Dan Mishin, Manifest OS CEO on Building AI-Native Legal Firms

**Grace Gong** (0:01)
Yeah, okay. Oh, we're like, oh, one sec. Oh my god, what is going on? Sorry. Whenever, oh no, oh no. One sec.
Oh my god. Whenever I have technical difficulty, I'm like, oh, we're on. Thank god. Okay. Hi, Dan. Welcome to Venture with Grace.

**Dan Mishin** (0:16)
So good to see you. Thank you for having me.

**Grace Gong** (0:19)
To start our show, I want to give a quick shout out to our amazing sponsor. This episode is brought to you by Nebius, the ultimate claw for AI innovators. Nebius provides AI infrastructure you can count on, combining reliability and speed with the flexibility and engineering support, a match by hyper-skillers. AI leaders like Meta, Shopify, and Higgsfield already partner with Nebius to run their AR workloads. Plus, venture-backed startup can save up to 150K on compute costs when they apply for access. Visit nebius.com or nebius.com/startup to learn more.
Okay. I feel like your background is super interesting. Obviously, you started a company slash like Airbnb since you were 11 It's like a hustle, but technically, I feel like it's a Airbnb.
And then later on, your founder and CEO of June Homes, which you have raised like over 70 million venture capital money and it was, it hit like $50 million AR. Maybe we could start with like what were some core lessons that you have learned early on in your career that kind of shape you into who you are today?

**Dan Mishin** (1:26)
Wow. I mean, I think my entire career is getting punched in the face many times over to learn the same lesson and slowly getting it through my thick skull after multiple repetitions. So the entire career is basically one large long term learning curve that was a supplement for MBAs and even high schools.
So many different lessons and so many different stages of evolution of thinking about companies in different ways, starting as a mercenary. I have no shame in admitting that, coming from a place where there was not a lot available to us and the poorest city in the poorest region of the poorest country in Europe. And over time, it started with like, initially it started with the hunger, financial hunger, and over time, it sort of evolved into something that I think is a little bit more coming from a better place, from a place of the ultimate end state, I think is the best companies are built by people that are doing this in service of others. And I'm slowly evolving into that. I don't know if I've answered your question.

**Grace Gong** (2:41)
I felt like you kind of did, which is like, I think like one of the things that you said on a different podcast was like, I think you guys were talking about the power of ask. So essentially like you only know one guy in New York City because and then you kind of asked this person and then they gave you like a 100K and then you just went from there to like raise a whole round for your new company. Maybe we could talk about like, we can start with like a Manifest and how do you think about like the next generation of legal and then we can talk about I guess like from the journey of like being an entrepreneur like raising venture capital from, whether it's like from Europe to the US and the whole journey.

**Dan Mishin** (3:26)
Yeah, happy to do that. Well, just to contextualize it, what Manifest is. Manifest is, by the way, oh my God, I can see myself in the screen and it's so distracting to look at my own images.

**Grace Gong** (3:37)
Oh, you can actually hide it. Yeah, I hide it. I cannot see to a screen, I'll die.

**Dan Mishin** (3:43)
I know, right? How do I do that?

**Grace Gong** (3:46)
Here's by the show Vertical, there is a, actually, I already hide it. I don't know how to hide it anymore. So there is a hide button, it's just like, yeah, hide it. Hide horizontal or hide vertical.
Oh, hide vertical. Yeah, just say hide vertical on the left side.

**Dan Mishin** (4:08)
Oh, okay, there we go. That's perfect.

**Grace Gong** (4:12)
Now you can just see one. It's like a Zoom call basically.

**Dan Mishin** (4:15)
Yeah. Okay, perfect.
Look, I mean, just to contextualize it, because people are like, who the hell is this guy? So I'm building a company called Manifest OS, and what Manifest OS does is it helps exceptional attorneys launch their legal practices in an AI native fashion from scratch. So think of this as you're a lawyer, you've been practicing for 12 to 15 years, you have already received a lot of experience, you know the practice of law, you know how to be a good lawyer. Maybe you currently work at a large law firm, and you're making a partner track, or maybe you already are a partner at a large law firm, and you know exactly what the profession of law entails, but we help you launch a completely new law firm from scratch, and make it fully AI native, where instead of manually drafting documents, you're now using AI agents to complete the work for you. Instead of employing three or four paralegals, you're now using AI agents to complete the paralegal work.