Mukhund and Madhav Jha, co-founders of Emergent, detail their journey of building an AI-powered app builder that reached $15M ARR in three months. They discuss their pivot from enterprise agents, the multi-agent architecture that enables production-ready apps, and their vision for a future with a 'billion builders'.
In a conversation with a16z, Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi and co-founder Ben Horowitz share pivotal stories and lessons from building Databricks. They cover Ali's transition to CEO, the strategies behind scaling an intense yet sustainable culture, the art of high-stakes dealmaking with giants like Microsoft, and the mindset required to turn down lucrative acquisition offers to build a trillion-dollar company.
Jesse Zhang, co-founder and CEO of Decagon, discusses how their AI agents are revolutionizing customer service for large enterprises by replacing mundane human labor. He covers their go-to-market strategy, the importance of a hardworking in-office culture, his journey as a second-time founder, and the future of an agentic world where AIs interact on behalf of companies and consumers.
Bob McGrew, an early executive at Palantir and former Chief Research Officer at OpenAI, explains the Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) model he helped pioneer. He details its origins, operational structure, and why it has become the dominant strategy for AI agent startups navigating a new market with immense product discovery needs.
Ben Scharfstein from Scale AI and a16z's Joe Schmidt discuss the nuances of enterprise AI adoption, contrasting vertical AI products with custom solutions. They delve into the 'forward-deployed engineering' model as a strategy to build durable moats by solving complex, specific enterprise problems, effectively 'trading margin for moat' in the new AI paradigm.
Max Junestrand, co-founder and CEO of Legora, shares insights on building a successful vertical AI company for the legal industry. He discusses their product strategy, the technical stack designed for a multi-model future, the go-to-market motion for conservative industries, and the challenges of scaling from 10 to 100 people in 13 months.