Why the Next Generation of Enterprise Software Looks Nothing Like Salesforce Transcript, AI Summary & Key Points

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. >> What's the most exciting thing someone's doing with Lightfield today? 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. Is there anything that you've done differently in this kind of AI era? >> 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.

>> What would be the one piece of advice that you'd go back and give yourself if you are just starting again? Um, welcome back to the A6Z podcast. I'm Joe Schmidt. I'm joined by my partner, Alex Rmpelle, and Keith Paris. Keith is the CEO at Lifefield. Lifefield 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. >> Excited to be here. >> Yeah, maybe we'll start just going back to the tome journey and how you got to light field.

very atypical journey. You got two products now to explosive scale. Um tell us a little bit about uh that that experience and how you ended up at Lifefield. >> We started to uh you know mostly because we were consumer people and we thought like LLMs were going to change the way people communicate and we were working on like selfie design 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 GBT3. >> Yeah. And what was the and tell us a little bit about the product too. So it was a it was a presentation product where you could use uh GPT uh to generate presentations and generate pages and and so forth. And we launched it around the same time as chat GPT and uh we just got explosive growth.

Um we got you know 2 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. >> Wow. Oh my gosh. And so you got that to amazing scale. You then decided to stop and completely hard pivot. >> What was that decision like? How did you make that choice? Why? >> Yeah. >> So I would say there are a lot of metrics behind it, but you know deep down I think at an instinctual level.

Um none of us like the product which is which is kind of a funny thing to say. Like I think at the end of the day if you're 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. And um we just couldn't for the life of us make good presentations. Wow. >> You know uh and what what I mean by that is you know we could never we could not see the path of like a high quality discerning presentation maker using this tool.

Yeah. 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 that the technology constrained us to being a tool for individuals and students. >> So interesting. Okay. So you go from AI presentations to >> nothing. And so how did you make the choice of what to >> maybe if if I can rewind a little bit.

I mean sometimes you get to this point and you're like oh well if the technology kind of continues advancing then it will be good enough. >> Yeah. >> But that's also a little bit of a danger. I think the uh it's calledium uh is is the but how did you decide I mean this was probably the question that you were getting at but like why not just wait it out for the technology to get better >> because I mean the leap between GPT3 and GPT6 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? >> Yeah it's a good question. So we 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, the relationship between the presenter and the audience and like no

amount of general reasoning gets you past that. Um, so we were like, this is a going to be a best a great tool for a oneshot pie in the sky presentation and we just couldn't figure out how to turn that into something that we were excited about. >> Yeah. How did you think about the problems that you wanted to attack next? I think the, you know, the hardest part of what you just said and the most painful part is none of us liked the product.

Like >> that's hard if that's your entire life. [laughter] >> How did you decide what was the product you actually wanted to build? What was that process like? So I think we we had a lot of conversations internally about how wait a minute why did we even build this company? We built this company because we wanted to help you know uh professionals tell expert stories you know hard stories.

So we're like let's see if we can find the B2B use case. >> So we um we we sort of looked in our user base. We had 25 million users or something and we found that the the the uh the B2B users were sales and marketing. >> Yep. >> Um so we reached out to them. We went and got 12 pilots uh from call it like 500,000 person companies around here and we're like hey we'll we'll do this for free.

We'll just we'll we'll we'll do great presentations for you and let's see where it goes. So we ended up being used by a couple of sales teams. And um at first we came in with we'll make your new business decks or we'll make your proposals and we're like wait a minute while you're here can can you do other things? >> Can you guys do some research? could you help us qualify leads?

Could you help us like um understand companies for expansion? And um >> at that point we were like sure, you know, let's just follow the heat, see what happens. I I think I think what makes early stage founders good at this is that you you sort of have no priors. You're you're willing to ignore the thing you built. And we were like, let's just follow this trail and see where it goes.

