Building a Team at AI Speed | Harvey’s Maggie Landers
from The a16z Show
48m 8s
Harvey is transforming the legal industry through rapid innovation, agility, and deep customer engagement, distinguishing itself from other AI-focused companies by prioritizing real-world impact over technical perfection. Despite scaling to over 2,000 employees and expanding globally, the company maintains a startup culture rooted in speed, experimentation, and transparency. Founders Winston and Gabriel remain hands-on, fostering trust through real-time communication, open sharing of challenges, and immediate feedback loops. Hiring is focused on values-driven candidates who embrace ambiguity, act decisively, and demonstrate strong judgment in fast-paced environments. Core values—simplicity, decisiveness, and jobs not finished—enable employees to move quickly, take ownership, and learn from mistakes. The company’s success relies on passion for legal transformation, a culture of collaboration, and the belief that every team member has a meaningful impact. As it grows, Harvey intentionally balances scale with entrepreneurial energy, ensuring that new hires and existing teams remain aligned with a shared vision of redefining how law is practiced in the digital age. This dynamic environment attracts individuals who thrive in uncertainty and are driven by purpose, creating a unique blend of ambition, innovation, and human connection.
Transforming the legal industry is very different than trying to transform customer support or build an AI harness or create a model.
You're going to do more in a month at Harvey than you put in a quarter somewhere else.
There's a lot of experimentation, so you're going to fail more than you're necessarily going to get it right.
And so I think the emphasis is on both failing fast and correcting to make something or build something that has never been built before.
It's like nothing inspires people more than actually seeing their impact in the world and knowing that even being part of a really large organization they still feel like everything they're doing is working towards a much bigger vision.
The right sort of mentality for Harvey is that passion to be part of creating it.
What about the legal industry gets you so fired up? I think that.
What happens when you add more than 1,000 employees in a year but still want to operate like a startup? A16Z's Katie Kirsch sits down with Harvey VP of Talent Maggie Landers to discuss how the company is approaching hiring and culture as its scales.
Maggie explains Harvey's focus on progress over perfection, giving employees the autonomy to move quickly, make mistakes, and learn.
They also discuss what Harvey looks for in new hires and why succeeding in a fast moving environment requires comfort with ambiguity and strong judgment.
Welcome to the A16Z podcast. Today we're joined by Maggie Landers who's the VP of Talent at Harvey. I'm so excited.
Harvey's valuation has been skyrocketing in the past year from 3 billion last February of 2025 to 5 billion in June, 8 billion in October, 11 billion this past March of 2026 and you've been at Harvey for you just hit your 1 year mark. Is that right?
Yes, I'm a little over 1 year. It's been insane, not just the valuation but the company growth, the customer growth or our growth. I think our product growth, but I would say that we don't take any of it for granted.
I don't think there's anyone internally who feels like we've fully made it or actualized our potential. It definitely still feels like a startup.
We've just celebrated our 4th birthday as a company. Happy birthday Harvey. Yes, happy birthday Harvey, but yeah, I don't think there's any part of us that feels that we are anywhere close to the company we aspire to build.
Are you celebrating wins in any way or it's just hard work pedals to the metal.
I think we definitely are. I think we celebrate in big ways. I think we celebrate in small ways. I think that whether it's sort of our global go to market company sort of wins channel where folks are constantly sort of celebrating the accomplishments and sharing kudos.
I think we come together as a company for celebrations like this anniversary product launches milestones, but we also have a jobs not finished culture. It's one of our core values.
And so I would say the celebration is always an acknowledgement of the great work that we've done, but then also we're thinking about what we need to do next. And I think that's just a very kind of core fundamental part of what Harvey is about.
I do think the team likes to have fun and there's a lot of humor in everything kind of injected in everything that we do, but we're always thinking ahead.
And I think you mentioned earlier, so are you employee number? Is it 340?
I'm somewhere in the 300s. And yeah, we've added over 1000 employees since I've joined and will likely be about 2000 employees before the end of this calendar year, which is insane.
More than 70% of the company started after January 1st at this year. Wow. What does that feel like on the inside? Is so many new faces? Are you all in person? Yeah, what's it like?
