Launching AI products with Braintrust’s CEO Ankur Goyal

**Elad Gil** (0:05)
So today on No Priors, we have Ankur Goyal, the co-founder and CEO of Braintrust. Ankur was previously vice president of engineering at Single Store and was the founder and CEO of Empyra, an AI company acquired by Figma. Braintrust is an end-to-end enterprise platform for building AI applications. They help companies like Notion, Airtable, Instacart, Zapier, Vercel, and many more with evals, observability, and prompt development for their AI products. And Braintrust just raised $36 million from Andreessen Horvitz and others. Ankur, thank you so much for joining us today on No Priors.

**Ankur Goyal** (0:36)
Very excited to be here.

**Elad Gil** (0:38)
Can you tell us a little bit more about Braintrust, what the product does, and we could talk a little bit about how you got started in this area and AI more generally.

**Ankur Goyal** (0:45)
Yeah, for sure. So I have been working on AI since what one might now think of as ancient history. Back in 2017, when we started working on Impura, things were totally different. But still, it was really hard to ship products that work. So we built tooling internally as we developed our AI products to help us evaluate things, collect real user data, use it to do better evals, and so on. Fast forward a few years, Figma acquired us and we actually ended up having exactly the same problems and building pretty much the same tooling. And I thought that was interesting for a few reasons. Some of which you pointed out, by the way, when we were hanging out and chatting about stuff. But one, Impiro was kind of pre-LLM. My time at Figma was post-LLM. But these problems were the same. And I think there's some longevity that's implied by that. Problems that existed pre-LLM probably are going to exist in LLM land for a while.
And the second thing is that having built the same tooling essentially twice, it was clear that there's a pretty consistent need. And so I have very fond memories of the two of us hanging out and talking to a bunch of folks like Brian and Mike at Zapier and Simon at Notion and many others. And I've been in a lot of user interviews over time. I've never seen anything resonate like the early ideas around Braintrust and really everyone's desire to have a good solution to the eval problem. So we got to work and built, honestly, a pretty crappy initial prototype. But people started using it. And, you know, Braintrust, just over a year later, has now kind of iterated from people's feedback and complaints and ideas into something I think that's really powerful. And yeah, that's how we kind of got started.

**Elad Gil** (2:43)
Well, yeah, I remember in the early conversations we had around the company, or the idea, I should say, it was meant to even potentially be open source. And it was the first time that I was involved with some sort of customer call. And people would say, we don't want you to open source it, which I found really surprising. Like people really pushed on, we want this to exist for a long time. We want to be able to pay for it. And so there was that kind of really interesting market pull. Why do you think there was so much interest or need for this or demand for it? Or, you know, what does Braintrust do and how does that really impact your customers?

**Ankur Goyal** (3:12)
You know, many of our customers had actually built, early customers had built like internal versions of Braintrust before we engaged with them. And there's a couple of things that sort of came out of that. One is it helped them gain an appreciation for how hard the problem is. Eval sound really easy. Oh, it's just a for loop, you know, and then I look at, I console.log the for loop as I go and I look at the results. But the reality is like, you know, the faster you can eval, the faster you can look at eval results, which start to get really complicated as you start doing things with agents and so on, the faster you can actually iterate and build stuff. It is actually a pretty hard problem to do evals well. And many of our early customers who were kind of like the pioneers in AI engineering had learned that the hard way. And I think the other problem is that, you know, folks, especially folks, you know, like Brian, for example, they saw that AI would be a pervasive technology throughout the whole org, not just a project that, you know, Brian might babysit and work on with one team. And having a really consistent and standardized, you know, way of doing things was really important. I remember early on, Brian pointed me to the Vercel docs, and he said, one of the things I love about this is that when new engineers are building UI now, they read these docs and they kind of learn the right way to build web applications. And you have that opportunity with AI. And I found that actually really motivating. And it really influenced how we think about things.