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Key Takeaways Harvey is an AI startup that develops solutions for legal professionals, like an AI assistant for drafting and research.
The startup’s 30-year-old CEO, Winston Weinberg, attributes its $11 billion valuation to a mindset of learning aggressively from failure.
He says it’s important to take the time to analyze failures and determine what you got right and what you got wrong.
Winston Weinberg, the cofounder and CEO of AI legal startup Harvey, says the company’s growth to an $11 billion valuation comes down to one unexpected factor: failure.
“I think it’s really hard to figure this out without failing,” Weinberg said on a recent episode of Fortune’s Term Sheet podcast. “You just have to fail a million times.”
Trained as an attorney, the 30-year-old founder began his career at a securities and antitrust law firm. In 2022, he walked away from that traditional path to launch Harvey, a company building AI tools for lawyers like a smart assistant for drafting and research. He has since attracted investment from the OpenAI Startup Fund, Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins.
Winston Weinberg. (Photo by Big Event Media/Getty Images for HumanX Conference)
The journey, however, has been anything but linear. A string of missteps and setbacks marked Harvey’s early days, and Weinberg says those failures fundamentally reshaped how he thinks about both success and defeat. For example, in early 2024, when Harvey was valued at around $700 million, Weinberg pursued a merger with a more “traditional” company. The deal ultimately fell through because Harvey would have had to take on too much debt to finance it.
“I remember we had a week of just being like, What is the future of our company? And how do we build this?” Weinberg recalled on The Upstarts Podcast last month.
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