a16zWhy the Next Generation of Enterprise Software Looks Nothing Like Salesforce
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
55 min read · 10,837 words- 0:00 – 0:52
Intro
- SPSpeaker
Three out of our five founding members came from Facebook. Building a revenue team is a very rich problem set. It's something that everyone cares about. It could always be done better.
- JSJoe Schmidt
What's the most exciting thing someone's doing with Lightfield today?
- SPSpeaker
This company, Power. They have this marketplace where they're aggregating folks that have various illnesses and complications that are looking for frontier treatment. So they've modeled all of this in Lightfield, and Lightfield actually helped someone with Alzheimer's find frontier treatment within days.
- JSJoe Schmidt
Is there anything that you've done differently in this kind of AI era?
- SPSpeaker
As a CRM company in a red ocean space, we have to be an expansion company. If we can help you completely model your business and your customer reality, then the rest will be easy.
- JSJoe Schmidt
What would be the one piece of advice that you'd go back and give yourself if you were just starting again? Um...
- 0:52 – 2:28
From Tome to Lightfield: The Pivot Story
- JSJoe Schmidt
Welcome back to the a16z podcast. I'm Joe Schmidt. I'm joined by my partner, Alex Rampell, and Keith Peiris. Keith is the CEO at Lightfield. Lightfield just raised a $47 million Series A led by us, and they're building a business world model. A business world model turns customer emails, calls, and meetings into a record that AI agents can use to get work done. We'll explore how Keith pivoted, which is very interesting, to Lightfield, how they built the initial product, and what customers can do with it. Keith, thanks for joining us.
- SPSpeaker
Excited to be here.
- JSJoe Schmidt
Yeah. Maybe we'll start just going back to the Tome journey and how you got to Lightfield. Very atypical journey. You got two products now to explosive scale. Um, tell us a little bit about, uh, that ex- that experience and how you ended up at Lightfield.
- SPSpeaker
We started Tome, uh, you know, mostly because we were consumer people, and we thought, like, LLMs were gonna change the way people communicate. And we were working on, like, selfie design-
- JSJoe Schmidt
Mm-hmm
- SPSpeaker
... you know, at Instagram and Messenger, and we decided to, to go into the, the storytelling of ideas. We got this product out to launch around the time of GPT-3.
- JSJoe Schmidt
Yeah. And what was the... And tell us a little bit about the product too.
- SPSpeaker
So it was, uh, it was a presentation product where you could use, uh, GPT, uh, to generate presentations and-
- JSJoe Schmidt
Yeah
- SPSpeaker
... generate pages and, uh, and so forth. And we launched it around the same time as ChatGPT, and, uh, we just got explosive growth. Um, we got m- you know, two million users a month. Um, you know, uh, people were, uh, lining up when we didn't have enough inference to, uh, you know, to, to support them.
- JSJoe Schmidt
Wow. Oh my gosh. And so you got that to amazing scale.
- 2:28 – 7:29
Why Not Just Wait for the Technology to Get Better?
- SPSpeaker
Yeah.
- JSJoe Schmidt
You then decided to stop and completely hard pivot. What was that decision like? How'd you make that choice? Why?
- SPSpeaker
Yeah. So I'd say there were a lot of metrics behind it, but, you know, deep down, I think at an instinctual level, um, none of us liked the product.
- JSJoe Schmidt
Oof.
- SPSpeaker
You know? Which was g- which was kind of a funny thing to say. Like, I think at the end of the day, if you're a, a, a founder, you have to, like, love the product that you're building, and you have to be excited for your customers to use it.
- JSJoe Schmidt
Yeah.
- SPSpeaker
And, um, we just couldn't, for the life of us, make good presentations.
- JSJoe Schmidt
Wow.
