a16z Podcast - The AI-Native CRM

Episode Date: September 16, 2026

a16z’s Alex Rampell and Joe Schmidt sit down with Lightfield co-founder and CEO Keith Peiris to discuss what it takes to rethink the CRM for an AI-native world, and the unusual pivot that got him there.Keith previously built Tome to 25 million users, but eventually walked away from the product after concluding that the underlying technology couldn’t capture enough context about a presenter, their audience, and the relationship between them. Starting again, his team followed customers from AI presentations into sales workflows and eventually found a harder problem: making sense of the fragmented and often conflicting data spread across a company’s emails, calls, CRM, and other systems.They unpack Lightfield’s idea of a “business world model,” why Keith believes intelligence can replace much of the rigid schema behind traditional software, and what changes when AI has enough context to reason about a company and its customers. They also get into building for greenfield versus brownfield markets, AI-era pricing, running a company where everyone is a generalist, and Keith’s lessons from making a hard pivot.Resources:Follow Keith Peiris on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithpeirisFollow Alex Rampell on X: https://x.com/arampellFollow Joe Schmidt on X: https://x.com/joeschmidtivLearn more about Lightfield: https://lightfield.app Stay Updated:Find a16z on YouTube: YouTubeFind a16z on XFind a16z on LinkedInListen to the a16z Show on SpotifyListen to the a16z Show on Apple PodcastsFollow our host: https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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? We have 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 the pivot journey again?

Keith Perez built home to 25 million users. Then he decided to start over. In this episode, A16Z's Alex Rampel and Joe Schmidt sit down with the Lightfield co-founder and CEO to unpack why he walked away from a fast-growing AI product and what he learned from the pivot. That journey led Keith to a problem inside the CRM. Companies have huge amounts of customer data spread across emails,

meetings, product usage, and databases, but no single system that understands the full relationship. They discuss Lightfield's approach to building a business world model. Why Alex calls the shift, intelligence is greater than schema, and how AI could rethink systems of record. They also get into how AI is changing the way Keith builds and operates. And why his advice to founders is simple. Ignore the noise, find real pain, and stay focused on customers. Welcome back to the A16E podcast.

I'm Joe Schmidt. I'm joined about my partner, Alex Rampel, and Keith Paris. 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.

Excited to be here. 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. Tell us a little bit about that experience and how you ended up at the Lightfield. We started Tom, mostly because we were consumer people,

and we thought LLMs were going to change the way people communicate. We were working on selfie design, you know, at Instagram and Messenger, and we decided to go into the storytelling of ideas. We got this product out to launch around the time of GPT3. Yeah, and tell us a little bit about the product. So it was a presentation product where you could use GPT to generate presentations and generate pages and so forth. And we launched it around the same time as ChatGPT.

And we just got explosive growth. We got 2 million users a month. People were lining up when we didn't have enough inference 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? So I'd say there are a lot of metrics behind it. But deep down, I think, at an instinctual level, none of us like the product, which is kind of a funny thing to say. I think at the end of the day, if you're a founder, you have to love the product that you're building and you have to be excited for your customers to use it. And we just couldn't for the life of us make good presentations.

And what I mean by that is we could not see the path of a high-quality discerning presentation maker using this tool in an indispensable way. We couldn't see people like yourselves using it for memos. we couldn't see people using it in investment banking or consulting. We just thought the technology constrained us to being a tool for individuals and students. So interesting. Okay, so you go from AI presentations to nothing. So how did you make the choice of what to build?

Maybe 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. it's called hopium. But how did you decide, I mean, this is 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 just the shape of the curve

and why not wait out the curve? Yeah, it's a good question. So we definitely thought about let's shrink the team and wait it out because we were seeing 3.5 to 4 and seeing the leaps being made. But I think the biggest issue was that the model just didn't have enough context to really understand the presenter, the audience,

the relationship between the presenter and the audience, and no amount of general reasoning gets you past that. So we were like, this is going to be at best, a great tool for a one-shot 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 now?

