From Roommates to Billionaires: Harvey's Founders Gabriel Pereyra and Winston Weinberg on Building AI Infrastructure for Law

**Robert Ambrogi** (0:03)
Today on LawNext, a conversation with the co-founders of Harvey, one of the most closely watched companies in legal AI. Gabriel Pereyra and Winston Weinberg started Harvey in 2022 when they were roommates sharing an apartment in San Francisco. Gabe had been working on AI research at Meta and Google, while Winston was a first-year litigation associate at O'Melveny & Myers. Today, they still share that same apartment, but Harvey has grown into a global company serving more than a thousand customers, and achieving a valuation of $8 billion. In this conversation, we go back to Harvey's earliest days, when Gabe and Winston were reaching out to thousands of lawyers on LinkedIn trying to get anyone to take a look at their product. We talk about the pivotal moment when they got early access to GPT-4, and how that transformed what they could build. And we discuss the breakthrough that came when Allen & Overy became their first major client, and announced it was deploying Harvey across its entire global firm. Now, so look ahead, we talk about Harvey's vision for becoming the operating system for legal work, their strategy for building agentic AI that can handle complex workflows, and their focus on moving beyond one-off tasks to client-matter-centric work. We even get into how two young founders with no management experience have learned to scale a company that now employs hundreds of people, more than 20% of whom are lawyers. I'm Bob Ambrogi, and this is LawNext, the podcast that features the innovators and entrepreneurs who are driving what's next in law. Before we get to that, please take this moment to hear from the sponsors who so generously support this podcast.
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Now, let's get to that conversation with Gabe and Winston. Gabe and Winston, welcome to Law Next.

**Winston Weinberg** (3:17)
Thanks for having us.

**Robert Ambrogi** (3:20)
Nice to see you guys and looking forward to our conversation today. A lot I want to cover, but I have to start with this question, because two weeks ago, I saw the two of you featured in the New York Times as two of the new billionaires of the AI boom. And since I may never again have the chance to talk to a billionaire, I have to ask, what's it like?

**Winston Weinberg** (3:43)
Literally, kind of a ridiculous article. I mean, Gabe and I literally live in the same apartment as we did when we started the startup. We have a third roommate who also works at the company.
I don't think it has really changed much at all. I think we've both helped our parents out in some instances, but in terms of our own personal lives, to be honest, we work the same amount of hours. Our apartment, I think, has the same furniture, Gabe, basically, as it did in the beginning, which, by the way, is no furniture, which is...

**Gabriel Pereyra** (4:18)
My mattress is still on the floor.

**Winston Weinberg** (4:20)
Yeah, we had one of our friends who works at the big labs come over kind of recently, and he was just appalled at basically just like, it's all boxes and everything like that. So, I don't know. I mean, these things are all on paper, so it doesn't really make sense.

**Gabriel Pereyra** (4:36)
I get it.

**Robert Ambrogi** (4:37)
It was just that article struck me as kind of funny. And I was wondering whether you're still sharing an apartment. I knew way back when I talked to you, when you guys were just getting started with this, you were roommates at that point. But at some point, maybe you'll be able to afford your own place.

**Winston Weinberg** (4:57)
Working on it.

**Robert Ambrogi** (4:58)
All right. Well, from billionaires to beginnings, I want to kind of go back a little bit to some of the early days and ask a couple of questions about that. It's interesting. I was actually looking back at my own notes. I'm an inveterate note taker.