- SPSpeaker
You know? Uh, and what, what I mean by that is, you know, we could never... We, we could not see the path of, like, a high-quality, discerning presentation maker using this tool-
- JSJoe Schmidt
Yeah
- SPSpeaker
... uh, in an indispensable way. We couldn't see, you know, people like yourselves using it for memos. We couldn't see people using it in, in, like, investment banking or consulting. Um, we just thought the, the technology constrained us to being a tool for individuals and students.
- JSJoe Schmidt
So interesting. Okay, so you go from AI presentations to-
- SPSpeaker
Yeah
- JSJoe Schmidt
... nothing. Right?
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- JSJoe Schmidt
And, and so how did you make the choice of what to build?
- ARAlex Rampell
Well, or may- maybe if I, if I can-
- SPSpeaker
Yeah.
- JSJoe Schmidt
Yeah
- ARAlex Rampell
... rewind a little bit.
- SPSpeaker
Yeah.
- ARAlex Rampell
I mean, sometimes you get to this point and you're like, "Oh, well, if the technology kinda continues advancing, then it will be good enough."
- SPSpeaker
Yeah.
- ARAlex Rampell
But that's also a little bit of a danger. I think the, uh... It's called hopium.
- JSJoe Schmidt
Yeah. [laughs]
- ARAlex Rampell
Uh, is, is the... But h- how did you decide... I mean, this is probably the question that you were getting at.
- JSJoe Schmidt
Yeah.
- ARAlex Rampell
But, like, why not just wait it out for the technology to get better? 'Cause I mean, the, the leap between GPT-3 and GPT-6 with Astra is extraordinary, but obviously, if you're burning money and everything, you don't have the luxury of waiting. But I guess, how did you think about, like, just the shape of the curve, and why not wait out the curve?
- JSJoe Schmidt
Hmm.
- SPSpeaker
Yeah. It's a good question. So w- we, we definitely thought about, "Let's shrink the team and wait it out," you know, because we were seeing 3.5 to four and, and seeing the leaps being made. But I think the biggest issue was that the model just didn't have enough context to, to really understand the presenter, the audience-
- 7:29 – 9:15
Knowing You're Onto Something With the New Product
- SPSpeaker
right now.
- JSJoe Schmidt
Yeah. When did you know that you were onto something with the new product?
- SPSpeaker
So there, there was a, a, a l- a little bit of di- discontinuity. We didn't know we wanted a CRM first. First, we built like a, a, a go-to-market assistant. Um, we got people to like it, and then, uh, we couldn't get anyone to pay for it. [chuckles]
- JSJoe Schmidt
Hmm. That's tough.
- SPSpeaker
Which is to say that, uh, you know, we had all of these AEs using it every day, but we had no pricing power because it wasn't our data.
- JSJoe Schmidt
Yeah.
- SPSpeaker
Um, you know, and there were 10 other companies and all of these companies competing for it. So we decided to shrink the team, um, start from scratch-
- JSJoe Schmidt
Yeah
- SPSpeaker
... and go and, like, reimagine the CRM from first principles. Then I think we, we built in, in the dark for about four months. Uh, and then, uh, we needed to find people to use our CRM, and it turns out no one wants to use your four-month-old CRM. So [chuckles] we, uh-
- JSJoe Schmidt
Go figure. [chuckles]
- SPSpeaker
So, uh, we, we sort of looked at the only asset we had left, which was this giant office space we couldn't get rid of. Uh, and we were like, "I'm gonna post on X and LinkedIn. You can sit in our office space if you use our CRM."
- JSJoe Schmidt
Mm.
- SPSpeaker
Um, and then we found 10-
- JSJoe Schmidt
Ne- negative pricing.
- SPSpeaker
Yeah, negative pricing.
- JSJoe Schmidt
Yeah.
- SPSpeaker
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Uh, so we found 10 startups to come use the product, and for some reason, they were in it every day. Um, and they were mad about everything missing. They were mad about how slow it was. But they were in it every day, and they were giving us Slack feedback about it, like every two hours.
- JSJoe Schmidt
Hmm.
