a16z · Sep 27, 2026 · 48m · 32m saved
With Maggie Landers, VP of Talent at Harvey
Maggie Landers said Harvey has added more than 1,000 employees in the year since she joined and will likely reach about 2,000 by the end of 2026.
Most companies that grow that fast add layers of process to slow mistakes down. Landers said Harvey, the legal AI company, has kept a single values interview for every candidate, posts its board decks for all staff to read, and would rather make a wrong decision than wait for 300 people to weigh in.
"More than 70% of the company started after January 1st of this year."
Maggie Landers, VP of Talent at Harvey, on a16z, has run the hiring behind that growth. She joined a little over a year ago, as an employee somewhere in the 300s, after almost a decade at her previous company, and her own recruiting team grew from about 16 people to 80 in that time.
The full interview is covered here so you can skip it. 48 minutes of audio, 16 minutes of reading.
Here are the 15 lessons that matter.
Key Takeaways
More than 70% of Harvey's staff started in 2026, and the company expects about 2,000 employees by year-end
Harvey says it does in a month what other companies do in a quarter, and new hires are told to expect to fail more often than they succeed
Anyone can message the founders on Slack and get an answer immediately, instead of waiting weeks to present to the executive team
Board decks are posted to the whole company after each board meeting
Harvey is in its "teenage years": past product-market fit, not yet a large company with systems for everything
The recruiting team grew from about 16 to 80 people in a year, and Harvey now has more than 400 jobs open
One values interview for every candidate, built on simplicity, decisiveness and "job's not finished"
Co-founder Winston says Harvey does not "take the square root of the weather"
Engineering, product and design went from 1 office to 4 in about 18 months: San Francisco, Toronto, New York and Bengaluru
Building legal AI is a different job from building models at OpenAI or Anthropic, and Landers wants candidates to say why they chose it
1. Still a Startup at Four
The host opened with Harvey's valuation, which she said had risen from $3 billion in February 2025 to $5 billion in June, $8 billion in October and $11 billion in March 2026. Landers, who had just passed one year at the company, said the growth in customers and product had been as fast as the valuation.
Nobody inside thinks the company has made it
"But I would say that we don't take any of it for granted." — Maggie Landers
"It definitely still feels like a startup." — Maggie Landers
She said the company had just celebrated its fourth birthday, and that no one internally feels Harvey is close to the company it wants to build.
Wins are celebrated, then the next job starts
Asked whether the company celebrates, Landers pointed to a global go-to-market wins channel on Slack where staff share kudos, and to company-wide gatherings for anniversaries, product launches and milestones. One of Harvey's core values limits how long any celebration lasts.
"But we also have a job's not finished culture. It's one of our core values." — Maggie Landers
She said the team has fun and injects humor into everything, but is always thinking about what comes next.
