# Scaling Enterprise AI Sales: Playbooks for Hypergrowth

**Podcast:** The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
**Published:** 2026-05-11

## Transcript

How much did the Jude Law cost?
We generated over $50 million of 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, when 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 hire 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 280%.
It's more about time than money right now.
When you have momentum and you have an advantage, press the advantage.
This is 20VC with me, Harry Stebbings, and joining me in the hot seat, we have Patrick Forqua, CRO at Lagora, the fastest growing enterprise business ever to hit 100 million in ARR, and now on track to hit 250 million in ARR by the end of the year.
Unparalleled growth, which led to a $550 million Series D at a $5.5 billion valuation led by Excel.
Note...
20VC 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.
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Patrick, dude, I've heard so many good things.
I was literally just chatting to Chathan and to Logan before this show.
They gave me phenomenally helpful insight, especially Logan.
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 at Braze for six years.
What was the single biggest sales lesson that you took with you from Braze to Lagora?
I think the biggest thing that we did really well at Braze that I've sort of taken over is implementation change management.
So Braze is 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 is a lot of effort.
There's a lot of stakeholder management, technical work streams, all these different things.
And for us at Legora, obviously we have an amazing product, but at the end of the day, our focus and our obsession is around helping our customers adopt those tools, like the Legora tools into their workflows, which is really hard.
So general change management strategies and all the learnings I took from Braze and taking that Legora is probably the biggest thing.
So I had Matt Fitzpatrick on the show, and this is why I don't normally send out the schedules because they're just going to go by the wayside very, very quickly.
But Matt Fitzpatrick, who's like this CEO of Invisible, which is a data provider, and he was like, oh, you can't sell into enterprise without FDEs 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 and change.
So you need top-down sponsorship, you need bottoms-up, sort of champion building, all the sort of normal adoption frameworks that you would use in traditional change management.
I think the biggest thing with agentic work and why FDEs are required, and we have both forward-deploy engineers, but we also have forward-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 Legora, 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.
In 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 the 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 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 who's in the loop at each decision-making inflection point, sort of progress this to achieving the goal.
Most businesses don't write things down like that.
They don't think like that.
And so having these forward deploy folks, you can do two things.
Integrate Lagora 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 XYZ M&A workflow works in practice.
This is how you do it before agents.
This is how you do it in Legora.
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 FDE model, which is more costly?
It's human hours upfront.
It's margin reduction.
What level of ACV do you think is needed?
Well, it's a great question.
People keep asking me why we raise so much money.
And I'm like, lawyers are expensive, man.
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 in 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, you're in danger of selling software that doesn't get used.
And we're very focused on, again, like I said, adoption frameworks and making sure that if we sell you 10 licenses that you use all.
and you get a lot of value out of it.
We're going to go to metrics that matter, adoption frameworks.
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 are contemplating, should I move to an AI company?
There'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, you know, I'm thinking about leaving and how'd you think about it?
And 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 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.
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 have 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 Chatham.
And so I'm going to give credit to both of them.
But they said that you've been phenomenal in terms of Bluntley creating a new playbook for this era.
Yeah.
And I think what's challenging with what you said there with the transience of models, competition, you name it, is like...
your playbook becomes relatively irrelevant.
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 want to be customer obsessed and you want to 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 help you win.
I think people can feel that and be prepared, be professional, you know, 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, you know, the impact that you can make sort of long-term.
That's still the same.
At Braze, we never ran pilots in Lagora.
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 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 blend.
There's certain things you have to throw out.
So the traditional SaaS playbook is like you don't want to 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 Legora and with Agentec tools, you have to still do discovery and still come with a point of view, but you have to use the product to sort of show what.
the future looks like.
And especially for us in a category creation moment, you're dealing with what they call traditionally unrealized pain.
We're not typically replacing a tool.
I mean, occasionally we will be.
But more often than not, we're sort of the first tool of its kind sort of coming into the organization.