- SPSpeaker
And, uh, it's like, "Oh, this is so different than Tome," in the sense that we have this, this barely working, barely finished product that people are in all the time, where they care about it so much they're going to give us feedback about it on an hourly basis.
- 9:15 – 11:18
CRM as a Repository: What's Actually Broken Today
- JSJoe Schmidt
Yeah.
- ARAlex Rampell
And when you think about C- I mean, did you, did you start off saying, you know, "I've used Salesforce and HubSpot and other things, and, like, here's what I want changed"? Or I guess, how did you triangulate on, like, the job to be done? 'Cause then in one hand, like a CRM is just a repository, right?
- SPSpeaker
Mm-hmm.
- ARAlex Rampell
It's like customer relationship manage- Well, here, here's the repository of all the information, all the customer information. Um, but on, on the other hand, it's also like this, you know, if you've talked to anybody who's run a sales team, one of their biggest pain points is like, "My stupid salespeople don't update the CRM." Um, and it's often like a stale, uh, you know, repository. But I guess, like, what, what were the, what were the governing principles, if you will, around, like, what was broken with the world today?
- SPSpeaker
Hmm.
- ARAlex Rampell
What were you gonna do differently? Or was it like, "Let's just have people with negative pricing, uh, in my office, and I'll figure out what they're complaining about and build around that"?
- SPSpeaker
I think, um, one of the things that benefited us was, was honestly how naive we were at the space. Because if you're in sort of a growth stage company, the CRM is the tool that reps use to not forget things.
- ARAlex Rampell
Right.
- SPSpeaker
It's the tool that powers low-level automation. Um, and it's also the tool that powers forecasts.
- ARAlex Rampell
Yeah.
- SPSpeaker
And, and I think, um, I think our naive view was actually the most important thing here is the latter. You know, w- if we can help you completely model your business and your customer reality, then the rest will be easy.
- ARAlex Rampell
Hmm.
- SPSpeaker
You know, the rest should just be prompts and tool calls. Um, and, and because of that, I think a lot of the world ran towards CRM for work.
- ARAlex Rampell
Yeah.
- SPSpeaker
And we ran towards, uh, s- uh, like h- like high fidelity business modeling. Uh, and because of that, we were like, "What gets in the way of, of this?" You know, it's the, the rep's manual entry.
- ARAlex Rampell
Yeah.
- SPSpeaker
It's the, like, rigidity of the schema, you know, the API quality. And, and w- we were sort of on our, uh, you know, on our island trying to, to, to, to world model in- instead of sending
- 11:18 – 18:48
The Architecture Choices That Make Lightfield Work
- SPSpeaker
emails.
- JSJoe Schmidt
Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about the very intentional decisions you made w- on the architecture and just, like, how you kind of built the primitives that allow this to happen? 'Cause it's interesting. Now it's, like, beautiful and the experience is incredible, but, like, it only works because you made the right choices early on. So talk a little bit about the way you kind of did that from first principles and what it now enables.
- SPSpeaker
Yeah. Uh, so actually three out of our five, uh, uh, founding members came from Facebook or Meta.
- ARAlex Rampell
Oh, interesting.
- SPSpeaker
And, uh, we had this very naive view that, um, actually the, the, the most important thing in the CRM is modeling the relationship.
- ARAlex Rampell
Yeah.
- SPSpeaker
Uh, so we actually looked at, you know, the, the sort of m- the Facebook timeline, and [chuckles] we were like, "We just need to, to, to model the, the chronological relationship between your business and this business."
- ARAlex Rampell
Huh.
- SPSpeaker
Uh, so we actually built out the activity log first-
- ARAlex Rampell
Hmm
- SPSpeaker
... of, you know, when did you first reach out? Um, what did you say to them? What did they say to you? What meetings did you have? What documents were sent back and forth? Um, you know, and then eventually, like, what are they doing in your product? How are they paying you? And, uh, we thought, like, working off of this activity log is sort of the right primitive.
- ARAlex Rampell
Interesting.