I think the hardest part of what you just said and the most painful part is none of us liked the product. That's hard if that's your entire life. How did you decide what was the product you actually wanted to build? What was that process like? So I think 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 professionals tell expert stories, hard stories. So we're like, let's see if we can find the B2B use case. So we sort of looked at our user. We had 25 million users or something, and we found that the B2B users were sales and marketing. Yep.

So we reached out to them. We went and got 12 pilots from, call it, like, 500 to 1,000 person companies around here. And we're like, hey, we'll do this for free. 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 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 you do other things? Yeah.

Can you guys do some research? Could you help us qualify leads? Can you help us understand companies for expansion? Yeah. And at that point, we were like, sure, let's just follow the heat, see what happens. I think what makes early stage founders good at this is that you sort of have no priors. Yeah. You're willing to ignore the thing you built.

And we're like, let's just follow this trail and see where it goes. And then 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 PRM, call recorder, your data warehouse, more, and then we'll figure out how to do this work for you. Then we realized that actually the hardest part of doing this work was actually making sense of all of the data across all of these disparate systems. And it was sort of incomplete. It was conflicting. You know, the call recorder often had a different view of reality than the CRM.

Actually, the work required to reorganize, it felt like the most important work. And I think through that, 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, 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's a little bit of discontinuity. We didn't know we wanted a CRM first. First, we built a go-to-market assistant. We got people to like it and then we couldn't get anyone to pay for it. That's tough.

To say that we had all of these AEs using it every day, but we had no pricing power because it wasn't our data. And there were 10 other companies in all of these companies competing for it. So we decided to shrink the team, start from scratch and go and reimagine the CRM from first principles. That I think we built in the dark for about four months. And then we needed define people to use our CRM. And it turns out no one wants to use your four-month-old CRM. So we... Good figure.

So we sort of looked at the only asset we had left, which was this giant office space we couldn't get rid of. And we were like, I'm going to post on X and LinkedIn. You can sit in our office space if you use our CRM. And then we found... Negative pricing. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So we found 10 startups to come use the product.

and for some reason they were in it every day 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 a slack feedback about it every two hours and it's like oh this is so different than Tome in the sense that we have 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. Did you start off saying, I've used Salesforce and HubSpot and other things, and here's what I want changed? Or I guess how did you triangulate the job to be done?

Because in one hand, like a CRM is just a repository, right? It's like customer relationship manageable. Here's the repository of all the information, all the customer information. But on the other hand, it's also like this, if you've talked to anybody who's run a sales team, one of their biggest pain points is my stupid salespeople don't update the CRM. And it's often a stale, you know, repository. But I guess what were the governing principles, if you will, around 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 in my office and I'll figure out what they're complaining about and build around that? I think one of the things that benefited us 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

and it's also the tool that powers forecasts. And I think our naive view is actually the most important thing here is the latter. If we can help you completely model your business and your customer reality, then the rest will be easy.

The rest should just be prompts and tool calls. And because of that, I think a lot of the world ran towards CRM for work. And we ran towards like high fidelity business modeling. And because of that, we were like, what gets in the way of this? You know, it's the reps manual entry.

It's the like rigidity of the schema, the API quality. And we were sort of on our, you know, on our island trying 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

founding members came from facebook or oh interesting and uh we had this very naive view that um Actually, the most important thing in the CRM is modeling the relationship. So we actually looked at, you know, the sort of the Facebook timeline. And we were like, we just need to model the chronological relationship between your business and this business. So we actually built out the activity log first of, you know, when did you first reach out? What did you say to them? What did they say to you? What meetings did you have?

What documents were sent back and forth? And then eventually, like, what are they doing in your product? How are they paying you? And 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 always have this, like, canonical log of relationship that everything's built on top of. And then how did you think about 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 that I remember initially really, you know, jiving with you on, which is 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 was there like a certain workflow that you were trying to enable that triggered that? Yeah. So we actually try, going fully unstructured.

And we found that the queries just took too long. Yeah, yeah. Right. You sort of have the needle in the haystack problem. So we ended up finding this semi-structured approach

where we store gobs of unstructured data in this activity log. Cool. And then the system can use the activity log to sort of infer causality and work through from there.

