Flo Crivello 00:00:00 I think people underestimate how literally we and the rest of the industry mean it when we say that we're building an AI employee.
Glenn Solomon 00:00:12 I'm thrilled to be joined by Flo Crivello, founder and CEO of Lindy. Lindy integrates with over 1600 business apps like slack, HubSpot, and the Google Suite, automating repetitive work using no code AI agents. 

How many of your employees would you say are AI?
Flo Crivello 00:00:29 I would say we would need to be about twice as big.
Glenn Solomon 00:00:32 You had some interesting roles at Uber. What did you learn from that experience?
Flo Crivello 00:00:36 Is the importance and the value and the possibility and the meaning of agency. It's another meme these days on Twitter, high agency and so forth. And I think it's hard to understand what it really means until you've lived it
Glenn Solomon 00:00:48 If you think forward that there. So what do you think typical company is going to look like?
Speaker 00:00:57 Welcome to Notable Perspectives, a podcast from the team at Notable
Capital, where we sit down with some of the most fascinating founders and builders in the AI era.
Speaker 00:01:06 Let's dive into today's episode.
Glenn Solomon 00:01:08 Hey everyone, I'm Glenn Solomon, and today on the podcast, I'm thrilled to be joined by Flo Crivello, founder and CEO of Lindy. Lindy integrates with over 1600 business apps like slack, HubSpot, and the Google Suite, automating repetitive work using no code AI agents. The Lindy website invites you to meet your first AI employee. simplest way for businesses to create, manage, and share agents with just a prompt. Very cool. things like customer support, outbound sales calls, meetings, recording. It's all available through Lindy. So I'm very excited to dig in with you and talk to you about what you see for the future of Lindy and the future of AI. and agents more generally, and also your story, how you landed, this idea for Lindy. It involves a fascinating pivot. I'm excited to dive into that as well today. and would love, you know, love to. Also, you've been such a successful entrepreneur. maybe dig into your wisdom and, and have you share some insights for other, would be entrepreneurs.
Glenn Solomon 00:02:21 Welcome to the show. It's great to have you.
Flo Crivello 00:02:23 Yean, Thanks for having me
Glenn Solomon 00:02:23 So, maybe, you know, just to start the level set.I gave a teased a little
bit about what Lindy does, but, baby, for the folks who are listening and watching who aren't as
familiar. Tell us a little bit about what Lindy actually does. Yeah.
Flo Crivello 00:02:42 I think the AI employee is the easiest way to describe it. one that's deeper.
It's a local platform, allowing businesses to automate various operations and various tasks using
AI agents as you name it, but does a lot of sales. Does a lot of marketing and a lot of customer
support. There's a lot of documented processing and so on and so forth. I think of all the last
three years agents have gone from this technology that didn't really work to a technology that
worked, but like it was hard to deploy, like VR, which required an engineering team and now is
making what I call is making the video what I call the Macintosh moment, where it's like it works
and anyone can use it and anyone can record it.
Flo Crivello 00:03:23 And I think that's going to be the story of agents over the next 12 months
or so.
Glenn Solomon 00:03:27 Fascinating. And yeah, just I invite everybody to visit, visit your
website and you can see like you can get started very, very quickly at these things. so maybe,
now that we've level set, let's take a brief history tour. you got an amazing personal journey, and
we'd love to hear how that's influenced where you are today. I move from France to the US with,
I think you've said basically no money, no plan or network. what was, you know, take us through
that decision. What influenced you to come to the US and how's that impacted your approach to
building companies? Yeah.
Flo Crivello 00:04:12 not to be too political since you're asking, you know, I, I libertarian and,
the wheels don't exist in French. It is hard to explain how avian the idea of libertarianism is to a
French mind is literally like the Twitter memes, like the European mind not comprehend.
Flo Crivello 00:04:32 and, I, and I also had studied, like a very small. I don't even know what to
call me to start that, which was like a small, like, agency, in Paris. And so you really get that
front row seat at your units of socialism. It's just like the system doesn't work. Like, taxation is
extremely high. It's really hard to build a business in these conditions, and in return for building
these businesses and providing jobs to people, which you get is contempt and hatred because
you represent it's a Marxist frame over there. So, I read, Atlas Shrugged and, at the age of 17
and, you know, like you let it stew and, you know, at 17, like, your psyche is still quite malleable,
and yet it it's to you, then it's to and then I like to me the tipping point was the night, for so long,
the socialist candidate in a socialist country that elected and I was already seeing this country
being unlivable. In an aside, double down.