- SPSpeaker
So we have this system where it sort of builds the activity log between your relationship, and then it uses that to trigger sort of the traditional CRM updates that you'd expect, right? Of like updating fields, updating stages, and so on and so forth. But you s- you, you always have this, like, canonical log of relationship that everything's built on top of.
- ARAlex Rampell
And then how did you think about there's, there's that chronological view-
- SPSpeaker
Yeah
- ARAlex Rampell
... but then there's all of this other meta- metadata that's never existed in any other CRM, right?
- SPSpeaker
Yeah.
- ARAlex Rampell
I mean, like, this was one of the things I remember initially really, you know, jiving with you on, which is there's, there's so much other context and, like, how do you then think about that as a part of this record? And I, I don't know when that came in or, or was there, like, a certain workflow that you were trying to enable-
- SPSpeaker
Mm-hmm
- ARAlex Rampell
... that triggered that?
- SPSpeaker
Yeah. So we, we actually tried going fully unstructured.
- ARAlex Rampell
Hmm.
- SPSpeaker
Um, and we found that, uh, the queries just took too long.
- ARAlex Rampell
Yeah, yeah. Well, you see the problem.
- SPSpeaker
Right, right. You sort of have the, like, needle in the haystack problem. So we ended up finding this, like, semi-structured approach where we store gobs of unstructured data in this activity log.
- ARAlex Rampell
Cool.
- SPSpeaker
Um, and then the system can use the activity log to sort of infer causality and-
- ARAlex Rampell
Yeah
- SPSpeaker
... work through from there, and that's why it, like, works so much better than a data lake.
- ARAlex Rampell
Yeah, yeah.
- 18:48 – 25:27
Greenfield vs Brownfield: Cracking the CRM Market
- ARAlex Rampell
So, I mean, one, one question that we talk about a lot here is this, uh, kind of greenfield versus brownfield thing. So if you think about like startups, normally, um, selling into the brownfield is hard just because it's brown. Um, meaning, what does brownfield mean?
- JSJoe Schmidt
Yeah.
- ARAlex Rampell
It means that like it's been trampled by an incumbent, right? Like he- hence brown, so like try selling ERP and you have a product that's much, much better than SAP, but like there's a saying that Joe's heard me use it a million times, like the best companies have hostages, not customers. Like SAP has hostages. That's a brownfield. Sometimes you can break in. I mean, like kind of cloud versus on-prem. What did cloud do? It's like it was brownfield, but I kinda just redefined the problem and said, "You know what? You're using," if you go back to like the CRM days, it's like, "You're using Siebel systems-
- JSJoe Schmidt
Mm-hmm
- ARAlex Rampell
... that's running on your IBM AS400 mainframe in your office. You're tired. Like the guy that maintained it quit. He was 92 years old. Maybe now you should use a cloud-based vendor," and that's kind of... Like that's, that's partially how that brownfield was done from on-prem to cloud. Um, but the other strategy is going greenfield, is saying, "I'm not gonna bother with the hostages. I'm just going to build the best product in the world, and then brand new companies that are untethered from any existing software solution, they'll just use me."
- JSJoe Schmidt
Mm-hmm.
- ARAlex Rampell
And I guess like when you were thinking through, I mean, going back to the, the, the early days of negative pricing with the, uh, free office space being the, the negative price, I mean, how did you think about like, you know, where, who are the right customers? How did you get to your, you know, what we call an, you know, ICP, ideal customer profile? Like maybe talk about that a little bit.
- SPSpeaker
Just to be totally real, you know, when we were starting the company, we didn't have a sharp enough thesis on how to get into brownfield.
- ARAlex Rampell
Hmm.
- SPSpeaker
Um, so I, I think we had this perspective that, you know, building a revenue team is a very rich problem set. It's someone that, something that everyone cares about. It could always be done better. So we like, we believe there's something in here.
- ARAlex Rampell
Hmm.
