Raffi Isanians (YC S24)

Attorneys are trained to spot issues. That’s literally what law school teaches. Show them your product, and the first thing they’ll say is: “the margin is off on this” Every hour they spend learning software is an hour they’re not billing. Raffi Isanians knows that because he lived it. Kirkland. Gunderson. Years inside private equity and venture work. That’s why Mage Legal has a simple standard: if a lawyer opens the product with no instructions and can’t figure it out, "we’re failing" "Comprehensive AI coverage across your entire data room. Surface red and yellow flags, draft memos, compare redlines, and ensure nothing falls through the cracks" 🎙️ Raffi Isanians (@RIsanians), Founder & CEO, Mage Legal on @thestartpod

Engineers think lawyers don't understand product. Lawyers know engineers don't understand the problem they're actually solving. Both are right. Both are wrong. And that tension? It's not a bug. It's the entire reason legal tech exists. The engineer who builds legal software without lawyers in the room isn't disrupting anything. They're building a tool that looks great in a demo and dies in a real workflow. The lawyer who dismisses every technical solution because "that's not how we do it" isn't protecting the profession. They're guaranteeing someone else will build the future without them. The legal tech companies actually winning right now? They figured out something the rest are still arguing about: You don't automate lawyers. You arm them. The best legal tech engineers I've worked with don't treat lawyers as end users to be managed. They treat them as domain experts whose decades of pattern recognition is the product's actual competitive advantage. And the best lawyers in legal tech? They don't just flag what's wrong with the product. They shape what it becomes. 3 things I've learned building at this intersection: 1. The earlier a lawyer touches the product — not as a customer, but as a co-builder — the fewer pivots you burn through. Not by a little. By orders of magnitude. 2. Engineers who understand legal workflows build tools lawyers actually adopt. Engineers who don't build beautiful software that sits unused next to a lawyer's yellow legal pad. 3. The lawyer who learns to think in user stories instead of just statutes becomes the most valuable person in any legal tech company. Full stop.

At least its honest...

You’re just not doing it right. Knowing which model to use, when, is one of the biggest gaps between “using AI” and actually getting value from it. New models ship constantly. You don’t have time to run evals across every workflow in the middle of a busy day. That’s where Mage is different. Model fusion isn’t a marketing term for us. It’s the reason outputs are materially better than our competitors. We don’t just pick a model. We often run multiple models to produce a single deliverable. Here’s a very basic example. The same question asked to two different models from two different foundation labs. Not all AI is the same.

Boil the Oceans You know the phrase: “don’t boil the ocean.” Everyone’s said it in some overly ambitious meeting. It’s good advice in normal times. It keeps teams focused. It prevents scope creep. But we are no longer in normal times, and I think it’s time to retire saying it. Artificial Superintelligence means it’s time to boil the ocean. We’ll start with a few lakes first. I was recently with a university endowment’s head of private investing who told me their engineers were terrified for their jobs after seeing what Claude Code could do. And I get it — that’s the natural first reaction. But it’s the wrong one. It’s a zero-sum reaction to a positive-sum moment. Instead of worrying about doing the same thing we’ve been doing for cheaper, why not focus on doing the thing we never even dreamed of doing? Why can’t that endowment achieve 50% net IRR instead of 10%? Why can’t a startup deliver a service that is 100x better than the incumbent? Why can’t we have fusion energy? Why can’t we talk to every single user and have a perfect understanding of every bug in our product? These aren’t rhetorical questions anymore. They’re engineering problems with paths to solutions. Here is what I think is actually going on with the fear: our fear of the future is directly proportional to how small our ambitions are. If your plan is to keep doing exactly what you’re doing, then yes, a machine that can do it faster and cheaper is terrifying. But if your plan is to do something dramatically bigger, then the machine is the best news you’ve ever gotten. If you’re a worker — someone who trades labor for a living — this is the moment to become a builder. Start a business. And if you’re already management or capital, it’s time to go 10x more hardcore on what your aspirations could be. Not eking out 5% efficiency gains. Not increasing profit margins 2% by lowering cost and firing people. Those are the old games. The new question is: what would it look like to build a product or service so good that people would happily pay 10x what they pay now? The net result of this is more jobs, not fewer. As Ryan Petersen likes to say, the human desire for more things is absolutely limitless. We can actually fulfill that desire now — if we have the agency to prompt it for ourselves. Buckminster Fuller coined the term “ephemeralization” in 1938: doing more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing. His entire vision of progress was about technology enabling radical expansion of human capability through dematerialization. He traced this from stone bridges to iron trusses to steel cables — each iteration stronger, longer, lighter, cheaper. He wasn’t describing job destruction. He was describing civilization getting better at being civilization. This is Jevons Paradox for everything. When you make a resource dramatically more efficient, you don’t use less of it — you use vastly more. Steam engines didn’t reduce coal consumption. They made coal so useful that demand exploded. The same thing is about to happen with intelligence, with labor, with every service and product we can imagine. But Jevons Paradox doesn’t activate on its own. It requires capital and management to actually raise their ambitions — to boil lakes and oceans instead of drowning them in committee That’s what startups have always been good at: moving fast in the face of radical uncertainty, building for the 10x future while everyone else is optimizing for the 1.05x present. Time to start.