Flo Crivello 00:05:31 And I remember distinctly, watching the results of the elections, on
election night, you know, I was watching the TV with my girlfriend then for so long, gets elected
in a, like, a bed. And so the media and nothing that people like in this country, I can't do it like
this is not. This is not like values. And it was. I was perhaps 19 or 20. and like you said, that it
was a very rash decision. Three months later, I had closed my company with, like, mobile and
broken with my girlfriend and moved to San Francisco with, like I said, like, no money, no
network, no job. Very little command of English. I really started to, like, make a deliberate effort
to wrap up on my English because it was. Was that good? how how about 60 licenses right
now? You should have seen with us back then. and, you know, I, I can't tell you, like, on a
weekly basis, at least I think back with just extreme gratefulness for the 20 year old me for that
decision he made, which, just with no hesitation, was like the most important and best decision
of my lifetime.
Flo Crivello 00:06:34 And every time, somehow, French news reached me for saying, like, they
have a fifth prime minister in two years. And I was like, right. Yes, again, which happens once or
twice every single year. And every time I'm like, I'm so bad at math.
Glenn Solomon 00:06:49 Well, you know, they say life comes down to just a couple of key
moments and key decisions. It sounds like that 20 year old, your 20 year old self, made a big,
important decision for you. Maybe another important decision, for you was going to work at
Uber, curious, like you had some interesting roles at Uber and a ball were some interesting
projects. how formative were your years at Uber and now being an entrepreneur, what did you
learn from that experience? Maybe. What would you have to unlearn from that experience, to
where you are today?
Flo Crivello 00:07:23 Yeah. it was extraordinary for me. I really think of it like I really grew up at
Uber professionally, but I had to unlearn like that.
Flo Crivello 00:07:31 The learnings that are very much not transferable pretty much anywhere
else is like the Uber have infinite money. So there was this meme at Uber that was like, the first
reflex of everyone was to say, it's not a problem if we can fix it. So it's like, I've never had a
point, like, how can money, how can we get to fix this money, right? We had this edict from
Travis to expand the methods you can to borrow as best as you can. And don't worry about the
other side. Right. And you were right. So that that doesn't work itself. But what does work and
what they did on there was, is the importance and the value and the possibility and the meaning
of agency. It's another meaning these days on Twitter or in high agency and so forth. And I think
it's hard to understand what it really means until you've lived it. Especially because money can
be that unblocked for that, for that agency. Like what it means you're taking that group of kids,
frankly, like young, like, I was 23 when I arrived at Uber, and I was surrounded by 23 to 25 year
olds given infinite money to perform invisible tasks.
Flo Crivello 00:08:33 and it worked. So I never really just stumbled on the way. And it was a
problem. My friend Shiho, you know, I will give 20 to 25 year olds. It doesn't always go well. But
I remember just to give you two examples. One of them was I joined and at first I joined the
Dragon org that were working on the driver app and the supply side of the business. and it was
quite late at that point. It reveals journey. It was like five years. So like horribly early days and
yet so if you think from first principles or like egg them, you have to design the driver for over.
What are the two most important things you put in there? You put I want to drive and I want to
see my blood. Right? Oh yeah, the laptop was me saying five years later. So I joined the driver
app and I was like an iOS engineer. And at the time I opened the driver opinions like I have no
wages in my earnings and and then like up to support people who at the time would call the
maps come up and not like it's like I found it in this and there's so many simple tickets are really
just to ask, how is it made? And that's insane.
Flo Crivello 00:09:32 Like what? Why have we not done that? And the response to me was like,
yeah, you should do it does like me and like a weekend like it said, yeah, just go ahead and do
that. Okay. And so I did it. I just like profitable team and like we had like some these emails, and
we will be able to drive apart the aliens out of the drive rack. And even more extreme example
was one night I was at the office at 9 p.m., which wasn't particularly late for like we served
dinner at like 8:45 p.m. every day. and so I was I was having dinner out of the office, and there
was this guy. He's famous that his name is already Scott. If you Google him, he he played a role
in the Ukraine war. Like, maybe he was the first person we had after practice and and I didn't
know him. And he was sitting next to me for dinner, and he pitched me this idea. He was like,
hey, I had this idea.
Flo Crivello 00:10:19 He was a data scientist at the time at Uber, and he actually had this idea.
He was like, wouldn't be neat if we could do Uber for like, all labor with that Uber works. so like
the Uber of staffing agencies, I was like, hey, he's printing it and sort of started changing it out to
like a 10:30 p.m.. We're like still talking and and we basically we pitched it to random Braves.
We pitched it to a couple of people and they were like, yeah, go do it. Go spend a virtual buddy
which has clicked that space for people. So I just like to spend a couple million bucks on this
and like, and report back. And what we did when a couple million dollars were like, we rented an
Airbnb in lieu of an office. We went we flew down to L.A., we hired land workers, we built an
app. We did all the debt by ourselves. And I was at the time materials engineer. At the time, he
was a scientist, and we were given that permission to do this, this, this crazy thing.
