How We 5X Our Revenue While Others Chase AI Updates | Lindy, Flo Crivello

1. 0:00 – 1:53

   Intro

   1. SPSpeaker0:00

      If you're not embarrassed by your first version, you shipped too late. In AI, I would even go as far as to say, like, if your first version works, you're not thinking big enough. You should build for the future generations of the model so much, and the models are improving so rapidly that the current generation of models should barely support your vision. Just barely. If you spend any time on Twitter, you feel like there is so much competition in AI agents. You feel like there is a new, a new company coming out every week. And yet when you're out in the market, like us, you don't run into competitors that often. So I sometimes compare it to like, there's like trillions of trillions of stars in the universe, and yet the universe is ninety-nine point nine percent empty space. It's the same, right? There's a lot of us nominally, but somehow it feels empty. And I think because the market is just so enormously huge. These people have gone about their entire life hearing everyone tell them the reason why they couldn't do things. But actually, if you do it, you're gonna be very, very successful [laughs] . You're gonna make a lot of money, you're gonna build something very impactful that's good for the world. It becomes addictive. It's like, "Ha!" Like, "Tell me you can't, I can't do it. I'll show you I can." [upbeat music] I'm Flo Crivello. I'm the CEO of Lindy, uh, which is the world's easiest way to build AI agents with no code. Lindy is a, a set of, of building blocks that you can put together to build your own AI agents and get them to do anything. One big use case that we have is, uh, customer support. Step one, customer support ticket arrives by email. Step two, you can have a condition building block that basically branches off the agent. So you can be like, "Hey, is this a customer asking a question or is this a customer asking for a refund?" Step three, for example, if they're asking a question, you can use our knowledge base building block, your FAQ, your website, a PDF, your Notion, whatever you want. Then you can ask Lindy, finally, step four, to answer the support ticket based on the knowledge that it extracted in the knowledge base. We have quintupled, uh, in revenue over the last six months and roughly doubled the size of the team since

2. 1:53 – 3:16

   Focus on What Never Changes

   1. SPSpeaker1:53

      then. [upbeat music] I think it's, uh, Jeff Bezos who said something like, "People always comment about how fast everything is always changing." Like, he likes to focus on what doesn't change, right? In a world where everything is always changing, he finds these pillars of stability to hang on to. And I think what doesn't change is the user, and a lot of preferences of the user are just immutable. That really surprised us. We released the platform, and we started to have quite a few users ask us for HIPAA compliance, which is this regulatory standard in the US that allows you to work with sensitive health information. So people started to be like, "Can you be HIPAA compliant? Can you be HIPAA compliant? I wanna use Lindy for healthcare use cases." And we were like, "Why?" Like, "What, what do you, what do you want us to be HIPAA compliant for?" And that's when we, we understood the use case, which is, turns out it's huge and it's a big industry today. There's a lot of really big companies dedicated solely to this use case where doctors spend a lot of time taking notes during patient visits. They call it charting because there's, like, a very specific standard of notes that they call SOAP notes. Some of them started building Lindys to help them build, get their SOAP notes. So they use Lindy on their mobile phone, and they recorded the conversation using the, the record feature that we have, and then they would prompt Lindy to give them the, the formatted notes. In the case of AI agents, the user wants something that's easy to use. They want something that's effective, something that works, something that's simple to use, something that's affordable, something that's fast. These things are always going to be the case, and the problem that the user is trying to solve is, is fairly constant

