Stockholm, we did a big rollout. I know Logan did it. Yeah. I give, you know, I'm a VC, so I give credit to all the VCs for living. But I give credit to Logan all that one, which is like, he paid up in a VONS for something that wasn't that obvious respectfully. I'm like, credit to him. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, he got me, that's all I got connected with, with Max was through Logan and he actually introduced me to Braz as well. So I'm always a big fan of the red point team. Sorry, you joined in, it was like three and a half, but so then we're like, a queen, do 25. And I remember we were at like seven, we raised a series B, we had everyone to Stockholm and I'm giving a big, you know, Rara, speech to the global team at that point, which fit in the kitchen of our Stockholm office. Basically, so we hit 25 in Q3 and then we went nuts in Q4 and like blew through every, you know, we ended the year at 70 and then obviously crossed 100 earlier this year. So the projections are very hard from our side. So from a forecast perspective at the beginning of the year, I only gave guidance to the board based on a six month, rolling six month basis. So at this point, based on the data that we have and the sort of pipe analysis that we have, we feel pretty good about our ability to forecast this sort of top line business. Individual productivity stuff can be a little all over the place 'cause obviously there's like blue bird deals that happen and things like that. And we also have a ton of inner quarter open and close. And so being able to forecast that is a little bit of a pin the tail and the donkey challenge, but we're getting better at that piece of it. Well, it's your biggest advice to other CRIs when you look at the CRIs that ping you on the 20X, that we discuss. What's your biggest advice to CRRs on how to do full costing effectively in this very dynamic landscape? It's really hard. The first thing I say is you have to have a little grace with yourself and set expectations appropriately because in this market it's been relatively elastic so far and that won't continue forever but right now that's sort of the experience that we're having. So I do two things. I do like a rep and manager commit, roll up, like bet your life. Rep, roll up, first line manager, second line manager. So what does that mean? I'm sorry if I'm not right. What do you grab, roll up? Yeah, so if you're a sales director at LaGuarda and let's say you have a team of eight people, you go all eight people, like bet your life, how much AR are you going to close this quarter? That level of seriousness. And then that manager has to take the rep roll up and then they have to commit whatever number based on that sort of input from the reps. The directors take that to the VPs. The VPs take their director roll ups and then they commit like a regional number. And right now we have, you know, including India, we have five regions. So APJ, India, EU, the UK and the US. I take the VP roll up and then I compare that to like the weighted forecasts. So then we've got the, we've got this amazing woman, our Rev Opsim Lulu, who I worked with to sort of create this sort of weighted version of what, like a weekly, monthly, quarterly forecast would look like based on the opportunity stages. So with that, you have to have really, really tight rigor around opportunity management. So the stages and the amounts on the opportunities have to be really dialed and updated in real time. In last quarter, the rep regional roll up and what we call Lulu cast, which is the weighted sort of what I call the math version of the forecast were the same. And we were pretty accurate on on both. Where does stages go most wrong? If you don't have really good entry and exit criteria, as you could explain to your grandma, what does entry and exit criteria mean? So in our, let's say in our sale, if you think about a sales process, there's sort of the two sided, like buyer journey, right? There's the funnel on the way in to close one. And then there's the funnel on the way out as you look for like advocacy and adoption. On the way in, you know, let's say we have five sale stages, for example, I mentioned the pipeline that we generated off of judo, to get into qualified pipe, but you have to go through a discovery call where we ask questions around like the buying process, what they're looking for, interested in things like that. And then to progress that to the next stage, certain things that they say have to be true, meaning like they have to be in a buying cycle, to have that budget, like think about band frameworks, like budget, authority, need time. And then as you move into the qualification criteria, it's like, okay, the next stage is the pilot. What do we need to do to get into the pilot? I sort of alluded to exactly to buy it and fosack, you know, budget allocation, things like that. If you get that right and you have consistency across like the global teams, then typically the forecasting is right. And if you get the right waiting based on your sort of funnel progression historically, then you can get to a weighted forecast. That's like directly