Flo Crivello 00:11:08 so, yeah, I think I think the meaning and importance and power of
agencies is definitely my take away from comments that you were.
Glenn Solomon 00:11:16 Just curious the, the, the first example you gave, putting earnings into
the driver app, did that engender more driver loyalty? Did you see like changing behavior as a
result of giving people more information? Oh for.
Flo Crivello 00:11:30 Sure. I don't remember like the exact measurable results, but like, we got
a lot of love. Like drivers were like, fine, I don't need to send an email to support anybody. Don't
have that I've made.
Glenn Solomon 00:11:39 Yeah. Amazing. it's sometimes the little things that really drive
tremendous value. Add new products for people. Great insight. okay. So you're at Uber? Yeah.
As a, as a, a young professional learning a lot, developing agency. when Covid hit, you built a
startup team flow, scaling it into a $50 million plus company. I believe I had 50 plus employees.
And during the pandemic. team flow has ultimately been pivoted into Lindy.
Glenn Solomon 00:12:19 so maybe start a team flow. What? What drove you to start at the
company? What? What opportunities? You see. and, you know, how did how did it go?
Flo Crivello 00:12:28 Yeah, it happened very organically. So for context, my my goal moving
here was always to stop a component. I had a checklist, which, by the way, I do not recommend
people do like simple phone calls. It's the deferred life plan. Like, I do not recommend people do
that. and in hindsight, I wish I had started a couple of years earlier. but my checklist was like, oh,
okay, I'm moving here. What? I want to learn English. I want to be better at English. I want to
have a green card. I want to have that work, and I want to have savings, but I had no safety net
whatsoever. and so I went to that. Oh, and our skills, obviously. And so, you know, I do work.
That's why I make the switch to product manager.
Flo Crivello 00:13:05 So I went about checking each item of that checklist dutifully. and until I
felt right and what I felt really like, I'll take, like, six months off. That was right before Covid, and
my initial plan was to go backpacking across Southeast Asia. And, that did not happen because
because of Covid, also included added, and so I called back. So I'm going to go home and I'm
going to figure it out. So cool. And then quarantine. Everyone is like at home and I'm in there.
What do I do when that's when it's like a toddler code. It's compulsive. and so I, I it happens
very organically. I, I, I did not connect to that at first because I had started building and hacking
together was a solution. Is like a spatial video conferencing solution where you see your video in
a bubble. You have like a literal office, like a top down view of a virtual office that seems aside,
and you can move around and move your video bubble around, and you can only hear and
develop the people around you.
Flo Crivello 00:14:03 Yeah. And at first I was like, oh, this is cool. I just did it because I'm such a
person. And then I stopped to have my friends over that virtual space because we were all
quarantined. So it's not like to hang out in that in the personal space. And then at some point for
me, it clicks and I'm like, oh my God. Every company is going remote right now. Whereas there
is probably tremendous willingness to pay for this. And so very organically, I can't I can't
overemphasize how great it was. Like at no point did I set myself down. And when like, this is
building a startup, I had a VC friend on the phone randomly one night and he was like, hey, I
had like one week left to deploy some QBs. Oh, maybe they'll stop you like that before, before
before I have to pay taxes on it. So can you please, please take my favorite and grind the letter?
oh. I will free you from the build.
Flo Crivello 00:14:48 and so it just happened like that. And then I started releasing it, and like, I
got, like, love and engagement. And then we raised a seed around and and and and just all it in
there.
Glenn Solomon 00:14:59 When did you make the decision, that, you know, you needed to
pivot? what led to that? that's a difficult moment for, for many founders. while there are points of
iteration along the way and startups all the time, the decision to kind of really shift gears is a
tough one. Tell us about that decision and, you know, and how it transpired for you.
Flo Crivello 00:15:21 You know, I actually find in my case, like the more painful part was that
the decision itself, if anything, I remember, the decision as a moment of relief. I think the more
painful but, is the there's a couple of months that precedes the decision of of six months of
loans. Because obviously you're deciding that things are not going well like that. So we really
already paid from part.
Flo Crivello 00:15:41 And in our experiments like Team Flow, the virtual office was going really
well. When people went remote, it was going really poorly when people went out to the office.
and so the growth flatlined and things were not going well. in parallel to that, we we had a bunch
of experiments because from Thimphu, we had a meeting recorder. From the meeting recorder,
we used the GPT three API, which had just unreleased, to build the meeting server. Riser has
actually built the thing that would update your CRM from your meetings, sales, your Salesforce,
then your hotspot. And this was all before activity, and this was all before the chatter about the
agents like Link chain just came out as a as a GitHub library like Harrison Chase had that story
yet. And and so, you know, simultaneously GPO was flatlining and we got excited about this
vision that was coming together about using headlamps not just to generate texts, because
sometimes everyone should start listening. So it's good to generate texts that will perform
actions for you.