3. 3:16 – 4:52

   Build AI That Barely Works

   1. SPSpeaker3:16

      as well. [upbeat music] LinkedIn's founder, Reid Hoffman, who said this famous thing, "If you're not embarrassed by your first version, you shipped too late." In AI, I would even go as far as to say, like, if your first version works, you're not thinking big enough. You should build for the future generations of the model so much, and the models are improving so rapidly that the current generation of models should barely support your vision. Just barely. That was very much our case at Lindy. Like, for a long time, the product simply did not work because the models were not good enough. The very first version of the product was just a prompt. So instead of building this AI agent using these building blocks that I mentioned, it was literally just writing text. Because it's just a prompt, you're just trusting this, uh, AI model to basically follow your instructions. It may not follow the instructions. You're, you're, you're, like, praying the LLM gods. Even to this day, even to the frontier models, like fast-forward two or three years, to this day, Claude Opus 4 or OpenAI o3, I use the very most frontier models right now. Even they very often struggle. We are building for the next generation of models. The current product doesn't work, and yet we keep building because we expect that the next generation of models will make it work. And the way I characterize it today is it's, it's sort of AI intern. It can perform simple enough tasks. Anything that you can describe in a step-by-step, uh, fashion is something that, that Lindy can do. Over the long term, the vision is to build a, a full-blown AI employee, an AI agent that can do anything that a human employee can do on a computer. So that's my piece of advice is, like, skate where the puck is going to be, in, uh, in Steve Jobs' words, and skate for where the, the next generation of models is going to be, and build with

4. 4:52 – 8:18

   Don't Hesitate to Pivot Hard

   1. SPSpeaker4:52

      that in mind. [upbeat music] Don't build a mine until you've, you've found gold. I really identify these two different distinct phases in a startup's life cycle. One, you prospect. You look for the right mining site where you can find gold. And once you've struck gold, but only then do you build a mine. And building a mine is basically hiring a team and raising money and all of that stuff. It is really hard to move a mine. And so if, if you built too large a mine and you haven't found gold, what you need to do is you need to destroy your mine. You need to fire your team. So I started at Uber as a software engineer. I took a six months break after Uber. So COVID break out, everybody was stuck at home. So I was just on my computer at home, and I, I read a blog post by, uh, John Palmer called, uh, Spatial Interfaces, sort of extolling the virtues of, of spatial design. And there was almost a call to action in that blog post that's like, "I wonder what a spatial Zoom would look like." I was like, "Oh, that's a good question." Like, and I started, like, hacking it together. And in the span of a couple of hours, I just had, like, a prototype of, like, a spatial Zoom. It's like you see your video in a bubble. You can move the bubble around on, like, a two-dimensional canvas, and you can only hear and be heard by people around you. And again, this coincided perfectly with COVID. And so I started hosting virtual happy hours in there with my friends, like, "Hey, join me in that space I, I built." And I, I sort of got sucked in little by little. I, I just kept adding features, and I realized it could be, like, a collaboration space. I added a whiteboard and so forth. And then I realized, like, oh my God, like, everybody's working remotely right now. Like, you know, this could be a virtual office. Like, there is a market here. I released it. It got traction. Like, bunch of users started signing up, raised some money, and then, like, the company was just, uh, off to the races. When COVID subsided and when people returned to the office, Team Flow started not going so well, and the growth stalled completely. What finally convinced me that there was simply no market anymore was, like, looking around and seeing all the competitors of which we had many Like good teams, like really good people, and they had raised a lot of money, and none of them were taking off. So that's when I just realized, like, there is no, there is no market. And so they did. It was extremely painful, but I fired two-thirds of the team, and it coincided with the release of the GPT-3 API. So it was before ChatGPT. It was like mid-2022. And we built a meeting recorder in Team Flow, and we were very interested in the GPT-3 API, and so we were like, "What can we do with it?" So we, we did what now a lot of applications do, which is a meeting summarization. And then sales team came to me, and they were like, "Flo, can this thing also update our Salesforce after sales calls?" And we were like, "Sure, I don't see why not." And so we basically kept building and kept fleshing out that, like, Salesforce integration and then HubSpot integration and, and that's when it clicked for us. Like, we realized that, like, wait a minute, we can get the LLM to not just generate text for us, but generate API calls, like generate actual actions for us. And so that's when we were like, "Wait a minute," like, this can be like an, an entire AI employee, basically. We got sucked into that, and again, it coincided with first Team Flow stalling out. We got excited about this AI thing. ChatGPT came about in the middle, exploded, and we're like, "Oh my God," like, AI is real. It's happening. And so we just decided in 2023 to completely fold Team Flow and just focus on the AI opportunity. And, and I, I did start very deliberately, and it's painful as a founder. You need to deliberately mismanage your team. You need to let them alone, and they're gonna hate you. They're like, "Where is our CEO? What's he doing all day?" I'm looking for gold. Like, the mine doesn't matter. The mine is so very mismanaged right now, and you guys are lost at sea, and I decide not to care because I'm gonna spend my time digging for gold. Um, that's, that's what I learned. Don't, don't build a mine before you, you found the gold.

