01:31:22 · Jordi Hays, Alex Spiro, John Coogan, Derek Blasberg
[01:31:22] S0: Yep. Yeah. Gotta say something... Yeah. Fortunately, we haven't had this issue, but it's just like I think every every celebrity is going through this. Every... A lot of a lot of tech companies are going through this where an account... Like, accounts accounts are just incentivized to share the most inflammatory thing possible every single time. And one, they directly make money on it now. Right? They're directly profiting off of it. But, yeah, I don't know. It's not not an easy solution. But... [01:31:50] S2: What what you are describing has been a problem since the advent of the media in lesser degrees, which is just that the more controversial the car crash, the more incendiary, the more clicks, the more voices, the more eyeballs. And so you know, what is the solution? I mean we have a hundred years of modern media history to look at it. There's been places that it becomes state owned and then they try to make it flatter, but then it's state owned. Mhmm. Every time somebody wealthy buys a media organization or social media company, everybody then questions their undue influence and on the oligarchy of it. And when it's left to shareholders, you have then the burdens of shareholders and you need to make the prices go up. If you make the price go up, it needs more eyeballs. If you need more eyeballs, it puts Back [01:32:32] S1: to the same point. [01:32:33] S2: A burden on the system. [01:32:34] S4: So Yeah. [01:32:35] S2: Have been tinkering this as... With this as a society and frankly across the world for a long time and we have not figured out.
01:32:35 · Alex Spiro, Jordi Hays, John Coogan
[01:32:35] S2: Have been tinkering this as... With this as a society and frankly across the world for a long time and we have not figured out. [01:32:43] S0: Yeah. We've been dealing with it hundreds of years and it's only gotten worse. Right. Well well, you know, [01:32:50] S2: people people forget it. I mean, we may be at a chaos point where it's definitely worse, but you know, there was a time when the ability to connect with each other wasn't... Was was more important [01:33:01] S1: Yeah. [01:33:01] S2: Than the downsides you're describing. When people in countries that didn't have internet until recently were able to learn information, were able to see that there's a bigger brighter world out there that their customs and cultures are incorrect about. There were beautiful things that happened because of it and because of social media to kept people connected during COVID [01:33:19] S1: Hundred percent. [01:33:19] S2: And and and offset loneliness. Yeah. It it... We may be at a point as you are suggesting of of too much of it, and it may be triggering loneliness. It may be triggering too much of everything you're describing. So I I I hear you, and I wish I I wish I had the perfect answer. [01:33:38] S1: But I but I I agree with your point. Like at the at the end of the day, find the ground truth and if it's not... If it's just noise, it's just noise. And so you you can deal with that pretty easily. But thank you so much for coming on the show. Have a great [01:33:50] S0: day. Great to hang. Appreciate it. [01:33:51] S1: Great to hang. [01:33:52] S0: It's been an honor.
01:33:52 · Jordi Hays, John Coogan, Anish Agarwal
[01:33:52] S0: It's been an honor. [01:33:52] S1: We'll talk to you soon. [01:33:53] S0: Have fun out there. I'll just [01:33:54] S1: get Let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces and now with AI agents. And we have Anish Agarwal from Traversal, the co founder and CEO in the waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TBPN Zoom. Here he is. How you doing? Welcome to the show. [01:34:14] S6: Good to see you both. [01:34:15] S1: Good to see [01:34:16] S0: you. Welcome back. [01:34:16] S1: Crystal clear audio. Sounds great. [01:34:19] S0: Yeah. Your team's cooking. [01:34:20] S1: Welcome to... Yeah. [01:34:21] S0: Good lighting, good audio, good hair. [01:34:24] S1: Gong has warmed up, but let's start with an introduction on yourself and the company. [01:34:30] S6: Awesome. Good seeing you both. So my name is Anish. I'm the CEO and co founder of Traversal. And at Traversal, we're building an AI site reliability engineer. So when your system goes down like a bank, [01:34:40] S0: you know, kind of a [01:34:40] S6: 100,000 people can't log in, we help try to figure out what broke and and how to fix it. [01:34:45] S0: Got it. Seems like might be important right now. [01:34:48] S1: It's super important right now. When did you start the company? Like, what's the journey to get to today?
01:34:54 · Anish Agarwal
[01:34:54] S6: Yeah. I feel like the... We started the company in January 2024, so I come from a totally different world. I'm a I'm a researcher by training in in my heart. So I'm a professor at Columbia University. Wow. And a big part of why I decided to start Traversal as my cofounder is we felt the best research is now actually happening in companies. Mhmm. And the best companies are getting informed on AI research. So that was really what got us going. And then our research is in a very specific niche field called causal machine learning, so we've always... We've all heard this phrase like correlation isn't causation. Mhmm. So our whole study was how do you get these systems to think about cause and effect relationships from data and that turns out to be super important for this problem of how do you troubleshoot incidents because when something breaks, everything breaks. It's like an epidemic that's flowing through your system. And so finding root cause is like finding a needle in a haystack with fake needles everywhere. So that's that's how we got started and I'd say we met when we just did a series a about a a year and a half ago. After that, the problem turned to be way way way harder than we expected. We thought we'd be off to the races, but it just turns out to be a way way way more hard problem than anyone would expect, especially for like large companies. So I'd say we were working through the desert just trying to figure out how to get something to work since the a. We finally did, I'd say, about a year... Six months ago, and since then we've been scaling and it's been way more fun.
01:36:12 · John Coogan, Anish Agarwal, Jordi Hays
[01:36:12] S1: And has the nature of that scaling been more Fortune 500 logos, bigger companies onboarding or just a huge volume of smaller companies, startups? Like, where has been... What... What's been driving the adoption and growth the most? [01:36:25] S6: Yeah. I think part of what was difficult when we started is that we got pulled by very large companies very early in our journey. So, like, companies like American Express or Sure. Or Pepsi. And this problem really shows up at scale. So when you have a company of that size, you have every tool under the sun, every observability tool under the sun. Mhmm. You have thousands of engineers, each of them with limited context. That fragmentation of people and tools and data is where the problem really shows up. And I think that's where also typically you can't just code something yourself. Have to go with a specialized solution. We started building for them right at the start, and so that's part of why it was so difficult from the start because of the scale we had to deal with. I'd say what we found is just usage really started uptaking with these companies [01:37:11] S0: Mhmm.
01:37:11 · Jordi Hays, Anish Agarwal
[01:37:11] S0: Mhmm. [01:37:12] S6: And and the repeatability of what we're doing started really showing up. Yeah. We focused on them from the start of the Fortune five hundred, but now I'd say that that the pull from them is also here because they understand the the the difficulty of this problem, especially with now the coding agents are in place. They all have their favorite tools. They're all using them, but the CIOs are not really seeing the ROI because everything gets stuck. It's because they're all now really scared about is this gonna work in production? Is it gonna have... Am I gonna have a security incident, reliability incidents? So... Like, [01:37:42] S0: just just how on edge, like, these sort of Fortune 500 scale clients are around cyber right now? Because I I imagine, like, no one really feels safe, you know. You could be in you could be even in, you know, consumer packaged goods and and still on edge.