And that's why it works so much better than a data leak. Yeah, yeah. And of course, you can put anything in it. You can put your snow If like records in it, you could put your activity. Maybe give them, because I think this is a good point.

Maybe give an example of, like, what does that mean? How is it actually used at the end state? Yeah. So, you know, a good example would be we have a lot of customer success folks on Lightfield, and they might be tasked with, hey, is this account ready for expansion? You know, 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 is done.

First, it's sort of the people interactions of what did they say to you, what do their tickets look like, and then it could 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. And then if you want to like compare, 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 the log of each customer to give you a good answer. So interesting.

How did you think about making the initial experience and like the initial configuration of all of this intuitive for a small, mid-sized, even large company? We had this view that's, well, 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? Yeah. Right. And we found that the biggest, most consequential decision they helped. help you with is your data model.

Yeah. 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 effectively schemalists?

Or just to say that, like, you know, we'll connect you 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, 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 schema-less setup where you log in, you connect your email and more. Yeah. And then we have built-in enrichment sources, and then it just assembles for you in real time.

So cool. Basically, like intelligence is greater than schema. Yeah. That's the crux. Yeah. So it feels like a consumer product. You just press sync. You wait five minutes.

since it's there. Well, if you go back to the really old days, it's like to save space, because you know, you only have, these were all just relational databases, right? And then to save 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, that's variable character. And you would actually pre-define 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 it. Like, just funny how far this has gotten. Because back then, when you were really, really managing every bit and every bite, you would literally pre-define the maximum number of characters for a column in a table. And now it's like no schema. It's just fun. It's just fun. Yeah.

So. The times have changed. Yes. Yes. Intelligence is greater than on schema. Maybe drafting off of that intelligence, you know, thought, so much of the interesting things I think that are happening. right now is you're giving someone the kind of chassis to committed intelligence at really hard problems. That example you gave 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 car world 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. It just doesn't matter. You know, it would light field the way that it does. Yeah. Other ones. So I love our customers that have strange business models where they just need to model different

things. We have this company power. And they work with pharmaceutical companies that help them find clinical trial participants. And on the other side, they have this marketplace where they're aggregating folks that, that have various illnesses and complications that are looking for frontier treatment. So they've modeled all of this in Lightfield, the B to C side and the B to B to B side,

and they've built automations to go and scrape the FDA and Clinical Trials.gov to give them a world model of every trial going on in the world and then do matching on the B2C side as well as with the right pharmaceutical company. So there's sort of like collisions happening. Wow. And Lightfield actually helped someone with Alzheimer's

find frontier treatment within days. That's incredible. So, I mean, one question that we talk about a lot here is this kind of greenfield versus brownfield thing. So if you think about like startups, normally selling into the brownfield is hard just because it's brown, 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 on-prem, 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 Siebel systems that's running on your IBM AS 400 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 partially how that brownfield was done from on-prem to cloud. But the other strategy is going Greenfield, 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 early days of negative pricing with the free office space being 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 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.

So I think we had this perspective that, you know, building a revenue. team is a very rich problem set. It's something that everyone cares about. It could always be done better. So we believe there's something in here, but we weren't sure exactly what it was. So we sort of figured, let's just try to win a new company. Yeah.

First. And we're like, how do we win a new company? It's actually my chief of staff and I doing LinkedIn prospecting, emailing YC companies. You know, I mean, like, hey, can we beat one of these startups here 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 I think we sort of found it over the past few months, which is to say you get lots of iteration. So we got 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 to B. And we now have customers that had like, yeah, zero rep. when they joined us now who have, you know, 100 reps. So we've been able to like look inside and figure out like what problems are resolving for you that you actually care about. Yeah.

And it seems like it was it was actually a little higher level than we had even anticipated. If you looked at all of the AICRM 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 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 do Brownfield. Like Salesforce is going to send emails. I mean, I guess they have as of today, right?

And we were like, I think the wedge in Brownfield has to do with like, you know, better understanding your company. So you can steer your company, the sort of like chaotic era of company building. But it took us, honestly, like, six months of having customers like that staring at them to sort of for that to emerge. Yeah, right. Well, one of the things that also emerges is 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 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 C-RM, which is free. And 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 FN. It's 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, graining 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 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 are like, you know what, I'm just perfectly fine using something that doesn't work as well?

