No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups
00:31:46 · Sarah Guo, Jake Stauch, Elad Gil
[00:31:46] S2: Do do you think to your point of being excited or you and Alex being excited about future capability, like, we're we're still missing some model capability here? The reason I ask is, know, the ability to be proactive and then predict what an individual, Jake as CEO, me as an investor, or me as a human being, you know, and and get it right is still very hard. Right? You need a lot of preference data. Think about an employee working for you. Like, okay. What are Jake's actual priorities? When he gives me this high level mission, what does he mean? Do you think that's a model problem, or it's entirely like a a guardrails and harness problem today? [00:32:22] S0: I think it's it's both, honestly. I think memory obviously has to be better and better because you wanna understand the preferences. You want the context to be insanely large, because I don't wanna have a bunch of different chats with you. I wanna have kind of one single chat that goes back all the way to our very first conversation, and you remember the key points of that that are relevant. And then I think the permissions problem will always remain the biggest thing, because even if I feel like you are a very, very valuable, smart agent, and I... You can do all these things for me, how much do I trust you to just run wild and not have to babysit [00:32:56] S1: your [00:32:56] S0: actions? [00:32:57] S1: You have to do that with people too. [00:32:58] S0: Right? Mean But you also have anybody who
00:32:58 · Jake Stauch, Elad Gil, Sarah Guo
[00:32:58] S0: Right? Mean But you also have anybody who [00:32:59] S1: works for you has to come back and check-in, and this is what you wanted, and here's three options. And so I think it's a very normal just process. Right? [00:33:05] S2: Yeah. Yeah. Company is about two and a half years old. You have gotten very quickly to at least an enterprise mature product. How big is the team today? [00:33:16] S0: We are 200 people today. [00:33:18] S2: 200 people. [00:33:18] S0: We're 20 in January, so it's been an incredible ramp year. [00:33:21] S2: That's quite a year. One, I guess, do you expect to continue hiring so fast? And as somebody who clearly believes in AI, like, why? And then two, just, you know, you've been part of... You and your team have been part of Startups before. Like, what are you operating... How are you operating very differently, you know, over the last two years than the previous ten? [00:33:39] S0: Yeah. The the hiring velocity, I think, will will increase even from where we're at today. We believe that there is unlimited demand for work, and there's unlimited competition, and there's unlimited ambition. And so even though every single employee does so much more than what they could do a year ago, we have even bigger ambitions for what they could do. And so I I think because every employee is so much more productive, we actually want more of them, not less of them. [00:34:04] S2: Given your, you know, time at Vercada before, how are you operating differently over the last two years than the previous ten?
00:34:04 · Sarah Guo, Jake Stauch
[00:34:04] S2: Given your, you know, time at Vercada before, how are you operating differently over the last two years than the previous ten? [00:34:12] S0: I think what's so unique about Serval and the category we're in and the moment we're in is the TAM is unbounded. So it feels like the addressable market is really more about the size of our ambition than it is about fundamental limitations on how big this business can get. Because we are automating essentially all kinds of work for every single employee in the world, the TAM is as big as we want it to be, and it's really how fast can we grow, and what is our ambition, and making decisions based on that versus, okay, here's here's what the market looks like. Here's what we think we can actually do. That's a different set of challenges. It's not it's not strictly better because now there's so much open space, and there's so many more decisions we have to make about what we actually wanna focus on. But it is really fun to not be constrained in and hemmed in by what the market allows for. [00:34:59] S2: How... Given that scope is very broad, do you organize, like, the cadence or the, you know, the EPD team?
00:34:59 · Sarah Guo, Jake Stauch
[00:34:59] S2: How... Given that scope is very broad, do you organize, like, the cadence or the, you know, the EPD team? [00:35:06] S0: We are embedded with customers. So even the the engineers that are not necessarily deployed, they are in the customer Slack channels. We are talking about customers nonstop. They're hearing from customers every single day. Most engineers are on at least one customer call a week. I think most of them are actually on at least a customer call a day. And so what this is, it's it's like immersion in a country to learn a foreign language. You become so immersed in your buyer and your customer's mindset that you understand what they want, you understand how they're thinking about things, and you are adapting to their preference changes in real time. So as they're moving with the market, and they're starting to talk about different products that they're trying out and things that they're excited about, our engineers are constantly aware of all of this and able to adapt very quickly. So we've decentralized product development really to the engineering team. We don't have a product function, because they're the ones talking to customers every day, and they're able to rapidly adapt to whatever customers are saying today and this week versus what they're saying a month ago.
00:35:06 · Jake Stauch, Sarah Guo
[00:35:06] S0: We are embedded with customers. So even the the engineers that are not necessarily deployed, they are in the customer Slack channels. We are talking about customers nonstop. They're hearing from customers every single day. Most engineers are on at least one customer call a week. I think most of them are actually on at least a customer call a day. And so what this is, it's it's like immersion in a country to learn a foreign language. You become so immersed in your buyer and your customer's mindset that you understand what they want, you understand how they're thinking about things, and you are adapting to their preference changes in real time. So as they're moving with the market, and they're starting to talk about different products that they're trying out and things that they're excited about, our engineers are constantly aware of all of this and able to adapt very quickly. So we've decentralized product development really to the engineering team. We don't have a product function, because they're the ones talking to customers every day, and they're able to rapidly adapt to whatever customers are saying today and this week versus what they're saying a month ago. [00:36:05] S2: That sounds like a a really, like, natural way to keep pace with, like, a ripping market and changing priorities for your customers. How do you and Alex and leadership then make sense of it? Like, you know, in a traditional enterprise software company, you'd have, like, architectural review.
00:36:05 · Sarah Guo, Jake Stauch
[00:36:05] S2: That sounds like a a really, like, natural way to keep pace with, like, a ripping market and changing priorities for your customers. How do you and Alex and leadership then make sense of it? Like, you know, in a traditional enterprise software company, you'd have, like, architectural review. [00:36:22] S0: Yeah. You'd have a A quarterly road map, and you'd prioritize the road map, and you'd, you know, train all your customers on the new launches. [00:36:28] S2: And you'd communicate with your customers that, like, things aren't gonna change too fast because they can only absorb it so fast too.