Scaling with Taste: Cecilia Ziniti on GC AI’s Series B and the Discipline Behind Hypergrowth

A real-time debrief on a breakout moment. GC AI just announced its Series B led by Scale Venture Partners and Northzone after crossing $10M ARR and serving legal teams at more than 1,000 companies in under two years.

Founder and CEO Cecilia Ziniti returns to First Builders to talk about going from day one to “kindergarten,” keeping the quality bar high while hiring fast, and why customer milestones matter more than funding.

In this conversation, Cecilia shares:
– How GC AI kept customer love strong while growing from hundreds to 1,000+ companies
– The framework for roadmap acceleration tied to real user feedback
– What changed from Series A to Series B—and how to decide how much to raise
– How to hire for taste and maintain discipline during hypergrowth
– Why customer obsession is still the ultimate growth strategy

It’s an inside look at scaling a company with taste, discipline, and an unwavering focus on customers.

FOLLOW CECILIA ZINITI

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ceciliaziniti
GC AI: https://gc.ai
Email: cecilia@gc.ai

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Transcript

0:04

Welcome to First Builders, the podcast for those who shape companies from the ground up. Today's is a special episode as we're having Chicilia Zaniti back on the podcast. Those of you that listened to our last episode with her will remember that she went from early career product roles to founding lawyer on Amazon Alexa to VP of Legal at Cruz and general counsel at Replit. Most recently, she co-founded GCAI to serve in-house lawyers like herself with former Replit coworker Bardia Porvicul. We invested in GCAI's first round of capital, and in less than 18 months, they've achieved over 10 million ARR and are used by legal legal teams inside of over 900 companies. Now this week they announced their Series B led by Scale Venture Partners in North Zone. It's a huge testament to what first builders are capable of, and we're having her back on the podcast to give us the inside scoop on this moment. Chitelia, welcome back on the show and congrats. Thank you. Thank you, Amber. It's great, it's great to be here. Yeah. Well, first off, like what does this milestone mean for GCAI and for you personally? Tomorrow, November 8th, is the second birthday of the company. We incorporated on November 8th of 23. You know, I think this will wait for the official announcement, so maybe it it's a week delayed. But thinking about that we would be serving, now I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna give you updated numbers, a thousand companies and you know, more ARR is like I knew that building a product for my former self for in-house legal would hit because there had no one else had been serving in-house lawyers the way that we do. Um, but I didn't know how much it would. So it's been incredibly exciting to see just like this dogged focus on the customer result in in the commercial success. And you know, it's fun because it's also first circle in the sense that I was actually a lawyer for you, Amber, at Cruz. Yeah, Amber was my internal client. And so the fact that she believed in me that making people like me, in-house lawyers like me, better would be a great business is is borne out, and it's it's so rewarding to be here. Thank you. Yeah, and and right now a lot of us are hearing about the top AI companies scaling faster than the tech industry has really ever seen, and you're definitely one of them. So, how does it feel for that to happen so fast? So it kind of feels like I mean, the closest analog, we talked about this on the show last time, is really parenting, where you're like, oh my gosh, I blinked and now I have a kindergartner. Like that's really what it is. Totally. Like I blinked and now you know we have a thousand customers. I remember the celebration when we had a hundred. I remember the celebration when we had a million in RR. And and it it's kind of this idea that you put one foot in front of the other and then you kind of look up and realize where you are. So that's what I would say is like focusing on the journey and the kind of days are short, but the years are long. Like that's kind of how how it is, where it's like, wow, okay, like we've done what we said we were gonna do, made the platform, you know, one percent or more better every day, and the year you're 38% better. And so that's what I would say is the main thing is this like, yes, of course, it was a crazy amount of work, and the the the day-to-day work is is really um, you have to have that discipline to put in the work day to day. But when you do and you gotta take a minute, particularly these milestones like a funding raise um or a customer milestone, which I think are actually more important, you see that and you're like, well, hey, look at that. It's great. Yeah, absolutely. And I love that you just referred to your company as a kindergartner, and it kind of ties back to, I think something we discussed on the last podcast uh from your time at Amazon was that Jeff Bezos had this day one mentality all the time. And so it's cool that you've made it all the way to Series B and uh so much revenue, over a thousand customers, and you're still like, you know, it's just kindergarten, we've