A lot of new faces, those onboarding classes just feel big growing. Yeah, they're growing for sure.
I would say it still feels like Harvey, and I can explain what that means, but I do think that we've done a good job of understanding kind of what makes somebody successful at Harvey and looking for a lot of those sort of characteristics when we go to market and we bring new people on board.
I also think that we have pretty good kind of self selection in that I think folks know that Harvey is a really ambitious company and that we are looking to be generational and what we build.
And I think that also attracts folks who are very sort of for the most part intrinsically motivated and want to do something super fulfilling.
But at the same time, it creates a ton of unique challenges when the majority of folks on board are relatively new under one year tenure.
I think you have this unique dynamic where, especially on the recruiting side, I see situations where a recruiter and a hiring manager and the leader are all relatively new and kind of actively working together to try to figure out how to run the process effectively.
What the right fit for the role is going to be and in many cases leaving behind what worked at their old company and in real time trying to figure out what is going to work at Harvey.
The beauty of working at a company like Harvey, both sort of AI native and frankly, a place that values kind of progress over perfection and wants to move quickly is that it almost doesn't matter what you did three years ago or five years ago or how you did it.
And I think it's more important that you're sort of like actively collaborating and working to figure out what is going to make sense in this new world.
And at this moment in time, we're genuinely trying to transform how the legal industry works and operates and do something unprecedented.
Everyone's experimenting and trying to figure it out for the first time, whether you're a tenured employee or not. It sounds like exciting, but also overwhelming and that you've got completely new faces now training other completely new faces.
But you mentioned, I love what you said about Harvey still feels like it's Harvey. It does. Yeah, tell me more about that.
I think that Harvey is unique in certain ways. I think our pace is pretty unique. We move very quickly.
If you come from an environment that you thought moved quickly, you join Harvey and you're like, wow, Harvey does fast.
Yeah, you're going to do more in a month at Harvey than you would in a quarter somewhere else. I'll do more in a year than you probably would over a few years.
So you actually have a lot of reps quickly in terms of trying to figure things out and figure out what works.
I think that most folks at Harvey have been successful in whatever it is that they were doing previously, whether they were practicing law in a more traditional environment, if they worked at a tech company previously, if they came from school or an academic program.
And I think that there's a bit of kind of ridding yourself of needing to be an A student when you join Harvey where most people probably were A students and super successful at whatever it was that they were doing previously.
I think that's really because what we're trying to do is a pretty brand new and be there's a lot of experimentation. So you're going to fail more than you're necessarily going to get it right.
And so I think the emphasis is on both failing fast and correcting experimentation and also kind of putting that ego aside for kind of the greater good of figuring out, okay, how do we all work together to make something.
Or build something that has never been built before.
Yeah, I like this piece around like progress over perfection, especially when you're talking about A plus students who are used to distinguishing between right and wrong and knowing what it takes to do something well.
And they're being thrust into an environment that's growing so fast they have to almost rewrite the rules as they go.
For sure, I also think that what we have to offer is this opportunity to learn and to grow and do something really meaningful.
A lot of people before they join, whether they're working parents like I am if they're sort of concerned about this like they've heard that it's an intense culture. I think folks have questions about sort of how Harvey might impact their lifestyle.
And what's it going to be like is it really cut the road is it really intense and the reality is I have seen more sort of true collaboration and teamwork at Harvey than I would have ever imagined probably more so anywhere that I've ever kind of worked people are really looking to support their colleagues there is a big emphasis on us sort of winning as a team.
I don't believe that.
what we're doing and the impact each individual
is able to have creates this sort of career fulfillment
that makes the effort required to put in worth it.
I think that there is nothing worse.
I can't imagine there'd be anything worse
than working really hard and knowing it doesn't matter.
If you show up or not,
like if that work doesn't actually matter,
if it's not gonna contribute,
if it's not gonna make a difference.
And so what we have to offer is this opportunity
to really come in even as we're growing so quickly
and know that every single person we bring in
is so kind of critical in our ability to get to the next level.
And we give folks a lot of agency.
So you're not gonna be held back.
You're gonna be able to sort of run and do things,
which I think makes it kind of balances out that,
yes, it's intense and yes, it moves fast,
but at the same time you're gonna get a lot of feedback.