accurate. You sit there about the different regions that you have. If you're advising CRC or today, do you have to be everywhere all at once today? Yes. It's different. And the speed at which we're doing it is very different. Going back to the braze experience, New York tech, you know, we had a London office. That was like sort of the next move, but it took us a really long time, for example, to expand into Germany, which we eventually did, expanding into Japan and other places, whereas all of the, we just opened in Germany, we just opened in Spain, we've opened five offices, maybe six in the US, Sydney, Bangalore, like we've been, we've been all over the place. India feels like a strange one. It's just such a different universe. What was the thing you buy in India and how's India going? We typically follow the ball in terms of pipeline from that perspective. We had a ton of initial interest. We have great interest in the Middle East. We have great interest in India. So there was a ton of inbound sort of signal. Where's the hardest? Again, call us, speak about Japan and South Korea. I'm friends with Daniel from U.I. Post, who says about kind of that being a difficult region. Where's the hardest? That region is very hard. And we've been consulting a lot of our investors, a lot of advisors on how best to enter those markets. But yeah, I would say APAC is probably the most complex. And certainly each region has its own nuance with respect to like data hosting requirements, processing requirements, you can't process stuff in Europe or the U.S. You have to process certain things in region. Some of the model providers don't provide, for example, if you're selling into China, certain model providers don't provide access to the models in China and other places. So there's definitely some architectural work that goes into it. And there's a ton of work we're also doing. We announced today a big project we've done with McKinsey, focusing on European public sector work. And if you think about the Fed ramp in the U.S. there's all kinds of things that are really hard from a technology perspective that you have to keep in mind. Was the greatest of respect I'm probably going to show. Sovereignty is kind of an interesting word that's thrown around. But to what extent do you see Americans choose Americans and Europeans choose European? Is that a thing? Definitely a thing. And certainly we have the perception when we come into a deal that I think everyone just, the people that think I'm from Sweden, for example, a lot of people look Swedish. I'm just seriously changing my name to Sven and I'm just doing a tool. It's like the guy from Frozen. Sorry, he's mute. But yeah, there's definitely that perception that we deal with. So, you know, the LLMs, I was joke, the LLMs we use are all American. But yeah, that's definitely a thing. In particular in Europe, obviously with a lot of the geopolitical stuff going on. In the U.S., people really care about understanding of like jurisdictional contexts and things like that. So it's a big thing. We spoke earlier about the hardest challenge and you said it was like just the speed in the velocity of scaling. What breaks that people don't see? And what are the lessons from that? Things like the plumbing and rev-ups of like how you do billing and your billing systems and like change. If you want to change anything in your pricing model, if you want to change anything in your billing system and you're adding as many customers as we are every month, it's very hard to do things like some of the, yeah, billing systems, you know, reporting and all that stuff. And a lot of it gets done manually at times because if you're changing from one system that worked for you at 10 million, that doesn't work for you at 100 million. And you have to make those changes. We migrated CRM. So we migrated to Salesforce, which is awesome. But anytime you do a CRM migration, it's a huge pain in the ass. And you know, - You migrate to two Salesforce. - Yes. - Yes. From what? Why don't I want to say? But I don't want to, you know, speak ill. I didn't mean that. - Speaking of speak ill, but it wasn't working for us. And so, you know, I did a full survey of the market. We picked Salesforce. And anytime you go through a system change like that, yeah, there's changed management, but there's also opportunity management and different things of like ways of working that are really hard to roll out and you have to get right. But people grumble. Do you think Salesforce faces the threat of being a database which agents cruel on top of and you have no interaction/engagement with? I think all the traditional SaaS companies are definitely under threat right now, but I have to say I've been so impressed with Salesforce. If you look at, they sort of did a hard, break glass in case of emergency pivot last year. And at their scale, they went full agentic and sort of the go-to-market framework and positioning. And, you know, credit for them for being, you know, they're very early on that ahead of every other big tech company. And I don't know how it's going to shake out, but I know we did a survey of all the other