Sarah Du
How Great Teams Build: Lessons & Reflections from Working with Ivo
I’ve sometimes described the difference between operating (i.e. being at a startup) and investing like this: imagine you’re back in school. As an investor, you’re taking a bunch of different classes, but every homework assignment looks the same. As an operator, you’re only in one class, but every homework assignment is different.
Earlier this summer, I had the chance to dive deep into a subject and work alongside one of my favorite high-growth AI companies and Uncork portfolio companies, Ivo.
Ivo is the trusted AI layer for contracts. Built for in-house legal teams, and adopted across the business. From redlining to repository, Ivo helps teams review, manage, and understand contracts faster and more consistently than ever before. The team is ambitious, talented, and deeply experienced (many are former lawyers themselves), and they’re moving fast to meet a huge market need.
Over the summer, I worked alongside the team on everything from writing product specs to creating product demo videos to crafting sales materials — a chance to see up close how great products are designed, built, and turned into something customers love.
Ivo’s Customer Advisory Board
A couple of takeaways — simple in concept, but powerful in practice — that I hope can be helpful to others building at this stage:
1. Speed builds trust
Ivo’s team ships fast — sometimes turning around a feature overnight to meet a customer request. It’s obvious, but still underrated: speed is a startup’s greatest advantage. Responsiveness doesn’t just solve the immediate problem, it builds a reputation for reliability and partnership.
2. Market pull changes everything
Ivo has what every founder (and investor) dreams of: strong inbound demand from the right buyers. In-house legal teams are actively searching for solutions in this space, and Ivo’s credibility and product quality mean they’re often first call. This creates a very different go-to-market motion — one where the challenge is less about getting attention and more about scaling to serve the interest quickly and well. As they say, rising tide lifts all boats.
3. LLM engineering: small tweaks, big gains
Even without giving away the recipe, it’s clear that how you prompt and evaluate large language models makes a huge difference. Sometimes a single, well-crafted prompt can replace what used to take multiple steps — reducing the effects of compounding errors and hallucinations. And giving the model a graceful “I don’t know” option can be the difference between a confident wrong answer and a trustworthy one (LLMs aren’t so good at admitting when they don’t know something). This deliberate approach to prompting and evaluation is what enables Ivo’s platform to achieve industry-leading accuracy.
4. Enterprise AI adoption: great product and people
At Ivo, trials and implementations are often hands-on and collaborative. They require close involvement of domain experts, personalized training, and joint brainstorming of use cases. Often, customers may not realize all the problems your product can solve — especially as the product surface area continues to expand.
This makes tight communication loops critical. At Ivo, that means not just sales and customer success staying close to product, but also domain experts embedded in the team who guide implementation and product design. That mix of customer-facing insight and subject matter expertise helps both educate customers and channel the right feedback back to product and engineering. The startups that get this right treat customer adoption not just as a sales motion, but as a cross-functional effort.
5. Where VCs can actually help most
From working alongside the team, three areas stood out as the most valuable ways investors can help a company at this stage:
Hiring: As the saying goes, the company you build is the people you hire. Scaling talent can often be the growth bottleneck.
Fundraising: Providing benchmarks, sharpening the narrative, and opening doors to the right investors — fundraising is arguably one of the few areas investors have “domain expertise” in :)
High-leverage customer intros: Connecting (or reconnecting) the right prospects with the right solution.
Ivo’s Repository Launch Party
Spending time inside Ivo was a reminder of just how much speed, customer focus, and a killer team matters. Ivo is hiring across engineering, product, and GTM — if you like working on challenging problems with a high-caliber team in one of the most interesting applications of AI, learn more here or message me!
