Winston Weinberg is the CEO and Co-Founder of Harvey, the leading professional services platform engineered with AI for law, tax, and finance. Winston has raised over $980M for Harvey from Sequoia, a16z, GV, Elad Gil and more with a last round price of $9.2BN post-money. Before founding Harvey in August 2022, Winston was an attorney at O'Melveny & Myers LLP, specializing in antitrust and securities litigation.
AGENDA:
04:10 #1 Thing Every Founder Needs to Do Everyday
05:33 Must Do Daily Routines and Productivity Tips for CEOs
12:45 How to Get Sequoia and a16z Term Sheets
15:06 Why VCs Suck at Helping Companies Hire?
27:01 What No One Understands About Enterprise AI Adoption
38:06 AI's Impact on Professional Services
39:26 Future of Law Firms: Do They Die?
43:38 What Everyone Should Know That No One Tells You About Hiring in Europe
47:08 I Have Massive Trust Issues…
54:17 Biggest Lessons on Effective Deal-Making
59:20 Cold Emailing OpenAI and It Leading to a Term Sheet
01:02:33 Quick Fire Round
Try NEXOS.AI for yourself with a 14-day free trial: https://nexos.ai/20vc
In this recap episode, we highlight the best moments from our 2025 interviews and reflect on the ideas that defined the year.
Featuring:
David Rubenstein (co-founder of Carlyle)
Yamini Rangan (CEO of HubSpot)
Ben Chestnut (co-founder of Mailchimp)
Winston Weinberg (co-founder and CEO of Harvey)
Garrett Lord (co-founder of Handshake)
Aidan Gomez (co-founder and CEO of Cohere)
Michelle Zatlyn (co-founder of Cloudflare)
Evan Spiegel (co-founder and CEO of Snap)
Connect with Joubin
X: https://x.com/Joubinmir
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joubin-mirzadegan-66186854/
Email: grit@kleinerperkins.com
Follow on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/company/kpgrit
Follow on X:
https://x.com/KPGrit
Learn more about Kleiner Perkins: https://www.kleinerperkins.com/
2025 has thus far been a year of great leaps and advances in AI technology. And Sarah and Elad have spoken with some of the most enterprising founders and scientific minds in the field of AI today. So we’re revisiting a few of our favorite conversations on No Priors so far in 2025 – Winston Weinberg (Harvey), Dr. Fei-Fei Li (World Labs), Brendan Foody (Mercor), Dan Hendrycks (Center for AI Safety), Noubar Afeyan (Flagship Pioneering), Brandon McKinzie and Eric Mitchell (OpenAI o3), Isa Fulford (OpenAI), Arvind Jain (Glen), and Dr. Shiv Rao (Abridge).
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Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil
Chapters:
00:00 – Episode Introduction
0:21 – Winston Weinberg on Leaning into New Capabilities
02:01 – Dr. Fei-Fei Li on Spatial Intelligence
04:13 – Brendan Foody on AI Disruption in the Workforce
06:10 – Dan Hendrycks on the Geopolitics of Superintelligence
08:06 – Noubar Afeyan on Entrepreneurship
10:38 – Brandon McKinzie and Eric Mitchell on Reasoning Models
12:41 – Isa Fulford on Training Deep Research
13:49 – Arvind Jain on Innovating Enterprise Search
16:21 – Dr. Shiv Rao on AI’s Human Impact
18:58 – Conclusion
Six leaders from across tech — from SaaS and semis to law and logistics — come together for our 250th episode milestone in this very special AI recap, where we unpack how new advances are transforming the way industries function, and how work gets done.
