Ankur Goyal: evaluation

Transcript context

…competitors. We'll go into that industry stuff later. I think what I realized then, my wife, Alana, actually told me this when we were working on Impira. She said, based on your personality, I want you to work on something next that is super competitive. And I kind of realized there's only one of two types of markets in startups. Either it's not crowded or it is crowded. Each of those things has a different set of trade-offs and I think there are founders that thrive in either environment. As someone who enjoys competition, I find it very motivating. Personally, it's better for me to work in a crowded market than it is to work in an empty market. Again, people are like, blah, blah, blah, stupid, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, actually, this is what I want to be doing. There were a few strategic bets that we made early on at Braintrust that I think helped us a lot. So one of them I mentioned is the hybrid on-prem thing. Another thing is we were the original folks who really prioritized TypeScript. Now, I would say every customer and probably north of 75% of the users that are running evals in Braintrust are using the TypeScript SDK. It's an overwhelming majority. And again, at the time, and still, AI is at least nominally dominated by Python, but product building is dominated by TypeScript. And the real opportunity to our discussion earlier is for product builders to use AI. And so, even if it's not the majority of typists using AI stuff, writing TypeScript, it worked out to be this magical niche for us that's led to a lot of, I would say, strong product market fit among product builders. And then the third thing that we did is, look, we knew that this LLM ops or whatever you want to call it space is going to be more than just evals. But again, early on, evals, I mean, there's one VC, I won't call them out. You know who you are because I assume you're going to be listening to this. But there's one VC who insisted on meeting us. And I've known them for a long time, blah, blah, blah. And they're like, you know what, actually, after thinking about it, we don't want to invest in Braintrust because it reminds me of CICD and that's a crappy market. And if you were going after logging and observability, that was your main thing, then that's a great market. But of all the things in LLM ops or whatever, if you draw a parallel to the previous world of software development, this is like CICD and CICD is not a great market. And I was like, okay, it's sort of like the hybrid on-prem thing. Go talk to a customer and you'll realize that this is the, I mean, I was at Figma when we used Datadog and we built our own prompt playground. It's not super hard to write some code that, you know, Vercel has a template that you can use to create your own prompt playground now. But evals were just really hard. And so I knew that the pain around evals was just significantly greater than anything else. And so if we built an insanely good solution around it, the other things would follow. ere just really hard. And so I knew that the pain around evals was just significantly greater than anything else. And so if we built an insanely good solution around it, the other things would follow. And lo and behold, of course, that VC came back a few months later and said, oh my God, you guys are doing observability now. Now we're interested. And that was another kind of interesting thing.…

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