got a long way to go. So yeah, how are you thinking about what's next, I guess? I mean, that's exactly right. Like the day one mentality is one of the things that I've taken the most from Amazon. That anything you can do, you can do excellently, and customers will always want you to do it better. And so when I think about what's next, it's really like we have a roadmap that's a mile long of things that our customers, our current customers, are asking us, let alone the people that are new. And so it's really more about like continuing to deliver. We had a you know an early innovation lead around how we're building the AI, how we were doing our rag, how we were doing um, you know, tool calling and other ways to do that. We were the first to come out and legal AI to come out with uh basically perplexity like web research. And now we're just building on top of it. People want more, they want more agentic capabilities, they want the ability to uh you know direct the legal AI in certain ways. So I would say roadmap acceleration is the primary thing that we're focused on. But also, this is you know, this is a big moment in AI, right? So as you saw it probably in your LP, you know, summit uh recently is like every company of every type, you know, from manufacturing to retail to e-commerce to logistics to healthcare, we're all thinking about how to work better with AI. And we're in this moment that's just like this critical moment, like 95 for the internet, where it's like this is where incredible businesses will be made because they they're able to meet that moment. So that's like I think one of the things I've been thinking about for the fundraiser is like how do we meet the moment? Yeah, absolutely. And then how are you kind of making it work internally day to day? So we're hiring like crazy. So anybody here looking for a role, go to market, operations, engineering, marketing, just across functions, we're hiring. But in terms of how to do it, it's like, you know, I think a lot about kind of scaling things that that I and my co-founder used to do, right? So a great example of that is I teach classes on AI, and now we have a team of people that do that. And I'm like, how do we take some of the knowledge that I've I've gained from teaching you know 55 cohorts, thousands of lawyers how to use AI and bake it in, right? So, how do you go from a great chef to a great restaurant? Um, you know, that's a little bit theoretical, but on a very kind of brass tax level, we literally we just closed an office lease in San Mateo and we're thinking, you know, we're looking at uh, you know, we've constantly upgraded the curriculum, hired a designer so the decks are really nice, and like, you know, thinking about the pedagogy of how people encounter legal AI, but even just like fixing small things, right? So like I get no greater joy than when I open up our feedback channel in Slack and I see four different AEs posting, hey, a customer asked me for this today, or hey, a customer was really delighted about this, or someone just we had someone from like our marketing team who was using the product and was like, hey, I tried to attach something a little bit confusing, where I exited out of that. Okay, what's the business value of that? Hard to say, but we've got now a team of 30 people who are using the product every day and who are making that kind of um that feedback, and then we we made that change later that day, right? So we have AI that we can use to literally, you know, at cursor, make this fix, we make the fix. And guess what? The platform is X percent more pleasant to use for everybody. So thinking about like institutionalizing and building that both the customer obsession and the discipline to put one foot in front of the other across functions, that's what I'm really focused on. And you know, there's more kind of like more startup lore type of stuff of like, you know, you know, raise the bar with every hire, hire people who are better than me at marketing or operations or finance or pick your function. That's been um, I think the biggest uh opportunity that we have at this phase. Yeah. And speaking of that customer obsession, I remember actually when you closed your seed round, there was a dinner where customers and investors and the team came together, and there was a lawyer sitting across from me at the table that was a customer of GCAI, and I remember them saying this was the tool that they were using at work, second only to Gmail, which is crazy. That was just at seed stage. And um, you know, me on the back end being able to see the investor updates, it's been crazy to see as you've grown that customer love has stayed so strong. And so I'm curious, like, what's your secret sauce? Because the fact that last week I saw you had over 900 customers, and this week it's you know over a thousand, you're growing so fast externally with sales, but also growing the team so fast internally to keep up with it. How do you keep that quality bar so high? Every day, every decision, every slack. I mean, it is that part I would say is the biggest challenge is like scaling that. And you know, there were uh so Sarah Guo did a great article on taste where it's like you hire people, and I think Dylan Field has said the same, but like you hire people that really care and people where you know it's like