And so you have to be willing to be audible ready to ask questions and then be able to pivot really quickly into building like an agentic workflow off the cuff as you're talking to someone.
And that's quite difficult.
Can we actually use that as a way of explaining the valuation because I think, you know, 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 because I thought it was a good one.
How do you think about that expansion from where we are to where we can be in terms of what Lagorra does?
Yeah.
So if you look at the legal tech sort of market, I think it's like 40 billion is the number that I see sort of floating around, depends on who you talk to.
But legal tech generally is a $40 billion market.
So then if you look at us, you look at our competitive set 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 rote 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, you know, there's a high degree of application for Ligar.
I want to go to the start of the funnel, so to speak, because, again, this was Chatham or Logan.
I can't believe I'm forgetting.
Age, my friend, is a killer.
You said it's insane and unhinged.
It's the same for media, by the way.
I'm in venture and media, and so I'm like double fucked.
I know.
The busiest guy in venture and media right now.
Honestly, it's a savage.
Well, I can't wait for him to create an AI Harry.
If Lagora can do that, I'll pay double.
But if we start at the pipe, What's the biggest lesson in how to construct an effective pipe in an AI world and how that pipeline 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 like, what's our inbound lead scoring?
How do we do data enrichment?
How do we do lead routing and lead scoring from a problem?
ballistic perspective.
So there's a ton of infrastructure you have to put in place first before you can really sort of go big on, you know, from an inbound perspective.
So on that basis, we've done a ton of work leading up to that campaign.
But like even last year of like getting our systems in place, getting the territory assignments in place, like all the rules and sort of SLAs around if we get a lead, you have to respond in this amount of time.
And even last year, you know, 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.
Today, we're over 500, and we still need more people and more systems to keep up with the demand.
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.
Gio 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 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 sort of regulatory.
compliance thing.
So we have dev teams that are really specialized in that.
I know you've got to get a permit to go to the bathroom.
I'm sorry.
Exactly.
I've got to get my ETA on the way in.
Oh, you want to get up to go to the bathroom?
You need a permit for that too.
I can't say the exact number, but I can tell you it was worth every penny.
Was it?
Yeah.
Because people are going to watch this and they're going to say, Harry's an ambassador and it's biased.
I wasn't sure about it.
Yeah.
And so tell me it was worth it, and I'm thrilled because I want it to be.
So last month alone, we generated over $50 million of qualified pipe.
And that's not just inbound leads.
That's pipeline that we talked to, qualified, and moved into a sales.
Can I be blunt, what was the months 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 want to misquote.
But, you know, from that perspective, we're seeing a ton of interest in demand.
And look, when I started- So lawyers give a shit about law.
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.
Because I can tell you, when I started in the U.S., I was our first U.S.
hire.
The first office that we had in the U.S.
was my apartment in Brooklyn.
And we, you know, as I was 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 late to a lot of deals.
And when we get into a deal, when we get into a pilot, 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, the Jude Law campaign wasn't for everyone, but overall, we got really positive feedback, and the biggest thing is just brand awareness for us.
It's super interesting in terms of brand awareness.
I had Nick from Revolut on the show, and he said one of the biggest lessons that he always had is he always thought brand awareness was fluffy bullshit.
And actually, it's one of the most powerful drivers of 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...
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, the undeniable truth is you are in a two-sided fight or however 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 Lagora versus Harvey.
How do you advise founders?
Because there are a lot of markets where it's Brax versus Ramp or Stripe versus Airwallex, 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 try to model after his ramp, 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 a ramp sales team, they're always prepared.
They don't have to 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 update my opportunity notes or draft this email.
And of course, we do all that stuff.
But the other thing that people don't think enough about is how are you using AI to deliver more differentiated from a services and insights perspective?
We have a lot of data from 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?
If I'm a founder listening to this, what does that add?
actually means that we use pilot data to then encourage net new customers.
We say, hey, 84% of people that use this type of email actually convert better.
Yeah, exactly.
So within a law 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, did the quality of your work increase?
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 Lagorix?
