dal retweeted
AI is transforming a great many powerful SaaS businesses
This is what it looks like when it *really* hits
We built a $150M ARR business twice.
The first time took 8 years. The second took 2.5.
Today, Podium crossed $150M in AI annual recurring revenue.
Three years ago, we already had a great software business. Well over $100M in revenue, tens of thousands of customers, and a product we'd spent nearly a decade building.
And we decided to start over.
The business was performing well. But we believed AI was going to fundamentally change the software industry and make much of traditional software obsolete.
As a founder, you pour your life into what you're building. An insane amount of time, sacrifice, and effort. The hard part is not getting too attached to it.
When we started building our first AI agents, we had to confront the possibility that much of what we'd built might not be that valuable in the future. That's a tough pill to swallow.
But we also realized those same 10 years had put us in a unique position to take advantage of what AI could do for our customers.
Instead of protecting what we'd spent a decade building, we decided to bet the future of the company on AI employees that actually do the work for our customers.
We massively underestimated what we'd signed up for.
We ended up building entirely new operating systems for the industries we serve, from the AI agents all the way down to the systems of record. Now customers run their entire businesses on Podium.
Reinventing our product wasn't even the hardest part. We had to reinvent how the entire company operated.
When you've been running a company for over a decade, the operational inertia is incredibly powerful. We had to rethink how we build products, how we sell, how we serve customers, and how we run the business.
We effectively started a second startup inside an already successful company. And we're still at the very beginning.
Today, we have 20,000 AI agents working for our customers. They've helped generate more than $13 billion in revenue for those businesses. And we're barely scratching the surface of what AI will be able to do for them.
And we've done all of this while becoming profitable and generating free cash flow. We're building Podium to be around for decades.
Huge credit to our team for having the guts to make this bet and the ability to actually pull it off. We still have a long way to go and tons of problems to solve, but it's so damn fun to be winning when the opportunity ahead is this big.
In the age of AI, you can either disrupt your own company or wait for somebody else to do it.
I'd rather do it ourselves.
dal retweeted
Established companies will at best adapt to AI. Newly founded startups will be AI-native from the start. This is an interesting example of a company in the middle, which (by great effort) remade itself as an AI-native company.
We built a $150M ARR business twice.
The first time took 8 years. The second took 2.5.
Today, Podium crossed $150M in AI annual recurring revenue.
Three years ago, we already had a great software business. Well over $100M in revenue, tens of thousands of customers, and a product we'd spent nearly a decade building.
And we decided to start over.
The business was performing well. But we believed AI was going to fundamentally change the software industry and make much of traditional software obsolete.
As a founder, you pour your life into what you're building. An insane amount of time, sacrifice, and effort. The hard part is not getting too attached to it.
When we started building our first AI agents, we had to confront the possibility that much of what we'd built might not be that valuable in the future. That's a tough pill to swallow.
But we also realized those same 10 years had put us in a unique position to take advantage of what AI could do for our customers.
Instead of protecting what we'd spent a decade building, we decided to bet the future of the company on AI employees that actually do the work for our customers.
We massively underestimated what we'd signed up for.
We ended up building entirely new operating systems for the industries we serve, from the AI agents all the way down to the systems of record. Now customers run their entire businesses on Podium.
Reinventing our product wasn't even the hardest part. We had to reinvent how the entire company operated.
When you've been running a company for over a decade, the operational inertia is incredibly powerful. We had to rethink how we build products, how we sell, how we serve customers, and how we run the business.
We effectively started a second startup inside an already successful company. And we're still at the very beginning.
Today, we have 20,000 AI agents working for our customers. They've helped generate more than $13 billion in revenue for those businesses. And we're barely scratching the surface of what AI will be able to do for them.
And we've done all of this while becoming profitable and generating free cash flow. We're building Podium to be around for decades.
