I want to double click on this massive 200page, 400page Google document that you have. How would you describe that to somebody and how do you use it? So, basic I mean I can break down the whole document. So, at the top it basically has like the couple things that I want to remember, right? Um, you know, kind of like motivational things. Some of the ones that I I care about the most are prioritization. Like this is something I think people have a really hard time with is every, you know, like three to six months you have to completely redo how you do prioritization as a leader, I think. Um, and if you don't, you're really going to start messing things up. And then it has the top three documents that I care about tracking. Um, and so, you know, if I'm concerned about a certain part of the org, then it will have, you know, like a revenue tracker. or if I'm super concerned about like uh post sales or we need to do much better like customer service on the back of things like that, it'll have a document there that has like a bunch of stats on that, right? And then under that it'll have what are the three goals for the quarter and almost always it's usually like one higher uh like one product feature. I mean, we ship now we're getting to the point we're shipping like four new products every quarter. Um, which is awesome, but you know, the one I care about the most or I need to focus on the most and then like one major area of the company I need to fix. And then after that it will have my daily list. And I think the the thing that's good about it like all of the company dashboard stuff and motivation like I think everyone has their version of that. The thing that I think is actually good is every day I rank everything I need to do. And so it's daily and then I refresh it and then I cross them out. And the reranking is I think really important because what I found is the more times I click into that doc that's called the list and I reank something the more I think about what I'm doing like meta about my thoughts. And that is really good. That's when I'm prioritizing the best by far. That's when my schedule looks the best. that's when I'm performing the best is how many times do I click in that dock during the day because it will make me reorg something, put something in first place in bold and ignore everything else. So, it's more of a prioritization like document.

What do you say no to? Most things. Um, and I think an increasing amount of things as the company goes on. I used to say no to not almost nothing. What What's your inner monologue when you're sort of looking at something and you're trying to decide, does this make my list? or do you capture it or do you just let it go? Like what is that? When I get really bad at it, I ask my chief of staff to force me to write a paragraph about why I'm going to take a meeting. Full paragraph about why I should take a meeting. And it's so easy if you do it that way because for 99% of meetings or events or whatever, you start writing the first sentence and you're like, I don't want to do this. And if you don't want to do this and you're like, "This is a waste of time," probably the meeting or the event is also a waste of time. For the things that I think are really important, when I'm like, "I got to write that paragraph." I could write 20 pages, right? It's really easy. Yeah. And so again, I think this goes back to like how much of your week and your day are you thinking about what you're doing? Seriously, like what is the goal of the company right now? Like what is the main bottleneck? What is the main problem? And I think like a good founder... it seems like what they're really good at is two things. One is they've built a machine. And so because they've built a machine, they have time to only focus on what is the main bottleneck with the machine, right? And so those are two different skill sets, I think. Um, and you have to have both, right? Because if all you're doing is like bottlenecks before you've built a machine, it's like you're never going to hire the right st. You're never going to get the processes right. You're never going to build the right product. And so you have to be constantly how do am I building out the machine? And then once that machine is somewhat built out, I think the number one goal is just how do you improve that machine constantly? And you kind of have to think about your company that way. The reason I think people have a really hard time saying no is they say yes to a lot of things that make them look good in the short term instead of being able to take the pain of ignoring it and then doing so well because you ignored it that people back off. So let me give you an example of this. If a third party or like an investor or someone like that says it's really important for you to hire a certain person right now, right? What you might end up doing is you take a bunch of meetings with that seuite, right? And you take tons of those meetings because the investor says, you know, you're having revenue problems, right? And the reason you're having revenue problems, it must be because you don't have a certainty suite, right? But deep down you're like, "The reason we have a revenue problem is because there's a problem with product. Has nothing to do with like anything that's going on here, right? It's not because we haven't hired a chief revenue officer yet. It's because the product isn't good enough." But that has a delay. And so what people want to do is they want to start making improvements to so that third party can see it immediately. So they'll start doing the meetings because every time you do that meeting, you get a pat on the back from your VC or someone that says, "Good job. you did that meeting, you're having progress." The alternative is you ignore everyone and everyone thinks it's getting worse and worse... and you go fix the issue that's actually an issue and then in a two quarters or 6 months all of a sudden the company's doing really well. And that's just so hard to do.