Flo Crivello 00:16:42 And I, I remember distinctly, I came probably within an hour of closing the
commentary. Frankly, I was like, okay, this is it, that we got a lot of capital left in the bank. We've
been very disciplined about managing our build like this. Is it being paid out? And then I was
like, there is, there is one more swing it there, you know, not just in the capital, in the in me. And
there is this idea that like, it's not gonna have to look very hard, like, but very excited about this
one idea. And so and so I let go of two thirds of the team that go to market, two thirds of the
team, and already the rest of the team, we were perhaps dead left or something then, but, and,
and I was like, we'll do this. and and truth to be told, I think people share like, it's never it's never
pleasant to let go of you. Call me the team and to see your co-workers leave.
Flo Crivello 00:17:33 But this thing is real excitement by division. And she'll never leave without,
like, we're all very into that office of this unhealthy business, which nothing. We did move the
needle at that point like other business.
Glenn Solomon 00:17:45 In most of these instances in my career, I've seen people kind of hold
on to a little bit of the old while also trying something new. So not doing the hard pivot, it sounds
like you really did a hard pivot. how critical was that in your mind to, you know, getting success
up, going with little indie.
Flo Crivello 00:18:06 Super, super support? Elad Gil, who is an investor in Lindy, warns against
this video alone. And so it's particularly coming out of it. he does say, people, those people,
people, people only occur on the previous year. The Val Classic is like building a startup is like
surveying an infinite jumble, because the search space is really infinite and infinite, dense
jumble from the top of a helicopter. And every so often, at some point, she spotted the jumble to
like.
Flo Crivello 00:18:33 And so you land there and it starts to, like, judge around you. And then
you see the something there is, there is nothing there. You don't keep hacking your way around
in trouble. You come back. You come back into the helicopter. so that's what we did. I think it
was the right decision.
Glenn Solomon 00:18:48 Very cool. I love that analogy. if. Okay, so let's talk more about Lindy
now. you know, as, as we mentioned earlier on, it is a it is a horizontal Asian platform. and I
think a lot of, a lot of companies in and around this area have chosen to be much more specific
in what they focus on, you know, sales support, other use cases, more vertical. What what gave
you the conviction to build a horizontal platform? and how did you write at that decision? And do
you think it's been the right one?
Flo Crivello 00:19:28 I do think it was the right one, but they want to help. things are going well
so far.
Flo Crivello 00:19:32 I look at. Yes, the the startup common wisdom is to build very narrow and
very practical. I think people are a little bit too prone to dispense a very universal sounding sort
of person. I think sometimes in tech at this point, all the economy, right. The speech diagnose
health tech script that can look like at all everything. And so it's just it's like, look, you know, your
mileage may be better, right? And so I find one of the most important questions to ask myself
when I, when I started eventually is to ask myself what category did it belong to because it
frames the startup. It teaches you about what the category has learned so far. And and I, I
looked around and I was like, okay, if you don't build any. I didn't tell you. What's the closest
thing technologically to an AI right now? And I think it's IBUs. I think it's this all of the automation
solutions. So, you are is it more like open like that, but at work at the individual companies.
Flo Crivello 00:20:25 So I started to like look into this category. And this category of all
categories traditionally is for example. And I think the reason for that is because the job of
automation, the job to be done with automation is horizontal, and you end up building primitives
that like horizontally across a variety of use cases in a variety of industries. Now, it doesn't mean
you don't pick an ICP. I think you have to pick one, one lane and one segment in particular to
play in. But for that segment, I think the segment and the customer excels are actually eager to
adopt a political solution that can help them solve a lot of the automation problems.
Glenn Solomon 00:21:01 So along that path, you've been, you you launched recently when you
built, which is putting more and more power into the hands of the user. It seems, I can create an
entire, back end or front end database all within the bill. the thing will even QA itself. tell us
about, like, that product, how it came to be and, and where it portends you're going as a
company.
Flo Crivello 00:21:32 Yeah. in a way, the product, at least technically, is the horizontal thesis
played out because the vertical thesis was always like, we are going to build low level
composable primitives like Lego blocks, that are going to, snap together and doesn't need to be
this combinatorial explosion of capabilities that are downstream of the extent of this practice. in
a way not to get to the philosophical, but like, that's how life works. Right. This this is like low
level reusable, like cells just like snap together, like cellular automata and so forth. work the
same way. So, we released, about eight weeks ago now. link is 3.0, which is is composed of two
things. One is it's an easier way, even easier way to build ages, because until 3.0, the way you
had to build it. I just was like to use the no code editor to treat fields. So like you could drag a
prop two boxes, arrows with three pointer to visually just the props. So yeah, like I just wanted to
do make it a notable tool and that's it.