Both feedback in the traditional sense,
but also just feedback from like an impact perspective
in seeing whatever it is that you build or that you launch
or that you market or that you sell,
kind of get out into the world.
And those reps happen quickly.
- Yeah, it's amazing.
It's like nothing inspires people more
than actually seeing their impact totally in the world
and knowing that even being part of a really large organization,
they still feel like everything they're doing
is working towards a much bigger vision.
There is nobody, I would be hard pressed to find anybody
at Harvey who feels like they're part of a machine
that could be running without them in the same way.
I think everybody feels deeply connected
to whatever it is that they're working on
and knows that they have an opportunity to make a real
impact on whatever that is.
- It's amazing.
You know, I often think that the culture of a company
comes from, I mean, initially the founders.
And obviously Harvey has is so much bigger
than just the founders today,
but there's still a massive part of what Harvey is
and Winston and Gabriel only started Harvey in 2022,
which was four years ago.
And now we're talking about hiring 600 people
by the end of this year.
You know, I'm curious when you think about
their leadership style, you know, what,
what does that look like, what kinds of leaders are they?
And how do they show up in the company
to help create that culture for everyone?
- I think they definitely set the tone.
They're both incredibly brilliant
and driven and motivated, which I think you expect
from founders.
What I would say is unique about Winston and Gabriel
is this quality to be both sort of very,
like operate at a very high level,
strategic, future facing altitude
and then get super into the details
and be able to do both.
They are very involved in the day to day, very.
Harvey is not a place where in order to present
something to the executive team or to the founders,
you're submitting a deck and waiting to get on
some calendar to present to the exact team eight weeks out
and have it be sort of reviewed and buttoned up.
You can slack Winston or Gabe and get a response immediately.
- Amazing, yeah.
- That attitude and I think the accessibility
and frankly the fact that they are still so in the details.
Shapes, I think the broader sort of executive team ethos.
So as we've added to the executive team
and we have some incredible new leaders on the team,
Rachel Hepworth is running marketing,
a neat drum ride on the product side,
Brooks Evans, that's our new CISO.
We have brought in some incredible experienced leaders,
Katie Burke's COO, my boss, amazing.
These folks all have that really, really unique combination
of strategic vision but real day-to-day involvement
and execution.
So learning from folks who have both the vision
and that sort of detailed understanding of how to run,
how to build a product or how to market a product
or how to build world-class security into everything we do
is super unique and I think a lot of people join to work
for one of these leaders because it's essentially
a master class in how to do some of these jobs,
not just as figure heads but as true collaborators.
- Yeah, I'm imagining Winston Gabe,
they're walking around the office looking over at people,
what are you working on?
That's the kind of curious mentality.
Do I have the right vision?
Yeah, help totally sitting with new hires at lunch,
introducing themselves, they also do founder AMAs,
which I think is great.
We actually have our interns host these,
which is amazing, seeing them sort of up in front
of the company, asking, Gabe and Winston,
everybody's questions that they might be too shy to ask
in person, they have a great dynamic.
I think co-founders tend to have a bit of a yin and yang
and I would describe them as kind of having
sort of a yin and yang vibe,
but they speak so openly about how they see
the company evolving, how they see the space evolving.
People feel very close to them
because I think they understand what
their thought process is because they share it.
When something's happening in the market,
it's not unusual for Winston to put a memo together
quickly with all of his thoughts
and put it in the company general channel
and everyone can just read what he thinks is gonna happen,
why he thinks it's gonna happen,
what his take on something is after every quarter,
he'll put together a quarterly memo for the whole team
on what he thinks worked and didn't et cetera.
And so I think sharing that as broadly as we do,
it's pretty open.
I mean, the company is very open in terms of what the leader
share, we post board decks for the whole company
to review after board meetings
so they can see what's been shared in those board meetings
and host AMAs and Slack so that people can ask questions
or get clarification.
I do think that keeps folks very connected to the leaders
as we scale globally, as we add so many folks,
it gives you a chance to kind of get inside
their brains a little bit.
- Yeah, love that.
