In this talk and fireside at Startup School 2026, Legora Co-founder and CEO Max Junestrand reflects on lessons learned while building a legal product that is now used across 50 countries and went from $1 million to $100 million ARR in roughly 18 months.
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Chapters:
00:00 — Intro
01:25 — What Lawyers Actually Needed
03:15 — The Origin Story
06:09 — Moving Into a Law Firm
07:22 — The YC Rejection
11:11 — San Francisco
12:20 — 80 Investor Meetings in 10 Days
13:26 — Freezing Sales to Fix the Product
16:19 — The Legora Product Manifesto
17:56 — Unlearning the Fancy Resume Hire
20:21 — The Law of Jante Problem
24:13 — Stockholm Onboarding as Superpower
25:26 — What Actually Made the Company
27:55 — Does Domain Expertise Still Matter?
29:14 — Betting on Model Improvement
34:09 — Building Your Own Evals
36:29 — When Should You Start a Startup?
41:41 — How Competitiveness Shows Up at Legora
44:17 — What Happens When You’re #1?
45:04 — How to Become More Ambitious
48:43 — Storytelling as the CEO Superpower
54:00 — Zero to $100M in 18 Months
