The AI-Native CRM

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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?

Um-

Keith Perez built Tome to twenty-five 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. Welcome back to the a16z podcast. I'm Joe Schmidt. I'm joined by my partner, Alex Rampell, and Keith Paris. Keith is the CEO at Lightfield. Lightfield just raised a forty-seven million dollar 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.

Excited to be here.

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.

We started Tome mostly because we were consumer people, and we thought LLMs were gonna change the way people communicate. And we were working on selfie design-

[chuckles]

... 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.

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

So it was a presentation product where you could use GPT to generate presentations and-

Yeah

... generate pages and so forth. And we launched it around the same time as ChatGPT, and we just got explosive growth. We got two