Building a Team at AI Speed | Harvey’s Maggie Landers
Maggie Landers, VP of Talent at Harvey, discusses how the legal AI company scaled from 340 to over 1,000 employees in one year while maintaining startup culture and values. She explains Harvey's approach to rapid hiring, emphasis on progress over perfection, founder leadership, and the specific traits they seek in candidates.
Summary
Harvey, a four-year-old AI company transforming the legal industry, has experienced explosive growth with valuations jumping from $3 billion to $11 billion in just over a year. Maggie Landers, who joined as VP of Talent just over a year ago, describes the unique challenge of scaling from 340 to over 1,000 employees while maintaining Harvey's core identity. Over 70% of the company joined after January 1st of the current year, with plans to reach 2,000 employees by year-end.
Harvey's culture centers on three core values: decisiveness, simplicity, and "jobs not finished." Decisiveness emphasizes moving fast and learning through experimentation rather than overanalysis—"we don't take the square root of the weather." Simplicity means avoiding over-engineering and releasing products quickly for feedback iteration. "Jobs not finished" reflects humility and continuous improvement mindset. These values enable the company to move significantly faster than industry peers—employees accomplish in one month what others might do in a quarter.
The company attracts people motivated by meaningful impact and industry transformation rather than just rapid growth. Harvey maintains close customer connections across all roles, with many employees having legal backgrounds or legal-focused responsibilities. The culture emphasizes collaboration over competition, with strong emphasis on teamwork and mutual support despite the intense pace.
Founders Winston and Gabriel set the tone through accessibility and hands-on involvement. They maintain detailed engagement in daily operations while thinking strategically, are available for quick Slack conversations, host founder AMAs (notably run by interns), and share transparency through quarterly memos and board decks with the entire company. This leadership style extends throughout the executive team, which includes experienced leaders like COO Katie Burke and CISO Brooks Evans who combine strategic vision with execution involvement.
Harvey's interview process includes a values-based interview for all candidates, assessing how they align with the company's three core values and whether the environment suits them. The company intentionally practices self-selection, wanting candidates to understand whether Harvey's stage (teenage years—post-product-market fit but pre-massive scale) and working style match their preferences.
Landers emphasizes that success at Harvey requires comfort with ambiguity, good judgment about when to seek input versus moving independently, and willingness to create processes that don't yet exist. The company operates from trust rather than fear, giving employees significant agency and autonomy. People join to transform the legal industry specifically, not just to work at a fast-growing AI company, which shapes candidate motivation and cultural fit.
About this episode
a16z’s Katie Kirsch sits down with Harvey VP of Talent Maggie Landers to discuss what happens inside a company growing at AI speed, and how you preserve culture while adding more than 1,000 employees in a year. Maggie explains why Harvey prioritizes progress over perfection, how its values of simplicity, decisiveness, and “job’s not finished” shape the way people work, and why moving quickly requires giving employees significant trust and autonomy. For people accustomed to being the “A student,” that can mean learning to experiment, make mistakes, and course-correct quickly. They also get into how Harvey identifies people who can thrive in that environment, what changes when most of your company is relatively new, the role its founders play in maintaining culture, and why judgment becomes increasingly important when employees are given the freedom to move fast.
Key Insights
- Landers argues that Harvey's pace—where employees accomplish in one month what takes a quarter elsewhere—creates more learning reps and faster feedback cycles, enabling teams to fail quickly and correct course.
- The company's three core values (decisiveness, simplicity, jobs not finished) function interdependently to enable rapid execution: decisiveness drives fast action, simplicity prevents over-engineering, and jobs not finished maintains humility about imperfection.
- Landers claims that over 70% of Harvey's workforce being newly hired creates a unique dynamic where recruiters, hiring managers, and leaders are all relatively new and learning together what works at Harvey specifically, rather than importing previous company practices.
- The founders maintain accessibility and hands-on involvement in day-to-day details while operating at strategic altitude, and this dual-level engagement shapes the broader executive team's ethos and prevents bureaucratic bottlenecks.
- Landers states that Harvey's customer-centric positioning and focus on transforming the legal industry specifically attracts different people than pure AI infrastructure or model-building companies, creating a distinct motivational profile among employees.
- The company intentionally practices self-selection during interviews, showing candidates the reality of working at Harvey's stage (post-product-market fit but pre-massive scale) so people can opt out if the ambiguity and pace don't suit them.
- Landers argues that good judgment—knowing who to loop in and when to press forward independently—is critical but difficult to assess, and becomes essential in high-agency environments where employees have significant autonomy.
- Harvey operates from a foundation of trust rather than fear, meaning processes like hybrid office policies and decision-making autonomy are enforced by intrinsic motivation and culture rather than surveillance or consensus requirements.
Topics
Transcript
Transforming the legal industry is very different than trying to transform customer support or build an AI harness or create a model. You're going to do more in a month at Harvey than you would in a quarter somewhere else. There's a lot of experimentation, so you're going to fail more than you're necessarily going to get it right. And so I think the emphasis is on both failing fast and correcting to make something or build something that has never been built before. It's like nothing inspires people more than actually seeing their impact in the world and knowing that even being part of a really large organization, they still feel like everything they're doing is working towards a…
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