00:48:23 · Shensi Ding, Gil Feig, Molly O'Shea
[00:48:23] S2: Oh my god. Yeah. [00:48:25] S0: Is. Yeah. It's intimidating every day. Like we we power critical functions for for a lot of these businesses. Like we're talking their core, you log in, that could be powered and and heavily driven by merge. You go and you use some core AI model and it looks up any data from anywhere, that's us as well. So these sort of things, like, we cannot break, we cannot go down. Everything's like four or five, six nines of uptime, absolutely essential. And if you if you if you lose that, you can lose all your customers overnight, like some companies have recently. [00:48:54] S2: Wow. [00:48:55] S1: Yeah. No pressure. [00:48:56] S0: No pressure. None. [00:48:57] S1: Yeah. None. You guys are so chill. [00:49:00] S2: Oh, yeah. [00:49:02] S1: Speaking of that, so one of our sponsors is Brex, and they're all about performance. Spending smarter We love Brex. [00:49:08] S2: They're great team. [00:49:08] S1: Love Brex. And so this is a question I usually like to ask as regards to performance, but like, how do you think about the metrics you use to measure success? What are the next milestones that you want to go after as a company? [00:49:23] S2: So yeah, revenue obviously matters the most, but also how much money we spent to get that revenue. That's really important. So we're always looking at like our gross margins, our cash burn, yeah, our cash burn multiple, what our runway looks like. Those are just really important for us. And we're always looking at that every week.
00:49:23 · Shensi Ding, Gil Feig, Molly O'Shea
[00:49:23] S2: So yeah, revenue obviously matters the most, but also how much money we spent to get that revenue. That's really important. So we're always looking at like our gross margins, our cash burn, yeah, our cash burn multiple, what our runway looks like. Those are just really important for us. And we're always looking at that every week. [00:49:36] S0: Yep. And then the metrics that we believe obviously heavily lead to that, our product, the quality of our product, we think our reputation and how people view us in the market is the driver of that. And so for us, it's never been okay to be in second place. We want to be the leading platform always. If we receive any negative feedback, we action immediately. We it's it's critical. We are the number one product on the market. We will not let that change. [00:49:58] S1: What are the biggest misconceptions that you think are happening in tech right now? Girl, [00:50:07] S0: Like, they told us it would be easy. [00:50:09] S2: No. We need [00:50:10] S1: some hot takes. Deal. Alright. I'm kidding. [00:50:12] S0: Everyone's just the SAT stuff. The [00:50:15] S2: biggest misconceptions. [00:50:17] S0: Biggest misconceptions. About what was it about? [00:50:19] S1: In tech right now. Yeah. Everybody's tied to their screens looking for the next model release, but what's the higher picture? Oh,
00:50:19 · Molly O'Shea, Shensi Ding
[00:50:19] S1: In tech right now. Yeah. Everybody's tied to their screens looking for the next model release, but what's the higher picture? Oh, [00:50:27] S2: yeah. So I mean, one take that I have is that I've noticed a lot of companies kind of overengineering their ML usage. They'll build their own custom models. They'll try to train their own models when really, you could probably just use the generic model and then focus more on making your product better. [00:50:45] S1: That's why it's been I mean, when should you build versus buy? [00:50:48] S2: I mean, yeah, there are some specific situations where you like, obviously you have to, and maybe I don't know, but I've noticed there are some companies that I was very surprised to hear how advanced they were when it came to training their own models when their product was lagging. And I, and I don't think that their customers end up actually seeing the benefit of all that work. And sometimes you need to just focus on like what everyone can publicly see more.
00:50:48 · Shensi Ding, Gil Feig, Molly O'Shea
[00:50:48] S2: I mean, yeah, there are some specific situations where you like, obviously you have to, and maybe I don't know, but I've noticed there are some companies that I was very surprised to hear how advanced they were when it came to training their own models when their product was lagging. And I, and I don't think that their customers end up actually seeing the benefit of all that work. And sometimes you need to just focus on like what everyone can publicly see more. [00:51:10] S0: I actually want to second that you see a lot of people trying to build like a custom harness or, you know, use something like workflow builder to build agents that repeatable and all of that. And I just ultimately think none of it matters because we're almost at the point now where English is the language that you use to tell an agent. It will be deterministic very soon. We already see it. You just say, Hey, go do X thing. That, Hey, go do X thing is your artifact. From then on out, that gets repeated by the agent infinitely. So I think all these platforms that are around, like build agents that are more reliable and that do things more repeatably, and none of that really matters. All that's going to matter is just can you type it in English somewhere, have that run on a periodic cadence for your background agents? And then do you have auditability for and observability for security? [00:51:55] S1: Okay. All right. Well, this is an easy closing question. What are you most looking forward to this year? [00:52:03] S2: It's not easy. This is hard to What the hell,
00:52:03 · Shensi Ding, Molly O'Shea, Gil Feig
[00:52:03] S2: It's not easy. This is hard to What the hell, [00:52:07] S1: man? What's your favorite color? I don't know. [00:52:09] S2: Okay. Okay. [00:52:09] S1: I know. White. [00:52:12] S2: Oh, yeah. This year. I mean, there's a lot we put a lot of hard work into the past few years, and, like, it's all really coming together. So I'm this I was I'm really excited for it to just, like, finally come through. I actually bought a spell early this year. I bought, like, an Etsy spell. Like, what [00:52:27] S1: what's law? I'm sorry. You bought a spell. [00:52:29] S0: Yeah. You never bought a spell? [00:52:30] S1: Is that why you're on sorcery? You know, like, this started as a witch podcast. [00:52:34] S2: Oh, really? Yeah. Love witch. Have you got a spell? [00:52:36] S1: No. I'm I'm just kidding. Oh, I [00:52:38] S2: have a girl owe only $10 for three wishes. [00:52:41] S1: I know. That's it? I know. [00:52:43] S2: And one of them already came true. [00:52:44] S0: And then they email you to your notes. [00:52:45] S2: Yeah. And the other one's, like, on its way. [00:52:47] S1: Are you sure you're not from LA? Do you have crystals? [00:52:54] S2: No. I don't. No? No. I don't. I do ask everyone what their horoscope is, and I actually did not believe in horoscopes until when we started this company. Like, 80% of our early team members were Tauruses and Libras because they can endure, like, abuse really well. Oh. I know. [00:53:06] S1: What are you? [00:53:07] S2: I'm an Aquarius. What are [00:53:09] S0: you? Taurus.
00:53:09 · Gil Feig, Shensi Ding, Molly O'Shea
[00:53:09] S0: you? Taurus. [00:53:09] S2: Yeah. He's very, like, abusable. Yeah. Damn. I know. It's very abusable. [00:53:14] S1: That's great. [00:53:14] S2: It's great. [00:53:15] S1: I'm a I'm a Leo. [00:53:16] S2: Oh, you know, you are a podcast host. [00:53:18] S1: What does it what does it mean, though? [00:53:20] S2: I just like I actually don't really know other than you're just, like, flashy, I think. That's the only thing I don't really know anything about. [00:53:28] S1: I'm quite an introvert. Oh, really? Yeah. My family was making fun of me at dinner last night because they're like, everything that you've been afraid of since you were a child, you're now doing. It's like facts. [00:53:39] S0: Face your fears. Yeah. Yeah. Have I have one other one that I just forgot. [00:53:44] S2: Okay. [00:53:45] S1: So [00:53:45] S0: wait a second. Oh, okay. So yeah. [00:53:49] S1: This just in.