Flo Crivello 00:22:33 And then it's just asking questions. It just builds for you. It's quite magical.
That's the first thing. The second thing which led to be built is a Lindy advocate. So it's a we.
And I as a rule, is always by the way, it as an individual platform, as a service is always
bottlenecked by the number of the version that it supports. And so for the last 2 or 3 years of our
existence as a startup, it's always been such a throw in a shoe like we have to build, we build
6000 integrations. And I think eventually we just realized it's never enough. You're always going
to be dominated by integrations until you can do the same things that the human can do, which
is look at the screen and click a mouse and type people. So we gave that virtual computer in the
cloud to to Linda. To. To the agent which included the domain. So there was a browser. And if
you had a box in the cloud, may just skip the terminal.
Flo Crivello 00:23:27 And then I remember very distinctly, I think I can probably the exact stage
you could choose the Thursday before the launch. The launch was on a Monday and Thursday
before at night with a 9 p.m. or something like that, and we were like grinding for the launch.
And the estimate comes to me is like, surely you better come see this. And hence I walk around
to his desk and he shows me if, like I just promptly binge in the rest of the globe, the web app,
and it did it feel shut and and then he not only tick that so it used as a terminal that we get this is
the emergent capability that we never built. Strabag just just emerged from the existence of the
terminal. So we need to do that and just use terminal to code and deploy the web server and all
of that. But then it also used some web browser and prompted is like, okay, I believe that we
that we do now repeatedly try open this web browser opens its own work It's around fight it and
it goes back fixes up.
Flo Crivello 00:24:21 I that that that was I think one of the most holy shit moments of my career.
I, I was I was blown away. and so, we released that in a way it was, it was supply Journal. It was
like, oh, we've got it working. I release it and it stuck enough into it quite well. Like, people are
having a blast building all sorts of tools, using it to build.
Glenn Solomon 00:24:44 Yeah. And, you know, on your site, I, I love the you give a lot of
examples of prompts that people can use to get things going. But I do think that you, you
mentioned earlier, inertia is has been a challenge with, getting, you know, AI in your case, like
your next AI employee spun up in companies. what do you think it's going to take to overcome
inertia for linear more generally AI? Obviously it's being adopted rapidly, but there are still plenty
of opportunities for AI to play bigger role with companies today. What are some of the friction
points that need to be ironed out?
Flo Crivello 00:25:27 It's got to be easy to deploy.
Flo Crivello 00:25:29 It's got to be reliable enough. I think it will just be to walk along the
technology curve and to some extent like, yes, we're going to do all of these things. I think to
some extent there's also a large psychological component which, you can't you can't you can't
accelerate that up too much of it to, to to tune up this technology at your own pace.
Unfortunately, yes.
Glenn Solomon 00:25:52 Have you been surprised by any unlocks along the way where people
have adopted, you know, certain use cases more rapidly, or surprising things that people have
adopted using a linear platform that you didn't anticipate? You mentioned this like sidle there, a
tool pillar, other things you've you've seen.
Flo Crivello 00:26:19 Perhaps one that you don't expect is people using agents a lot for like just
ingesting a huge amount of information about their business and and dispatching back almost
like a heartbeat of anywhere you have like a central agent. But just accept all of this knowledge
because that's what the levels are really good at. Only, I guess this being now that I have
millions of tokens in the courthouse windows, they can click into just so much information so fast
and then summarize it back and you can see so much time of and value combined, because
executive WB spends so much of that time just ingesting information and trying to synthesize, if
it makes sense out of it.
Flo Crivello 00:26:57 And so we've seen that pattern that I did not expect. And and this is also
one of my favorite clinical use cases where people use agents to, for example.
Glenn Solomon 00:27:06 read.
Flo Crivello 00:27:06 All the simple pictures that happened in one day in the company who will
ingest the transcript of all the sales calls that happened in one day in the company, and we'll see
all the slack messages that come in and then cover all of this up and then dispatch it back out to
the company, and in the form of like a bullet consumer. And so I find that it sells a lot more
consistency, a lot more alignment inside the company, because now everyone is like, well, what
everyone else is doing.