this level of of detail orientation is like so, you know, like I hung a clock at home and it was like a few inches too high, and for like a week, I'm like that's not gonna work, we're gonna move it. And it's like hire people that literally get hives if the clock's in the wrong spot, and you know, and care enough to move it because obviously I could leave it, but it's like how much more joy are you gonna have? But it but it's a challenge, and not everybody wants to work that way. I think I think that's the case. And you know, they maybe they're not, we talked about this a little bit on the podcast last time, is like, you know, a high growth startup is doing something right and probably maintaining some kind of excellence bar. Um, and based on that, you know, if you if you don't fill up to it, I I I think there was a clip of Michael Jordan that was very popular among BC and venture-backed companies uh five or so years ago where he's like, look, you're gonna push people, and then some people don't want to be pushed. And I I think that's right. So that's the hardest part, is where you've got people who are are good, but but may bristle at being pushed like that. But the flip side for me is always the positive of like, so all our all hands, we just had an all hands a couple hours ago, is like we're posting the numbers, we're looking at that. It's fun to win. So you have to get people that think it's fun to win. And if that means you move the clock two inches and you gotta rehang it, that's what it means. And so, like that recognition that that's a privilege, I think is the is is the is the biggest part. But you know, is it is and this is something where you know, back to day one, Jeff Bezos, people would ask me about it, and he explained that you know, disagreeing commit for a leader doesn't mean you're tired and you don't care. It means you do care and you trust the team because it's very easy as a leader to be like, all right, you've worn me down. I don't, you know, I don't care, pick whatever pricing you want. And and I don't I have to resist very hard um doing that. And I I think I've done I think I've done a good job, but also you know, have the maturity, you know, there was the founder mode article, and you know, I think that that tossed up a little bit of a little bit of debate, but the like the idea that like if the founder stops caring, you're dead. And I think that would that would extend that to the whole team. Totally. And what just kind of like stepping back from a macro perspective, what has felt easy and what has felt hard uh if you were to pick like one thing about building GCAI to date? What has felt easy is definitely relating with customers. Um, I think people can tell when you care about them and they remember and they recommend you to friends. And so that part has been relatively easy because our stated goal and our actual goal and our actual practice is to make a product that customers love. And so I think when people recognize that and the dividends it's paid are higher than I even expected. So that's the easy part. The hard part is like I would say, you know, for any builder, you have these moments of doubt and you just you just will, like, and it and it's not anything that you can necessarily predict, and it might be some dumb thing, right? Like we had a uh basically an accounts payable person pay uh like a like a phishing invoice, all right. And so obviously frustrating, annoying, bad operations, but it got to me more than you would think. Like it like tanked the day, and I'm like objectively, okay, it's whatever a thousand dollars, who cares? But just the fact of that and being able to have the judgment to just like let that stuff go, or just be like setting systems a place to not have that happen, I would say dealing with the the randomness and the and the kind of like just like things randomly happen that are very good, things will randomly happen that are bad. And I think um, you know, Brian Chesky talks about this, a lot of builders talk about this, that like you don't even necessarily know or can predict those. And so having the resilience to have those things happen, you know, move on and not let them tank your day or whatever is I would say the hardest part. Yeah, and sometimes I felt that too, even just building the council. Like if you have a great day and you bring on a new investor or you close a new sale or something big happens, you're on this high. But the higher you let yourself go, the lower you can crash when something bad happens because you're just expecting good all the time. So yeah, it's more about like just mood management, uh, expectation management as a as a founder. So I hear you. Um yeah, and then you know, your series A wasn't that long ago. You've been growing so fast. What would you say was different about raising series A versus series B? So the fact of product market fit has always been a thing for us. We were very lucky to have product market fit almost immediately when we started selling. But the fact of like, is this some kind of you know, brute force reason that we're selling, I think was a question, but this time it just wasn't because we went in having you know several hundred customers, 700, 800, and just usage metrics that were very clear. So this time, you know, we were oversubscribed and very lucky. We're