Founder Snapshot
- Founder: Nick Fleisher, Co-Founder & CEO
- Company: Sandstone
- Stage: Seed
- Investors: Sequoia Capital (lead), SV Angel, Kearny Jackson
- Founded: 2025
- Previous: Formerly McKinsey, lead of AI and legal tech strategy practice
“My freshman year roommate and I decided that the dream was to drop out,” Nick Fleisher says. It was a classic Silicon Valley beginning: they built mobile apps, tried, and failed. While Nick eventually finished school and landed at McKinsey, that early itch to build never quite left him.
At McKinsey, Nick accidentally found himself leading the firm’s legal tech and AI strategy practice. He was advising Fortune 10 companies on how to navigate the messy, high-stakes intersection of law and technology. That’s where he met Jarryd Strydom, a lawyer-turned-engineer who had been an in-house attorney before joining McKinsey.
Jarryd & Nick joined forces with Liam Germain (Nick’s freshman year roommate!) and the three of them co-founded Sandstone. They all noticed the same glaring gap in the market. While everyone else was building AI for law firms, the in-house legal departments at major corporations were drowning in context they couldn’t access.
“You think about how engineers have JIRA and Linear and tools like that,” Nick explains. “On the legal side, that doesn’t really exist.”
The missing knowledge layer
The problem for an in-house lawyer isn’t that they don’t know the law - it’s that they don’t know the business. A lawyer at a company like Wayfair or Uber might spend half their day just trying to understand a single request from a sales rep. They have to hunt down Salesforce records, read Jira tickets, and chase people across Slack threads.
Sandstone was built to be the “OS” for these teams. It starts as a bot that sits on top of Outlook, Gmail, Teams, and Slack to manage the intake of work items. But the real magic is the “legal context graph” it builds in the background.
“If it’s a sales agreement that needs to be reviewed, we’re actually going to go check your Salesforce,” Nick says. “We’ll use that business context to actually suggest changes and a response so that the lawyers don’t spend time on admin data, but rather they can stay in Sandstone and focus on the actual legal work.”
By centralizing all that scattered business context, Sandstone turns the legal team from a bottleneck into “superhumans” who can see across the entire organization.
A “No Ego” culture of shared context
Sandstone is now a team of 25 in Brooklyn, backed by a $10 million seed round led by Sequoia. But despite the rapid growth and the high-profile investors, the culture remains grounded in the same “ship everything” mentality Nick and his roommate had back in college.
“Everyone here ships something and codes to some extent,” Nick says. At a recent internal hackathon, a member of the post-sales team built a bot to manage incoming bugs. At Sandstone, silos don’t exist; even the sales reps are deeply embedded in the product.
Nick is adamant about maintaining a “no ego” environment. He recalls how, at McKinsey, he watched senior partners openly ask junior team members for feedback. He’s brought that same openness to Sandstone.
“I had an AE today who started a week ago slack me feedback after we did a demo today,” Nick says. “Giving me constructive feedback on my demo - which is awesome. That’s incredible.”
This transparency extends to how they communicate. Most internal conversations happen in shared Slack channels rather than private DMs. “I want everyone to have shared communication channels and be on the same pace,” Nick explains. “Everyone gets all the context at the same time.”
The “Seller’s Paradise”
For those on the growth and sales side, Sandstone represents what Nick calls a “seller’s paradise.” Since their public launch two months ago, they’ve been running over 100 demos a week. One team member runs a podcast with 40,000 listeners who are exactly their target buyers.
“It’s sort of a seller’s paradise, if you will, of tens of thousands of accounts that are interested and we just have to go sell to them,” Nick says. One recent hire spent their first week in conversations with five Fortune 500 companies - without ever having to do a single outbound call.
But “selling” at Sandstone looks different than it does at most startups. It’s about building deep, personal empathy with the lawyers they serve. Nick tells the story of Oliver, their first growth hire.
“I literally saw him go sell to a Chief Legal Officer on a Wednesday,” Nick recalls. “And then on Friday night, he was having dinner at this guy’s house.” Oliver isn’t a lawyer, but he’s “really good at connecting with the problems and trying to get deep on what their issues are.”
Scaling the team
As Sandstone prepares to double its headcount this year, Nick is looking for people who can own problems end-to-end. He provides his team with an “unlimited AI budget,” encouraging them to leverage every tool possible to move faster.
“You could literally spend your salary’s worth on AI, and that’s fine,” Nick says. “People spend a lot on AI.”
Whether it’s an engineer who wants to be forward-deployed with customers or an AE who cares about the tiny design details that lawyers obsess over, Nick is building a team that values the craft as much as the speed.
“There’s this balance of moving very quickly, but being obsessed with design and details,” Nick says. “And that is a trait that we look for on both sides - engineering and go-to-market.”
Everything at Sandstone points back to that same core bet: that the next generation of great companies won’t just use AI to automate tasks, but to build a deeper knowledge of the business itself.
“If your legal team can be more proactive, those types of unlocks move deals faster,” Nick says. “It literally impacts every single part of the business.”
Learn More
Sandstone was born out of the acute frustration experienced by in-house legal teams who spend more time on process than progress due to a lack of shared context. The platform provides a comprehensive solution for intake, triage, execution, fulfillment, and measurement of legal work - designed to run across email, messaging, and the business tools teams already use. Sandstone is headquartered in New York. To learn more, visit www.sandstone.com