Um, and then the uh the first thing we asked was like, "Oh, just give us access to your context box," which at the time I thought was Salesforce. So, we're like, "Great. Give us access to your CRM, your call recorder, your data warehouse, more and then we'll figure out how to do this work for you." >> Then we realized actually the hardest part of doing this work was actually um making sense of all of the data across all of these disparate systems, you know, and it was sort of uh it was incomplete.

it was uh conflicting. You know what what the the call recorder often had a different view of reality than the CRM. Actually the the work required to reorganize it felt like the most important work. M >> um and I I think through that we we started to realize, wait a minute, maybe this is the more interesting problem to solve, >> which is that if you can reorganize reality for a company in a way that machines can understand and also for humans to understand, um that feels like a way more interesting and enduring company

than the one that we're on right now. >> Yeah. When did you know that you were on to something with the new product? So there there's a a little bit of discontinuity. We didn't know we wanted a CRM first. First first we built like 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. [laughter] >> That was 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.

Yeah. >> 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 and go and like reimagine the CRM from first principles that I think we we built in in the dark for about 4 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 we uh figure [laughter] >> 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. >> Um, and then we found 10 >> negative pricing. >> Negative pricing. 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. and 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. >> And I was like, "Oh, this is so different than to 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."

>> Yeah. And when you think about C I mean did you did you start off saying you know I view 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 because in one hand like a CRM is just a repository right it's like >> customer relationship manage well here here's the repository of all the information all the customer information um but 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 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? >> What were you going to 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.

I think u 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 >> it's the tool that powers low-level automation um and it's also the tool that powers forecasts and and I think um I think our naive view was actually the most important thing here is the ladder you know we if we can help you completely model your business and your customer reality, then the rest will be easy, >> 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. >> We ran towards uh like like highfidelity business modeling. Uh, and because of that, we were like, what gets in the way of this? You know, it's the the rep's manual entry. like the API quality and and we were sort of on our uh you know on our island trying to to world model instead of sending emails.

>> Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about the very intentional decisions you made on the architecture and just like how you kind of built the primitives that allow this to happen because 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.

>> Yeah. Uh so actually three out of our five uh uh founding members came from Facebook or data and u we had this very naive view that um actually the the the most important thing in the CRM is modeling the relationship. U so we actually looked at you know the the sort of the Facebook timeline and we were like we just need to to to model the the chronological relationship between your business and this business.

>> U so we actually built out the activity log first 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.

>> Interesting. >> So we have the 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 you you always have this like canonical log of relationship that everything's built on top of.

And then how did you think about there's there's that chronological view, but then there's all of this other metadata that's never existed in any other CRM, right? I mean, like this was one of the things I remember initially really, you know, jing 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 don't know when that came in or or was there like a certain workflow that you were trying to enable that >> triggered that?

Yeah. So we we actually tried going fully unstructured. >> Um and we found that uh the queries just took too long. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Right. You sort of have the like needle in the haystack problem. So we ended up finding this like semistructured approach where we store gobs of unstructured data in this activity log. >> Cool. >> Um and then the system can use the activity log to sort of infer causality and work through from there.

And that's why it like works so much better than a data leak. >> Yeah. Um, and of course you can put anything in it. You can put your snowflake records in it. You can put your activity. >> Well, maybe give because I I think I think this is a good point like maybe give an example of like what does that mean? How how is it actually used at the end state?

>> Yeah. So, u you know a good example would be u we have a lot of customer success folks on lightfield and um they might be tasked with hey is this account ready for expansion? You know um and if you ask lightfield this open question like you know what should we sell to them? what you know when should we sell to them. It can now go through everything that this account has do done.

First it's sort of the people interactions of what did they say to you? What what do their tickets look like? And then it can also go to the product usage which is just stored as like activity log entries. You're like well they haven't logged in in a month. Maybe you should try to sell them more stuff. >> Yeah. >> Um and then if you want to like compare uh because you know the most common question is like which of these accounts should I work on expansion?

Now it can like traverse the sort of CRM schema and then dive deep into uh you know into the the log of each customer to to give you a good answer. >> So interesting. How do you think how did you think about making the initial experience and like the initial configuration of all of this >> intuitive for a small midsize even large company >> we had this view that uh it's funny we spoke to a lot of CRM consultants and you know we started to write down like what is it that you do right and we found that uh the biggest

most consequential decision they help you with is your your data model. >> Yeah. You screw that up, it's over. >> It's over, right? If you get the wrong stages, the wrong fields, you can't get the reps to go back in time and fill it out. It's over. We're like, >> can we be, you know, effectively schemaless, >> just to say that like, you know, we'll connect you to, we'll connect to your emails, we'll give you a call recorder, we'll connect to your data warehouse, and then just assemble your relationships for you.

and then you can fill out the fields later, you know, um if you change your minds about the fields, you can just traverse the activity log and refill them. >> So, we ended up with this like schemaless setup >> where you log in, you connect your email and more. >> Yeah. >> Uh and then uh we we have built-in enrichment sources and then it just assembles for you in real time.