working with investors that we're really excited to work with. And, you know, we were able to be a little bit, you know, pretty picky about sharing, you know, not only, you know, a good fund and you know, obviously the capital, but that we could go with investors that really saw that this like kind of customer-obsessed approach was the right one. Because, you know, there's a lot of ways to build great companies. There are customers that are companies that are marketing led or that are sales led, or that, you know, Berkshire Hathaway, of course, famously has like, you know, their website looks like it's from 1995, but yet they're incredible. So, like, there's a lot of ways to build a great business. And so I think this time the round was like, okay, your way, GCAI's way of building a great business is is is is one that's gonna result in in venture returns and and sort of already has very quickly. That was a little bit different. I mean, at the A, like I love our A investors, we're sound ventures then, and then obviously worked with the council at seed and um and others at seed that that we're very happy with, but um, but it was a different feeling that like now it's about really like we've nailed it, now scale it was really going in. Yeah, exactly. I feel like as you move from seed to series B and growth stage, it goes from like investors, at least from my perspective, are thinking of talent recognition at the start, and then later it's like we're not talking about anecdotes or early data anymore. It's like, is there enough data here to make a decision? Um, and people can kind of no longer say there's not enough data on GCAI with so many customers and uh so many reps at this point. So that's awesome. And you mentioned that it was oversubscribed, and I remember all the conversations we had about that as you were trying to figure out, you know, who you're gonna take for this round. Um, did you decide to raise as much as you could, or did you limit it to a strategic portion? Just for the founders listening, how were you kind of thinking about that? We did not want to overraise, and we were very specific that this raise was gonna take us to 250 million in revenue, and we kind of did the math and and worked on a financial model around that. Um, you know, some debate, right? Because there was there is a an argument to be made that you should build a war chest. But my advice there is like these are first class problems. Like the fact of raising or not, if I'm honest, it's kind of binary. Where it's like if you are able to raise, you're probably able to raise more than you even need. And so then it's like it's like thinking about that. Um, you know, for us, like there's some competitive dynamics at play. Everybody knows who the big people are in legal AI, it's fine. But you know, I don't ever want it to be the case of like they're really good at fundraising, like I don't want people telling me that I'm really good at fundraising. Maybe I am, but I want it to be like I'm really good at building a great business. And I have seen CEOs who are just phenomenal at fundraising and not particularly good at operators, and those are not good businesses, and so you know, that's that's something that I that I thought about too. You know, that being said, like, is it do I feel you know comfortable that our burns pretty low, notwithstanding that we've raised a lot and and I'm gonna be managing that and going after the opportunity, like of course, but um yeah, we probably could have raised twice as much as we did, and then just but I didn't do that. Then how did being better known this time around, having gone and raised a seed in a Series A in the past, shape sort of investor dynamics or those conversations? Were you talking to a lot of the same people or totally new group of VCs? We did pitch some of the same folks, and we had some people who'd missed out on our A and then you know came in here. Um investor, you know, a Glay Ventures was super excited to work with them, um, had just been very consistent building a relationship over time and you know, made allocation for them and I'm just super excited about the value they bring in the pitch process, introduced us to a bunch of customers, introduced us to a pricing consultant, did a whole bunch of like just like very value add stuff. In terms of you know, the bigger names, like you know, I think what is it, Ryan at Flexport posted yesterday that he's like Sequoia has passed on me 10 times, I don't really care who runs them. And I read that and I thought, you know what, you and me both, but I also thought, you know what, if if if I don't there's enough people that believe, I don't have to chase people that don't. Like build a business enough that you can just not care. And you know, it's also like you know, going back to the school thing, you know, I I went to Berkeley for law school, did incredibly well my first year, could have transferred to Harvard or Stanford, but was like, no, I'm a great experience here, and and why would I do that? They're more expensive anyways, and I'm making these connections and I'm gonna like have this great experience. And now, you know, a lot of my Berkeley classmates are my customers. And it turned out that going to Berkeley set me up to do this, like basically tech law practice that's been my whole career. And