·S1 E133

Inside Canada’s Fastest Growing AI Company | Spellbook, Scott Stevenson

March 12

1h 35m

Episode Description

Scott Stevenson is the Co-founder and CEO of Spellbook.

Spellbook is an AI copilot for contract review and drafting, essentially “Cursor for lawyers.” They have 4,000 customers in 80 countries, and to my knowledge is the fastest growing AI company in Canada, and the largest company in the world built on a Microsoft Word plugin.

Scott has been building in legal AI longer than almost anyone. We talk about why legal software was essentially untouched before LLM’s, why the market is so hot right now, if it’s sustainable, and how Spellbook navigates product differentiation compared to horizontal AI products like ChatGPT.

We talk about why fine-tuning your own models was one of the biggest mistakes early AI companies made, how to build a network effect as a vertical AI product, and Spellbook’s philosophy of “Don’t sharpen your axe when the chainsaw is coming out tomorrow”.

Spellbook spent a few years finding PMF before really taking off in 2022, and Scott shares their playbook for launching over 100 product experiments in three years, how to know when to lean in, and what it’s been like scaling Spellbook post-PMF.

Thank you to Numeral and Flex for supporting this episode.

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Timestamps:

(0:30) Spellbook: “Cursor for Contracts”

(3:08) Building the world’s largest Microsoft Word plugin

(14:06) Why legal software was untouched before LLMs

(18:32) $30 trillion moves through contracts annually

(20:51) Why ChatGPT won’t replace vertical tools

(25:15) Fine-tuning was the biggest mistake in AI

(30:00) Differences between pro and amateur gamers

(37:38) Top-down vs. bottoms-up in legal AI