>> So cool. >> Um and >> basically like intelligence is greater than schema. That's the >> the crux. >> Um so it feels like a consumer product. You just press sync, you wait five minutes, and it's there. >> Well, if you go back to the really old days, it's like to save space because, you know, you'd only have these were all just relational databases, right?

>> And then to savea space in a given table, like each column, it's like, oh, it's a I don't know how much you know SQL, but like you know, varcar. Yeah, >> that's variable character. And you would actually predefine how many characters that particular column could be in the table, >> right? So like you'd say like name would be varcar 25. Yeah. >> Right.

It's like oh shoot this person has too long of an it's just funny how far this has gotten >> because back then when you were really really managing every every bit and every bite um you would literally predefine the maximum number of characters for for a column in a table. And now it's like no schema. It's just it's just funny. Yes. So >> the times have changed.

>> Yes. Yes. Intelligence is greater than than schema. >> Exly. Um I maybe drafting off of that intelligence, you know, thought. So some so so much of the interesting things I think that are happening right now is you're giving someone the kind of chassis to commit intelligence at really hard problems. That example you gave on a on a CSM saying, "How do I upsell this customer?"

What's the most exciting or most random or interesting thing someone's doing with Lightfield today that they couldn't have done in the var world or or another world before this one? >> So, one of the things that I'm really proud of is we started with fully arbitrary schema like custom object custom relationship because it just doesn't matter you know in light field the way that it does other ones.

So, I I love the our customers that have strange business models where they just need to model different things. Um we have this company power and they uh they work with pharmaceutical companies that um uh to help them find clinical trial participants and on the other side 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, you know, the the BTOC side and the B2B side, and they've they've built automations to go and scrape the FDA and clinical trials.gov to give them a a world model of every trial going on in the world >> and then do matching on the BTOC side as well as with the right pharmaceutical company. So there's sort of like collisions happening.

>> Wow. Um, and uh, Lightfield actually helped someone with Alzheimer's find frontier treatment within days. >> That's incredible. >> So, I mean, one one question that we talk about a lot here is this uh, kind of green field 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? It means that like it's been trampled by an incumbent, >> right? Like 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 onrem what did cloud do it's like it was brownfield but I kind of 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 seable systems 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 onrem to cloud.

Um but the other strategy is going green field is saying I'm not going to 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. >> And >> I guess like when you were thinking through I mean going back to the the the early days of negative pricing with the 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. >> 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 Bradfield. Uh 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. But we weren't sure exactly what it was. So we we sort of figured let's just try to win a new company. >> Yeah. >> First. Um and we were like how do we win a new company? was actually uh my my chief of staff and I doing LinkedIn prospecting, emailing YC companies, you know, being like, "Hey, can we can we beat one of these startup CRM?"

Um and and that was sort of how we got started. And we figured by listening really deeply, we would find, you know, the sort of wedge required to go brownfield eventually. 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 preede to seed seed to 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. >> 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. Yeah. Um, and it seemed like it was it was actually a little higher level than we had even anticipated. If you looked at all of the AI CRM billboards around 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 event like Salesforce is going to send emails. I mean I guess they have as of as of today, right? Um and we were like >> I think the wedge in Brownfield has to do with like you know better understanding your company >> um so you can steer your company the sort of like chaotic era of company building.

But it it took us honestly like 6 months of having customers like that staring at them to to sort of for that to emerge. >> Yeah. >> Right. Well, one of the things that also emerges is um if you're creating a better product and you have all of these people that are consumers of the product, of course, but like let's just take the Greenfield versus Brownfield distinction.

The VP of sales that you hire at your Greenfield company has been acclimated and trained to use this thing. I actually remember when I when I started one of my first companies, I was so adamant about not paying $85 a month for Salesforce that I used this thing called Sugar CRM, which was free. >> And uh finally I gave up. Like I finally started paying for Salesforce.