so, like, you can't know in advance, like the serendipity. I will say my advice for founders would be that go with investors that increase your luck surface area. So, this is like one of these Tim Ferris type of concepts, but I very wholeheartedly believe it. And I have seen that having a lot of people around the table, it's annoying to get like, you know, consents and whatever and all the corporate stuff. But I would say, and I think Siki Chen from Runway has said this too, that having, you know, a lot of people that want you to win, like in general, that's better than fewer people wanting you to win. Absolutely. Uh, and what do you hope that founders and legal leaders take away from watching your path? Being the best you you can be and constantly learning, constantly increasing that lux surface area. Things have paid off in ways that I could never have imagined. Like connections that I've made, you know, we have customers who were people I interviewed for jobs ago. Um, you know, I was uh uh briefly uh during a sabbatical, I was a fractional general counsel, so I have incredible empathy for our customers that that do that. And at that time learned just enough healthcare to know, like, hey, um, I know the basic issues in healthcare law, but I knew that I wasn't ever gonna be an exceptional healthcare attorney. So just like the every experience that you have, it really, you know. I mean, Steve Jobs, of course, he's brilliant, but this like you can't write your calligraphy going forwards is just going backwards. Ergo, do things that are gonna, that are gonna, you know, make a good story and you're proud of, and regardless. And so that's I would say my biggest advice. And for lawyers, like, you know, we're just a little bit more risk averse. So I would say, like, this sort of like worst thing that happens thinking, you know, the worst thing that happens is the job doesn't work out, and you go back to being a lawyer. It's not, it's not any kind of tragedy. Nobody can take away your past bar exam, you passed it already, and so you have this incredible safety net to go back to. So there's a book that I read called Burn the Boats, uh, Matt Higgins, and he basically makes the point that like, don't worry so much about plan B because then you're not focused on plan A. And so I I definitely think that that's advice that particular lawyers can take. And founders, like, if you've already made the leap to become a founder, you know, you've done that and and just you know, do what you can one foot in front of the other every day to make it succeed. Yeah. And there's another thing that I heard as you were talking through that, which is leave a good impression on everybody that you work with because you know, the fact that you were able to bring people on as customers that you interviewed four jobs ago, uh, is just a testament. And the fact that you have scaled so fast and we're doing all those workshops, I imagine that was one of the ways that you were able to get so many people in to learn about GC AI in the first place. Um, and I feel that too as a VC, you know, I've invested in multiple former cruise co-workers, and you know, I hear pitches from Snap and different places like that. And uh I think if anybody's like early career here thinking, um, is what I'm doing right now mattering, or should I just kind of coast or should I go all out? Um, I think going all out and just being like somebody that others around you look at as a top performer really does pay off long term. So um I credit you for that too. Um, but anyways, it's I really appreciate you being on the show today, and I'm so excited about what's ahead for GCAI. Is there anything you want to plug kind of moving forward? How do people get in touch with you? How do they get GCAI inside of their companies? Absolutely. So um gc.ai, a four-letter domain, which you know, the IP lawyer and me bought it and was so excited to do that. But check us out at gc.ai, um, find me on LinkedIn, so Chichilia is in needy on LinkedIn. Um, but in terms of getting it for your company, you know, just mention builders if you email us sales at gc.ai or just email myself, email me chichilia at gc.ai. And you know, the pitch really is that you know, any company has legal considerations, and you know, we give every company a legal advantage. And we're seeing this, particularly in companies now with lawyers. Will we do have a goal post B to sell to companies without lawyers? But if you have in-house counsel, um, they should be using gc.ai. I'll give them a personal demo myself if you're a friend of the council. Um, so reach out. Um, and then on the classes, um, we teach these workshops and just just come and try it because I think as a leader, like if you're not already seeing gains from AI right now, you're you're you need to get on board. This is my is my advice. And it should be fun. Like, that's the thing is that our users and people that use AI have more or report more satisfaction at work. So, like, why wouldn't you? You're gonna get productivity gains and your people are gonna be happier. Like, why wouldn't you be doing it? So, so reach out. Um, I feel super lucky to work with you, um, Amber. And um, thanks again for having me on. I feel so lucky to be part of the journey. Thank you, Chatelia. Hey, thanks a lot. Have a great day. Me too.