Gabe Pereyra - President & Co-Founder of Harvey

Gabe Pereyra (0:00)

And we're like, oh shoot, we need a name to do this. And then one day, like I was just sitting in the living room, Winston came out of his room and he just goes, What about Harvey? And we were both just like, oh, it's perfect. As soon as we started calling Harvey, they were like, Harvey had this great answer. And we're like, oh, that's like really good.

Brendan Foody (0:20)

I'm Brendan Foodie and welcome to the Frontier. Today I'm welcoming Gabe, the co-founder and president of Harvey. And he is leading the transition of application layer companies like Cursor and Harvey becoming full stack AI companies as they post-train their own models. They are helping the legal industry transition to owning their intelligence for all of their use cases inside law firms. I'm excited for you to hear more about that story on the show.

Gabe, I'm super excited to have you. Thank you so much for joining today.

Gabe Pereyra (0:49)

Thanks so much for having me.

Brendan Foody (0:50)

I figured we can kick it off with a little bit of your origin story growing up in the um Bay Area, same as me. And so maybe talk a little bit about that, where you're from, what you were excited about growing up, and sort of all the things that led up to Harvey.

Gabe Pereyra (1:04)

Yeah. So grew up in Cupertino.

Uh both my parents were PhDs in computer science. My mom worked at Apple for 30 years, uh, led the team that built the autocorrect products. So whenever your iPhone corrects deducting, like that's her fault. My dad was like a math professor at Stanford and other places. And as a kid, I did not want to do computer science. I didn't want to do what my parents did. I wanted to play soccer professionally. So I was super into soccer, dropped out of high school to go to Brazil and play, got injured, and then still didn't want to do computer science, did finance, wanted to do investment banking, like maybe start a hedge fund.

Uh, then started doing that. And I was like, this is not what I like. And my parents kind of never really pressured me, but they were like, you should try computer science. And I tried, I was like, oh, I love this. Um, and quickly found AI research uh and started working with Yoshua Bengio, who's one of the early pioneers.

Brendan Foody (1:55)

Were you in Montreal there?

Gabe Pereyra (1:56)

I was working remotely. So I was at USC for undergrad, but connected with him and then did the brain residency when I graduated undergrad and got to work with Hinton, Jeff, like a bunch of these folks, and always knew that I was kind of like doing AI research to eventually start a company.

The company that I thought I wanted to start was Personalized Education. I left Deep Mind to try to start that, and it ended up being kind of the wrong time, the wrong market. Went to Meta and was working on their large language model team. And I had met Winston, we became best friends, roommates, and I was brainstorming startup ideas.

Brendan Foody (2:29)

And roughly what year was this? Or what was the year that you like joined Deep Mind and then Meta subsequently?

Gabe Pereyra (2:33)

Out of undergrad, I went to Brain for a year, then Deep Mind, then left to do startups for a couple years and then joined Meta. Meta kind of right around right after COVID.

Brendan Foody (2:44)

Okay.

Gabe Pereyra (2:44)

Uh, and then Winston and I were roommates during COVID. Yeah. I was brainstorming startup ideas.

Brendan Foody (2:49)

Right as GPT-3 was coming out of the GPT three and I for the people in the industry, it was clear that things were starting to work.

Gabe Pereyra (2:56)

Yeah, and kind of GPT-2, GPT-3, like if you're working at those labs, it was kind of this like holy shit moment of just you can just scale these language models and you could just see them getting better. And they were solving these tasks that like I had worked on over the past 10 years, and you just like couldn't really make progress.

So it was it was pretty clear that that was going somewhere. And at the time, Winston was at a large law firm doing litigation. I was showing him these models and he tried doing some of his associate tasks, and he was like, these can kind of do what I'm doing, but not really. But there's there's something here. And I was just like, these are clearly gonna get much better. And we reached out to Sam and Brad at OpenAI. They ended up being our seed investors. And when we first started Harvey, it wasn't clear that you could do big law and kind of corporate legal work because GPT-3 wasn't there. But then they showed us like an early version of GPT-4, and that was just the like light bulb moment of like, okay, we can just go and like build this type of company.