Why? Not because of like product gaps or anything like but like I hired this VP of sales and he was like I'm not using that f in like I was like it's easier, it's better, but like that was also challenging. So, it's also like this I mean it's not like a new company needs to be in the business of like training people per se, but like there's also that gap.

It's one of the things that is seldom understood about like Greenfield versus Brownfield is that like the Greenfield people hire Brownfield like VPs that actually like make product or sorry make uh purchasing decisions. So, how did you like, you know, I feel adamantly this is a much much much better product, but like how do you overcome some of the objections, if you will, from people who were like, you know what, I'm just perfectly fine using something that doesn't work as well.

>> Um, it's a good question. One of our design principles early on was, you know, we figured we were going to be great at convincing the founder, the engineering leader, the product leader to use sort of frontier tech to understand and serve customers, but you know, it was probably going to be a lot of work to convince that VP of sales that joins this is the way.

>> So, we had this idea uh where for all of our salesled plans where we're like, we're going to give this thing away for free to anyone in the company. Um and one it helps the com it helps light field you know to just understand what engineering's doing what customer support's doing what uh finance is doing. Um the other thing is it it'll create sort of real company network effects that make it harder to rip and replace us.

>> Yeah. Uh, so we've been at a few companies now where, you know, the seasoned VP of sales comes in and they're like, you know, this is cool, but I only know how to use uh Salesforce because I've been trained that way. And the rest of the company is like, well, hold on. >> You know, [laughter] this is like how the engineers understand customers. This is how finance does revenue recognition.

This is how customer success uh does account scoring. Um, can you try harder to figure [laughter] this out? you know, in which case then, you know, we have the relationship, we jump in, we show them how we're going to make their lives easier and uh and we've got a fighting chance. >> 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 want to try to, you know, give those tables to people and try to make it very skeoric 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. Light people will just tell you when something happens like 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. >> Yeah. Yeah. I think we've we've actually on the side of pragmatism here. >> Um which is to say that like right now I'm the the deacto sales manager at the company and I still run all of our meetings from the spreadsheet view. Um, I think we had this view of if we really want to be like a real enterprise CRM, we can't be religious about the way people work.

Um, so we've leaned into we have great dashboards, we have great table views. Um, you can use those things if you want and then if you're sort of at the frontier, you can do it all >> and you want like CLI or whatever. >> Yeah, exactly. You can also do that. >> Yeah. Yeah, totally. >> Well, I find that like, you know, so it's funny. I just bought a new car.

I came from a BMW which had like nine million buttons. Like you know if you go in an airplane, right? It's like you look at the cockpit and it's like how does the pilot know? Yeah. Like what these there were like 9,000 switches >> straight out of all. >> 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 stock to change gears.

>> Yeah. >> There isn't one. >> Yeah. >> Like the most physical of physical buttons. It's just completely gone. But actually it's so simple and so intuitive that like a 5-year-old can use it. I mean, hopefully a 5-year-old isn't driving a car, but you get where I'm going. It's like I mean, it it also it's like another way of kind of thinking about like schema versus schema list, right?

It's like if you have all these knobs and switches, it's great. It's so advanced like the VP of sales like part of like or if you talk to finance people, they know all their buttons in Bloomberg, >> but like one of the ways that you're able to build something great is just make it so intuitive. Yeah. >> That like even a 5-year-old can do it. >> Yeah.

>> Um there's a whole category on Reddit called Eli 5. explain like I'm five, right? Like >> uh so it it kind of feels like the cool thing. I mean, I don't know if you're the you're the boss, not me, but like it feels like that's kind of what you have, right? It's like you have this old era which like lots of knobs and switches and everything else, but again, part of the benefit of plain language intelligence is that you don't need any of those things.

It's almost rendered inacronistic. >> Yeah, this is true. And we I feel like we we run into this in different ways, right? which is to say that uh we haven't won the war on uh you know deterministic dashboards. I think everyone wants to look at the same dashboard every morning when they're drinking get their coffee. Me too. Um but they're all >> hopefully it's revenue going up.

>> It's always always up. >> Um but I I think for for some of these like old workflows, we've completely reimagined them. Um one of the most classic sales workflows is the idea of a sequence, >> right? of um you know you send out five emails at different times on different triggers to someone that you know might have expressed interest in your product and you used to have to express these things >> with arrows >> and conditions and variables.