Featuring:
• Bret Taylor (Sierra Co-founder)
• Winston Weinberg (Harvey Co-founder and CEO)
• Matt Murphy (Marvell Technology Chairman and CEO)
• Yamini Rangan (HubSpot CEO)
• Chris Urmson (Aurora CEO)
• Varun Mohan (Windsurf Co-founder and CEO)
Connect with Joubin:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joubin-mirzadegan-66186854/
- X: https://x.com/Joubinmir
Email: grit@kleinerperkins.com
Learn more about Kleiner Perkins: https://www.kleinerperkins.com
Harvey CEO Winston Weinberg explains why success in legal AI requires more than just model capabilities—it demands deep process expertise that doesn’t exist online. He shares how Harvey balances rapid product development with earning trust from law firms through hyper-personalized demos and deep industry expertise. The discussion covers Harvey’s approach to product development—expanding specialized capabilities then collapsing them into unified workflows—and why focusing on complex work like international mergers creates the most defensible position in legal AI.
Hosted by: Sonya Huang and Pat Grady, Sequoia Capital
Guests: Winston Weinberg, CEO & co-founder of Harvey; and Ilya Fushman, partner at Kleiner Perkins
“If you think about pretty much any job out there in the world, we will have some sort of [AI] copilot,” says Kleiner Perkins partner Ilya Fushman. “The question is, who are the right folks to build it, and what’s their vision?”
For Harvey CEO & co-founder Winston Weinberg, the vision is clear: Silicon Valley cannot and should not try to disrupt the legal profession by automating the job of lawyers. Instead, he says, they need to have “respect for the industry” before designing AI solutions that speed up specific tasks.
“These industries are incredibly complex,” Winston says. “Legal is one of the oldest professions known to man. There are firms that are over a hundred years old. There are firms that are hundreds of years old, and having a brand that says, ‘We are partnering with the industry to transform it’ versus ‘We are just going to steamroll the industry’ is really important for us.”
Chapters:
(01:16) - The zeitgeist switch
(02:58) - What is Harvey?
(06:10) - Chief Law Officers
(07:58) - Agentic workflows
(09:43) - Ilya’s investment thesis
(12:48) - Collaborating with AI
(16:05) - Task automation
(20:52) - Why is it called Harvey?
(23:14) - Respecting the legal industry
(26:43) - Winston’s past jobs
(28:47) - First steps
(32:13) - Scaling the company
(35:02) - Scaling yourself
(37:19) - Who works for Harvey
(40:50) - Making mistakes
(43:15) - Making sacrifices
(45:51) - Growing too fast
(50:50) - Setting priorities
(54:54) - Harvey’s competitors
(57:38) - Internal virality
(01:00:46) - Testing Harvey’s limits
(01:03:29) - Who Harvey is hiring
(01:04:01) - What “grit” means to Winston
Mentioned in this episode: ChatGPT, the Fortune 500, Microsoft Copilot, Gabe Pereyra, Activision, Excel, Counsel AI Corporation, Suits, Harvard University, Netflix, Dell, O'Melveny & Myers, Hueston Hennigan, Meta, Reddit, Jason Kwon, Anthropic, Marissa Mayer, Eric Schmidt, Google, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Glean.
Links:
Connect with Winston
Twitter
LinkedIn
Connect with Ilya
Twitter
LinkedIn
Connect with Joubin
Twitter
LinkedIn
Email: grit@kleinerperkins.com
Learn more about Kleiner Perkins
This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm
This week on No Priors, Sarah sits down with Harvey cofounder and CEO Winston Weinberg. Harvey is one of the leading application layer AI companies, building domain-specific AI for law firms, professional service providers, and the Fortune 500. They are already working with companies like Bridgewater, KKR, PWC, and O’Melveny with over $500M in funding from OpenAI, Sequoia, Kleiner, GV and Elad and Sarah. In this episode, Sarah and Winston cover AI product strategy, the future of professional services, company values, keeping up with research, and the law industry of the future.
Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to show@no-priors.com
Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @WinstonWeinberg
Show Notes:
0:00 Introduction
2:39 Harvey’s founding story
3:46 Capability improvement
6:39 Building teams around AI capabilities
9:17 End to end task completion
12:37 Beginning with large industry leaders
17:21 Working with users skeptical of automation
20:40 Being a lawyer today and in the future
26:02 Adapting product for other domains
26:58 Hiring philosophy at Harvey
30:39 Lessons and mistakes as a founder
32:53 Personal drive
40:21 Advice to other founders
44:35 Prediction for next ChatGPT moment
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