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
It’s great that people are trying not only to earn money but also to inspire others to work and create their own things. Neural networks are our future, and we can develop them. Each of us can. And that in itself is inspiring.
mind-opening pitch. Thanks for sharing it with us
wow i never thought about it like that
TL;DR 🚀
Building a successful AI startup requires picking valuable problems where AI can assist, replace, or do the unthinkable, deeply understanding the domain, rigorously evaluating AI outputs, and focusing on product quality over marketing.
🚀 Key Points
– Pick ideas where AI can assist professionals, replace jobs, or enable previously impossible tasks 💡
– Focus on understanding exactly what professionals do and break tasks into clear steps for AI to follow ⚙
– Use rigorous, objective evaluations to improve AI reliability from demo to production ✅
– Build a great product first; marketing and sales follow naturally if the product truly solves problems 📈
– Price AI services based on value delivered, listen to customers, and build trust through comparisons and pilots 🤝
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this is super helpful for anyone starting out
beautifully spoken, thank you
who knew building ai could be this wild
great
seems like Jerry Seinfeld appearing in a different domain
Gold