Harvey reinvents its org every six months

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 17:37

   deeper building the company out today like what does it take to build an ai forward company so i reached out to pat grady and he said the one thing that he emphasized was that you've been able to reinvent the company over and over again. So what was it like from the beginning to now? And what do you think was like, what are the key unlocks along the way that you think are critical? Yeah. I mean, the key unlock is hiring for sure. Like that is it. Um, and when I say hiring, I don't just mean hiring new people. I mean like also development, right. And like promoting people, putting them into different roles, things like that. Or, or honestly, in some instances, they get outscaled and like figuring out a better role for them. But every six months, i'd say i start to get like this weird feeling of like things are just breaking right um and i feel

2. 18:25

   it's like a pressure that like builds up um and then usually hope so far what has happened is every time that has happened there's been like three big changes that i need to make and i realize i need to make them and then i make them and then like the pressure like flows off um and that happens like literally every six months i'd say um maybe three to six months something like that and it it feels like if you do not constantly change you are just going to get so behind that you die as a company right now um and i think a lot of that is actually like who do you decide to promote who do you decide to hire uh that is more important than anything else because a lot of people can't do that like it is really hard for every six months for someone to like massively change how they operate um it's even simple stuff like when i see somebody like mass starting to

3. 19:19

   really break the first thing i do is i'll go and we'll do like a calendar audit of just like really yeah seriously that's like the first thing it's i know it's so stupid and it's so simple but you go in and you do a calendar audit and you come up with like really good ways to be like do you have to do any of these things but tell me what is the main prior this week are any of these related to that prior and you will start seeing people and i do it myself like you just come up with so many excuses for why you're doing stuff and at the end of the day it's like no that's not relevant that's not relevant that's not relevant um and i think that like finding people that are really good at doing that themselves and i think there's a decent amount of people at this company now that have learned how to do that that's how you scale like that is how you scale it

4. 20:00

   It's like crazy rapid pace that normally, you know, companies need to like reinvent themselves maybe every like five years, 10 years, something like that. I think you have to do it every six months. So what's your framework for prioritization? How do you determine if you can't do something or not? Yeah. So I mean, for me, I have like a bunch of different rules. One of the really simple rules is like my chief of staff, whenever she sends me something, I have to write a paragraph for why I do it. Not kidding. You don't use an AI for this? No. It's really important because if you start for the stuff that is really, really, really important, and again, this is outside of ordinary.

5. 20:38

   I don't do this for product reviews that we do weekly. If you sit down and you can write an entire paragraph about why you're going to do something, you definitely are going to do it. If what happens is you go, it's so annoying that I have to write this down. Why would I ever need to do that you probably don't need to do it it's not that important right and then what i've found is the stuff that is really important i could write like 100 pages about what i'm doing right and i know it's it's like kind of a small silly thing but it helps a lot to get a massive unlock