Max Junestrand: You Need The Willingness To Learn Faster Than Anyone Else

**Max Junestrand** (0:07)
This is a much warmer welcome than what we had coming into Y Combinator the first time. Legora's YC journey started with a rejection, but more on that story later.
In YC, they teach you something, and it's called the two-sentence description. It is, describe your company in two sentences. Legora is the agentic operating system for lawyers, and it handles complex legal work from start to finish, so lawyers can achieve more than ever before. And over 3% of all the world's lawyers are now active users of Legora. You will learn more about this when you get accepted into YC.
So, when we started looking at the legal industry, it felt like one of the biggest opportunities to apply large language models to solve real problems. And the software that we were up against looked like it had built in the 90s. As software engineers, we have been incredibly spoiled with great software, because we love to build for each other and for ourselves. But in the legal industry, this is what the software used to look like and what we were up against when we started out.
Now, Legora has grown into a global brand, putting celebrities like Jude Law at the New York Wall Street. And still, I feel like we are only getting started. My most favorite Slack channel in Legora is customer love. It is where our customers post things that they sort of truly feel like they couldn't have achieved without our system. And we mine many of our sales calls for quotes like this. And I wanted to share just a couple with you because I think at the end of the day, this is what it's all about. A parent asked me at one of the tournaments how I juggle work and all of the golf travel. One word, Legora. Never has the path between an idea and execute have been so short. Never, man. If Legora went away tomorrow, I'd just go back to coaching high school basketball.
When Legora went into YC, we were questioned about the idea of even selling and working in the legal industry. It is such a conservative business that had never been sort of lenient to software before. But from the time that we went into GA of October 2024, until the last end of quarter, we've grown from one to 100 million in ARR. And starting from just three engineers in Sweden, to a company of over 750 people all over the world, this is awesome. And the fact that we've gotten to do this starting from Europe, I think just adds another flare in that hat.
But the Legora story almost didn't happen. And it actually didn't start with me. In fact, it started almost like the great beginning of a joke. And so a lawyer, a physicist, an engineer, and a psychologist back in 2020, before GPT, before AI was cool, started a company called Judilica. And what they observed was that law school students were going into their internships basically to summarize court cases. And with the early models from Google called BERT, they started to explore what this space could be and what was possible to build.
My story started in the Swedish archipelago at an island which looks something like this. And I met my two co-founders at a volleyball game.
I think startup founder stories can come from many different places. And this definitely wasn't one, you know, high odds of a place to start. But when I met August and Sige, they showed me a demo of the product they had built. And our group chat actually looked exactly like this. They gave me a demo of the project. And with GPT 3.5, they had built a very simple product that could explain what a stock option agreement really meant. And so we started with that. And I said, this is a super cool demo, a super cool project. And my co-founder Sige said, I'm glad you want to help out. And I ended up helping out a little bit more than just that.
When GPT 3.5 came, that was the internet moment of our generation. I dropped out of college. I never finished my master thesis because the opportunity cost of not building had become too large. But when we started out, it wasn't obvious that we were going to be a success. And so, to learn about what the legal industry was, what it meant, how lawyers actually worked, we came up with the ingenious plan of cold emailing lawyers on their emails that we could find on their websites, and writing to them on LinkedIn asking for a lunch, where we could learn more about their different practice areas. And we offered to pay their hourly fee to have lunch with us. And many of them took us up on that offer, but fortunately for us, many of them didn't make us pay for the hour, and many of them even paid for the lunch. And once we had gotten our feet under ourselves, we approached one of the largest law firms in the Nordics named Mannheimer-Swartling. But just two years before that, their managing partner had gone on TV and said that AI, back when they were starting to use it, was really more artificial than intelligent. And so we had to work really hard to change the perception of what both technology and what AI could be in the area of law.