It's a good question. One of our design principles early on was that 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 customers. But, you know, it was probably going to be a lot of work to convince that VP of sales that joins. Totally. This is the way. So we had this idea for all of our sales-led plans, we're like, we're going to give this thing away for free to anyone in the company. And one, it helps lightfield, you know, to just understand what engineering is doing, what customer supports doing, what finance is doing. The other thing is it'll create sort of real company network effects that make it harder to rip and replace us.

So we've been at a few companies now where, you know, the season VP of sales comes in and they're like, you know, this is cool, but I only know how to use Salesforce because I've been trained that. way. And the rest of the company is like, well, hold on. This is like how the engineers understand customers. This is how finance does revenue recognition. This is how customer success does account scoring. Can you try harder to figure this out? 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 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 give those tables to people and try to make it very schemorphic? Like, here's the CRM that you're used to. And 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. Like, people will just tell you when something happens. Like, how do you think about those kind of product tradeoffs, 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, I think we've actually erred on the side of pragmatism here, which is to say that right now I'm the de facto sales manager at the company, and I still run all of our meetings from the spreadsheet view in light field. 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. So we've leaned into, we have great dashboards, we have great table views. 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 CLAI or whatever. Yeah, exactly. You could also do that.

Yeah, yeah, totally. Well, I find it 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? Yeah. It's like, you look at the cockpit.

And it's like, how does the pilot know? Yeah. Like what these, there was 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 Tesla's, they don't even have,

they don't even have like a stock to change gears. There isn't one. Like the most physical of physical buttons, it's 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 isn't driving a car. But you get where I'm going.

It's like, I mean, 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 is 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 that, like, even a five-year-old can do it. Yeah. There's a whole category on Reddit called Eli Five, explained, like, I'm five, right? Like, so it kind of feels like the cool thing. I mean, I don't know, 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 is, 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 anachronistic. Yeah, this is true. And I feel like we run into this in different ways, right? Which is to say that we haven't won the war on, 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. But they're all of these. Hopefully it's revenue going up. It's always, always up. Yeah, also. But I think for some of these like old workflows, we've completely reimagined them.

One of the most classic sales workflows is the idea of a sequence, right? 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. Yeah. And you used to have to express these things with arrows and conditions and variables. Yeah. Whereas in Lightfield, we're like, no, you just chat with the agent. And 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, you know, at first we had some sales leaders that were like, I don't trust this thing. I need my knobs. I need my switches. But then they sort of come around to, wait a minute, this is actually efficient, better. And I have to learn less. I think we're like running into this in sort of every aspect of running a go-to-market team. Yeah.

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 how you're responding at Lefield? First of all, I think just being a system of record, we have to be open-minded. You know, it's your data. It's not ours.

Yeah. Right. And we tell our customers that we take a lot of pride in the modeling and the accuracy of your business. We built our own email sync, we built our own Slack sync, we built our own data warehouse sync, and we are proud of how high performance our database is. And then you can take that wherever you want. So we've actually had a couple of customers that would 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? And we're supportive of it. of that. You can push it all through MCP or CLI. But after a few weeks, they almost always realize, wait a minute, your harness was actually doing quite a bit. Yeah. It had better entity recognition. It had better precision and recall. It was faster. And we're like, yeah, that's our job. I think our take is, you know, it's your day to do what you want. And 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 seat-based pricing where the seats don't make sense anymore. Like imagine running, like, thank God you run Lightfield and not Zen Desk, right? It's like, what are they? Like, how many seats 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 the software is dead, the whole SaaSpocalypse, like, you know, you're also going to, you know, supermarkets 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 can 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 outcome-based pricing in this space? because it's not as, like, support almost makes sense where it's like it's a cost, kind of 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 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? 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. But how did you get to pricing and how do you think about everything that's going on in that triangle? Yeah, it's a good question. We started with both extremes

