r_thambapillai

our current prototype of this functionality is fairly basic and surfaces things from the underlying chats like: Users want a "create ticket tool", or "The run SOQL query often fails because it references fields that don't exist. You should provide documentation of the actual fields". Happy to chat if you want to you can find me on bookface as the founder of credal

Great launch!! There’s a lot of very silly comments of people saying they will vibe code this… errr good luck being the slop version of this startup. :/

It’s a cool product and I’m curious to see where you go. We build an MCP factory, where our enterprise customers use our product to build MCPs that their employees use in Claude or Codex. What would be cool for me is if I could use this to surface insights to them, rather than just to our team.

Credal.ai actually does this for Enterprise usecases today (disclaimer: i am the founder). We use mostly the MCP framework, but you can set rules for human in the loop (HITL) based on the arguments for a tool call. (e.g. sending an email to yourself or your team is ok without HITL, but if anyone else is in to, cc or bcc then HITL is needed)

didn't OpenAI just say they needed a code red to be relentlessly focussed on making ChatGPT market leading again? Why are they launching new products? Is the code red over is the gemini threat considered done?

while it makes sense that companies are unlikely to want to maintain a bunch of auxiliary saas tools just because Claude Code exists, it might be the case that Claude Code massively reduces the barrier to entry for software companies, and in theory the maintenance costs as well. So while companies will still outsource a lot, their options for outsourcing could go up a tonne, so even though companies are still spending money on external options, those options see margin pressure that dilute SaaS from 70% margin in the era where building great software was hard, to ~0%, if building great software suddenly becomes trivial.

really early stage, financial advisors aren't really that necessary, besides really basic stuff like filing taxes which I imagine may be less interesting to you. It becomes more valuable as you approach the Series A stage prepping your accounts for that and then obviously after that you need more serious in house finance teams alongside various external parties.

what are the booking platforms your referring to?

while its clear that your testing team should have their own 5 Ys as well, I think its reasonable for the manager of your team asking you the question: how do we prevent this in the future? The unfortunate reality of large companies is that sometimes the quality and behaviour of other teams is (to some extent/on some time horizon) out of your control, and so the question for any given team lead is often "what can I do differently". It does seem that in this case there probably was some mechanism that your team could have had its own internal testing process that needn't replicate the full responsibilities of the testing team but could at least have caught this issue.

Person who has spent years building up their large bicep to wield their very large hammer is upset about the invention of very small hammer intended to be used for small nails. :D

Should I hire a lawyer to fill out the form to apply for citizenship as a Green Card (marriage) holder

I think the questions were 90-95% predictable/seen before from Founder, which is fair because most VCs want to understand the basics first. We must have met with 100-200 VCs when we actually did the raise, so after the first 50 or so, I stopped getting new questions

i did a round of feedback with some fellow founders and they were way, way more difficult than the VCs were.

It looks like Slack updated their Terms, effective today for new apps and in 1 month for existing apps, to ban:

1. Commercially distributing an application that uses the Slack APIs without an explicit license to do that from Salesforce (Slack's parent company)

2. Indexing and storing data from Slack (from the actual API terms of service: https://slack.com/intl/en-gb/terms-of-service/api `you may not create persistent copies, archives, indexes, or long-term data stores`

3. For apps outside the marketplace, (inc. for ex. Glean) the rate limit is now 1 request per minute

It is extremely dreadful

If I have a candidate on a h1B at another company that I want to hire, what is the process to get them started at my company?

I thought this was a very powerful meta learning, something that abstracts across all the experiences.

> And I think my current happiness stems mainly from the fact that I like the person I've become, someone who can fail again and again and again and again and still find a way, for the most part, to be happy.

Curious if you have any other learnings that are less specific to a particular endeavour but hold tru/derive from your experiences across all of them

Very true, although I suppose a significant fraction of the decline at that time might be a result of the end of the Empire, which given that there are simply no such successful Empires anywhere in the world anymore was almost certainly inevitable.

By comparison, the performance of the UK in the last 20 years vs the US or the Nordics is a singular tragedy.

As a Brit, when I was raising the seed round for my startup, UK and European VCs would consistently try to haggle you down on price while the American VC's were exclusively focussed on trying to figure out whether this could be a billion dollar business or not (in the end we raised a $5m seed led by Spark, and have done extremely well and raised more since).

The UK lost Deep Mind - which could have been OpenAI!! -- to Google. I think part of the issue is cultural - the level of ambition in the UK is just small compared to the US. Individual founders like Demis or Tom Blomfield may have it but recruiting enough talent with the ambition levels of early Palantir or OpenAI employees is so hard because there are so few. Instead, a lot of extremely smart people in the UK would rather get the 'safe' job at Google, or McKinsey than the 'this will never work but can you imagine how cool it would be if it did' job at a startup.

There are probably political reasons as well. Unfortunately the UK has not been well governed for 20 years or so, and hence economic outcomes as a whole have been abysmal.

most folks will go to whomever is free but ultimately most folks for whom the problem is valuable will go to whomever is best

Definitely!! My intent was not to claim founder-dadhood is harder than any other specific version but just to lay out the specifics/particulars of what to expect if you are a founder-cum-dad. Probably one of these should exist for every possible permutation!

