How the Smartest Companies Use AI | Ankur Goyal, Braintrust

The Peel with Turner Novak

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Ankur Goyal is the Founder and CEO of Braintrust, the end to end developer platform for building the world's best AI products. Their customers include companies like Instacart, Zapier, Notion, Airtable, Replit, and more.

We hit on the importance of LLM evals, advice for building AI products, why the best companies have two AI product roadmaps, and his non-conventional advice for founders.

Timestamps:

(00:00) Intro (04:04) Why everyone’s now an AI company (06:03) Reasons LLM evals are so important (08:10) Typescript becoming the language of AI (09:19) Replacing vibe checks with Braintrust (10:37) Making OpenAI’s protocols the standard (11:27) Why the best companies have two AI roadmaps (13:06) Building your product so each LLM release makes it better (14:54) Predicting AGI is impossible (15:54) Why people who work with LLMs aren’t worried about AI safety (16:52) The best developers are all-in on co-pilots (18:11) How AI is changing software development (21:09) Combining IDE, CIDC, and observability in one product (27:18) Are models more like CPU’s or relational databases? (30:14) How to pick an LLM (33:00) Advice for staying on top of new AI developments (34:30) Why tool calling is so important (38:02) Advice for young software engineers (40:25) Learning to code doing linear algebra homework (42:36) Lack of purpose interning in big tech (44:07) Working at MemSQL learning to be a founder (47:52) How to get a job at a startup (50:43) Building his first startups product on an international flight (52:39) Three lessons from his first failed startup (54:46) Don’t delegate what you’re good at (55:46) Why you should be careful listening to VCs advice (57:34) Tactics for successful delegation (59:36) Why Ankur doesn’t do any meetings (01:02:42) The importance of self-service in unlocking certain customer segments (01:05:14) How Braintrust got started (01:07:45) Advice on picking your target customers (01:10:35) How Braintrust hires with work trials (01:15:21) Balancing security with a modern UI (01:17:49) Why it’s hard to sell non-AI products right now (01:19:21) Advice for selling to large enterprises (01:23:10) Ankur’s favorite AI products

Referenced:

https://www.braintrustdata.com/

SICP Book

PDF: https://web.mit.edu/6.001/6.037/sicp.pdf

Hardcopy: https://www.amazon.com/Structure-Interpretation-Computer-Programs-Engineering/dp/0262510871

Linear’s guide to work trials: https://linear.app/blog/why-and-how-we-do-work-trials-at-linear

Where to find Ankur:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/ankrgyl

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ankrgyl/

Where to find Turner:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/TurnerNovak

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/turnernovak/

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