>> Um whereas in in light field we're like no you just chat with the agent. The agent writes out a recipe for you. The recipe takes into account what's in your world model and it sort of runs with it. And um you know at first we had some sales leaders that were like I don't trust this thing. >> Uh I need my knobs. I need my switches. Um but then they sort of come around to wait a minute this is actually efficient better.

>> Um and I have to learn less. Uh I think we're like running into this in in sort of every aspect of of running a go to market team. >> Yeah. There's there's of course this whole movement right now of everyone thinks they can build basically everything themselves and you know software is dead and what can I do myself versus not. How do you talk to customers that want to try to build elements of this or trying to build elements of this and just say a little bit more about that movement and and and how you're responding

at Lfield. >> First of all, I think just being a system of record, we have to be open-minded. You know, it's our com it's it's your data. It's not ours, right? Um, and we we we tell our customers that we take a lot of pride in the modeling and the accuracy of your business. Um, we built our own email sync, we built our own Slack sync, we built our own um data warehouse sync and um, we are proud of how high performance our our database is.

Um, and then you can take that wherever you want. Uh, so we've actually had a couple of customers that would, you know, use Lightfield as the core system of record and then they'll try to build their own harness on top. Maybe they've got a company harness, right? Um, and, you know, we we're supportive of that. You could push it all through MCP or CLI.

Uh, but after a few weeks, they almost always realize, wait a minute, your harness was actually doing quite a bit. >> Yeah. >> Um, it was it had better entity recognition. It had uh better precision and recall. It was faster. Uh and we're like, "Yeah, that's that's our job, you [laughter] know." Uh so I think our take is, you know, it's your day to do what you want, but we're going to work hard to earn the right to your productivity every day.

>> Yeah. Where do you think I mean, kind of on that topic, I mean, pricing is such a crazy question right now because there's seatbased pricing where the seats don't make sense anymore. Like imagine running like thank god you run lightfield and not zenesk right it's like what are they like how many seats do you need maybe zero right that's pretty scary then there's kind of like outcome based pricing but like what is an outcome it's like am I selling the thing 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 the whole SAS apocalypse like you know you're also going to you know supermarket Markets are dead. You're going to grow your own food. Car manufacturers are dead. You're going to weld your own aluminum.

Like, you know, there's you could take this to the extreme, but like I guess where do you think about how did you come up with pricing maybe is kind of question number one. And then what do you think about outcomebased 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 kind of match it up with the question whereas like it almost feels like the last job standing for humans will be sales, >> right? Um but anyway, like kind of pricing outcomes, competition, just curious how you thought about like how did you get to your pricing from negative pricing, which I would not recommend you keep in perpetuity, [laughter] >> but kind of how did you get to pricing and how do you think about everything that's going on in that triangle?

>> Yeah. Uh it's a good question. We we started with both extremes and we figured that that is the fastest path 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. >> U it was >> I think it was received really well by our customers. Uh but then the the head just the head was using 10,000x more than the tail.

Yeah. >> Uh and we realized that >> using in terms of consumption. >> Yeah. In terms of consumption. and uh we weren't going to be in business for a long time with with per seat pricing. >> So then we tried purist consumption pricing where uh everything is a credit um in in light field and um then we found that nobody touched anything. >> Yeah. [laughter] >> You could imagine it was it was the worst three weeks of the company's life [laughter] of we have all of these signups but they're not doing >> anything.

Yeah. This is not good. >> Yeah. Um so then we started talking to customers. We realized there's sort of like um and Joe actually we we divided like sort of four buckets of work that 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 in perceived pricing. They're like, I don't want to think about the like error bounds of my core CRM when I look at my budget, you know, over the next year. So, they're like, make that fixed. Um, and then we found there were two other buckets.

One was sort of pipeline generation. >> Um, where you're you're pretty down to pay consumption pricing and pipeline generation. You realize there's enrichment, there's actually alpha for you. You'll get more meetings, you know, um that that can convert to revenue. Um, and then there's this other bucket of of workflow automations of uh where I think there's just an expectation that you pay for those.