- SPSpeaker
But we weren't sure exactly what it was, so we, we sort of figured, let's just try to win a new company-
- ARAlex Rampell
Yeah
- SPSpeaker
... first. Um, and we were like, "How, how do we win a new company?" So actually, uh, my, my chief of staff and I doing LinkedIn prospecting, emailing YC companies, [chuckles] you know what I mean? Like, "Hey, can we, can we beat one of these startup CRMs?" Um, and, and that was sort of how we got started, and we figured by listening really deeply-
- ARAlex Rampell
Yeah
- SPSpeaker
... we would find, you know, the sort of wedge required to go brownfield eventually.
- ARAlex Rampell
Hmm.
- SPSpeaker
And, um, I think we sort of found it over the past few months, which is to say you get lots of iteration. So we got, um, one of the nice things about serving an early-stage startup right now is it's never been faster to go from pre-seed to seed, seed to A, A to B. And we, we've, we now have customers that had like, you know, zero reps when they joined us now who have, you know, 100 reps.
- ARAlex Rampell
Hmm.
- SPSpeaker
Um, so we've been start, been able to like look inside and figure out like what problems are we solving for you that you actually care about.
- ARAlex Rampell
Yeah.
- SPSpeaker
Um, and it seems like it was, it was actually a little higher level than we had even anticipated. 'Cause if you look, looked at all of the AI CRM billboards around-
- ARAlex Rampell
Yeah
- SPSpeaker
... Silicon Valley in the past couple of years, they've always been about like do the work, do the work, do the work, right? Of like, uh, lead scoring, sending out outbound emails and more. And I think our team always had this perspective that that wasn't really the wedge to, to do brownfield. Like even, like Salesforce is gonna send emails. I mean, I guess they have as of, as of today, right?
- ARAlex Rampell
Yeah.
- SPSpeaker
Um, and we were like, I think the wedge in brownfield has to do with like, you know, better understanding your company.
- ARAlex Rampell
Hmm.
- SPSpeaker
Um, so you can steer your company in this sort of like chaotic era of company building. But it, it took us honestly like six months of having customers like that, staring at them-
- ARAlex Rampell
Yeah
- SPSpeaker
... to, to sort of, for that to emerge.
- 25:27 – 30:56
Skeuomorphic vs Natural Language: The Product Trade-Off
- ARAlex Rampell
You know, there's so many different ways to now do those tasks that were just a table in the past. And so do you wanna try to br- you know, give those tables to people and try to make it very skeuomorphic, like, "Here's the CRM that you're used to, and it, it's also blue," and blah, blah, blah? Or is it, you know, "Hey, actually, you can now use natural language to do a lot of this. You don't actually have to look at all these dashboards. Lightfield will just tell you when something happens." Like, how, how, how do you think about those kind of product trade-offs, which I think a lot of systems of record are actually trying to figure out, how do we bring people to the real future, which is now here?
- SPSpeaker
Yeah. Yeah. I think we've, we've actually erred on the side of pragmatism here.
- ARAlex Rampell
Mm.
- SPSpeaker
Um, which is to say that like right now I'm the, the de facto sales manager at the company.
- ARAlex Rampell
Yeah.
- SPSpeaker
And I still run all of our meetings from the spreadsheet view-
- ARAlex Rampell
Yeah
- SPSpeaker
... of Lightfield. Um, I think we have this view of if we really wanna be like a real enterprise CRM, we can't be religious-
- ARAlex Rampell
Yeah
- SPSpeaker
... about the way people work. Um, so we've leaned into, we have great dashboards, we have great table views.
- ARAlex Rampell
Yeah.
- SPSpeaker
Um, you can use those things if you want, and then if you're sort of at the frontier, you can do it all in chat.
- ARAlex Rampell
And you want like C- yeah, CLI or whatever. Yeah.
- SPSpeaker
Yeah, exactly.
- ARAlex Rampell
Yeah, yeah.
- SPSpeaker
You could also do that.