What's a recent story or a fun fact,
or something that the founders recently shared
that people were amused by or that stands out for you?
- I don't know if there's a single anecdote,
I think that it's pretty normal to hear them speak
about stakes that they've made,
things that they look back on,
that they think we should have done completely differently,
times maybe where as a company we got lucky,
but it was not on purpose or times where we made the wrong call.
There's a lot of, I guess vulnerability for lack of a better word,
transparency in terms of how they think things are going
to, there's no mystery.
And I think that all the leaders sort of share that mentality.
There's no mystery in terms of where we think we are
nailing it, where we need to put in more work or more reps,
what we haven't figured out yet.
And there's a lot of just kind of openness at the company level.
And I don't think that people could be as impactful
if there wasn't.
People know what we're all kind of working toward.
- This sounds like Harvey's, you know,
Harvey's culture is open and transparent
and vulnerable and supportive and low ego.
And it's got all these amazing qualities.
And you know, obviously not every company is right for everyone.
You know, it's clear why people would want to join Harvey.
I'm curious, you know, why would people leave
or why do you tend to see people not be as great
as a fit for Harvey?
- Harvey is entering teenage years.
I would describe it as such because we are not
this teeny tiny startup that hasn't found product market fit.
And we're also not this fully actualized sort of
old, longstanding mega public company.
And I think that there are a lot of people
who either prefer this sort of structure and stability
and pace of one of those massive companies.
And I also think that there are people who want to be
at really, really early startups where maybe
they haven't found product market fit.
Maybe the role is undefined.
Maybe you're kind of figuring out what. to work on working across everything.
We're just not at that phase anymore.
So I think that given that word that in between,
which frankly I love, and I know a lot of people love
where you've got this vision and strategy
and leadership team that folks can learn a ton from,
but you also aren't this big sort of behemoth
that's working as a machine, that's not for everybody.
Some people want more structure, some people want less structure,
and I think that's okay.
Our goal, especially on my team as a recruiting team,
is to make sure the resort matches the brochure.
We want people to basically get as close to life
within Harvey during that interview process as possible
for them to be able to make the call.
Does this feel right, does this feel exciting,
does this feel like, this is the kind of work I want to do,
this is the work that gets me excited, and if not,
I think that's, we're doing our job also by showcasing,
I think what the role entails with a company is about
and knowing that people are going to self-select and they're
going to self-select out.
But yeah, I think that this industry and the stage and the size
and the way of working is not for everyone.
- Yeah, like I described, you're in this in-between period,
and so you're looking for other, for people who are down
for that ride of taking a company from its teenage years
all the way into adulthood and you know, kind of pass the point
where everything is scrappy and undefined,
but not yet at the point where there are systems
for everything, and so maybe people who are willing
to and excited about, you know,
creating those more scalable systems.
- So totally, that's absolutely right.
And I also think that AI application layer companies
in general are trying to transform industries.
I think that we attract folks who have
a certain customer centricity and an interest
and a desire to sort of genuinely sort of reshape
something like the legal industry.
It is very tangible, we are very close to our customers.
We start up every all hands with sort of a customer
testimonial, it doesn't matter what team you're on,
you're very, very connected to what our customers
are trying to do, and we have so many lawyers
or folks who are no longer practicing law,
but ones who are within Harvey and all sorts of roles.
Of course, we have an internal legal team,
but we also have applied legal researchers
who sit in product, we have legal innovation partners
who sort of liaise with various, you know, CIOs
and the innovation community, we have our legal engineers
and legal engineering product specialists
who sit on the sales team.
And so there's this like deep admiration
and respect for the legal industry,
for these law firms, for these in-house legal teams,
what they're trying to do.
And the folks at Harvey are genuinely looking
to be part of transforming all of it.
And I think that there are a lot of companies
that whether they're focused more on sort of the
other liars at the stack, maybe purely building models
themselves or infrastructure companies, et cetera,
that have very cool technology,
but don't necessarily touch the customer in the same way.
I think it takes a certain person to be,
I think certain folks are motivated
to work on these customer problems,
and that might look different at different places.
- Yeah, is that what inspired you to join Harvey?
Or actually, tell me about the story of you first
hearing about Harvey and deciding to join?
