Ali Ansari: $7M to $700M+ ARR in ~2 years: Building micro1 | The Further, Faster Podcast

Ali Ansari (0:00)

The way to think about data and knowledge kind of distilling into models is like, it's really an alignment problem, right? And again, it's like a phrase that's overused. But what I mean by this specifically is like, you need to continuously align the models for what humanity cares for and what that state, at that moment in time, what the knowledge kind of base looks like, right? Which again, is changing. And with AI, it's going to change even faster.

So if it changes faster, we need even more data over time to dynamically align the models with humans' interests, human know-how, human laws, etc.

Antler (0:43)

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Welcome to The Antler, Further, Faster Podcast. Excited to be here today. Our guest today believes that human data will be a trillion dollar market in the future, and I'm sure it's going to be a great conversation. Excited to have Ali Ansari here with me today, CEO, founder of Micro One.

Micro One is a data lab to train frontier models and devaluate agents. And I think it's fair to say one of the fastest growing companies ever in history. I think in the past 18 months, it's grown from 7 million in annual revenue to over 450 million in revenue. So absolute rocket ship. Just some of the other stats here, 7 million experts on the platform, tens of thousands actively training models, working with all the top frontier AI labs, and the business has expanded from AI model training, robotics model training to agents valuations and more. Really excited to have you here, Ali, and excited to see you again. Yeah. Thanks for having me. There's lots of great stuff to talk about. For sure. Absolutely. I really wanted to just get started with your own story, and great businesses are started by great people, and you've had quite a fascinating journey yourself. So maybe just to start things off, just take us back. I understand when you were 10, you came to California and you found yourself in school. How much do you remember from that experience when you came here?

Ali Ansari (2:30)

Yeah, I remember quite a bit. I was born in Iran, moved to the US, like you said, when I was 10 years old.

I remember my mom tried to have my sister and I learn English when we were in Iran, but we were kind of kids that we didn't really get along too much with the English teachers, so we ended up not really learning too much English. So when I came here, I basically had to learn everything from scratch. So it was a bit of a shock. I was put right into third grade and had to go in and quickly learn. So I do remember those moments, but it's been a fun journey, very grateful for the US and the fact that we were able to win what's called the Green Card Lottery and to be able to come. So, yeah.

Antler (3:21)

I think most people who become, or many people become entrepreneurs later in life, actually have had a history from early days. I remember selling floppy disks in high school and stuff. Was there anything about that experience of coming here and having to learn the language and maybe feeling dislocated that led you down this path? Or how do you think about that?

Ali Ansari (3:45)

Yeah, I think in retrospect, this was part of it.

The thing that... The catalyst for me to start my entrepreneurial journey early on was actually something very simple, which is I was 12, 13 years old. I was on my phone a bunch. My mom was like, hey, you're always on your phone. Try to make some money on your phone. It's like, okay, great. Let me try. So I just went on eBay, started listing stuff. And then I remember I ended up listing a bunch of stuff around the house, and I ended up selling my dad's shoes as one of the first ever products I ended up selling on eBay.

Antler (4:25)

Did he know that you were going to sell his shoes? No, he didn't know.

Ali Ansari (4:28)

I just listed it. I was like, let's see what happens here. And then of course, I mispriced the shoes, so I ended up selling pretty quickly. So I was like, oh, wow, making money is actually quite easy. You can just sell stuff. And then I went up to my mom and dad, I was like, hey, look, I just sold the shoes, we got to ship it, we got to give it to the... And then my dad was like, why are you selling my shoes?