Morgan Favier

While AI is now being applied to everything from healthcare to customer support, no single use case has yet been nearly as popular or lucrative as code writing. Jack Newton, co-founder and CEO of Clio, a Canadian law firm management software company, is convinced that legal tech is poised to be the next big winner of the LLMs era. That’s a self-interested claim — 18-year-old Clio is a legal tech company — but the numbers are hard to dismiss. Clio saw its revenue growth accelerate sharply after integrating AI into its offering in 2023. The company surpassed $200 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) in mid-2024, doubled that figure by late last year, and just announced that its ARR reached $500 million. “LLMs are so excellent for coding because all the existing code in the world is a huge repository to train on,” Newton said. “The analogy to legal is really clear.” Law firms hold massive corpuses of contracts and agreements, providing a rich basis of text-based data for AI models to learn from. “Tech companies and lawyers alike are recognizing what a huge amount of upside there is for legal with LLMs,” Newton said. Clio isn’t the only legal tech company seeing a massive revenue surge driven by AI. Four-year-old Harvey, which offers LLM AI for law firms, hit ARR …

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I’ve been keeping a Notion doc of everything I’ve been doing for the events we've been planning recently - the kickoff in Boston, the upcoming roadshow, etc. It’s messy. It’s CHAOS. It probably makes zero sense to anyone but me. But it's there. The decisions, the context, the brainstorming the things I’d do differently next time, the retro for the team to drop ideas, the agendas, it’s all in one place. And that’s what matters. When you’re building something new (like customer events at a company that hasn’t done them this way before), perfect documentation is a luxury. And it's WAY too easy to keep everything in your head (guilty 🙋‍♀️) and just use needing to move fast as a reason for skipping getting it on paper. Capturing what’s happening while it’s happening is *essential* That kickoff event I ran last week? The Notion doc for that looks like a brain dump in a blender. Same with our roadshow planning doc. But now I’ve got raw material I can turn into something repeatable. Something I can hand off. Something people can reference as a (messy) starting point. Something I can improve. Documentation isn’t about being clean. It’s about being useful – especially for Future Me (t's and p's to her). What's 1 piece of advice you have for balancing moving fast with getting shit down on paper?

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U.S. energy demand is surging — don’t get left behind. New gas projects and large industrial loads are reshaping power markets at breakneck speed. In this high-stakes landscape, timely and accurate data is essential. Halcyon’s Data Products, powered by a regularly updated authoritative data catalog of 4.5+ million documents from all 50 public utility commissions, ensure you always have the latest energy market intelligence. Download this guide to see how AI can help power sector stakeholders find new growth opportunities first.

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Lauren Schuman built product-led growth at Mailchimp before PLG was even a buzzword. Now VP of Product Growth at Bitly, Lauren joined us this week on LaunchPod and breaks down what worked, what failed, and where PLG can’t go it alone. Check out the whole episode and find out: 🏆 How a single homepage tweak led to a 183% spike in feature adoption 👍 Why they rebuilt Mailchimp’s core email editor from scratch, and how she convinced execs to greenlight the project 🙅 The lessons from trying to shoehorn PLG into a sales-led org (and how to know if it’ll fail) “PLG isn’t a feature or a funnel,it’s a company-wide motion. And if everyone isn’t aligned, it won’t work.” 📽️📖 Watch/listen/read & subscribe on Substack to never miss an episode: https://lnkd.in/eCARyDwe 📽️ Watch on YouTube: https://lnkd.in/emWj9tMy 🎧 Listen on Spotify: https://lnkd.in/eQMrD44w 🎧 Listen on Apple: ​​https://lnkd.in/ed-nf7m4

