Lexroom v. JetHR 🌊

It's time for builders #45

This week, Italian Tech Week rebranded to Wave.

I really like the concept behind it.

And the logo!

Hats off to the Vento team.

Changing a name is not easy - I saw it first-hand recently 😂

I won’t spoil anything about us for now.

Let me focus on tech waves.

What changed from my previous startup ❓

Now that we have some traction (knock on wood), I get this question a lot.

Honestly, I am the same person.

Same ambition.

Yeah, I learnt things, sure, but I’m in a totally different sector.

Whatever useful skills I am applying were honed over the years at Plug and Play and Poliferie.

The real difference is in the market and the timing.

Our users do something important and costly that GenAI alone can revolutionise.

It’s also not the most obvious sector to the VC-startup bubble, so at least in Italy, we are a first mover.

Previously, in building an alternative to LinkedIn, I was 20 years too late (and hopefully not so many too early).

Why now ⏰

This is one of those must-have slides on pitch decks.

I don’t think it’s so necessary to build a huge company.

But is it possible to do it fast without it?

Let’s take the two most famous software series-A startups in Italy right now.

Lexroom and JetHR.

Both are growing very fast and are obviously led by exceptional entrepreneurs.

The former, though, has great market timing: legal is one of the top use cases for GenAI globally.

From the outside, it seems they hit an inflection point: word of mouth and social proof are pushing growth.

I bet that their leads are afraid of falling behind if they don’t adopt Lexroom fast enough.

The latter, instead, as Ogliengo said himself, is not an easy sell.

Switching costs are high, and there is no technological breakthrough they are riding.

It’s a testament to the team’s competence that they managed to grow so fast.

It’s like Lexroom is riding a wave, while JetHR is pushing against headwinds.

Teasing Italian investors 😈

Just a year ago, no Italian VC took part in Lexroom’s seed round.

Whilst JetHR’s pre-seed was the most popular ever among local investors.

Maybe it’s just a coincidence.

Or could it be that, as an ecosystem, we are still too conservative?

Maybe better the obvious but hard problem versus the uncertain, but potentially better-timed one?

The best timing is contrarian by definition.

You go for it when nobody else has seen the wave coming.

And when it’s obvious the wave is big, it’s too late to start riding it.

Famous examples 🔎👉🚘🚀

Google and Facebook, almost from the beginning, rode some of the biggest waves the world had seen in a long time.

Tesla and SpaceX took more than a decade each before anyone thought they could make sense.

So yea ideally you ride a wave, but some entrepreneurs are even able to create waves themselves.

Sure, the latter examples are in deeptech, but scaling software and fighting bureaucracy in Italy is as hard as hardware.

What about us 🍀

We are just getting started, and we have a long way to go.

But I can’t think of any well-funded, fast-growing startup in Italy that is a pure GenAI application like us.

As you can see from our token count (700mln in total so far), which Matteo could compare with our peers at a recent AWS lunch.

Except for Lexroom, of course, but they are a few years ahead.

In one of the two most “obvious” use cases for LLMs (the other being legal) - obvious with hindsight, of course, ahah.

Tenders is more of a hidden gem.

Very far from the world of startups and VCs.

But it’s a lot of white-collar time and value competing for 10-15% of the European economy.

And all the work is about reading, analysing, comparing, and writing long documents 😉

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