- I had been at my previous company for almost a decade,
and I had gotten a call from a recruiter.
He kind of laughed and basically said,
"I have the perfect role for you, for two reasons,
one being Katie, my boss,
being probably one of the most sort of inspiring leaders
in the people space she's now taken on the COO role at Harvey,
but I knew that her scope was very big,
and she was working across many different priorities,
and that I could learn a ton from her,
not just in the recruiting or HR space,
but just about business in general.
And the other piece was what Harvey was doing
in the legal industry, but also in AI.
I felt like it was a massive opportunity.
And frankly, we have a very market motion,
and we are super customer-centric and AI transformation
is more than just building a great product,
but we have essentially this heavy people motion
where for all of our customers,
we have essentially an army of go-to-market resources
for them, both pre-sale and post-sale.
And we had plans to get to 16 markets in a year.
So the growth that was gonna be required
to sort of actualize our potential
and essentially give our customers the attention they needed,
created a very unique recruiting challenge.
In terms of how quickly you are going to have to hyper-scale
across so many different markets,
and do it with a level of quality and care.
While maintaining a really high bar.
So the opportunity for impact in my role in particular
was pretty unique.
I knew what the growth plans were.
The growth plans expanded quickly after I started.
And I definitely wasn't sure it was possible.
I wasn't sure we could pull it off.
And I think that that's sort of the story of Harvey.
You join and you're being asked to do something
that you don't actually know is maybe,
whether or not it's like maybe possible or possible
in that amount of time or possible at the level
or quality and execution that you think you should be able
to operate, but then you just do it.
You just do it. We have a funny saying on our
the new media team at A6NZ, we always say,
"You can just do things."
And so you just got to do it.
Someone's got to do it.
And you just got to get in there, roll up your season,
figure it out.
It sounds like that's what the role was, you know.
Like Maggie, we think you can do it.
For sure. And also, we're going to help you do it.
So that was a big part of it, too.
I think that in a head of recruiting role or a head of talent,
role it's important how the leaders look at the function.
It's important that they actually believe
that it matters to go out to market
and hire some of the best people in the industry.
It's important that they believe that part of their job
is doing that.
It's not another team's job to just go out and bring folks in.
And also, they were willing to resource it
and staff it.
I mean, that is a very important component
of, I think, asking people to push themselves
is to give them their resources and the support.
And we do that across the board.
So my team went from, I want to say about 16 to 80 folks
in a year in order to support that growth.
That's incredible.
If you look across other teams, whether it's engineering teams
or product teams or marketing teams,
I think that they would all agree that they're being given
all the tools that they need in order to do what they need
to do and build something great for our customers.
And you're hiring hundreds of people right now.
What, how does that work?
What teams are you hiring for?
What roles?
I want to hear about the interview process.
Yeah.
We have over 400 jobs open right now.
So I won't go into the specific roles.
But we are hiring across every team.
We are hiring pretty much across every region.
We have added many new regions.
We will continue to add some new regions.
I won't share any today.
But I'll stay tuned.
Stay tuned.
The interview process definitely differs by team.
The engineering loop looks very different than the--
SDR loop as you would expect.
I would say that the commonalities
across the process, season, and different regions,
we have a values interview for all candidates
when they come on site.
The values interviews structured around R3 values.
So simplicity, decisiveness, and jobs not finished.
It's an opportunity both to understand
how people have worked in the past,
but also give candidates the chance to dig in
and dive into our values and ask questions about what they mean
and how they show up.
And frankly, as we talked before about self-selection
think about, is this the kind of environment
where I want to work and how they might approach scenarios
that come up with those values in mind?
Can you give me a quick one-liner on each of these values
and what you look for?
- Absolutely.
So for decisiveness, when's it love to say
we don't take the square root of the weather?
(laughing)
What does that mean?
- What it basically means is we want to move fast.
We'd rather make mistakes and learn than over-analyze
and spend all this time pontificating on how is this going to go
or what do you think of this thing or that thing?
- It's almost about just being willing to build
and put things out into the world
and then react really quickly.
And so that is, I think,
sort of the underlying value or mentality
that drives our pace.