and we figure that that is the fastest path to find the efficient frontier. We started with pure seat pricing because it just matched the sort of Salesforce subspot world. It was, I think it was received really well by our customers,

but then the head just, the head was using 10,000 X more than the tail. yeah uh and we realized using in terms of consumption yeah in terms of consumption yeah and uh we weren't going to be in business for a long time yeah with with proceed 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 yeah you could have too expensive it was it was the worst three weeks of the company's life of we have all of these signups but they're not

doing anything. Yeah, this is not good. Yeah. So then we started talking to customers. We realized there's sort of like, and Joe, actually, we were divided like sort of four buckets of work that Lightfield does, and we're able to distinguish between them. The first was sort of your like everyday CRM work of capture a meeting,

fill out records, update tasks. I think most of our customers just expect that to be covered in a platform fee or expect that to be covered per seat 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. And then we found there are two other buckets. One was sort of pipeline generation where you're pretty down to pay consumption price in a pipeline generation. You realize there's enrichment. There's actually alpha for you. You'll get more meetings,

you know, that can convert to And then there's this other bucket of workflow automations of where I think there's just an expectation that you pay for those. Yeah. What's a good example of that, by the way? It would be like 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 it's a deep tech company or it should go to Matt because it's a health tech company. Yeah. And I think that's doing real work, right? can imagine the ROI on that.

So you'll pay for that. And then the last piece is honestly intelligence and forecasting, which is maybe the most undiscovered part of Lightfield of you've got this, you know, a 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 I think in that world, you'll definitely pay for the, you know, you'll pay for the alpha there.

I changed my sales process after letting GPT6 rip on the light field for a couple of hours on the weekend. So all of that is to say we sort of landed in this platform fee plus seat for core CRM and we do consumption for everything else and it's landed pretty well. To your other question about outcomes, I think the hardest thing about being a sales company is that our outcomes are sort of dependent on the strength of your product market fit. Right, of course. It would be incredibly efficient for us to do outbound prospecting for open AI. Yeah. And they'd have incredible outcomes. They are interested.

And it would be... Call here. Incredibly inefficient, you know, for me to do outbound prospecting for a seed-stage startup with no website. Yeah. Right. So I think where we've landed at the moment is we have to charge for the work. Yeah. We can't quite charge for the outcome in the space.

for now. Yeah. Maybe from when you started Tom to today, how is 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 step function changed 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 fixed with Lightfield is Henry, my co-founder,

says this all the time. It's like, we had a lot of people playing house, you know, just to say that you have the product per 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 blade. Yeah.

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

in this era of company building. So we were like, none of that. No one has a swim lane. You know, the expression, man plans and God laughs. Now it's man plans and open AI life. Yeah, exactly. So now we, it's funny

everyone owns product and everyone owns customer success which is kind of an interesting setup we have 40 people at the company everyone shows up to the same stand-up every morning

we stack rank the most important problems some of them are delivery some of them are engineering some of them are CES and then whoever's free just takes them interesting and we do continuous planning so every day the list can change every week

We reassess the list. And then whoever is free just picks up the problem. 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. Anyone can ramp up on our design system library because the LLN in Dutch Figma. And then, you know, anyone can auto-create tasks in linear because of Lightfield's connectivity

to linear. So we sort of have this environment where basically everyone is, generalist and engineers run projects designers run projects CSMs run projects and then if you're a specialist you sort of like work on 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 just don't know how you how do you how do you how do you how do you manage that process.

I would say that it's always this push and pull of each week we like meet about road mapping and GTM and we just edit it. And I were like, yes, we have this customer that asked for this. Like how does it fit into the mission? It doesn't. So I think it's just this like constant editing to make sure that what's coming out of the company is coherent. 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. So we still do company bug bashes. It was something I learned at Instagram when I was there. The company needs to like this before it goes to customers. Yeah. And I feel like those things combine keep us moving pretty fast. So cool. What's the thing that worries you the most?