Glenn Solomon 00:27:40 Very interesting alignment, driving alignment that way. I would also
think you could spot anomalies more rapidly early at which is which is so critical. Right. you
know, and and oftentimes, in a sea of a lot of information, it's difficult to, to distill an anomaly
that's starting to occur. Maybe it's a, you know, a problem with the product or the release or
something, you know, that's going on in the world that's impacting a company in a way it wasn't
anticipated.
Glenn Solomon 00:28:11 to me that feels like, you know, creating more agile company as a
result, is one of the potential benefits of adopting AI more rapidly.
Flo Crivello 00:28:19 100%. And although it turns on the lights, there is this, this version. this is
a it's called a blind default blind. But he uses this analogy because, like, if you got the legal stool
and all of a sudden you see a batch of Asian people walk through the door and buy red
envelopes. They're like, what's happening here? And then you build about like the Chinese New
Year, or like the red envelopes, and you buy envelopes for like the next year and all of that stuff.
If you have an e-commerce website, you don't see the pattern immediately by default until you
really look for it. It's really hard to find these patterns. You don't see it. And so every tech
company is default lights. I have no idea what's going on in the business. This I have all the
tools on the lights. I receive these reports all the time, and I do see these patterns and people
are starting to use.
Flo Crivello 00:29:04 For example, a couple of weeks ago, we started to have a bunch of
dentists book labels do this. and and and I was like, what's happening with this? And and there
is that book at the dentist that I was starting to use as to automate back office operations. I
wouldn't have known that or I would have known it. But later, if you do search for the secret.
Glenn Solomon 00:29:25 Maybe I, you know, maybe Lindy is encouraging. the consumption of
candy amongst the young kids is causing more dentists that do the activity. okay. So one of the
things that, you face and a lot of a lot of companies building in the AI, area of face is, you know,
some reliance on research and frontier research, frontier lab, innovation going on, whether it be
from OpenAI or Google or Tropic or others. how do you think about that? you know, on what
models do you base? you know, the Lindy agents today. And do you think this is a risk for
businesses like yours or an opportunity and curious? Yeah, I'm just curious how that how that
plays into your thinking longer term.
Flo Crivello 00:30:16 Yeah, yeah. We all know that. So you can decide which model you want
to use, not only on a pure agent basis, but even on the basis of each of your agents. let's say
the default model currently is cloud for select, which is my personal favorite model. you know,
my pet peeve is when entrepreneurs totally dismiss the threat of the front lines. And during the
market, it's like, oh, you know, it's going to be fine. Look, you know, it'd be it'd be a fool not to
keep them in the pool all day of your life and be somewhat worried about them. That said, the
case to be made to not worry too much about them is. Well, what does I think? So does the
proposal. That much to. You know, I think there is this weird thing that's happening right now in
tech and in the AI where because these products and companies are powered by the LMS and
The coup is existing that somehow the rules of sass are suspended and slack is just another
building block.
Flo Crivello 00:31:13 It's like a new technology that if you use that, the rules remain the same.
Like you, you have to obsess about a particular problem and the particular customer and the
particular job to be done. And I think that your competitive advantages style that comes from
that focus on the particular ACP and the particular and these labs that customers mostly today
are. Well, in the case of the consumers and like developers. and it's a different city and a
different from the one also like the map so far building virtual platforms. So I keep my head
down and I keep focusing my customer on my competitors too much.
Glenn Solomon 00:31:51 Yeah. I mean, the best analogy I can think of here is the database
market, where, you know, clearly, Oracle was the open AI of his day. but there was, you know,
by the way, I'm glad to hear that. Claude Sonet is, is your model choice today where I travel by
train and drop it. But, like, there, there are similar to the to the way the, frontier Lab market and
frontier model market has evolved.
Glenn Solomon 00:32:22 You know, if you go back a couple of decades, the database market
evolved and, and Oracle started developing its own applications. So I'm sure there was a
concern back then. Oh my gosh. You know if you're building applications now Oracle is going to
crush you. And obviously Oracle had some success with application builds. Although their
primary business up until very recently it's really the database. but it's left massive opportunities
for companies that were very focused on their workflows, their customers, their ICP. I suspect
this will be similar, but, you know, history does have a way of repeating itself or at least rhyming.
And I suspect I suspect that's the way this is going to go.
Flo Crivello 00:33:02 100%. Alport. You know, just though there's some very prominent Oracle
alumni just building more like the percussion player. Yeah.
Glenn Solomon 00:33:11 so let's talk a little bit about, like, your vision and future state. and, and
maybe you can get to some advice you'd have for others. what's building a team like, been
what's been building a team, like in, in the AI era? you know, any particular challenges or,
unique elements of of building a team in this kind of market? and have you done anything
differently than, you know, you would have done in, in, say, prior eras to be successful building
magic team in the AI world?
Flo Crivello 00:33:48 Nothing qualitatively different.
