As fears mount over AI replacing jobs—or workers being outpaced by more AI-savvy peers—standing still has become a liability. For Winston Weinberg, the CEO of AI legal startup Harvey—now valued at $11 billion—that reality isn’t theoretical, it’s how he runs his company.
“You have to re-earn your position every six months; you need to re-earn your role at Harvey every six months,” Weinberg said on the latest episode of Fortune’s Term Sheet podcast. “It includes me, 100%.”
The mandate isn’t about churn for the sake of it—it’s about survival in an era where innovation is compounding quickly and falling behind can lead to dire consequences. That pressure is especially acute in Silicon Valley, where startups are racing not just against time, but against each other to build the defining AI companies of the next decade. For Harvey, that’s top of mind.
“If you don’t reinvent yourself as a company and as a leader, and whatever your role is at a company right now, fast enough, you will lose,” Weinberg added in the interview with Fortune’s Allie Garfinkle.
Weinberg, a lawyer by training, cofounded Harvey in 2022 alongside Gabriel Pereyra, a former Meta and Google DeepMind AI research scientist. In the company’s early days, the pair notably cold-emailed OpenAI CEO Sam Altman—an outreach that eventually helped them secure early access to GPT-4 and backing from the OpenAI Startup Fund. Harvey, which builds AI tools for law firms and in-house legal teams, has also attracted investment from Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins.