- ARAlex Rampell
Yeah, yeah. Totally. Well, I find that like, you know, so it's, it's funny, I just bought a new car. I came from a BMW which had like 9 million buttons. Like, you know if you go in an airplane.
- SPSpeaker
Yeah. [chuckles]
- ARAlex Rampell
Right? It's like you look at the cockpit and it's like how does the pilot know-
- SPSpeaker
Yeah
- ARAlex Rampell
... like what these... There were like 9,000 switches.
- SPSpeaker
It's straight out of Apollo 13.
- ARAlex Rampell
And like the really cool thing, it's actually even scary, like, you know, I don't know if you know this, like the newest Teslas, they don't even have, they don't even have like a stalk-
- SPSpeaker
Yeah
- ARAlex Rampell
... to change gears.
- SPSpeaker
Yeah.
- ARAlex Rampell
There isn't one.
- SPSpeaker
Yeah.
- ARAlex Rampell
Like the most physical of physical buttons is just completely gone. But actually it's so simple and so intuitive that like a five-year-old can use it. I mean, hopefully a five-year-old-
- SPSpeaker
Yeah
- 30:56 – 36:22
Pricing in the AI Era & Outcome-Based Models
- ARAlex Rampell
Where do you think, I mean, kind of on that topic, I mean, pricing is such a crazy question right now because there's seat-based pricing where the seats don't make sense anymore. Like imagine running, like thank God you run Lightfield and not Zendesk, right?
- SPSpeaker
Yeah.
- ARAlex Rampell
It's like what are they, like how many seats do you need? Maybe zero, right? That's pretty scary. Then there's kinda like outcome-based pricing, but like what is an outcome? It's like, am I selling the th- what if I just have like a happy customer forever, like, you know, I'm still using CRM for that, so outcomes are kind of tricky. And then against all of that, you have this idea, which I don't agree with obviously, but like people, like software is dead-
- SPSpeaker
Yeah
- ARAlex Rampell
... the whole SaaSpocalypse. Like, you know, you're also gonna, you know, supermarkets are dead, you're gonna grow your own food. Car manufacturers are dead, you're gonna weld your own aluminum. Like, you know, there, there's, you can take this to the extreme. But like I guess, where do you think about, or how did you come up with pricing maybe is kinda question number one, and then what do you think about outcome-based pricing in this space? Because it's not as-- Like support almost makes sense where it's like it's a cost, can I bring down the cost? And of course like, you know, you can have software answer questions, like it's a knowledge base. There's a fixed number of, of answers. I kinda match it up with the question. Whereas like, it almost feels like the last job standing for humans will be sales.
- SPSpeaker
Mm-hmm.
- ARAlex Rampell
Right? Um, but anyway, like kinda pricing, outcomes, competition, just curious how you thought about like how did you get to your pricing from negative pricing-
- SPSpeaker
Yeah
- ARAlex Rampell
... which I would not recommend you keep in perpetuity.
- SPSpeaker
Yeah. [laughs]
- ARAlex Rampell
But kinda how did you get to pricing and how do you think about everything that's going on in that triangle?
- SPSpeaker
Yeah. Uh, that's a good question. We, we started with both extremes, and we figured that that is the fastest path to, to, to, to, to find the efficient frontier. We started with pure seat pricing, um, because it just matched the sort of Salesforce, HubSpot world.
- ARAlex Rampell
Yeah.
- SPSpeaker
Uh, it was... I think it was received really well by our customers, uh, but then the, the head just, w- the, the head was using 10,000 X more than the tail.
- ARAlex Rampell
Yeah.
- SPSpeaker
Uh, and we realized that-
- ARAlex Rampell
Using in terms of consumption.
- SPSpeaker
Yeah, in terms of consumption.
- ARAlex Rampell
Yeah.