Flo Crivello 00:33:51 I think intensity and hard work always matters in startups. I think it matters
more than ever in AI because it's just so competitive, it's so fast moving. And so We. I give the
NHL even stronger than before. When I talk to candidates and I very often people of that like
which only two days ago we had a candidate up that was I was like, hey, this is a lot of work. Are
you sure you will sign up for this? and I they sold her so much just like it, which is great. This is
why this is the way to do it. You know, I think to some extent, I'm going to play with India a little
bit here, like it's made higher and easier. Like, I have an agent that I built. This is all a template
for it. On on on on the website. It's like a recruiting agent. And literally for me it is as easy as
going like, hey, I'm looking for software engineers. Find me 200 software engineers working at
this company.
Flo Crivello 00:34:40 Figma and whatnot are in the Bay area. and that's literally just the prompt.
And in the span of two minutes or so, I've reached out to two hundreds of engineers as me, and
it sends for the emails and so on and so forth. So that helps as far as that's concerned.
otherwise I would say like AI is, a dead weight or regret because the products are just so, so
exciting to work out.
Glenn Solomon 00:35:04 How much, you know, meat, your meat, your next AI employee, how
much? How many of your employees would you say or AI today? And you know, when you think
about, yeah, you know, Lindy and all the work you're getting done today versus, you know, if you
were trying to do something similar, but in, in the pre AI pre agent era.
Flo Crivello 00:35:25 Yeah, I would say that's a great way to frame it. I would say we would
need to be that twice as big if it wasn't full. Well I will use the product and you can see it in our
matrix like our all really efficient or growing really efficient right there.
Flo Crivello 00:35:39 Like which you can measure using like build multiple and other metrics
and or build multiple. This where you build run quite fast by our size company.
Glenn Solomon 00:35:48 Yeah. I mean this is fundamentally going to change the way I think the
people gauge success at companies. And they are sort of like what the expectations become
with respect to, you know, revenue per employee, our output per velocity, per headcount, etc.
it's quite exciting. so if you, if you think forward a decade or so, what do you think the, typical
companies gonna look like? you know, I don't know. Yeah. In, in in ten years. Kind. I know it's it's
hard to stretch the imagination that far, but things are going to be a lot different. Yeah.
Flo Crivello 00:36:27 I think people underestimate how literally we and the rest of the industry
mean it when we say that, we're building the employee, you are literally going to be able to it will
be as literal as you jump on a zoom call. Welcome to the company executives in AI.
Flo Crivello 00:36:44 Share your screen with me before computer use. So that's here. So on
the screen with me, you'll be able to build agent based skills that will Zendesk go and look. It's
impossible to guess except by being an AI has infinite hours in the day. Doesn't sleep, doesn't
go on strike. And I'm French, but the fortifications a crack. And then. So I think that scanning. I
think AGI is coming as people underestimate how real there's going to be. It's really hard to
foresee the nature of the businesses that's going to exist. If we're going to accept it and we
butcher it a bit, something like it is easy to forecast the automobile. It's hard to forecast the
traffic or something on the wall. Math is like one of the second order effects of video, and I often
use the analogy of what the internet has done to media. I expect agents to do to the rest of the
business. Namely, I think it's going to be a tremendously equalizing force if you consider me
established.
Flo Crivello 00:37:42 Right? Like the duck YouTube of today in the world is built that basically
media and regular humans like a nobody in the middle of America. And he had no crew, no
capital, no equipment. It was just him and his tangent, and he states that he built the empire. I
think the same thing is going to happen to business at large. I think the gap between idea and
reality is going to shrink tremendously, and I think that scaling operations, which as everyone
knows, is so painful, that is 95% of the work on the market is really about scaling it. And that
takes decades. It's just like, hey, I bet the thing I want this, that times a million, the gates is so,
so hard. I think that we can actually, almost trivial. and I think that the nature of the businesses
that come out of it is going to seem as alien to it as perhaps established, would have seemed
alien to like a CNN executive 20 years ago.
Glenn Solomon 00:38:33 I love that the gap between idea and reality shrinks in this world, and
what the implications are of that.
Glenn Solomon 00:38:40 I it reminds me, Greg Taylor recently likened, the, you know, kind of
where we are with intelligence Today, going from scarcity to abundance. similar to, you know,
prior, prior sort of transitions, like with power and energy, and transportation, where, you know,
at one point in the industrialized, in the journey of industrialization, those things were scarce.
