
11 segments available
Jake Heller is the co-founder & CEO of Casetext, the AI legal startup behind CoCounsel, which was acquired by Thomson Reuters for $650 million. In his talk at AI Startup School on June 17th, 2025, he shared how his team did it—from picking the right idea to building AI products that actually work—and how founders can turn a cool demo into a reliable tool used by real customers. Chapters: 00:00 — How We Built a $650M AI Company 01:00 — Picking the Right Idea in the AI Era 04:45 — Three Types of AI Startups: Assist, Replace, or Do the Unthinkable 09:25 — How to Build Reliable AI Products (Not Just Demos) 16:30 — The Importance of Evals and Testing 24:20 — Why Product Quality Beats Marketing and Hype 26:00 — How to Price and Sell AI Products 27:45 — Building Trust with Customers 29:30 — Product Isn’t Just Pixels, It’s Everything Around It 33:00 — What Founders Should Really Focus On 36:00 — Q&A: Picking Markets, Focus, and Defensibility
"What we're going to talk about today is how my company uh built an AI app that was so good we're able to bring it to an exit for $650 million and how you can do that too. All right, so really we're ta..."
"goes to one of these old professions like law or accounting or finance or whatever, the first thing you find out is I cannot believe that they were doing it this way. And so I immediately left that an..."
"sending them to opposing council. So that's one big category is assisting people doing their work. The second big category is just replacing the work altogether. People currently hire lawyers. What if..."
"of nuts to me is everything I'm going to say right now may sound very simple and common sensical and maybe even obvious, but the craziest is nobody's doing it. Like, nobody's picking ideas the way tha..."
"you don't have your coffee that morning, uh you wake up on the wrong side of the bed, it might just output the wrong stuff for prompts. I'm sure you've all seen this before. Even if you just use chat ..."
"marketing a lot of people really really think that when you guys series A's and series B's, you'll have people on your board who say product doesn't really matter that much if you're really good at ma..."
"loop. And this would usually cost somebody $1,000 per contract to review if they went with a traditional law firm. They're charging $500 per contract. Again, for context, a lot of the tools you guys u..."
"they're not used to using your product yet. They have like no idea what to expect. So, how do you build trust? Some really smart companies are doing like head-to-head comparisons. Keep your law firm a..."
"like growing roles at startups is these four deployed engineers, which I think is a really fancy term for just like boots on the ground people to sit next to your customer and make sure the product's ..."
">> Uh it's a great question Michael so I'll answer what I should have done and also what I did do. All right >> perfect thank you. What I should have done is at the seed stage focus on making a great ..."
"existed in both spheres of making small impacts on a small number of people um and making only small differences their lives and contrasted with you know making a huge impact on many more lawyers in o..."