People get excited about using the latest and greatest in AI.
And so if you take that and you apply it to the three practice areas where maybe we're 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 get that.
And so one, it's like execution and being prepared.
Anything else on it, how to navigate that, hey, we're looking at Brex versus Ramp, Harvey versus Lagora.
One of my biggest bits of advice, fans, is always be respectful.
Knocking your competition is not in a sales process.
It just doesn't come across that well.
Sell yourself, don't bash them.
Exactly.
And we try to stay in our lane and focus on ourselves.
Now, obviously, as you mentioned, we have one big competitor and they come up on every...
you know, deathmatch on every deal.
It's super competitive.
We have a ton of respect for them.
We, you know, it's not like anyone over at Legora is just like...
thinking that every deal we're going to is a cakewalk.
It's the exact opposite.
They're very good, 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.
Because at the end of the day, you really want to win, you got to go out-execute, not deliver, and evolve your playbook.
We run pilots very differently now than we did a quarter ago, the quarter 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 the firm context as an example, you can't just have a litigation attorney go talk to an M&A team.
You've got to have an M&A attorney go talk to an M&A team.
And so as we've scaled out from just me to...
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 and pilots and sort of build those bespoke 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- And so when you say getting on-site, what do you mean?
You say in the sales process, 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, 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 really any size, because at the end of the day- For firms, this is sort of a bet the company type decision.
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 a bet the decision, because this is like their core investment in the 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 gain?
Yeah, we don't give Legora 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 a competitive dynamic, we do face that from various competitors.
And do Harvey 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 eight-mile talk track.
At the end of eight-mile where he just says everything that's wrong with him about him and his family, we just say, this is exactly what's going to happen.
If you pick us, this is what the counter is going to be.
They're going to go to this point.
We have a pretty good point of view on what will happen, and it usually does.
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 Max and you're Patrick, easy one, I'd just say, like, 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 investors that our margin is going to suck.
There's no revenue.
It's going to suck.
But next year, we're going to be at a billion five in revenue.
Well, that'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, does it 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...
Yeah, it's gonna be tough.
And so I think from going to zero is not helpful in that sort of dynamic.
But I see what you're saying.
We do try to be easy to work with.
And so from that perspective, we try and be as flexible as we can be.
There's a very interesting behavioral economic study, which is they gave away a yoga class for free in a park.
And it had a 52% attendance rate.
And then they charged $35, and it had a 92% attendance rate.
Exactly.
Yeah, exactly.
It's like people...
commit to what they pay for.
Exactly.
And you have to have value, place value in your partners.
And we find that to be true.
Well, you know, I interviewed Winston and Harvey, and I thought it was very smart, one of their GTM approaches, which is using PE as 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 the tools they're using.
And certainly private equity.
Who has the power?
Does the PE firms have the power over the law firms?
Or does the law firms have the power over the PE?
I think it depends on the firm and depends on the PA 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.
Like selling to a 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.
And then 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 or advice on lead scoring, going back to that?
Anything you see people doing way wrong?
Lessons.
The one thing that remains true is that the longer you let a lead sit, the worse the conversion rate is, right?
And so we just try to optimize for the highest intense 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 with that.
I don't think we have any like...
No, dude, it's exactly like a deal.
When you're out, we'll see it in two weeks.
It's like, eh, it's gonna die.
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 remains true, and I don't think we have any big insights on that.
We have that cool.
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 of things.
Going back to the pilot example, one thing that we've learned is, you know, we've had some firms who, you know, say, oh, we have this really onerous 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 like test documents.
you know, 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, like there is a little bit of pain on the front end of like 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 Deloitte and these big law firms and EY, the InfoSec process is non-trivial.
So if you can get buy-in on identifying the success 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 calls.
How do you make that transition of like, I'm so pleased, Patrick, that you're excited about Legora.
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 Legora that's like floored me, at Braze, we had this problem.
So at 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 bend over backwards to get this done.
With Legora, because...