sort of hyperscaling AI companies and most of them are using Salesforce. If there's one CEO you would bet on for a title shift change in landscapes, it would be Banyoff. Yeah, 100%. I mean, like I said, anytime the words Banyoff and Davos came up in a deal review, you knew you're pretty fucked. So yeah, he's, he's, he's done a lot about Banyoff, which I actually see in Max. His Max would get on every freaking plane just to close the deal 100%. And you have to have that right now. And Max basically lives on a plane. I mean, as do I, candidly. So that's one you see, you see guys like him leaning in and yeah, I think Max is one of the, my, what would pretty great CEOs and very lucky? What does no one see about Max that you think makes him special? I think he leads from the front. So he's always up early online, you know, pushing the ball, setting the tone for the team. So as a leader, he's someone who he's going to get on the flight, he's going to take the call, he's going to jump on an escalation, he's going to call into a deal. He's going to do whatever it takes. And I think that that permeates throughout the organization, but also he's very kind. And, you know, he cares deeply about the business and he cares deeply about building the business in the right way. He wants to build a business that's remembered with a culture that like made a big impact on the people that work there. And he's very focused not just on LaGoura being successful, but all the people at LaGoura, you know, developing their career and taking that next step. And he takes that stuff really seriously. And we, we work on that as a leadership team. Any lessons on culture with scale? It's, that's one of the hardest things. When people ask me what's hard, maintaining the culture that we have as we add the number of people that we're adding is very difficult. Don't laugh. I have this now. Well, I don't have time to say hello to everyone internally. I used to come in and I was like under 20. Yes. And I could literally go around and say good morning to everyone, which is nice. And now I can't. And I find that really weird, which is pathetic, given how tiny it is going to be. But that's a weird one for me. Anything that you learn, no, do. So our cultural values are LFG, lean in, grow together and fight for excellence. So from a culture perspective, I think it goes back to just being intentional. You have to repeat what your values are. You have to highlight what good looks like. And you have to constantly reinforce your expectations around cultural ways of workings. And so one of the things I always say is like we're big on no assholes. The biggest way to get on my shit list is to be disrespectful to, you know, to someone internally or, you know, having forbid someone X, externally. And so living our standards and constantly reinvent. forcing what those are, there's something that we spend a lot of time on and making sure that we're building company the right way. And that's why Matt has ever hired me. [LAUGHTER] Kind of a weird one, but it's like everyone's talking about like token maxing now. For you as CRO, you're the man holding the budget. How do you think about like encouraging AI usage internally, token maxing, token budgeting, anything that CRO's of the future will need to contemplate consider that they're not today? We're pushing our teams to use AI in every aspect of the deal as much as possible. And thankfully for us, like budget isn't a huge concern at the moment. So we're really focused on automating those-- It's not difficult. And what I mean by that is actually, as the man with the budget, I don't want people to know that I have a lot of budget. Yeah, well, it's more around my expectations. It's less around the budgetary questions and more around. We have access to a bunch of different AI tools. And we've created playbooks for things like account planning as an example where we've created an agent that can do a one-click account plan and help you do like meeting prep for use case development and things like that. So it's more around being really specific of-- we expect you to be using these tools. Here's the stuff that we've built, like from a central team perspective. But I also expect our teams to be going out and building their own stuff and elevating the game. Because again, we can't do things the same way that we did things last year and expect to be successful moving forward. And I want them to share that stuff broadly. And we highlight what good looks like on our all of our sort of global team calls. Are you seeing non-enge people building their own tools? 