AI Summary
5 min readBuilding a Team at AI Speed | Harvey’s Maggie Landers
Harvey, the AI-native legal technology company, has grown from a four-year-old startup to an organization approaching 2,000 employees, with more than 70% of its workforce joining after January of the same year. Maggie Landers, Harvey’s VP of Talent, joined when the company had roughly 340 employees and has since helped scale the team across offices in San Francisco, New York, London, Toronto, Bangalore, and a growing list of global markets including Chicago, Dallas, Dublin, Paris, Madrid, Milan, Sydney, and Singapore. The company’s valuation rose from $3 billion in February 2025 to $11 billion by March 2026, but Landers insists the internal feeling remains that of a startup: “I don’t think there’s anyone internally who feels like we’ve fully made it or actualized our potential.”
Progress Over Perfection
The defining operating principle at Harvey is a bias toward action over analysis. Landers describes the pace bluntly: “You’re going to do more in a month at Harvey than you would in a quarter somewhere else.” This speed creates a specific psychological demand. Most hires were high achievers in previous roles — “A students” — but at Harvey they must unlearn perfectionism. “There’s a lot of experimentation,” Landers says. “So you’re going to fail more than you’re necessarily going to get it right.”
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What you'll learn
- 1 (01:04) **Introduction & Harvey's Hyper-Growth** - Katie Kirsch introduces Maggie Landers, VP of Talent at Harvey, and sets the stage for a conversation about scaling culture and hiring at an AI-native company.
- 2 (06:55) **What “Harvey Still Feels Like Harvey” Means** - Maggie explains the core operating principles that define the company’s unique pace and mindset.
- 3 (10:15) **The Power of Impact and Agency** - Maggie argues that the intensity of the work is balanced by the direct, visible impact each employee has on the company's mission.
- 4 (12:00) **Founder Leadership: Winston & Gabe’s Yin and Yang** - Maggie describes how the co-founders set the tone for the culture through their unique leadership style.
- 5 (18:48) **Why People Leave (or Don’t Fit)** - Maggie gives an honest assessment of who Harvey is not for, framing the company's current stage as "teenage years."
- 6 (24:36) **Maggie’s Origin Story: Why She Joined** - Maggie shares the personal story of how she was recruited to Harvey and the unique challenge that sold her.
- 7 (29:25) **How Harvey Hires: The Values Interview** - Maggie outlines the common thread in the hiring process across different teams and geographies.
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Show Notes
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.
Resources:
Follow Maggie Landers on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/maggiecohenlanders
Follow Katie Kirsch on X: https://x.com/katiekirsch
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