I would say speed. I was just to say, we're in this really interesting environment, and maybe I'll share something from the past. Before we started Lightfield, I read all of these like Tegas reports about people, moving off of, you know, flavor of the month CRM to Salesforce. And I remember reading this one

about one of your portfolio companies, 11 Labs, where they were on, you know, one of these startup CRMs. Yeah. And then they couldn't get that company to build dashboards fast enough. And it was like four months, you know. And, you know,

the folks at 11 Labs were tired of asking for dashboards that moved to Salesforce. And that's actually the thing that makes me the most paranoid. 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 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 pot or pick your number, but not 100, not two. 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. 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, but you still have

to make tradeoffs of like, am I priority? 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 know, 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 Lightfield, we sort of built this skill where 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? You know, I think in a competitive space, you often 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 of 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 three-year time horizon and how do we prioritize?

I think because of that, we've leaned more towards building for our fastest-growing customers than, you know, our average customer. Yeah. 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.

Yeah. The other thing that's kind of interesting is that my observation is, I kind of like to joke that AI is almost overhyped in Silicon Valley. I don't think it is, but it's like massively underhyped outside of this little region of the world. And part of it is like people haven't tried things in years. They're like, oh, I tried chat GPT 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.

But I mean, how do you think about like long, like, kind of, 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, 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, that you can't just like advertise on 101 and reach them. How do you think about Silicon Valley overhype versus kind of rest of world under hype? Yeah. I think for most of these, system of record companies, you end up getting most of your revenue scale from actually, you know, the 50 miles out of here and more. 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. 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, it'd be like, all right, we've got, we've got health care, you know, or we've got, you know, fintech or whatever it is. So I just see the focus on Silicon Valley, 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 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 destroying the exact same stuff, but I don't know if I could 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 really peculiar. I always found that where it's like, 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 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 contact information, like all of that stuff is the same. same, but like, 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 many ways, your, your CRM is maybe harder to move off than your bank. Yeah. Yeah. Until lightfield. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And we, we make

it easy. Yeah, we've made it a lot easier. But I, I think in terms of like the mental overhead, yeah, yeah. You just do not want to choose the wrong one. Yes. And because of that, I think, that the reference ability goes a long way. On the way in, I was telling Joe that we, you know, we do great with healthcare and health tech. I think part of it is, you know, that we do really well in these complex deals where there's like 50 different stakeholders or context engineering done really well. And also, we were hardcore about security at the start. So we signed BAAs, you know, and we did penetration testing for years.

And now it's so easy, you know, for us. to win a health tech deal. And I think it's because we sort of have this, like, network that we can reference and move on. I think that's just part of the game. You know, if I imagine even myself, like, you know, I don't want to choose the wrong ERP. Yeah.

You know, so I probably want to choose the ERP that companies who look like me chose so that I never have to think about this after I buy it. Yeah. 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, 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, it's free, right? But like the support isn't 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 kind of over-talked about? I think it's a little over-talked about.

We heard it a lot when I, our ICP was like the seed stage founder. Yeah. Where we would often hear a 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 try it out.

Call us in five weekends. Yeah, exactly. And then they were like, ah, like none of this works right. It's hallucinating. It's sending out about emails. I think on the larger company side, 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, 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 a business world model is really hard. Yeah. Uh, and 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 am, I'm stoked about life. becoming your sort of crystal ball for scenario planted. And the thing that gets me up in the morning is actually having folks use Lightfield to think about how many reps should I hire,

what products should I build next, where do I go? And one of our customers who sells to Enterprise discovered through Lightfield he needs to build a mid-market product and built this whole new product line because of this thing he found. And I'm just excited about us, being that sort of like mirror for a company to make their hardest most consequential decision. I think this goes back to the point Alex was making on like, okay, in this world of like

maximalists and 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 it's something that historically would have required like really smart people, and a lot of ops folks and sequel and a bunch of other stuff. And instead now you can 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. Maybe my last question for you is there's a lot of people that may, I think there are 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 most important thing to remember is that almost none of the noise around you matters when you're in a pivot. 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 maniacally focused on your customers.

Yeah. And then the rest is total noise. I remember when we were going through 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 am I options going to get repriced and honestly like

none of that matters I think you can just put the blinders on and you know and 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. Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z podcast. If you like this episode, be sure to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or review

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