Advice to Founders from Maven AGI

What would be each of your advice to early stage founders that are building a jacket? Whether it's AI agents that support humans or like autonomous agents that can fund processes. But in, primarily in that space, the.

Jackets, my number one thing would be solve a, solve a big problem. Like I see a ton of people going out there and they're solving very niche problems for a very small segment of the market. I'm sure there's an opportunity there to build a lifestyle business, but probably not one that you'd want to fund as a vc. And so I think for all of us, we said, hey, if we're going to leave the amazing companies that we're working at and we're going to go out there and try to do something, we want to be impactful, we want to be able to empower customers to be happier. Not just for five companies but for an entire cadre of companies. So that's my advice and I think it's interesting is like, you know, for a lot of companies you see TAM expansion over time. You know, if we were to look at what the TAM was for Gen AI last year versus this year, it's changed significantly.

I'll probably build on that in a slightly different way. One of the things I felt I was, I learned at Google is that you, you, you can actually dream really, really big. So in this particular piece of technology it has unnaturally gotten a large swath of engineers to be very excited to be builders again. It was just very opportunistic. While also like there was just like a lot of great people I have worked with who are kind of like frustrated where they were. It was just perfect timing to like, let's bring the band back together and let's, let's, let's do something crazy. We raised a large enough round that we could afford to do that. I think that particular question is really a function of can you afford it or not.

I think your ability to recruit is also a byproduct of the size of the opportunity you're going after and how interesting the problem is. So if you're focusing on something that's very niche, it's a small tam, like probably not something people are going to get excited about. And so if you want to go out there and recruit a world class team, you have to be solving a world class problem.

The other thing is that I would argue if you're trying to build a world changing company, building the recruiting muscle early is a critical checkbox. If you're uncomfortable doing it, you better do it quickly and Kind of get the reps in because this particular industry is moving faster than anything I've ever seen before. So the ability to recruit quickly is kind of critical because you need to be able to scale fairly quickly. I mean, we're. What is it? How old are we now? 13, 14 months old, and we're almost 40 people. And if we were doing that, like, with three of us and I'm coding behind the scenes, we wouldn't be where we are today.

And it goes back to, like, we founded the company with intentionality. We wanted to go big and we wanted to go fast. In order for us to be able to do that, there are certain things that we're going to have to, like, move faster than you typically would when you look at, you know, kind of historically great companies. In Boston, HubSpot, took them a couple years to get to a million in ARR. Klaviyo took them three years in order to get to a million in ARR. UiPath. Not Boston based, but, like, it took them 10 years to get to a million ARR. We've exceeded all of those numbers. And the reason why is that we've been able to be intentional about what we wanted to build, who we were targeting and how we were going to do that. And so, you know, for us, if Sami was coding this thing for, you know, the next three years, like, we would be restricted by our ability to be able to move fast. We can't build 50 integrations, one person coding, you know, for, you know, Sammy, he wrote a whole bunch of the early code. But in order for us to continue, he needed to be able to bring in people to help them with that. And the same with, like, powder LED sales. Of course, you know, I'm out there on the front lines. We're having conversations with Sami and Eugene, talking to the people on the technical side and the business buyers. We were the first people in the door, and our early customers were all sold by us. But once you get signal from the market, hey, we have product, market fit, and we're ready to go. Great. We have to move faster here.

That's great. I love that. Thanks, Jonathan. Eugene, your tips for the founders out there.

So my advice for the founders out there as technologists, it's really easy to get enamored by this magical technology. Like maybe this LLM thing is really alien technology from the future. Like, it very well could be, and it's, I think, magical. But we need to develop empathy for real user problems and not just our customers, but their customers and how they're thinking about to make sure you deeply understand your customer, their workflows and how this new thing fits in and not just the end state of where you're trying to reach but what are the steps to get there. We didn't start with selling AI agents that are going to take over and like have your support team go away. We started with a chat experience. That chat existed as a surface and we started with Copilot for agents as the entry point product into support support as the entry flow into the enterprise because we understood how the buyer would think about this and had true empathy for their problems. And so for the founders that are touched or kind of inspired by this technology also get inspired by the user problems that you're trying to solve with this technology. Don't just show up with like oh this is a cute toy this is a cool tech. I don't know what what would to do with it but bring the the full solution.