To filter priorities, the CEO requires himself to write a full paragraph justifying why he should take on a new, non-routine task. If it's difficult or annoying to articulate the reason, the task is deemed unimportant and gets cut.
At the pace of AI development, the feeling of 'things breaking' happens every 3-6 months. Leaders must proactively reinvent the company on this cadence—reassessing roles, priorities, and processes—or risk becoming obsolete. The alternative is getting so far behind that the company dies.
When entering new countries, Harvey AI first set up local Azure instances to comply with data sovereignty laws. This technical requirement became a reliable predictor that customer demand would soon necessitate a full physical office in that region.
Relying solely on expensive frontier models is unsustainable. Vertical AI companies must build a portfolio of smaller, specialized models that match frontier performance on specific tasks but cost 100x less, effectively allocating intelligence where it's needed most.
The biggest cultural shock for lawyers moving to a tech company like Harvey AI is the concept of performance-based termination. Law firms rarely fire people and have rigid promotion cycles, making tech's meritocratic, fast-moving environment a difficult adjustment.
As companies spend billions on tokens, they will demand justification, similar to how law firms use the billable hour. Vertical AI startups can win by demonstrating the specific ROI of every token used for a business task, answering the question: 'Where's my ROI?'
In data-scarce verticals like law, Harvey AI overcomes the lack of public training data by using coding models to create synthetic documents. This pipeline is so effective that even lawyers can't tell the difference, unlocking the ability to post-train specialized models.
Harvey AI's M&A strategy prioritizes acquiring talented teams over buying existing tech, even from outside its industry. The rationale is that great talent can build new products much faster with modern AI tools, making the team the more valuable asset.