• Partnering with Sandstone: An AI-Native Platform for In-House Legal Teams Nick and Jarryd are empowering in-house legal teams to streamline and scale their operations. • The first sentence of my Sequoia profile reads: “Happenstance has been a theme in my life-that, and being open to opportunities.” Partnering withSandstoneis Exhibit A. • I was introduced to CEO Nick Fleisher by Genevieve Forslund from our talent team. • She had flagged Nick as an up-and-comer-someone we should consider either for Sequoia itself or for one of our portfolio companies. • She also introduced him to the CEO of a cybersecurity company we’d partnered with. • That CEO fell in love with Nick immediately and gave me explicit marching orders: “Your mission is to help close Nick.” I happened to be spending a month in New York.

Article Summaries:

  • Sequoia Ventures has announced a partnership with Sandstone, an AI‑native platform designed to streamline operations for in‑house legal teams. The collaboration follows Sequoia’s identification of Sandstone founder Nick Fleisher, a former McKinsey engagement manager who leveraged AI to automate contract term extraction and build a workflow engine for general counsel. Sequoia’s talent team, led by Genevieve Forslund, introduced the firm to Fleisher, who expressed a strong preference for launching his own venture rather than joining a portfolio company. The partnership aims to deploy Sandstone’s AI‑driven legal intelligence to help understaffed legal departments shift from reactive tasks to strategic work.

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