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We are still creating screens. Full stop. Data and intelligence are baked into nearly every competitive product. So what should a modern design stack actually look like? For most teams, it still starts in a graphical layout tool. Figma, usually. We’re drawing pictures of screens, but now with more collaboration and component libraries. And sure, that’s progress. But is it still the right center of gravity? Let’s cut through the hype for a minute and zoom out. Most product teams optimize for what hits the customer. Not just how it looks, but how it behaves. How fast it gets someone to an answer. How well it responds to intent. How much of the system’s value actually comes through the experience. That output is often shaped by logic, context, and content. And yet many of us are still designing from static components and placeholder copy. For all the talk of dynamic and intelligent experiences, that hardly feels like progress. Now swing to the other end of the spectrum — the world of “just go straight to code.” Maybe you’re skipping mockups and generating production components. Or piping your design system into an LLM-powered app to spit out React code. Cool stuff. BUT even then, we’re often clinging to the same old paradigm — UI and components with basic state changes. Because at the end of the day, we’re still building interfaces from known blocks. Pre-trained patterns. Familiar layouts seen (and cloned) across the industry. It’s faster, but is it smarter? Now add the rise of multi-modal, dynamic systems. Experiences that don’t live on a screen, but move fluidly across browser, app, voice, embedded agent. The UI isn’t always visible. It has to be summoned. It adapts. It disappears. It reasons. So here’s the honest question: Are design systems even the right framing anymore? Is the UI a static surface, or a system-level decision? And if we’re still using tools built around drawing rectangles, or generating rectangles in code, maybe we’re asking too little of our design stack. Maybe it’s time to push for something much more.

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This is 100% where we come full circle and start writing one sentence articles instead of 3,000 word essays about a perfect Margarita recipe that somehow baked in your life story and for some reason have 4 video embeds and a table of contents with suggested side dishes. #seo #llm #ai

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Yesterday's podcast was Techcrunch's Equity, narrated by Rebecca Bellan. The guest was former NEA partner and current Premise company founder Vanessa Larco. They talked about AI and how it is coming to the consumer in 2026. Vanessa said some really provocative things about venerable internet businesses and even caused me to rethink my negative stance on wearable AI like Meta's glasses. As an The Internet Oldtimers (literally) it was shocking to hear this statement: "I'm thinking about all the legacy stuff. Like WebMD, should that exist? Probably not. Is that going to be eaten by OpenAI? Probably. Should it have its own standalone app? Maybe, maybe not. I think that's the bigger question, right? Like TripAdvisor, should it exist? In what format, if it should? And is that just going to be subsumed by OpenAI” That's how far AI can penetrate into search and discovery - wholesale consuming well known brands and making them simply part of their service - very different than today's experience. Every consumer site/app needs to ask themselves, "Will I exist? and in what form?" True existential dread time!

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My latest piece for The Art of Content is about my favorite AI project...and it's a 75-page document that, statistically speaking, nobody reads. 🙃 And yet! Our Brand Voice and Positioning Guide has become the single most useful thing I've built in my time at Bubble. It started as a pretty standard internal style guide, but these days it lives in the knowledge base of every Claude project anyone on the marketing team touches, it's the first thing we hand contractors, and it's the foundation of our work in AirOps. Basically, I've accepted that people are going to hand my team AI-generated drafts to edit, and I've accepted that people are probably not going to read my style guide. So I built something that their AI tools will actually use for them. In the blog post, I break down exactly what's in it, section by section. Consider this a very long and detailed invitation to steal it. You know where to look! 👇 (And thanks as always to Rachel Bicha for making this little corner of the internet exist.)

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We have a social media epidemic today. How soon until there's an AI epidemic? Think about the conversations you have today about social media. I bet 50% of them involve the word "mindfulness" *Ways to stop checking your phone *Trying to be less "online" and more "IRL" *Buying dumbphones or bricks If we're not careful with the way we incorporate AI into our lives, we're bound to repeat the exact same mistakes of the last 20 years. And so a few ways I'm trying to be mindful about my relationship with technology: 1. Is this something I'm genuinely bad at.... like building decks? Then use a tool like Gamma 2. Is this something that annoys me? Working remote means every single conversation is a result of typing. It sucks. Wispr Flow has been great. 3. Can I use a thought partner? Working remote, I can't just grab someone and go for a walk to get coffee and bounce ideas off them like I used to. So I have custom GPTs that help me solve the occassional problem when I'm stuck. 4. Is this absolutely core to our business? So much so that delegating to AI could introduce even a 10% risk? Then I probably won't use it..... for v1 at least. 5. Is this something that helps me learn? Since college, I've learned best by handwriting notes in the moment and then transcribing them. I'm not quite ready to give that up. As Ant Murphy said in a recent post, that's how you develop your 'product sense' and intuition. Curious how others are approaching the "let's automate ourselves" hype with not losing yourself in the process.... ** Post inspired by Katie Parrott's essay: https://lnkd.in/d3PDdBvF

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"The Morning is built by humans, for humans." Continuing to clock organizations who are putting stakes in the ground about AI usage. This is from Sam Sifton last week in The New York Times The Morning.