Hundreds of legal AI companies. Billions in funding. The tools I needed at Kirkland & Ellis and Gunderson Dettmer still don't exist. So we built them. November 2022. GPT-3.5 drafted a ToS that was 90% right. I knew the industry was about to change. So I left. Two years later, every attorney I talked to said the same thing: "The AI tools? They're just there to make clients happy. No one actually uses them." Tech people don't know what attorneys do. Attorneys don't know how to build AI. We do both. Mage Legal.

Mage Legal just launched on @ycombinator's Launch YC! Mage: Legal Diligence for M&A and Financings. Minutes, Not Days.. Check them out: ycombinator.com/launches/PKC-m…

@HarryStebbings Go to sf. Walk around Saturday night. See who’s got the office lights still on after 2am. Wait for them to leave and invest. We are at 59 Grant. See you soon.

I really need to find unhinged founders. I'm not looking for intellectually curious. I am looking for unwaveringly obsessed, borderline psychotic individuals intent on changing a generation.

AI isn’t the competitor. Your competitors using AI are. This isn’t an AI problem--it’s an architecture problem. You can’t bolt AI onto legacy systems and expect magic. The real breakthroughs are coming from founders who are highly technical AND deeply domain-expert, rebuilding platforms from the ground up. Everyone else will spend 2–3 years trying to catch up. The gap is being created now. #AI #FutureOfWork #Innovation

Keith Rabois said it: people already use ChatGPT instead of doctors and soon they’ll use AI to buy a home. True. But buying a home is too high-stakes for raw AI. That’s why we built @ModernRealty_ ⚡️ AI speed 🧠 Licensed agents reviewing every message 🔒 Zero corners cut

The former home of Ronald & Nancy Reagan is for sale — a 12,000 sq ft riverfront estate built as California’s official Governor’s Mansion in 1975. zillow.com/homedetails/23…

AI is a superpower — but also a shortcut. Raymond’s interviewed dozens of engineers lately. Too many are clearly using AI during interviews. Pro tip: We can see the screen reflected in your glasses — watching answers generate in real time. AI should sharpen your edge, not be your crutch. If you can’t think under pressure without it, you’re not ready. Use AI to prep. Not to pretend.

The original real estate disruptor experiment is over. Rocket bought Redfin for $1.75B—exactly what it was worth at IPO in 2017. 3 hard lessons for startups: Innovation without profitability isn't sustainable ($368M in losses) Disruptors often "go native" and become what they tried to disrupt Focus beats trying to do everything #RealEstate

OpenAI to Trump: Let AI train on copyrighted work. Should we suspend copyright laws to make it easier for AI to train their models? #AILaw #CopyrightLaw #TechLegal nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news…

Redfin & Rocket's $1.75B merger is a masterclass in business survival. The 21-year-old real estate disruptor sold to a mortgage giant. Here's why it matters to everyone running a business or using a credit card: 1. Redfin had $1.2B debt, only $173M cash, and never profited. Even their $250M emergency loan had a 12% interest rate. Debt kills established companies. 2. Rocket buys Redfin's 50M monthly visitors, not agents. Smart businesses buy audiences, not assets. $140M cost cuts + $60M new mortgage revenue = smart math. 3. Redfin made $1B+ yearly revenue but bled cash. Revenue without profit is vanity. 4. One company controls your homebuying: Search (Redfin), Agents (Redfin), Mortgages (Rocket). The one-stop advantage is worth billions. 5. If growth stopped today, would margins keep you alive? Redfin's answer was no. Don't be Redfin. #BusinessLessons #StartupStrategy

Would you buy one of the nicest penthouses in SF for $2.8M? What if it was in the heart of the tenderloin. redf.in/vvDCQR

@ShaanVP @somewherehiring ModernRealty.io have your cake and eat it too.

Am I dumb to buy a home without an agent? If I'm selling my house, I want an agent. But buying -- why do I need one? Zillow to search for listings. @somewherehiring assistant to plan tours Thinking of just paying flat fee $10k for paperwork vs. $100k+ agent commission

@austin_rief Take a look at Modern Realty YC S24 by @RIsanians & @needhelptho! rchkkgs04hk.typeform.com/to/u2HNWCsl?ty…

@Jason If you want to better understand addiction and fentanyl, take a look at Soft White Underbelly on YouTube. It will entirely change your perspective. @softwhiteunderbelly?si=LIB-G5qU-rJ31GGg" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">youtube.com/@softwhiteunde…

100% of families with a loved ones suffering from these super drugs in San Francisco, wants that loved one arrested and detoxed — 100%! Yet, the socialist and commie lunatics running the city fight for these individuals to maintain their “freedom” and “right” to be on the streets and on fentanyl Why? 🤔 Why do these 3rd parties fight to keep this suffering happening? Because they are running a huge grift: $50-100k is spent on each one of these poor souls per year… at a minimum. arresting them and sending them to the tank to dry out, before sending them home or treatment, would end the “big homeless” industrial complex. These suffering junkies are their *customers* when you frame it that way, it all makes sense — who wants to lose a loyal, dedicated and wildly profitable customer?

@CCgong @ycombinator As someone also in YC right now. Your support is worth more than he can convey.

My boyfriend is in YC and this is what I come home to Friday night. I make sure that he’s fed, do his laundry cut his hair. I give feedback, customer intros, and encouragement. YC girlfriends should be granted sweat equity. @ycombinator 30 days until demo day 💪