Episode 50: Harvey CEO Winston Weinberg
And here's to the next 50! đ„ł
I turned down an invitation to a dinner recently, despite being told âThere will be a lot of potential business for you there.â
âThanks,â I said, âhereâs the thing though â and I donât mean to sound like an arrogant prick â but sales are not really my challenge.â
My inviter was taken aback. âSo then, what is your biggest challenge?â they asked.
I replied, âStaying 6 months ahead of everyone else.â
Hey there, Iâm Zach Abramowitz and I am Legally Disrupted! If you want to know what that little tĂȘte-Ă -tĂȘte has to do with Winston Weinberg and Harvey, keep scrolling. If you just want đïžEpisode 50 of Zach Abramowitz is Legally Disrupted injected straight into your veins, I feel you, so go ahead and click play.
One of the things that we talked about in this wide ranging conversation was the importance as well the challenge of looking six months ahead. No one understands that better than the team at Harvey. Gabeâs proximity to transformer models from his time at Google, Winstonâs proximity to the law from his stint at OâMelveny and their proximity to each other gave Harvey a six month head start. So when I was playing around with ChatGPT in December of 2022 and having my mind blown, the guys at Harvey had already seen GPT 4.0. And itâs not just about what tools they had. Itâs that access to the models allowed them to start wrapping their heads around AI and all of its implications. Early adoption compounds, so does being first. As Winston said in the podcast, they have had plenty of time to make mistakes and learn from failure.
And, as a result, sales at Harvey are not their biggest challenge at the moment.
The biggest challenge at Harvey is planning for whatâs coming six months down the line: model breakthroughs, changing user behavior (e.g. canât we just build this in Claude?), new market entrants, token pricing and scaling compute, just to name a few.
Staying ahead is the challenge for anyone in this market, whether youâre an $11B company like Harvey or whether youâre someone like me who is advising companies on AI strategy. No one is going to pay the Killer Whale Strategies team for strategic advice if we donât stay at least six months ahead.
If you are interested in staying ahead, the podcast with Winston is a great place to start. If youâre into the audio only experience, you can get listen to our conversation on Apple Podcasts or on Spotify. Another way to stay ahead would be subscribing to this newsletter.
Why should you be only the one to stay ahead? Do the right thing and share this post with someone who is in deep need of some good old fashioned legal disruption.
This wasnât my most viewed tweet of the week, but it was certainly my favorite.
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