- SPSpeaker
And, uh, we weren't gonna be in business for a long time-
- ARAlex Rampell
Yeah
- SPSpeaker
... [chuckles] with, with, with per seat pricing. So then we tried purest consumption pricing, where, uh, everything is a credit, um, in, in Lightfield. And, um, then we found that nobody touched anything.
- ARAlex Rampell
Yeah.
- SPSpeaker
[laughs] You know, as you can, as you can imagine.
- ARAlex Rampell
Too expensive, yes.
- SPSpeaker
It was, it was about the, the worst three weeks of the company's life of we have all of these signups, but they're not doing anything.
- ARAlex Rampell
Doing anything, yeah. This is not good.
- SPSpeaker
Yeah. Um, so then we started talking to customers. We realized there's sort of like, um, and Joe actually, we, we ended up finding like sort of four buckets of work that-
- ARAlex Rampell
Yeah
- SPSpeaker
... Lightfield does, uh, and, and we're able to distinguish between them. Um, the first was sort of your like everyday CRM work of capture a meeting, fill out records, update tasks. Um, I think most of our customers just expect that to be covered in a platform fee, or expect that to be covered-
- 36:22 – 40:02
Company Culture, Velocity & Shipping Speed at Lightfield
- SPSpeaker
for now.
- ARAlex Rampell
Yeah.
- JSJoe Schmidt
Yeah. Maybe from when you started Tome to today, how has the actual, like, work changed? Something that I found amazing and just really fascinating about the company when we first met over a year ago was just how fast you guys were already shipping, and it feels like the velocity has just gone through the roof. So I'd be curious how you've designed company culture and tooling and all the decision-making around basically velocity and just the, the, the step function change from before and after. Talk a little bit about that.
- SPSpeaker
Yeah. So I think-- Well, I mean, one of the things I regret about Tome that we've definitely cl- uh, fixed with Lightfield is, uh, Henry, my co-founder, says this all the time. It's like we had a lot of people playing house.
- JSJoe Schmidt
Mm.
- SPSpeaker
You know, just to say that you have the product leader and the marketing leader and the CS leader, and they all have their swim lanes, and they get really mad if someone gives them feedback about something in their swim lane.
- JSJoe Schmidt
Yeah.
- SPSpeaker
Um, and I, I think because of that, it just, you know, we were sort of slowed to a crawl and, you know, may-maybe put another way, it was impossible to pivot.
- JSJoe Schmidt
Yeah.
- SPSpeaker
Right? 'Cause you had all of these-
- JSJoe Schmidt
Yeah
- SPSpeaker
... like appendages that weren't talking to the-
- JSJoe Schmidt
Yeah
- SPSpeaker
... the, the brains. Uh, so we were like, uh... And then we also tried to plan too far in advance, um, which I think is sort of challenging-
- JSJoe Schmidt
Yeah
- SPSpeaker
... in, you know, in this era of company building. Um, so we were like, none of that. Uh, no one has a swim lane. Um-
- ARAlex Rampell
You know, you know the expression, "Man plans and God laughs."
- JSJoe Schmidt
[chuckles]
- ARAlex Rampell
Now it's, "Man plans and OpenAI laughs."
- SPSpeaker
Yeah.
- JSJoe Schmidt
[laughs]
- SPSpeaker
Yeah, exactly. Um, so now we, um... It's funny. Uh, everyone owns product and everyone owns customer success, uh, which is kind of a, an, an interesting setup of-
- JSJoe Schmidt
Yeah
- SPSpeaker
... we do, we have 40 people at the company. Everyone shows up to the same standup every morning.
- JSJoe Schmidt
Mm.
- SPSpeaker
Um, we stack rank the most important problems. Some of them are delivery, some of them are engineering, some of them are CS.
- JSJoe Schmidt
Yeah.
- SPSpeaker
And then whoever's free just takes them.
- JSJoe Schmidt
Interesting.
- SPSpeaker
Um, and we're, and we do continuous planning. So every day the list can change. Every week we, we, we reassess the list. Um, and then whoever's free just picks up the problem. Um, but it's, you know, because of that-- Uh, sorry, because of the age that we're in, you know, anyone can ramp up on a customer through Lightfield.