There's so much chatter in the market about AI and the firms and corporates both want to understand what others are doing.
We actually get access to power.
pretty easily.
And people want to learn because on a law firm side, they're getting asked by their clients, how are you using AI and what tools are you using?
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 impact as quickly as possible.
So you want to grab attention.
really fast.
And lucky for us, the LaGora product's 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 sheep-like in terms of following others.
I don't understand why anyone would attribute that to us.
To what extent is legal a sheep-like industry where it's like, oh, Clifford Chance, 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 category creation moments because this is all new.
The 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.
Do you not feel both you and Harvey at IBM at this stage?
I was going to say, last year, we were the new entrant.
We were trying to make our name and we were- You were not IBM at last year.
We were definitely not last year.
I think at this point, working with the firms that we work with, having Devavoise and Linklaters 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 the 100 AMLOR and Harvey've got 40 or 60?
I don't know their numbers.
I think they said 50 of AMLOR.
Yeah, 50.
Does that mean we're fighting over the next 30 or does that mean we're fighting for each other's candidly?
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 theirs are.
We're 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.
God, the old SaaS world feels quite nice.
Yeah, exactly.
It's like 30% growth a year.
Do you pay attention to social?
Because for VCs, you saw it last week, the VCs, like Paul Graham tweets, and then Matt Miller tweets back.
I'm not saying anything about either individual.
I like them both immensely.
But 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 wear shorts everywhere.
I need to go after my own heart.
Yeah, even in Scandinavia.
But I try not to think about it too much.
And obviously, we've got Chaitan 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, Bessemer, 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, you know, our competition do the same thing.
And that's definitely an element of these sort of opportunities.
I always tell founders that I want to.
work with, use your cap table as a weapon.
Yeah.
Like, absolutely.
Exactly.
What did Harvey do better than you today?
That's a hard one.
And I don't want to give, I don't, 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 intran 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.
And ramping people.
What's the biggest lesson on how to do training well?
Because it's not easy, actually.
And this is another thing as a leader that's very different than in the SaaS environment.
How so?
Because I thought talent development would maybe be the same.
Well, yes, but in the SaaS world, it's much more predictable and on this very clear, slow operating model.
So you had quarterly releases with some monthly shipping in between.
Ahead of the quarterly release, you've got all this documentation, you do a big certification, you go through all these programs.
With Lagora, we do big, huge product things 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 feature 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 teams really embed 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.
sync video and Notion content, as well as team level enablement.
So we activate on our product guys in that way.
Don't worry about being too specific.
How does that look then for sales training then?
First week, what do I get?
I get a Notion link and 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, Vilgat told me to go to Best Buy and buy an Apple computer.
And then I went and had a couple of videos of Max doing a demo.
Now, every two weeks, we have a new hire class.
And at this point, it's between 40 and 50 people joining every two weeks.
We send everyone to Stockholm doing immersive five days.
And this is not like something where you're just going to go do a couple of video things and then go like walk around Stockholm.
Like this is intense, immersive.
We expect GTMs and LEs to come out of that week to be ready to go.
You know, 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 calls on their own with clients?
Yes.
That'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, you know.
of who the company was.
Now Patrick decided to sit that way.
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, an immersive first week?
I'm sorry to be specific, but there's so many founders that listen literally with 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 the entry and exit criteria.
We do a full day of demo work.
We have a huge library, yes, of gong and video content from a demo perspective.
But we also do a lot of role plays.
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 how the tech stuff sort of works.
And then the technologies, you have to train up on the sort of 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, as 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.
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 going to make it?
We score demo quality.
using AI, we use Gong, and then you can create a scoring mechanism for how the call went, 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 our enablement team goes in and looks at the call and does 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, oh, well, you know, enterprise is really difficult to understand whether someone's a good sales rep because the sales cycles are long?
From a traditional SaaS perspective, that might still be true.
With us, even our enterprise folks, when they come in, they're going to 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 BDR, go do some account-based marketing, get the initial meetings.
That's like sort of traditional.