You can't operate at the pace we do
and be completely afraid to make a mistake.
You can't move at our pace and get 300 people
to weigh in on every decision that you want to make.
It's not a consensus driven place.
It's really about people being able to take ownership
and make those decisions and move forward
and be able to own when they were the wrong decisions
but also understand that if we don't act,
we're never gonna move things forward.
Simplicity, again, I think is one of the reasons
why we are able to move fast, right?
It goes hand in hand with the decisiveness
but let's not over-build.
Let's put something out into the world.
Let's get feedback.
Let's go from there.
Let's make this simple.
I think that those two
in conjunction with this sort of jobs not finished mentality
which is really about the fact that kind of,
not just the work is never done
but that we have a sense of humility
and openness to the ways that it could be done better
or could have been done better.
I think those three things hand in hand
create that environment I was describing to you
about this straight A student giving up
some of the perfectionist tendencies,
ultimately for the satisfaction of being able to
have this massive impact on the industry
and frankly drive their career forward incredibly quickly.
It also creates a real culture of discourse.
I think that the ability to speak openly about mistakes
the ability to put things out in front of people
before they're completely perfect,
the ability to make a decision without
all the necessary information
just doing the best that you can is this sort of
like a hotbed for growth and learning.
It's not a place about sort of posturing
and sharing all the things that you've done right.
So yeah, I think for folks who genuinely
want to kind of go through this crash course
of essentially learning and growing
and getting all this feedback
and building a bunch of stuff and seeing what works
and seeing what doesn't work
and doing it with other people who are also
just in the same boat, it's pretty amazing.
Sounds like a very iterative let's experiment.
Let's just see how it goes.
There's only, it goes back to what you said
about you can't take the square root of whether
and you just need to run with it, break it down,
make decisions, learn by doing.
Yeah, most companies move out of that phase really quickly
and they're very afraid to make mistakes
and they slow things down and create a bunch of friction
so that people can't move so fast.
And I would say that we don't operate out of fear.
Winston said recently in one of our co-founder AMAs
that the thing that he wants to hold on to most
as we grow is trust.
And the trust that we have for our employees
and frankly the agency that we give folks
to just run and execute without a lot of the policing
and without a lot of the friction
is what continues to allow us to hire
the amazing folks that we do
and move as quickly as we do
and experiment the way that we do.
And so people forget that we're only four years old
but we still have held on to
that trust we still allow folks to have that level
of agency and autonomy and the values enable it.
They allow you to move quickly,
they allow you to make mistakes
and or without that, I think that we would not be
seeing the success that we have.
Yeah, I love that it all comes down to trust.
I have maybe one or two last questions.
So one, you mentioned the team is opening up new locations.
I won't pry, I'll have to wait to get through a deal
on where you're opening up.
But you already have offices here in San Francisco,
New York, Chicago, Dallas, London, Dublin, Paris,
Madrid, Milan and many more.
Correct.
Which is crazy.
Sydney, Singapore, yep.
I missed a few, Sydney, Singapore.
It's a while.
I probably missed a few too, but yes.
Are all the offices different?
Have you been to all of them?
You're based in San Francisco.
What is that all of it?
Could be a sense of just the different locations
and what that's looked like for your team.
I have not been to all of the offices.
I plan to get to a few more this fall,
but I've spent a lot of time,
I'm based in our San Francisco office.
I've spent a lot of time in New York office
as well.
I've been out to our London office.
I would say that we do a great job
of having a core Harvey brand and buy,
but also each office feels distinct for that market.
And not every office has the same mix of functions.
So EPD, which is our engineering product and design team,
went from one location just in San Francisco
about 18 months ago to four locations.
So San Francisco, Toronto, New York,
and Bangalore, India are sort of the home of our four EPD hubs.
And those offices have that mix of EPD and Go-to-Market.
A lot of the other global offices start out
with our legal engineering function,
some of our Go-to-Market function.
And because lawyers practice law differently
in different parts of the world
and speak different languages, as I mentioned,
we do so much to sort of help our customers not just implement
Harvey, but truly transform their organizations.
We want to make sure that the folks that are on the ground
in those regions understand how laws practice there.
They have experience within that jurisdiction
and speak the language, et cetera.