- 40:02 – 51:49
What Worries Keith Most Right Now
- JSJoe Schmidt
So cool.
- ARAlex Rampell
What's the thing that worries you the most?
- SPSpeaker
I would say speed. Um, which is to say we're, we're in this really interesting, uh, environment. Uh, and, uh, may-maybe I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll share something from the past. Before we started Lightfield, I read all of these, like, Tegus reports about people moving off of, you know, flavor-of-the-month CRM to Salesforce. [chuckles] And, um, I remember reading this one about, uh, one of your portfolio companies, Eleven Labs, where they were on, you know, uh, one of these startup CRMs.
- JSJoe Schmidt
Yeah.
- SPSpeaker
And, um, then, uh, the, uh, they couldn't get that company to build dashboards fast enough, and it was like four months, you know? [chuckles]
- JSJoe Schmidt
Wow.
- SPSpeaker
And, uh, you know, the, the, the folks at Eleven Labs were tired of asking for dashboards and moved to Salesforce.
- JSJoe Schmidt
Yep.
- SPSpeaker
Um, and, uh, that's actually the thing that makes me the most paranoid of I think we've got this incredible wedge-
- JSJoe Schmidt
Yeah
- SPSpeaker
... of being just, like, the best CRM for new companies, and we just have to build everything so that, uh, you know, those folks never feel the desire to go to the old world.
- JSJoe Schmidt
Yeah.
- ARAlex Rampell
How do you-- Actually, on that, how do you prioritize? I mean, this is, like, the craziness about the new world, and it actually goes back to, like, your point on everybody being a generalist, is that once upon a time, you would have, like, a 10-person product design and engineering pod, or pick your number, but not, not 100, not two.
- SPSpeaker
Mm-hmm.
- ARAlex Rampell
Uh, you'd have the product manager, you'd have the designer, and then you'd have, like, nine engineers. And you would have things that would be, like, booked out until, like, 2028.
- SPSpeaker
Hmm.
- ARAlex Rampell
Um, and now anybody can just prompt their way into a product. Right? So like if everybody actually is understanding like what we need to do. But, so on the one hand, it's like you could build everything much more quickly.
- SPSpeaker
Mm-hmm.
- ARAlex Rampell
Um, but you still have to make trade-offs of like, am I prioritizing this customer that I know? Like, shoot, I have this amazing company. They're gonna churn unless I build this.
- SPSpeaker
Yeah.
- ARAlex Rampell
That's a really good reason to build that thing. But actually, that might not be a good thing because you have like 15 other customers that you're not gonna sign up unless you build the other thing. And this is a time, you know, this has been a problem since like, you know, BC era.
- SPSpeaker
Mm.
- ARAlex Rampell
But I guess how have you-- Is there anything that you've learned and done differently in this kind of AI era around anybody can build anything, and therefore you could theoretically have like unlimited product managers and engineers in your company?
- SPSpeaker
It's funny. We, in Lightfield, we sort of, uh, built this, um, this skill where we, we, we like look at the expansion potential of an account. And I think as a CRM company in a red ocean space, we have to be an expansion company.
- ARAlex Rampell
Yeah.
- SPSpeaker
Right? Um, you know, uh, I, I think in a competitive space, you often, um, don't get the initial land that you would've expected 'cause it's just important to win every company. But you're like, by year three, by year five, this is not-
- ARAlex Rampell
Yeah
- SPSpeaker
... gonna matter because you'll be a huge company. We'll be an important part of you.
- ARAlex Rampell
Yep.
- SPSpeaker
Right? So I, I think we take this perspective of like what's sort of the expansion value of this account over a three-year time horizon-
Episode duration: 52:03
Install uListen for AI-powered chat & search across the full episode — Get Full Transcript
Transcript of episode K5yGLO8c6T0
