The CEO of $2 billion Harvey rival Legora says he still interviews everyone and asks this question

• The CEO of Legora said he is still closely involved with hiring at the 300-person startup.
• "I try to create missionaries, not mercenaries," Max Junestrand said about his hiring strategy.
• The Swedish company competes with the US-based legal AI darling, Harvey.

This CEO says that when you're signing up to work at his startup, you're in for a ride.

On an episode of the "20VC" podcast released on Monday, the CEO of the $2 billion legal AI startup Legora shared an interview question he asks candidates to gauge their cultural fit.

"I still interview everyone, so I ask quite brutal questions about, 'Why take a hard job? You could go work somewhere else,'" Max Junestrand said.

The Swedish startup competes with San Francisco-based Harvey, which has a valuation of $8 billion.

"I try to create missionaries, not mercenaries," Junestrand said, referring to an analogy coined by Kleiner Perkins venture capitalist John Doerr years ago. "And I think we've successfully done that."

At the time, Doerr explained that mercenaries work for themselves and start companies to flip them, while missionaries are focused on working for a team and thinking about the long term.

The Legora CEO, who cofounded the startup in 2023, said he looks for people with "raw grit" who don't mind late hours. He said his staff has dinner in the office at 8 p.m., and the company signed deals on New Year's Eve.

At the company's Christmas dinner, they served mulled wine — and KPIs.

"We had the big sales dashboard in front of us at the wine thing, and everybody kept looking at it, because everybody wants momentum," he said.

Legora has 300 employees, and it plans to double the team's size during the first half of this year. A Legora representative told Business Insider that the company's head count doubled in the last six months.

Legora is among a handful of European startups reviving excitement in the region's entrepreneurship and venture capital scene. Compared to their American counterparts, European companies have traditionally faced investor skepticism for being slow, overcommitted to work-life balance, and heavily tied by regulation.

Swedish vibe coding startup Lovable, French frontier AI lab Mistral, and recently listed Swedish fintech Klarna are among other names driving the push.