100%. Really? Yeah, 100%. Oh, and not what way, not any. I mean, we have legal engineers, for example, who have a product idea around something that we should build in LaGora, maybe for a specific industry. We have a fun's attorney who works with us who's excellent in Felix. And he had a perspective on some things we could build for our private equity clients would be highly impactful. And he was having a hard time describing the requirements to our product team and just spent a weekend vibe coded up a version of what he thought would be impactful and showed it to the team, showed it to me. And it was highly, highly helpful and just understanding what the vision of the product could be. So that's an example. Final one before we do a Quink file, which is, I know budget is not necessarily a constraint, but it always is slightly. Yeah, you have to keep it in mind. For sure. What would you do if you had unlimited money that you're not doing today? That's a great question. It's less about money and more about time. And the hardest thing that we have right now is taking the time to sort of pause and think about ways of working and like our operating model. And I'd love to, for example, do a two-day boot camp where we bring in some AI experts and we go through every part of every process of every go to market team and every motion and build more automation and more agents to do more things to take sort of that road work off of my team's plates so they can focus on those things that have the highest and biggest impact. The money is more about time than money right now. And taking that time to think strategically and get everyone together in person is so, there's so much value. Ever we did our sales kickoff at the beginning of the year in Stockholm. There was so much learning. There was so much relationship building that happened. I wish we could do that stuff all the time. And just the speed of development of our business, we don't have time to get together in that way. And that's something I wish we were able to do a lot more of. Did you ever doubt whether you were able to make the jump to netish Gen CRO? Yeah, definitely. How did you get comfortable with that? I think everyone, I face it every day as an investor where like what was good is no longer good. Legora's growth is unparalleled before it was one to five. Yeah, exactly. We're forced to think through like shit, maybe we need to be energy investors, maybe we need to be infrastructure investors. And you all struck with this, am I good enough to make the jump? How do you reflect on that? For me, it's more about being super intentional about what I want in my vision for myself. And honestly, people ask me, what do you want to do next? Like I'm doing it. Like this is what I've always wanted to do. Like the job I'm doing right now is the job I've wanted to do for a really long time. But more often than not, in this world, it's more around like did you bet on the right horse? So I took a bat after leaving Brayden went to another company and it didn't work out. I was working really hard. I was doing all kinds of things that I thought were smart. And we just weren't seeing the results. And then come to Legora, right place, right time, right market. And so much of our success has to do with the company, the team and the market that we go into. It's like sports. You put the wrong person on the wrong team in the wrong system. Like they're not going to be as successful as they would have been otherwise. And I just feel very fortunate. The truth is true product market fit is so unwavering. Yes. Any question of like, oh, do I have it or not? If you have it, you fucking know. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And when you have it, when you have momentum and you have an advantage, press the advantage. If anything is working, disseminate that to the team, press, press, press. In terms of playbooks and things that work competitively, when we find something that works, we document, share and press on that immediately. That changes all the time and people react to things change. But that's the kind of stuff that gets me out of bed in the morning. Final, final one. But there are a lot of people who may be a question whether they took the right step or did the right decision. You mentioned the interim moves that you did and we all respect to company. Some decisions don't work out. Don't want to be grind and think like that. But any lessons are advice to someone who's thinking, ah, I don't know if I made that right step. I don't know if it was the right decision. Any advice? Mostly when people come to me and ask that question, I say, are you hitting your numbers? Like, are you doing well in your role? Do you like your boss? Are you learning? Are you getting better? And is this serving you in the way where you're making an impact on the company and the company's making an impact on you to help you level up and get better? And if the answer to all three of those things is yes, then typically I think you're in a good spot. If you've got two out of three or one out of three, maybe it's time to think about what's next. You know, I walk every weekend with my mother, I'm out of breath and I always talk about two big decisions without any. She gave me the best advice as we can to go to him about something specifically with our staff funds. And she said, you know, move fast, but don't be in a hurry. Exactly. I sort of was brilliant. I think it's the same about the graduate. She's like, you don't want to sit and rot in a company. Yeah. But you also don't want to jump too fast and too hastily. Exactly. You have to be really thoughtful around it. And like I said, it's so much of it around picking the