The AI-Native CRM

Keith Peiris (0:00)

Three out of our five founding members came from Facebook. Building a revenue team is a very rich problem set. It's something that everyone cares about. It could always be done better.

Joe Schmidt (0:10)

What's the most exciting thing someone's doing with Lightfield today?

Keith Peiris (0:13)

We have this company Power. They have this marketplace where they're aggregating folks that have various illnesses and complications that are looking for frontier treatment. So they've modeled all of this in Lightfield, and Lightfield actually helped someone with Alzheimer's find frontier treatment within days.

Alex Rampell (0:29)

Is there anything that you've done differently in this kind of AI era?

Keith Peiris (0:33)

As a CRM company in a red ocean space, we have to be an expansion company. If we can help you completely model your business and your customer reality, then the rest will be easy.

Joe Schmidt (0:45)

What would be the one piece of advice that you'd go back and give yourself if you were just starting the pivot journey again?

SPEAKER_4 (0:52)

Keith Peiris built Tome to 25 million users. Then he decided to start over. In this episode, a16z's Alex Rampell and Joe Schmidt sit down with the Lightfield co-founder and CEO to unpack why he walked away from a fast growing AI product and what he learned from the pivot.

That journey led Keith to a problem inside the CRM. Companies have huge amounts of customer data spread across emails, meetings, product usage and databases, but no single system that understands the full relationship.

They discuss Lightfield's approach to building a business world model. Why Alex calls the shift, intelligence is greater than schema, and how AI could rethink systems of record. They also get into how AI is changing the way Keith builds and operates, and why his advice to founders is simple. Ignore the noise, find real pain, and stay focused on customers.

Joe Schmidt (1:48)

Welcome back to the a16z podcast. I'm Joe Schmidt. I'm joined by my partner Alex Rampell and Keith Peiris. Keith is the CEO at Lightfield. Lightfield just raised a $47 million Series A led by us, and they're building a business world model. A business world model turns customer emails, calls and meetings into a record that AI agents can use to get work done. We'll explore how Keith pivoted, which is very interesting to Lightfield, how they built the initial product, and what customers can do with it. Keith, thanks for joining us.

Keith Peiris (2:16)

Excited to be here.

Joe Schmidt (2:17)

Yeah. Maybe we'll start just going back to the Tome journey and how you got to Lightfield.

Very atypical journey. You got two products now to explosive scale. Tell us a little bit about that experience and how you ended up at Lightfield.

Keith Peiris (2:30)

We started Tome mostly because we were consumer people, and we thought LLMs were going to change the way people communicate. We were working on selfie design, you know, at Instagram and Messenger, and we decided to go into the storytelling of ideas. We got this product out to launch around the time of GPT-3.

Joe Schmidt (2:46)

Yeah, and tell us a little bit about the product.

Keith Peiris (2:48)

So it was a presentation product where you could use GPT to generate presentations. You could generate pages and so forth. And we launched it around the same time as ChatGPT.

And we just got explosive growth. We got 2 million users a month. People were lining up when we didn't have enough inference to support them.

Joe Schmidt (3:08)

Wow. Oh my gosh. And so you got that to amazing scale. You then decided to stop and completely hard pivot. What was that decision like? How did you make that choice?

Why?

Keith Peiris (3:19)

So I would say there are a lot of metrics behind it, but deep down, I think at an instinctual level, none of us like the product, which is kind of a funny thing to say. I think at the end of the day, if you're a founder, you have to love the product that you're building and you have to be excited for your customers to use it.

Joe Schmidt (3:35)

Yeah.

Keith Peiris (3:35)

And we just couldn't for the life of us make good presentations.

And what I mean by that is we could not see the path of a high quality discerning presentation maker using this tool. Yeah. In an indispensable way. We couldn't see people like yourselves using it for memos. We couldn't see people using it in investment banking or consulting. We just thought the technology constrained us to being a tool for individuals and students.

Joe Schmidt (4:01)

So interesting. Okay. So you go from AI presentations to nothing.