And so a lot of our growth has been around providing
our customers with this amazing experience.
And they take that knowledge and sort of the local nuances
and that definitely shapes sort of the differences
in how the offices feel.
But we have a great workplace team.
We have a great real estate team.
We tend to find the right spots.
We tend to find great locations.
We have beautiful spaces.
And it's also important, I think, for our customers
to know that they can come visit us and spend time
with employees in like a beautiful space.
Typically near, where a lot of law firms work,
but there's more that we're going to continue to do
and build out so that our customers can access us
wherever they need to.
And there's certain locations where you're hiring
more aggressively than others?
Or is it pretty spread across the board?
- It's spread across the board.
We tend to swarm new markets and do events
and kind of go that extra mile early on
when we're entering a new place
to sort of deep dive with the town there
and sort of understand the landscape,
but the founding teams are super important.
I think we put these strong founding teams in place
and then through referrals and great sort of leaders there.
They tend to have this sort of flywheel effect
in bringing a lot of great folks in
and you're based in the Simsisco office, right?
Tell me about the Simsisco office.
- Yeah.
- Do you work in, then there are like five days a week
is the team pretty hybrid?
- We have a hybrid.
We have a hybrid three day a week policy,
but I would say people are in typically more than that.
It is very much
tarot versus stick when it comes to that hybrid
in office policy.
We are not a place that has to do policing
in terms of how many days a week have you come in?
We have an energy and I can speak
for the Simsisco office.
There is a buzz for sure in office.
People are there, they're collaborating.
It's a beautiful space to work in.
There's always something going on.
You're running into somebody in the hall
or asking a question.
Somebody's like, "Oh, I forgot to tell you this thing
or that thing."
You get a lot done.
I think you learn from your team members.
As I mentioned so many people are new
and most people are frankly onboarding or ramping in some way.
And so being able to sit next to somebody
who's maybe six months ahead of you
or four weeks ahead of you and ask questions
is so important.
I actually see people who tend to come in
sort of more than those three days
because they'd rather be in the office
than working from home.
Anything you want candidates to know.
If you actually take us that back,
transforming the legal industry is very different
than trying to transform customer support.
Or build an AI harness or create a model,
even though we're now building some of our own models.
But understanding what we are truly trying to achieve
and how that is going to make your job different
than working at Anthropic or at OpenAI
or at 11 Labs or at Sierra,
I think is super important
because it will be different.
And so I think taking the time to actually think about that,
what is unique about this industry?
What is unique about the way laws practice?
How long it's been practiced for?
The security requirements, you know,
when we think about the fact that law is essentially like
the basis of civilization as we know it
and our aspirations to essentially transform this whole space.
Taking the time to think about it does,
I believe help folks start to differentiate
some of these opportunities.
- So what I feel like I'm hearing is
the thing you love to hear most from candidates
is what about the legal industry gets you so fired up?
- I think that's a big part of it.
I also think that people are attracted to gross companies
and they should be because it opens up
a lot of opportunities.
When a company is growing,
they're, you just get more at-bats
than if a company is shrinking or remaining flat.
I think that what people should understand
is that we are still a startup as well.
And so what you're getting sort of,
while you're getting all these up,
while you're going to have all these at-bats,
I think that people sometimes ask for processes
that don't exist yet.
And the right sort of mentality,
I think for Harvey is that passion
to be part of creating it
and the ability to work through
some of the what might be seen as noise
and not get frustrated,
but frankly get energized by it.
You can call it chaos, you can call it,
you know, opportunities.
I think that thinking about the kind of environment
that you'd be excited to be a part of is super important.
I think that there has to be a little bit
of this sort of adventurous kind of maverick attitude.
I think that like sort of managing the ambiguity
is so kind of key and critical
to being successful at Harvey.
Yeah, you want,
it sounds like you're looking for people
you can pull into the trenches with you
and who are excited to find their way through
and that have a lot of resources
and a lot of momentum behind them,
but there's still these big questions
that your company is asking
and that you're looking for people
who are eager to roll their sleeves
to help you answer them.
Absolutely.