They became abundant. And then expectations changed. And it's the way we live our lives
changes. I think he used the example of, like going to the supermarket and, you know, seeing
every variety of fruits available and in prior buy and, and how disruptive it would be to life if
those weren't available. But the percentage of people involved in agriculture has dropped
dramatically as that abundance has occurred. And, you know, going into a room and switching
the light switch on and off. Imagine if, you know, light didn't exist the way we expected it to. And
if intelligence, goes through the same sort of men emphasis over time in ten years.
Glenn Solomon 00:39:51 What does that mean for companies? And I'm curious, you know, just
to take this one step further. Like for founders and would be founders thinking about building
their companies and it takes, you know, they should be thinking about what life's going to look
like not just a year from now, but five years from now and ten years from now. If they want to
build a lasting company, what do you think the implications are for, you know, startups and how
to think about building companies in this era? Any, any, any thing that's been valuable to you
that you you want to make sure other people know?
Flo Crivello 00:40:24 Oh, it's great to to sound like a what was the saying, like playing my own
book or something. Yeah, yeah.
Glenn Solomon 00:40:29 Oh, I'm giving you that chance.
Flo Crivello 00:40:31 Thank you I appreciate that. yeah. I mean, look, I think, this is the
opportunity for people to break out of the status quo and to break out of their routine in the way
they've been doing things.
Flo Crivello 00:40:42 And, like, it's uncomfortable and insulting because the playbooks are not
nearly as defined. And at least the state of the technology today look like truths to be told. Like
we don't have the AI employee yet. It is not available. With this latest performance, it is not as
easy to use as a human. We don't have EDI, but for some cases it's definitely there for customer
support in particular. Definitely the whole SDR definitely there. And so yes, I think the bill is
going to be tremendous alpha and a huge opportunity now like nothing. It is the future today for
people to, force themselves to adopt these new technologies right now. And I think what is an
opportunity today is going to be a threat tomorrow in five years, if you don't do it. It's like at first if
you UW technology, you like the computer or like, you know, you're more efficient as a business
if you wait too long. And also operating with fax machines, you know, in 2010, like your business
is not going to exist anymore.
Flo Crivello 00:41:34 So I would urge people to, to, to to adopt this early on. They think they
need to.
Glenn Solomon 00:41:40 Do you think is this the biggest misconception you think is out there,
or is that like, you know, people with head with their heads in the sand and not adopting rapidly
or likely to get disrupted or just not find the success they're looking for. Or there are other, other
sort of misunderstandings out there in the market that you see.
Flo Crivello 00:41:58 I think that's the one I think I think the technology is still a little lower than
people realize because and I can't blame people because, there's just so much tourism, on
LinkedIn, on Twitter, it's like, I don't blame people for thinking it's all high because it wants to be
told it's 95% high. That's 5% that's rare, and that's 5% is improving faster than any technology
has ever improved before in the history of technology. truly, the AI agents today are so different
from AI. Just on six multiple cloud, multiple. and so I do urge people to find these that are
actually making substantiated claims highly of regular currency samples and to and to look into
that.
Glenn Solomon 00:42:39 It's interesting to hear you say like, you know, it's 5% today. but it's
dancing rap as rapidly as anything you've ever seen. It kind of reminds me again. History does
have a way of at least rhyming, if not repeating. back to like, mobile. And people were so
excited about the emergence of mobile. There was but there was a lot of, you know, mobile
washing. Right? Companies were just like, you know, create an awful app or some terrible
online mobile experience and say, well, we're mobile too now. but what happened and, and, and
and I remember it's like Facebook really adopted mobile successfully. there was a lot of
skepticism, if you remember, like the IPO, the day the IPO, Facebook, the company did not
perform well. And there was all this consternation about mobile being a terrible trend for
Facebook because, you know, you couldn't advertise effectively on mobile. And it was probably
that 5% moment, and then it became ten, 20, 50.
Glenn Solomon 00:43:42 Now, you know, you wouldn't dream of having a business with a
digital presence, and you wouldn't dream of performing business without digital presence. Say
that any business with a digital presence has got to be strong and nowhere else. There's
there's, you know, there's there's there's not a good future ahead. And I think the same that's
probably true for AI. It will probably put back in and have that, realization at some point. So or
appreciate you saying that. Flo, really appreciate spending time with us today. This has been
super insightful. and it's great to hear, the success you're having with Lindy. It's very exciting. I
think it's a harbinger of lots of great things to come, both for your company and for AI. and, and
how it's going to impact the economy at large more generally. So thank you so much for joining
us.
Flo Crivello 00:44:28 Thanks for Having me.
Speaker 3 00:44:30 Great. Thanks for listening to Notable Perspectives, a podcast from the
team at Notable Capital. If you enjoyed the show, be sure to give us a rating and subscribe on
your favorite podcast app.
Speaker 3 00:44:39 You can learn more about Notable Capital by visiting. Notable cap com.