5. 8:18 – 10:11

   Stop Avoiding Micromanagement

   1. SPSpeaker8:24

      My leadership philosophy is the job of a CEO is to win. And so that, that's my guiding light. Epistemologically, that is how I will define what is right or wrong. Perhaps I would compare it to gardening. You know, it starts with, like, selecting the seeds. So I really do believe, like, half the job is just recruiting, like getting the right people into the door. Like, again, I think it's Chris Rub boy who said, "The people you hire is the company you build," and I'm reminded every day of how true that is. It's half the job. So just getting the right seeds. If you don't have that, the plant won't be good. And then giving a direction to the team and to the seed, like that's the sun. You grow in this direction, you know? So that's, that's the second big part of the job is just setting the vision and guiding the plant as it grows. But you can't grow for the plant. The plant won't grow the way you want it to, so you've got to fire people. There's this amazing book by Bill Walsh called, uh, The Score Takes Care of Itself, right? And so the philosophy of Bill Walsh is, like, success consists of just two things. One, identifying the right inputs that lead to success, and two, nailing each and every one of these inputs perfectly right. If you do these two things, you will win. If you don't win, it means you either don't understand what it takes to win or you're not doing what it takes to win. That's just one of these two things. And so it's actually funny. We, we onboarded a new employee this morning. He's the first one of his function, and I spent the day yesterday, Sunday, like literally seven plus hours just writing an 18 pages long document about this is precisely, exactly... We st- we call it the standard of excellence. Step by step by step, this is the job. Again, that's the plants. Like, if you, if you see them doing something wrong, it's like, "No." It's like you're a guard. It's like, "No, this is not what you, this is not what you, this is not what you do." And you just keep putting these guardrails, and you refer back to the doc that you wrote. Absolutely, you should micromanage. The reason why you are in a position of, of, of authority is because someone, with capital most likely, trusted you and your taste. So you, you are entitled, you are in fact obligated to micromanage. That, that's why you're in your seat. You exercise your taste, you exercise your judgment, you exercise your, your knowledge about your business, your industry, your user, your product, and you guide the plant. That's my philosophy.

6. 10:11 – 11:59

   Be a Definite Optimist

   1. SPSpeaker10:17

      I view building a company as a way to bring an ambitious, bold vision to reality. I don't think the lean startup model leads you there. I'm a huge fan of, uh, Peter Thiel's thinking on this. He calls it, uh, definite optimism. It's like a two by two. You've got a definite and indefinite and optimism and pessimism. And so definite or indefinite is like, do you know or do you not know? There's a lot of indefinite optimists in tech. I view crypto as, uh, the, the eternal indefinite optimist, uh, industry. It's like we don't know what's gonna happen. We don't know why things are gonna go well, but wag me, we're all gonna make it. You know, everything's gonna go so well, but we, we can't exactly tell you how. Instead, Peter Thiel pushes for this vision of, of a definite optimism. It's like you must have a crisp opinion, a well-defined opinion of what the world will look like in the future, what it should look like, what it must look like, and bring that vision to life. What percent of your time did you spend in 2022 speaking to an AI? It was 0%. Today, in 2025, it's, it's a lot more than that, and I think the trend is going to continue and continue and continue. AI agents are basically, in the short term, going to turn us all into managers. Instead of doing individual contributor work, you're going to manage a swarm of AI agents doing your work. I sometimes describe it as like imagine if any random 25-year-old could have the same impact in the world as Google. And so I, I think that AI agents are going to do to the world of business at large what the internet has done to media. It's going to be a very powerful leveling of the playing field. It's going to unlock opportunity to-- for, for everyone, regardless of their network or their capital or their access or their geography. It's just really going to come down to their vision and the ideas they have and their ability to leverage AI agents.

Episode duration: 12:29