I've ramped cold territories before.
I've managed teams that have done that in a SaaS perspective.
This isn't that.
This is one of the hottest markets of all time.
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 like 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 experience selling to law firms or someone who has experience 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.
RCVs like 250, 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 like 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 a million dollar proposal across the line.
And I'd much rather have someone who is really strong in understanding organizational dynamics and change management and was really confident in sending large proposals and 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 was a big, big global law firm that we won.
How big was 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 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.
Yeah, yeah.
You want to be on form.
You sleep well on the night 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 CEO bake-off?
It is, I mean, in my career, yes.
But in terms of the Legora experience, no.
Because again, these are such important decisions.
If you're a tall blow for my, I don'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, what the vision for the company is.
Does that align with your vision?
Does it align with your values?
you know, 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 who 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.
Okay, dude, everyone has a flip side.
Take me to a deal you lost.
When you look back on it, what's the postmortem?
Like what more could we have done?
I'm thinking about one right now.
And as always with enterprise, 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 on a panel.
Sometimes you get to meet all five people.
Sometimes you meet four out of five.
Sometimes you meet one in terms of like 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 we weren't able to to get that so that was really painful is the days of steak buying dinners over or actually not It's not like it used to be.
I mean, you know, back in the early days when I was first, you know, 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, it's definitely evolved.
I think more so these days people want to do like activities, you know, get out and maybe not go to a steak dinner or do something a little more fun.
God, it reminds me of like mini golf dates.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, not quite like that.
But I mean, relationships are still really important.
And certainly for us, it's actually conferences.
There's so many conferences and so many events.
And any chance we have to sort of show up and show up.
And that works because in like traditional tech, I think there's been a realization that it's helpful for our 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.
In 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 office is 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 hear someone smart 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, you know, get.
some talent in the room from a thought leader point of view and to have them do like a fireside chat with Max, that's highly, highly effective and something that we do very often and really well.
What have you 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.
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 deal size.
When we think about incentivizing teams, I think sales comp packages are really hard to get my head around.
Traditional SaaS, going back to this traditional versus new world, 4XOT.
Good.
Then I have Becca from Clay who's like 6 to 7x.
And then I have my dear friend Carless from Eleven Labs who went very viral saying 20x.
And I'm like, oh my God, I feel like such an insignificant human being.
I heard that 20x number.
I got so many.
I mean, obviously, I follow the show.
You got so many pings.
Every CRO got so many pings.
All my friends who are in this business were like, wait, what's your multiple?
Did you hear this guy?
Everyone got that.
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, it 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 the metrics we were just talking about before.
So look at ramp time, productivity per head, ARR 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 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 you think 812x today is where you sit, which is good.
Yeah.
What percent of people should hit that?
Our average attainment last year was 280%.
Wow.
Is that an ineffective attainment setting?
Yeah, that was a bad job by me.
Yeah, no offense.
Yeah, no, I mean, when I started, again, 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 fell.
I remember giving, we raised our Series B and I remember giving a big like rah-rah.
We had everyone to Stockholm.
We did a big rollout.
When Logan did it.
Yeah.
I give, you know, I'm a VC, so I give credit to other VCs for a living.
But I give credit to Logan on that one, which is like he paid up in advance for something that wasn't that obvious, respectfully.
And like credit to him.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, he got me, that's how I got connected with Max was through Logan.
And he actually introduced me to Braze as well.
So I'm always a big fan of the Redpoint team.
Sorry, you joined and it was like three.
Yeah, three and a half.
So then we're like, can we 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, rah-rah 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 blew through every, 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 a sort of top-line business.
Individual productivity stuff can be a little all over the place because obviously there's like bluebird deals that happen and things like that.
And we also have a ton of inner corridor open and close.
And so being able to forecast that is a little bit of a pin the tail on the donkey challenge, but we're getting better at that piece of it.
What's your biggest advice to other CROs when you look at the CROs that ping you on the 20x that we discussed?
