William Sun, Auctor CEO on AI for Software Implementations

**Grace Gong** (0:03)
Hi, welcome to Venture with Grace.

**William Sun** (0:05)
Hello. Thank you for having me.

**Grace Gong** (0:07)
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I want to start with, since you guys are, I guess, maybe we could start from your original story before starting Auctor, since you have found a different company and went through YC. What were some core lessons that you've learned from the previous company before starting Auctor?

**William Sun** (0:57)
Yeah, I think a lot of it was just being able to break down problems by first principles. I met my co-founders all at Hopkins, which is where I went to university, study biomedical engineering and computer science. I think overall, a lot of those lessons learned were basically, how do you solve a problem and break it down into smaller problems?
I think I took a lot of those learnings into Auctor, and ultimately when we were doing YC as well. Not having had a sales background or a go-to-market background, how do you break that down into smaller problems, into digestible things that you can be able to execute on? I think that was one of the biggest learnings.

**Grace Gong** (1:39)
For sure. Maybe we could start from Auctor as a company, so since it is like an AI agent for software implementation and delivery.
I feel like nowadays living in Silicon Valley, everyone's building an AI agent for something. Maybe we could start from when you first came up with the idea to creating the company.

**William Sun** (2:00)
Yeah. I think it was pretty serendipitous in terms of how Auctor came to be. But I think it was a lot of the times, similar to other founders I've talked to, just a perfect mix at the right time and the right place.
This was around when GPT was really starting to get good, and picking up a lot of traction within enterprise and seeing, hey, this is no longer just a toy, but rather something that can actually deliver real enterprise value. It was also around this time that I was actually gotten introduced to the world of services. I have a really close friend of mine that works at Deloitte, which is a very large global system integrator.
Just being a really close friend of mine, him and I would catch up, and a lot of the times he would talk to me about some of the pains that he was feeling on a day-to-day basis in terms of the work that he was doing around this notion of implementing software. At that time, it was pretty naïve to the concept, but being the curious person that I was, I decided to dive deeper into it. I really just uncovered this huge industry around IT services, specifically the act of delivering value of software by implementing it, and realized that there's a lot of inefficiencies and manual and legacy workflows that go into these big implementations. When you think about ERPs or CRMs or ITSM systems or even HTM systems, these are large scale implementations that take months to even years and cost millions of dollars. A lot of the times, unfortunately, they don't go well or according to plan, and actually create a lot of experiences that the clients and end customers aren't very happy with. It was a big problem that I had identified, and as this technology around AI was hitting this inflection point where it was becoming very, very useful, it was combining these two and ultimately culminating into creating Auctor.

**Grace Gong** (3:52)
For sure. So the founder of Servo was on our pod as well, so they're also going after the ID services and Slash ServiceNow, also the ServiceNow CTO and CPO was on our show as well.

**William Sun** (4:04)
Yeah, I saw that.

**Grace Gong** (4:05)
When you're thinking about the competitive landscape, what would you say is the main competitive advantage for Auctor?

**William Sun** (4:15)
I think it's first breaking down what Auctor is meant to do and who we service, and then I think it's how do you break down the competitive landscape in that context. So for us, we are helping the people that are doing the actual implementation themselves, the practitioners, the doers, as I like to say sometimes. And these people are either the professional services teams inside the software vendors or, more importantly, the system integrator partner ecosystem around these big software vendors that are doing the implementation itself, right?