right market and the right company. I think people over indexed on title and under index on growth. I'd rather take a role, you know, maybe below the level you're at at a high growth company. You did. I did. I did. I think you would have a, as the sole owner of your kitchen. Yes, yes. My kitchen was the hottest tech company in Brooklyn. But yeah, you know, bet on yourself. Have confidence in yourself and bet on growth. Because if you're going to come in and operate at a really high level within a high growth environment, that's the best thing for your career, as opposed to like having some ego around, like, oh, I'm, you know, I'm ex title. I want to stay that. I'd rather go somewhere where you can make a big impact in a growth framework. Final final on our promise. Someone's great. They want a bigger salary than the rest of the people in that role. They're great. You might know that great. You just suck it up and pay more. But what about what that does to everyone else? You now want that same. Yeah, you can't really do that. And we have bands and we have to have, like, parody and fairness for a reason. And that's like, that's one way to create, you know, sort of a toxic culture. Because if people figure that stuff out, then that leads to sort of bad things in the long run. Even though in the short term, it might feel good because you get this person, like, you've got to go about it the right way, I think. It's tough, yeah. Right, my friend, you ready to rock and roll? Let's do it. Quick, fine. What do you know now that you go back to yourself on day one and say, you know, you should know this. Yeah, the degree to which the broader sort of investor influence on our deals and sort of the syndicate of influence around sort of the opportunity, not just the opportunity itself. I wish I had known a few things on that sooner. Since almost like a land grab on investors as well. Exactly, exactly. Like, if you look at our last fundraiser, CFO David, describe it as the investment syndicate. Sort of reminds me of the mission impossible. So, one of my friends is a GP at Adtery in Australia. Yeah, yeah. And he pinged me about the gorgas, they joined the round. Exactly. And it's like land grab on Australia. Exactly. We want people that are leaning in and going to really help. Yeah, no, I totally get that. We mentioned Jude Law. What personality, individual brand would you most like to be in the next legora ad? Well, we have one coming up with Aaron Judge. That's going to be awesome. That's pretty cool. Yeah, very cool. I can tell you with that I have a first grader in Brooklyn and you go to drop off at his elementary school and the number of Aaron Judge jerseys is astronomical. So, very cool firm from a New York and US perspective. I'm really excited. What one tool could you not live without? I use Gemini all the time. Wow, it was an expecting that. Yeah. What's it best for? I find it actually best for like transcript analysis. It's really good at that. But it also has access to all the systems of work that we use. So we use Gmail, calendar and Google Drive. So from an agentic perspective, it has all the context and it has all my stuff. It helps me with like meeting prep. It helps me with managing my calendar. A lot of this sort of simple productivity stuff. It's very good at not to mention making funny pictures. I have to say I love whisper play. Yeah, whisper flow is awesome. Definitely. That's one of those viral products that everyone in Silicon Valley is busy talking about. It's great. It's really good. The only shit thing is in offices. Exactly. Exactly in the middle of the office. and I just like taught to my computer and I just lived. - Yeah, yeah. I actually think that that's gonna be one of the ways of working on team-hide headsets. - I think that's right. - I think that's my customer support. - I'm gonna say, we've got a lot of headsets and a lot of air pods, you know, going around. What was the best advice you've ever been given? - I had a mentor tell me, if you wanna be a CRO, you need to be really well-rounded. I think mostly at the beginning of my career, I'd been really successful in a more like transactional mid-market sort of role. And then I moved into leadership very early. My 20s, I was like running a big team and thought I was killing it, right? But I couldn't get a real VP job 'cause I didn't have like big enterprise experience. But if you wanna be a CRO, it's not just sales, it's customer success, it's partnerships, it's implementation on boarding. It's all these different things and me taking a step back and doing different roles to give myself a broader set of experiences, I think it's been really beneficial. - Dude, I've absolutely loved this. - Thank you so much for being so open for putting up with my meandering. I got to describe the other day as the Louis Theroux. (laughs) - Adventure. Which I didn't know whether it's a compliment or not, but you've been amazing. - No, thanks so much, I really enjoyed it. They're traveling me. - But before we leave you today, you have the idea, but often with AI tools, you hit a wall. 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