What's your biggest advice to CROs on how the fuck to do forecasting effectively in this very dynamic landscape?
It's really hard.
And the first thing I say is you got 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 actually mean?
I'm sorry for being a rep roll up.
Yeah, so you have, if you're a sales director at Legora, and let's say you have a team of eight people, you go all eight people, like bet your life, how much ARR 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 a regional number.
And right now, 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 this amazing woman on RevOps team, 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 rollup.
And what we call LuluCast, which is the weighted, sort of what I call the math version of the forecast, were the same.
And we were pretty accurate on both.
Where do 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?
And let's say in our sale, if you think about a sales process, there's sort of the two-sided 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 advocacy and adoption.
On the way in, let's say we have five sales stages.
For example, I mentioned the pipeline that we generated off of Jude Law.
To get into qualified pipe, you have to go through a discovery call where we ask questions around 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...
that they say have to be true, meaning like they have to be in a buying cycle, have to have budget, like think about BANT 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 as executive buy-in, InfoSec, budget allocation, things like that.
If you get that right...
and you have consistency across the global teams, then typically the forecasting is right.
And if you get the right weighting based on your sort of funnel progression historically, then you can get to a weighted forecast that's like directionally accurate.
You said there about the different regions that you have.
If you're advising CROs, CEOs 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, 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 those, we just opened in Germany.
We just opened in Spain.
We've opened five offices, maybe six in the US, Sydney, Bangalore.
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, Carl has spoke about Japan and South Korea.
I'm friends with Daniel from UiPath who always 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 data hosting requirements, processing requirements.
You can't process stuff in Europe or the US.
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 FedRAMP in the US, there's all kinds of things that are really hard from a technology perspective that you have to keep in mind.
With the greatest respect I'm probably getting into trouble, sovereignty is kind of an interesting word that's thrown around.
But to what extent do you see Americans choose Americans and Europeans choose Americans?
is 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, people think I'm from Sweden, for example.
You look Swedish.
Seriously, you could change your name to Sven and partially be that.
Just don't talk.
That's like the guy from Frozen.
Sorry, he's mute.
But yeah, there's definitely that perception that we deal with.
You know, the LLMs, I always 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 US, people really care about understanding of like jurisdictional context 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 and the velocity of scaling.
Yeah.
What breaks that people don't see?
And what are the lessons from that?
Things like the plumbing and rev ops.
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 gets very hard to do things like some of the yeah billing systems, 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.
So you migrated to Salesforce?
Yes.
From what?
What I want to say.
but I don't want to speak ill.
No, no, no, I didn't mean that bad.
Speak ill, but it wasn't working for us.
And so I did a full survey of the market.
We picked Salesforce.
And anytime you go through a systems change like that, yeah, there's change management, but there's also opportunity management and different things and 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 crawl on top of and you have no interaction slash 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 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 Benioff.
Yeah, 100%.
I've been, like I said, anytime the words Benioff and Davos came up in a deal review, you knew you were pretty fucked.
So, yeah, he's definitely...
But what I love about Benioff, which I actually see in Max, is Max would get on every freaking plane 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 guys like him leaning in, and yeah.
I think Max is one of the pretty great CEOs.
I'm 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, 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 Legora being successful, but all the people at Legora, 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?
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 where 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 compared to you.
But that's a weird one for me.
Anything that you learn, know, do.
So our cultural values are LFG.
lean in, grow together, and fight for excellence.
So from a cultural 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 someone internally or, you know.
heaven forbid, someone externally.
And so living our standards and constantly reinforcing what those are is 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 never hired me.
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 CROs 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 the sort of- Is that 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 all of our sort of global team calls.
Are you seeing non-eng people building their own tools?
100%.
Really?
Yeah, 100%.
In what way?
I mean, we have legal engineers, for example, who will have a product idea around something that we should build in Lagora, maybe for a specific industry.
Like, we have a funds attorney.
who works with us, who's excellent, named Felix.
And he had a perspective on some things we could build for our private equity clients.
