Lightfield CEO: AI makes teams more generalist, no fixed roles at 40-person company
Lightfield co-founder and CEO Keith Peiris on why AI ends swim lanes and makes everyone a generalist...
Keith Peiris, CEO of Lightfield, talks about how AI is making teams more generalist and killing rigid roles. He shares how his 40-person company has no fixed roles, with everyone owning product and customer success, and how this helped them pivot from an AI presentation tool to a CRM.
Lightfield CEO Keith Peiris explains how AI is changing company structures. He says his team of 40 people has no fixed roles, with everyone owning product and customer success. Engineers, designers, and CSMs all run projects. This structure was key to pivoting from an AI presentation tool to a CRM, which he calls a 'business world model' that reconciles scattered customer data into one source of truth.
Lightfield co-founder and CEO Keith Peiris on why AI ends swim lanes and makes everyone a generalist...
Lightfield co-founder and CEO Keith Peiris on why AI ends swim lanes and makes everyone a generalist: "One of the things I regret about Tome that we've definitely fixed with Lightfield is... Henry, my co-founder, says this all the time: We had a lot of people playing house." "You have the product leader and the marketing leader and the CS leader, and they all have their swim lanes, and they get really mad if someone gives them feedback about something in their swim lane." "Because of that, we were slowed to a crawl. Maybe put another way, it was impossible to pivot." "So we're like, none of that. No one has a swim lane. Everyone owns product and everyone owns customer success... We have 40 people at the company. Everyone shows up to the same standup every morning. We stack rank the most important problems... and then whoever's free just takes them." "Because of the age that we're in... We have this environment where basically everyone is a generalist. Engineers run projects, designers run projects, CSMs run projects." @keithpeiris @joeschmidtiv Your browser does not support the video tag. 🔗 View on Twitter a16z @a16z Lightfield co-founder and CEO Keith Peiris on killing a product with two million monthly users and rebuilding the CRM from scratch: Lightfield's predecessor was an AI presentation tool growing faster than the team could buy inference to support it. Keith shut it down anyway. Nobody on the team liked the product. Keith decided he wanted to attack the CRM space, a vertical that's notoriously hard to break into. A company's record of its customers is scattered across a whole stack of systems that often contradict each other. His bet is reconciling them into one coherent source of truth, what Lightfield calls a business world model. Every agent a team might run sits downstream of it. In this conversation with a16z's Alex Rampell and Joe Schmidt: the office space they traded for their first 10 customers, why a CRM ended up modeled on the Facebook timeline, three attempts at pricing before one worked, and why nobody at a 40-person company has a fixed role. 00:00 Intro 01:24 Why 2 million users wasn't enough 03:36 Why better models wouldn't have fixed it 06:41 Reconciling the data was the real product 08:16 How free rent bought their first 10 customers 10:12 A CRM does 3 jobs and only 1 matters 11:42 Autopilot CRM nobody has to update 14:56 No more rigid data models 17:11 How one customer modeled a whole marketplace 18:48 Taking customers from an incumbent 23:49 How to survive a new head of sales 26:03 Why the CEO still uses a spreadsheet view 30:55 Pricing models that failed before one worked 36:23 Fixed roles make product pivots impossible 40:02 Why slow shipping loses CRM customers 43:17 What Silicon Valley customers are actually worth 46:20 Why buyers need a reference who looks like them 50:40 What to ignore during a pivot YouTube: youtube.com/watch?v=K5yGLO… @keithpeiris @lightfld @arampell @joeschmidtiv Your browser does not support the video tag. 🔗 View on Twitter 🔗 View Quoted Tweet 💬 3 🔄 1 ❤️ 17 👀 9987 📊 4 ⚡