>> Yeah. >> Um, >> what's a good example of that, by the way? >> It would be like uh someone signs up on our website for a demo and then Lightfield does a little bit of research and realizes, oh, this should go to Henry because uh, you know, it's a it's a deep tech company or it should go to Matt because it's a health tech company. >> Um, and I think that's doing real work, right?

you can imagine the ROI on that. So, so you'll you'll pay for that. And then the last piece is honestly intelligence and forecasting. Um, which is, you know, maybe the most undiscovered part of Lightfield of you've got this, >> you know, little like crystal ball or snow globe of your company and now you're going to deploy frontier intelligence to it and start scenario planning and figuring out what's next.

And um, I think in that world you'll definitely pay for the, you know, you you'll pay for the alpha there. Yeah. All right. of um I changed my sales process after letting GPT6 rip on Lifefield for for a couple of hours on the weekend. So, uh all of that is to say, we sort of landed in this platform fee plus seat for um core CRM and we do consumption for everything else and it's landed pretty well.

Uh to your other question about outcomes, um I think the hardest thing about being uh a sales company is that our outcomes are sort of dependent on the strength of your product market fit, right? Of course. >> Um it would be incredibly effic efficient for us to do outbound prospecting for open AI [laughter] and they' be they'd have incredible outcomes and >> they are interested.

>> Yeah. Yeah. Uh and it would be uh incredibly uh uh inefficient, you know, for me to uh do outbound prospecting for a seedstage startup with no website. >> Yeah. >> Right. Um so I think where where we've landed at the moment is we have to charge for the work. >> Yeah. >> Uh we can't quite charge for the outcome in the space uh for now. >> Yeah. >> 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-m around basically velocity and just the the the step function change from before and after.

Talk a little bit about that. >> Yeah. So I think I mean one of the things I regret about Tome that we definitely uh fixed with Lightfield is uh Henry my co-founder says this all the time is like we had a lot of people playing house you know which is 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 swimblade.

Yeah. Um, and I I think because of that it just, you know, we were sort of slowed to a crawl. And, you know, maybe put another way, it was impossible to pivot, right? Because you had all of these like appendages that weren't talking to the >> the brain. So, we were like, uh, and then we also tried to plan too far in advance. >> Um, which I think is sort of challenging, you know, in this era of company building.

Um, so we're like, none of that. Uh, no one has a swim lane. >> You know, the expression man plans and God laughs. Now it's man plans and open AI lives. >> Yeah. [laughter] Yeah. Exactly. Um so now we um >> it's funny everyone owns product and everyone owns customer success. >> Uh which is kind of a an interesting setup of we do we have 40 people at the company.

Everyone shows up to the same standup every morning. Um we stack rank the most important problems. Some of them are delivery some of them are engineering. Some of them are CS. And then whoever's free just takes them. interesting. >> 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, sorry, because of the age that we're in, you know, anyone can ramp up on a customer through Lightfield. Yep. Right. uh anyone can ramp up on our design system library because the LLM can touch Figma and then you know anyone can autocreate tasks in linear because of light fields connectivity to linear.

So we sort of have this this this environment where basically everyone is a generalist >> um and engineers run projects, designers run projects, CSMs run projects. Um, and then if you're the specialist, you sort of like work on uh more of the similar projects than not. >> Yeah. How do you keep that everyone's a generalist and everyone's, you know, kind of constantly coming up with something and working on the most important thing?

Like how do you keep that aligned with this very coherent, >> you know, view of the future? I I just don't know how you how do you how do you manage that process? Yeah, I would say that it's um it's always this push and pull of you know each week we like meet about road mapping in GTM and we just edit it >> and I were like >> yes we had this customer that asked for this like how does it fit into the mission it doesn't you know um so I think it's just this like constant editing >> to make sure that what's coming out of

the company is coherent um we also I would say that the bar to start a project is very low at lightfield but the bar to ship the project is pretty high >> um So, we uh we still do company bug bashes. Uh it was something I learned at Instagram when I was there. Uh the company needs to like this before it goes to customers. >> Yeah. >> Um and I feel like those things combined keep us moving pretty fast.

