Grit24 Feb 2025

#231 CEO & Co-Founder Harvey, Winston Weinberg w/ Ilya Fushman: Worthy Sacrifices

Guests: Winston Weinberg, CEO & co-founder of Harvey; and Ilya Fushman, partner at Kleiner Perkins

“If you think about pretty much any job out there in the world, we will have some sort of [AI] copilot,” says Kleiner Perkins partner Ilya Fushman. “The question is, who are the right folks to build it, and what’s their vision?”

For Harvey CEO & co-founder Winston Weinberg, the vision is clear: Silicon Valley cannot and should not try to disrupt the legal profession by automating the job of lawyers. Instead, he says, they need to have “respect for the industry” before designing AI solutions that speed up specific tasks.

“These industries are incredibly complex,” Winston says. “Legal is one of the oldest professions known to man. There are firms that are over a hundred years old. There are firms that are hundreds of years old, and having a brand that says, ‘We are partnering with the industry to transform it’ versus ‘We are just going to steamroll the industry’ is really important for us.”

Chapters:

(01:16) - The zeitgeist switch
(02:58) - What is Harvey?
(06:10) - Chief Law Officers
(07:58) - Agentic workflows
(09:43) - Ilya’s investment thesis
(12:48) - Collaborating with AI
(16:05) - Task automation
(20:52) - Why is it called Harvey?
(23:14) - Respecting the legal industry
(26:43) - Winston’s past jobs
(28:47) - First steps
(32:13) - Scaling the company
(35:02) - Scaling yourself
(37:19) - Who works for Harvey
(40:50) - Making mistakes
(43:15) - Making sacrifices
(45:51) - Growing too fast
(50:50) - Setting priorities
(54:54) - Harvey’s competitors
(57:38) - Internal virality
(01:00:46) - Testing Harvey’s limits
(01:03:29) - Who Harvey is hiring
(01:04:01) - What “grit” means to Winston

Mentioned in this episode: ChatGPT, the Fortune 500, Microsoft Copilot, Gabe Pereyra, Activision, Excel, Counsel AI Corporation, Suits, Harvard University, Netflix, Dell, O'Melveny & Myers, Hueston Hennigan, Meta, Reddit, Jason Kwon, Anthropic, Marissa Mayer, Eric Schmidt, Google, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Glean.

Links:

Connect with Winston

Connect with Ilya

Connect with Joubin

Learn more about Kleiner Perkins

This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

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