So I um got very lucky where I met my co-founder um Gabe. And he had a background in AI research. So he was one of the first folks at the at Google Brain... we became really good friends... and at some point I was like can you just like what what is an LLM? Can you show me one of these things? Um and what was available at the time was a public access point API uh to GBD3. This is like early 2022, right? I started using it to do very basic like here's a fact pattern, here's a statute in California, you know, apply this fact pattern uh to the same statute or the statute to the fact pattern and it got really good outputs. Then to kind of like test it even more, we went on r/leal advice, which is a subreddit where people ask a bunch of legal questions... and we grabbed a bunch of landlord tenant questions in California and we ran this chain of thought prompt over them and we basically gave it to three landlord tenant lawyers and we said somebody asked this question... would you send this with zero edits on 86 out of a hundred of those questions three out of three attorneys said yes and that was the oh my god moment for me. Gabe had some friends um that were thinking about uh joining this company called OpenAI. We basically said we're using GPD3 to do this. let's just cold email Sam um Sam Alman and uh the general counsel at the time whose name is Jason Quan... we emailed them the results and we basically said the I mean the body of the email was basically did you know that the models were this good at legal and we emailed them that they got back to us like pretty fast... and then we met with the rest of the leadership team on actually the 4th of July and we pitched them our idea for the company and we raised money after that. They were your original investor. Yeah. We didn't go to any other VCs or anything like that.

What was the darkest moment as you were building this when everything felt like it was just caving in and you were about to give up or quit? One of them was super early on we thought we we basically thought that there was going to be a way to like oneshot ourselves into like building the company instead of doing it the hard way. The idea was basically we're going to buy this company that ended up it was 10 times bigger than us people-wise. We tried to buy it. We kind of like signed actually the deal um before we had the money... we were short uh we got like a lot of it... we were trying to raise um like around like 700 million or something like that and we got I think like 500 in clean equity. And we decided not to do that [take the debt]. And when that happened... I thought the company was over. I was just like, I don't think like we can build fast enough. I think the model providers are just going to eat us. What was your inner monologue? It's like 24 hours. Um it was really fast. And I think like the reason it was so fast and by the way I've had a lot of periods like this... you just have to get used to this of like it's over, it's over, it's over, it's over. And then everything's fine. And now you know you take those moments and then you just get like a you build resilience... and one thing that that gives me I'm more confident in the company today than I've ever been... because I now have a team of people that I have failed with so many times. We have massively butchered product lines and then recovered them. So, determine if something's a one-way or two-way door immediately... with the idea that baseline 99.9% of things is a two-way door. No one at the company ever has been let go because they made too many mistakes. It's never happened. They always broke. And the thing that broke was they started to get decision paralysis. They started to not be able to scale.

Yeah, that's what I'm seeing across our company just massively where like the people who were I already thought were like 10x are now 100x. Um and so I do think you're you're seeing like the power law of ability um just increase by a lot, right? I think it's the same thing that happens in sports, right? If you're a little bit faster than your opponent in basketball... you will just slightly get the ball in front of them every time... I think it's the same thing where you can take those competitive advantages and now all of the sudden you're winning most of the time, right? And I think that that's what's going up happening in knowledge work where you know if an attorney is is slightly better or slightly faster, they're going to get all the work. The expectations are just going to change, right? Like if you think about the the largest effect that email had on the legal industry was people expected you to respond with work product faster... It's going to be the same here. If I'm a CEO and I want a deal to get done, I want the one that's done in 48 hours so it doesn't get leaked to the press. In professional services I think there's two types of work. There are there is I want work done which is like I deliver a work product right and that is going to get fully commoditized. The decision or advice is not going to go anywhere. In fact, my guess is it's actually going to be more valuable over time. Because you only really get that from a bunch of experience... the top lawyers who succeed really well, those are the ones who I think have mastered what you master in the first year of law school plus understand a business and understand their clients really well.