>> So cool. What's the thing that worries you the most? >> I would say speed. Um I just say we're in this really interesting uh environment and uh maybe I'll I'll I'll share something from the past. Before we started Lightfield, I read all of these like Teus reports about people moving off of, you know, flavor of the month CRM to Salesforce and um I remember reading this one about uh one of your portfolio companies, 11 Labs, where they run, you know, one of these startup CRM 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, and uh you know, the the the folks at 11 Labs were tired of asking for dashboards. It moved to Salesforce. >> Y and uh that's actually the thing that makes me the most paranoid of I think we've got this incredible wedge >> 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. >> Yeah. 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.

>> 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. >> 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 >> um but you still have to make tradeoffs of like am I prioritizing this customer that I know like shoot I have this amazing

company they're going to churn unless I build this 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 going to sign up unless you build the other thing and this is a time this has been a problem since like you BC era, 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. >> It's funny in light field we sort of uh built this um this skill where 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. Yeah. Right. Um you know I think in a competitive space you often um don't get the initial land that you would have expected because it's just important to win every company but you're like by year three by year five this is not going to matter because you'll be a

huge company we'll be an important part of you right so I think we take this perspective of like what's sort of the expansion value of this account over a threeyear time horizon and how do we prioritize I think because of that we've like leaned more towards building for our fastest growing customers than um you know our average customer but uh but I would say at the same time we have to build everything and you know it's sort of a time of being a little more maximalist than usual.

>> The other thing that's kind of interesting is that my observation is uh I kind of like to joke that's that AI is almost overhyped in Silicon Valley. I don't think it is but and it's like massively underhyped outside of this little region of the world. >> Um and part of it is like people haven't tried things in years. like, "Oh, I tried chat GBT in November of 2022 and it hallucinated something.

Oh, that doesn't work." And then they just kind of put it to bed. Now they think it's going to kill them somehow. [laughter] Um, but I mean, how do you think about like long like, you know, kind of it's it's related to Greenfield versus Brownfield, but like you can get Silicon Valley, but it's kind of crossing the chasm into like the rest of the country, the rest of the world where that's a very very I mean, it's the same type of customers.

They have products, they have employees, they have salespeople, they sell things, they want reports, but they're not as plugged in to like you can't just like advertise on 101 uh and and reach them. How do you think about Silicon Valley overhype versus kind of rest of world underhype? >> Yeah. Uh I think for most of these system of record companies, you end up getting most of your revenue scale from actually, you know, the the 50 miles out of here and and more.

Um, I've always thought about this moment in company building as a trick to get reference logos, which is that, you know, we have customers that have raised like $200 million that have three go to market people and they're going to be huge one day. U, so we just need to do amazing work for them so we can take their logos when we go to the rest of the world and be like, "All right, we've got we've got healthcare, you know, or we've got uh, you know, fintech or or whatever it is."

So, I I just see the focus on Silicon Valley not as a not as efficient revenue capture, but actually just like efficient marketing capture to go out there and be like, "All right, we're excited to get into manufacturing. We're actually working with a bunch of great manufacturing companies here and now we can do that for you." >> What is funny how customers think, right?

It's like, all right, you're using the exact same software, but like somehow like if Joe is in a different industry than me and he's a super happy customer and like I want the exact same I'm going to use the Fields example, so just bear with me. But like I'm stoing the exact same stuff, but I don't know if I can trust you because he sells, you know, toothbrushes and I sell, you know, Coca-Cola.

Yeah. >> But it's like if he sells toothbrush, oh, I must have the thing that the other toothbrush seller sells. It's it's really peculiar. I always found that where it's like it's the but like somehow that goes back to referenceability. It's like customers like they just want to know like it's like the old nobody gets fired for buying IBM. It's like I want to know that this works especially for something that is a system of record and I want to know that somebody that is a competitor to me or a friend of mine or like

somebody in like the same you know kind of vertical is using the product before I'm willing to make the jump. So do do you find that that's true almost because it's like you mentioned manufacturing versus X. It's like at the end of the day, a customer is a customer. Yeah. >> Right. Like the context and the the the contact information, like all that stuff is the same, but like why why do is it is it just like they care because they there's just so much trust associated with the product?

>> I think so. I think in in many ways your your CRM is maybe harder to move off of than your bank. >> Yeah. >> Um and >> it's a light field. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Exactly. And then we we make it easy. >> We Yeah, we've made it a lot easier. Um but I I I think in terms of like the the mental overhead you just do not want to choose the wrong one. >> Yes.