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Figma just became the largest VC-backed tech IPO in 4 years. Adobe tried to buy them for $20B but regulators killed the deal. Now they're worth $68B. As a long-time user, here's what most people miss about their success: We'd been Figma customers since 2019. Before that? Version control hell with Sketch files. "design_final_v2_ACTUALLY_FINAL.sketch" Every designer knows this pain. Then the announcement hit: Adobe announces they're buying Figma for $20B. My entire team panicked. We knew what was coming: - Creative Cloud monopoly pricing. - Features locked behind higher tiers. - Innovation grinding to a halt. - Adobe XD was already proof they couldn't compete. December 2023: Regulators kill the deal. Figma keeps the $1B breakup fee. What happened next shocked everyone: They went absolutely ballistic on product. While Adobe was stuck in regulatory hell, Figma shipped: - Slides (goodbye Google Slides for product teams) - Sites (designers can now build and ship websites directly) - Auto Layout (responsive design that actually works) The numbers tell the story: $749M revenue (+48% YoY) 132% net dollar retention 13M+ monthly users Yesterday they IPO'd at $33. Closed at $115.50. That's a $68B valuation. 3.4x what Adobe offered. But WHY the $68B valuation? 1. They made multiplayer design feel inevitable. Not "cloud storage" like everyone else. Real-time cursors. Live editing. Comments that don't suck. It's Google Docs for design - seems obvious now, wasn't then. 2. Browser-based was the entire moat. No downloads. No IT approval. No "what version are you on?" Just send a link. When COVID hit, they were the only tool that worked instantly for remote teams. 3. They turned designers into buyers. 963 companies paying $100k+. How? Designer starts free account → Team loves it → Manager can't say no → IT has no installation blockers → Finance sees the productivity gains. 4. The $1B breakup fee became rocket fuel. Most companies would've coasted. Figma used it to ship their entire roadmap in 12 months. They knew this was their shot to create permanent distance from Adobe. OUR LESSON: Figma proved something everyone forgot: Make the best product. Not best sales team. Not biggest marketing budget. Not most aggressive M&A strategy. The BEST product. $20B seemed like a win in 2022. $68B is just the beginning. When 13M designers can't imagine working without your tool, you've already won.

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A few weeks ago, we launched a new home page for Lucky Orange, and the scroll depth metrics are crushing it. We focused on making the page more narrative-driven, and so far, it seems like visitors are engaging and reading as intended. But my favorite part of the new page? This block right here. I can’t recall where I first saw this idea, but I adapted it for Lucky Orange—and it feels like such a human way to communicate your solution. We placed it right below some product-heavy content, and it shifts the tone to a more consultative approach. In a low-touch, product-led environment, this kind of messaging can really cut through.

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Are engagement-optimized algorithms a defective product? A U.S. jury just answered that question. And the answer was a big fat "YES". That’s the real headline coming out of the landmark case against Meta and Google, imo. Not content moderation. Not Section 230. Product design. The argument that won: These platforms aren’t neutral — they’re engineered systems built to maximize attention, and in doing so, they can cause harm. Infinite scroll. Autoplay. Algorithmic loops. Dopamine-driven feedback. The jury didn’t just acknowledge it. They assigned liability. This feels like a turning point. Because if engagement optimization is now legally risky, then the entire business model of social platforms gets questioned. We may look back on this the same way we look at Big Tobacco: Not as a content problem — but as a design problem. And if that framing sticks, everything changes. Curious how others are thinking about this? Especially those building in media, tech, and creator platforms.

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🔥 Today's hot take 🔥 I've always said it's unlikely a Content Design org's maturity surpasses the maturity level of the Design org it sits within. Now with AI, I think a Design org's maturity will be dependent on the maturity of its Content org. #UX #UXDesign #ContentDesign #DesignMaturity

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I’m seeing a lot of criticism on Meta’s Vibes app and OpenAI’s rumored Sora 2 video app, but these products should be celebrated. Separating out AI content from human feeds is the best case scenario for where we’re headed. Keeping these two content (and more importantly, revenue) streams separate ensures that AI-generated content won’t over-saturate human content and cause corporations to tweak the algorithms into AI slop oblivion.

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Figma had their IPO on Thursday but retail investors were left feeling disappointed. With this being one of the most anticipated IPO’s many people flocked to Robinhood to execute this trade but were only able to obtain a less shares than they expected.

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