It'd be highly impactful.
And he was having a hard time sort of 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 like highly, highly helpful in just understanding sort of what the vision of the product could be.
So that's an example.
Final one before we do a quick fire, which is...
I know budget's not necessarily a constraint, but it always is slightly.
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.
in our operating model.
And I'd love to, for example, do a two-day bootcamp 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 rote work off of my team's plate 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, there's so much value.
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 next gen cro Yeah, definitely.
How do 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.
Lagora'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 are 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 and my vision for myself.
And honestly, people ask me, what do you want to do next?
Like, I'm doing it.
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 bet after leaving Braze and 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, you know, come to Lagora.
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 you know 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 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 and 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 maybe are questioning whether they took the right step or did the right decision.
You mentioned the interim moves that you did and with all respect to companies, some decisions don't work out, don't want to be crying or anything like that.
But any lessons or 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 is 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, you know, maybe it's time to think about what's next.
You know, I walk every weekend with my mother a marathon.
Yeah, yeah.
And I had to always talk about big decisions with her.
And she gave me the best advice this weekend.
I was talking about something specifically with real-time funds.
And she said, you know, move fast, but don't be in a hurry.
Exactly.
I thought it was brilliant.
I think it's the same advice.
That's a great line.
Which is that 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, so much of it's around picking the right market and the right company.
I think people over-index on title and under-index on growth.
I'd rather take a role maybe below the level you're at, a high-growth company.
You did.
You took a VP of GTM, I think, or whatever, as the sole owner of your kitchen.
Yes, yes.
My kitchen was the hottest tech company in Brooklyn.
But yeah, 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 X title, I want to stay that.
I'd rather go somewhere where you can make a big impact than a growth framework.
Final, final one, I promise.
Someone's great, they want a bigger salary than the rest of the people in that role.
They're great, you and Max know they're great.
You just suck it up and pay more, but what about what that does to everyone else who now wants 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 is 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.
Quickfire, 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.
It's interesting.
It's almost like a land grab on investors as well.
Exactly, exactly.
Like if you look at our last fundraiser, our CFO, David, describe it as the investment syndicate.
Sort of reminds me of the Mission Impossible.
One of my friends is a GP at Airtree in Australia.
Yeah, yeah.
And he pinged me about Legora because 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, 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 from a New York and US perspective.
We're really excited.
What one tool could you not live without?
I use Gemini all the time.
Wow.
I wasn't 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, you know, an agentic perspective, it has all the context and it has all of my stuff.
And so it helps me with like meeting prep.
It helps me with managing my calendar.
A lot of the sort of simple productivity stuff, it's very good at, not to mention, you know, making funny pictures.
I have to say, I love Whisperflow.
Yeah, Whisperflow is awesome.
Definitely.
That's one of those viral products that everyone in Silicon Valley is talking about.
It's freaking great.
It's great.
It's really good.
The only shit thing is in offices.
Exactly.
I'm standing in the middle of the office and I just talk to my computer and it's just weird.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, I actually think that that's going to be one of the ways of working.
Our team hired headsets so they now look like customer support.
I was going to say, we've got a lot of headsets and a lot of AirPods going around.
What was the best advice you've ever been given?
I had a mentor.
tell me if you want to be a CRO, you need to be really well-rounded.
I think mostly at the beginning of my career, I had been really successful in a more like transactional mid-market sort of role.
And then I moved into leadership very early in my 20s and was like running a big team.
And, you know, I thought I was killing it, right?
But I couldn't get...
like a real VP job because I didn't have like big enterprise experience.
But if you want to be a CRO, it's not just sales, it's customer success, it's partnerships, you know, it's implementation onboarding.
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 has been really, really beneficial.
Dude, I absolutely love this.
Thank you so much for being so open, for putting up with my meandering.
I got described the other day as the Louis Thoreau adventure, which I didn't know whether to say it was like a compliment or not, but you've been amazing.
No, thanks so much, Harry.
I really enjoyed it.
Thanks for having me.
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