>> Um and and because of that I I think that the referenceability goes a long way. Um on the way in I was telling Joe that we uh you know we we do great with um healthcare and health tech. Uh I think part of it is you know that we do really well in these complex deals where there's like 50 different stakeholders. our context engineering done really well and also we we were hardcore about security at the start so we signed baasa you know and we did penetration testing um for for years and >> um now it's so easy you know

for us to win a health tech deal >> uh and I think it's because we sort of have this like network that that we can reference and move on and I think that's just part of the game you know um if I imagine even myself like you know I don't want to choose the wrong ERP you know, so I probably want to choose the ERP that companies who look like me chose >> uh so that I never have to think about this after I buy it.

>> Yeah. Do you do you run into kind of going back to an earlier question, do you run into people in this crazy era of saying, "No, I'm not going to use anything. I'm just going to build it myself because that's the craziest, right? It's like like am I going to be around like is the guy that is working at my company who's decided to vibe code a CRM like the it's free, right?

But like the support, is it free? Like the salary that I'm paying him or her isn't free. But do you run into people that are trying to DIY or is that uh is that kind of over overtalked about? >> I think it's a little overtalked about. Um we we heard it a lot when our ICP was like the the seed stage founder. >> Yeah. >> Um where we and we would often hear look we can either pay you X or >> we can do this over like four weekends and we were like great >> good luck.

>> Good luck. You should you should try it. call us in five weekends. >> Yeah, exactly. Uh and then they were like, uh like none of this works right. It's hallucinating. It's sending out bad emails. I I think on the like larger company side, um we don't hear I'm going to build my own system of record. We hear I'm going to build my own company brain.

>> Yeah. >> Um a lot. And then we we we've had so many of these folks come back and be like, actually building a company brain or building building a business world model is really hard. Uh, and I think maybe the hardest part of it is modeling the customers. So, we tried and we don't like our results. So, we'll come to you now. >> Yeah. >> What are you most excited about for the future?

I >> mean, I think the thing I'm most excited about, it's it's funny. I um I'm stoked about Lifefield becoming your sort of crystal ball for scenario planning. Um, and the the the thing that gets me up in the morning is actually having folks use Lightfield to think about u how many reps should I hire? Uh, what product should I build next? Where do I go?

Um, and uh, you know, one of our customers uh, who sells to enterprise discovered through Lightfield he needs to build a mid-market product >> uh, and built this whole new product line because of this thing he found. And I'm I'm just excited about us being that sort of like mirror. >> Yes. for a company to make their their hardest most consequential decision.

I think this is this goes back to the point Alex was making on like okay in this world of like maximalist and you can you can build for anyone actually the answer is having a tool like lightfield like if you just have all of this data and all this context you can actually be data driven and this is the exact opportunity to throw frontier intelligence at a really complicated decision right and and it's something that historically would have required like really smart people and a lot of ops folks and SQL and a bunch of

other stuff and instead now you just talk to Lightfield, you know, for an afternoon or a weekend and come up with a really intelligent plan to move forward. And I think that's one of the reasons that you can run your company the way you run it, which is really really cool. Um, maybe my last question for you is there's a lot of people that may I think there at least there will be a handful of people that are going through some pivot moment that are watching this and you know thinking about the future where they're Keith

and they're talking about their new amazing company. What would be the one piece of advice that you'd go back and give yourself if you were just starting the pivot journey again with the benefit of hindsight? >> I think the the most important thing to to remember is that uh almost none of the noise around you matters when you're in a pivot. Um you just need to find pain.

You need to be inspired to build a product or service that solves that pain and you need to be like maniacally focused on your customers. >> Yeah. >> Um and then the rest is total noise. I remember when we were going near this, people were talking about how their office reminded our office reminded them of the good old days. They were talking about how like the food wasn't inspiring.

They were talking about like well how are my options going to get repriced and um honestly like none of that matters. I think you can just put the blinders on and uh you know and f focus on the core. >> Yeah. Well, I we could not be more impressed with what you've done. the business you've built, the product is absolutely incredible. If you haven't tried it, you need to try it.

It's incredible. Go check it out at lightfield.app. Keith, it's an absolute pleasure to work with you and we're so excited for the future. Thanks for the honor. >> Thanks for having me. >> Yeah. Thanks, Keith.