The AI-Native CRM

Keith Peiris, co-founder and CEO of Lightfield, joins Alex Rampell and Joe Schmidt of a16z to discuss his journey from building Tome, an AI presentation product that garnered 2 million users a month, to pivoting and raising a $47 million Series A for Lightfield, an AI-native CRM. Peiris shares insights into the challenges of building an AI product, the importance of understanding customer reality, and how Lightfield is rethinking traditional CRM systems.

The Pivot from Tome to Lightfield

Peiris recounts the unexpected success of Tome, an AI presentation product launched around the same time as GPT-3. Despite its explosive growth, the team realized they didn't love the product. "I think at the end of the day, if you're a founder, you have to love the product that you're building and you have to be excited for your customers to use it," Peiris states. The core issue was the inability to see a path for the AI to generate high-quality, discerning presentations that professionals would find indispensable. The technology, while impressive, constrained them to a tool for individuals and students, rather than the expert storytelling they initially envisioned.

Faced with this realization, Peiris and his team decided to pivot. They explored various B2B use cases, initially offering their presentation services for free to sales teams. What they discovered was a deeper need: companies weren't just looking for better presentations; they wanted help understanding their customers and managing their data across disparate systems. The existing CRM landscape was fragmented, with customer data spread across emails, meetings, product usage, and databases, yet no single system understood the full relationship. This led them to the insight that reorganizing customer reality in a way that both machines and humans could understand was a far more interesting and enduring problem to solve.