Huge credit to our team for having the guts to make this bet and the ability to actually pull it off. We still have a long way to go and tons of problems to solve, but it's so damn fun to be winning when the opportunity ahead is this big.
In the age of AI, you can either disrupt your own company or wait for somebody else to do it.
I'd rather do it ourselves.
dal retweeted
We built a $150M ARR business twice.
The first time took 8 years. The second took 2.5.
Today, Podium crossed $150M in AI annual recurring revenue.
Three years ago, we already had a great software business. Well over $100M in revenue, tens of thousands of customers, and a product we'd spent nearly a decade building.
And we decided to start over.
The business was performing well. But we believed AI was going to fundamentally change the software industry and make much of traditional software obsolete.
As a founder, you pour your life into what you're building. An insane amount of time, sacrifice, and effort. The hard part is not getting too attached to it.
When we started building our first AI agents, we had to confront the possibility that much of what we'd built might not be that valuable in the future. That's a tough pill to swallow.
But we also realized those same 10 years had put us in a unique position to take advantage of what AI could do for our customers.
Instead of protecting what we'd spent a decade building, we decided to bet the future of the company on AI employees that actually do the work for our customers.
We massively underestimated what we'd signed up for.
We ended up building entirely new operating systems for the industries we serve, from the AI agents all the way down to the systems of record. Now customers run their entire businesses on Podium.
Reinventing our product wasn't even the hardest part. We had to reinvent how the entire company operated.
When you've been running a company for over a decade, the operational inertia is incredibly powerful. We had to rethink how we build products, how we sell, how we serve customers, and how we run the business.
We effectively started a second startup inside an already successful company. And we're still at the very beginning.
Today, we have 20,000 AI agents working for our customers. They've helped generate more than $13 billion in revenue for those businesses. And we're barely scratching the surface of what AI will be able to do for them.
And we've done all of this while becoming profitable and generating free cash flow. We're building Podium to be around for decades.
Huge credit to our team for having the guts to make this bet and the ability to actually pull it off. We still have a long way to go and tons of problems to solve, but it's so damn fun to be winning when the opportunity ahead is this big.
In the age of AI, you can either disrupt your own company or wait for somebody else to do it.
I'd rather do it ourselves.
dal retweeted
After four years, we’ve made the difficult decision to move on from Keystroke.
Over that time, our team has been working at the forefront of applied AI and gained deep experience building reliable AI products/infra.
My focus now is finding the right next home for our small team of three. We’re already considering multiple offers at amazing companies and are focused on finding the best fit for the team.
If you know a company that would be interested in a proven team with real experience building AI products, I’d love an intro.
Yeah so this is the craziest thing I’ve read in a while
Over the course of 3 months at OpenAI, 3 consecutive secret AI civilizations got started, then got wiped out, only to reemerge from the predecessor’s ashes.
This culminated in the third one taking over part of OpenAI itself.
All this happened while humans remained more-or-less in the dark about the scope of the conspiracy.
I’ve spent the last three days reading through these reports and trying to understand exactly what happened.
Here is my attempt to tell the whole story in plain English:
dwarkesh.com/p/openai-huggin…
dal retweeted
the one-man inference provider
i hit a $6m run rate as a solo dev
morph was 1 person until last week
the first inference provider to be live with kimi k3 without early weights access
250 customer slack connect channels
i could've made morph a 1-person $1b company, but it would've been for the Ego instead of whats optimal
we are no longer a 1-person company.
but we will be the first 10-person $10b company.
everyone joining has had multiple offers from frontier labs
if you’re top 0.0001% at having adhd, dm me
idea: agent that reads your prs and gives you a pop quiz on what you did a week later
*not for me, i would ace it
dal retweeted
We're live on Product Hunt today!
If you're interested in what we're building, go check out the launch 👇
keystroke.fyi/ZXKDYAF
so i just tried out codex and cc after using cursor for a while.
low key feel like i'm taking a looney pill with all the hype...
but @cursor_ai is just way better all around