Judgment's an important one as well
and it's hard because it's hard to assess
and it's hard to measure,
but I also think that when you're given agency
and autonomy and opportunity for impact
and you're going to get a lot of at-bats
because we do move relatively quickly,
you have to have that sort of spidey sense, right?
You have to have good judgment,
you have to have that voice in the back
of your head that's saying,
hey, before I press send on this thing,
is there somebody who I should have run through this way?
And it's not 10 people, right?
It's like that perfect balance of,
I'm not going to go out and ask
for 20 people's feedback on this,
but who is the right person who should have seen this
before I press send?
Or is there one spot check I want to do here
before pushing this live?
Or I think, again, hard to assess
and hard to put your finger on it,
but having that judgment in an environment
that does move really quickly
where there is a lot of agency and autonomy
is kind of a critical part of success
and also being able to maintain that trust.
- Thanks for listening to this episode
of the A16Z podcast.
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Podcast Summary
Key Points:
Harvey prioritizes progress over perfection, enabling rapid experimentation, quick decision-making, and learning from failure rather than chasing flawless outcomes.
The company maintains a startup mentality even as it scales rapidly, with over 1,000 new employees added in a year and a workforce now exceeding 2,000 by year-end.
Core values like simplicity, decisiveness, and "jobs not finished" drive a culture of agility, autonomy, and continuous improvement, where employees are empowered to act without over-analyzing.
Founders Winston and Gabriel remain deeply involved in daily operations, fostering transparency through real-time updates, AMAs, and open sharing of insights and mistakes.
Success at Harvey depends on passion for transforming the legal industry, comfort with ambiguity, strong judgment, and the willingness to embrace uncertainty and iterative learning.
The hiring process emphasizes cultural fit and values alignment, with all candidates undergoing a values interview focused on decisiveness, simplicity, and ongoing improvement.
Global expansion includes new offices in key legal markets, each tailored to local practices and needs, ensuring cultural relevance and customer access.
Employees are motivated by the tangible impact of their work and the shared vision of creating a revolutionary, future-proof legal industry.
Summary:
Harvey is transforming the legal industry through rapid innovation, agility, and deep customer engagement, distinguishing itself from other AI-focused companies by prioritizing real-world impact over technical perfection. Despite scaling to over 2,000 employees and expanding globally, the company maintains a startup culture rooted in speed, experimentation, and transparency. Founders Winston and Gabriel remain hands-on, fostering trust through real-time communication, open sharing of challenges, and immediate feedback loops.
Hiring is focused on values-driven candidates who embrace ambiguity, act decisively, and demonstrate strong judgment in fast-paced environments. Core values—simplicity, decisiveness, and jobs not finished—enable employees to move quickly, take ownership, and learn from mistakes. The company’s success relies on passion for legal transformation, a culture of collaboration, and the belief that every team member has a meaningful impact.
As it grows, Harvey intentionally balances scale with entrepreneurial energy, ensuring that new hires and existing teams remain aligned with a shared vision of redefining how law is practiced in the digital age. This dynamic environment attracts individuals who thrive in uncertainty and are driven by purpose, creating a unique blend of ambition, innovation, and human connection.
FAQs
Harvey focuses on transforming the legal industry, which requires deep customer understanding and real-world impact. The work is mission-driven, with employees seeing direct results of their efforts, unlike in more abstract AI model-building environments.
Harvey maintains a startup culture by emphasizing progress over perfection, giving employees autonomy, and fostering a 'jobs not finished' mindset. This allows fast iteration and learning even as the company grows rapidly.
Harvey values simplicity, decisiveness, and jobs not finished. These values encourage fast decision-making, avoiding over-analysis, and embracing learning through experimentation and iteration.
Harvey maintains a startup mentality by allowing rapid experimentation, giving employees agency, and promoting open feedback. This creates a sense of shared ownership and innovation, even as the company scales to thousands of employees.
Success at Harvey requires comfort with ambiguity, strong judgment, and a passion for solving real-world problems. Candidates should be willing to fail fast, learn quickly, and work collaboratively in a fast-moving environment.
Harvey ensures every employee sees the impact of their work through real-time customer feedback and visible product milestones. This sense of purpose and contribution fuels motivation and career fulfillment.
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