1.You should definitely just have the argument and decide who is the CEO. Yes, it will be challenging. But understanding who actually makes the final decision about what now will at least let you avoid 100 small arguments. A good CEO will make most of these sorts of decisions in a way that in the end, if they turn out to be bad, you can change course or roll it back. If you can't even agree to try an experimental idea... good luck.

2. Agree roles, responsibilities and expectations, and areas of ownership. If you have good traction and he is responsible for driving growth in the market, it sounds like he is doing reasonably well and should probably stay in charge of making the final decision on growth for now. But do you guys have targets or growth goals in mind? If you do, and you're hitting them... just take the win and move on. If you're not hitting your growth goals then that should be enough for you guys to agree to try something different, whether that's experimenting with different pricing, marketing, product etc. Either way, having areas of the business that you can both exercise some agency / decision making over will make you both feel better. And combining that with concrete targets will give you an objective yardstick to measure whether the existing strategies are working.

really interesting to see them hire two folks from consumer-tech backgrounds, rather than B2B or developer tools. I wonder if that signals an increasing focus on ChatGPT as a consumer product rather than the API / Enterprise products? (Edit: Sarah actually has a background in both Enterprise and Consumer)

The incentive for first party tool providers to do this is going to be huge, whether its Slack, Google, Microsoft, or really any other SaaS tool. Ultimately, if business want to avoid getting commoditized by their vendors, they need be in control of their data, and their AI strategy. And that probably ultimately means turning off all of these small-utility-very-expensive-and-might-ruin-your-business features, and actually creating a centralized, access controlled, well governed knowledge base which you can plug any open source or black box LLM, from any provider.

I once encountered this in the real world as a data analyst a long time ago. I was working at an e-commerce company, called The Hut Group, and the whole year our marketing team had been saying our marketing cost of goods sold (the percentage of our revenue we needed to spend on marketing) had been declining across every product category. But at year end, the execs were shocked to realize that our cost of goods sold had almost doubled, from 10% to nearly 20%.

The finance team had asked me to double check the marketing team's numbers, to see if there'd been some funny math in the reporting. But the marketing team were totally right, marketing spend across the three main categories - games, beauty, and nutrition had all fallen (~15% to ~10%, ~30% to ~25%, and ~50% to ~30% respectively). However, the mix of these product categories had shifted massively, with nutrition growing from roughly 10% of our total sales to now nearly 50%.

In net that meant that whilst the marketing team had gotten more cost-efficient at selling every individual product category, the growth in the nutrition industry had vastly outstripped the growth in all other categories, and since that was the highest individual category, the aggregate marketing costs % had gone up, even though the team had improved every category. I then had the fun job of explaining the Yule Simpson paradox to a bunch of accountants.

I'm a big fan of Fern's SDKs (disclaimer, I became an investor in their company, but after I used their product)

I think incident.io have done a really great job of putting "product engineer" really front and centre of their recruitment process, and have a bunch of awesome folks / talent there (many hired from GoCardless, my former employer).

On the specialist vs generalist question, I'm curious if OP has opinions on how to pick from amongst the many specialists to go deep in? Product Managers? FE? BE? Subject matter experts? etc

Curious if you have a resource to read that shows this?

Of course, the profit incentive also applies to all the employees (which isn't necessarily a bad thing, its good to align the company's goals with those of the employees). But when the executives likely have 10s of millions of dollars on the line, and many of the IC's will likely have single digit millions on the line as well, it doesn't seem exactly straightforward to view this as the employees are unbiased adjudicators of what's in the interest of the non-profit entity, which is supposed to be what's in charge.

It is sort of strange that our communal reaction is to say "well this board didn't act anything like a normal corporate board": of course it didn't, that was indeed the whole point of not having a normal corporate board in charge.

Whatever you think of Sam, Adam, Ilya etc, the one conclusion that seems safe to reach is that in the end, the profit/financial incentives ended up being far more important than the NGOs mission, no matter what legal structure was in place.

someone commented this ChatGPT link as a summary of the changes... (but the comment seems to have been deleted? not sure why it was deleted but I thought the summary was useful - although of course hard to verify accuracy / hallucination free)

https://chat.openai.com/share/baf35afa-87c4-4946-8ef6-fe26f6...

IF that were a good summary it would seem relatively benign, except for the extremely scary penultimate line:

`Use of Content to Improve Services:

The older terms mentioned that OpenAI does not use content from the API to develop or improve services but may use content from other services to help develop and improve the services. Users had the option to opt-out if they didn't want their non-API content used for this purpose .

The new terms do not explicitly mention this aspect, which may suggest a change in policy or it might be covered under different specific documentation now .`

But then on closer inspection the business terms (which govern API use), do state: "We will not use Customer Content to develop or improve the Services." which I assume means that the underlying terms have not changed, they've just changed where the relevant terms live. ("Customer Content" is defined to mean customer provided inputs and outputs. I assume that if they can't train on Customer Content, that means they can't train on synthetic data create to resemble customer content as well, although I'm not a lawyer so would probably want to consult one about that.