I was working in a neuroscience lab at Duke... I dropped out of college to start my first company at a company testing advertising with brain scans... one of our customers said, "Hey, can I take that headset home? Can I put that on my son and see when he's paying attention to his homework and when he's not? He has ADHD..." And we ended up pivoting the company to build out a consumer product for kids with ADHD, building new hardware, a new headset, and that became Neuroplus. ran that company for about seven years. We had rabid fans of our product that loved what we were doing. And that gave me this delusion that we had found product market fit or we were just around the corner from really unlocking massive growth... we just done a successful Kickstarter campaign... But so at the time when I got Forbes 30 under 30, I didn't think of the company as falling apart... So maybe we did have some product market fit, but it was with a market that was so small that it it was pretty irrelevant and inconsequential... It's only in retrospect when I joined Vicata and I saw real product market fit that you see how different it is. So, when I was on first call with a customer, a sales rep was demoing the product and I didn't think the sales rep did a very good job and they messed up a lot... And then at the end of the call, the customer says, "Okay, sounds good. Could you send me a quote? I think we'll probably buy 30 cameras or so in the next month."... you don't have to be perfect at every other aspect of the business if you get that part right.

Servil is an AI native platform for IT teams. We help automate help desk requests, onboarding, offboarding, just in time access requests... we had a theory that the product that we wanted to build had to be a platform. It had to combine the full ITSM this AI native workflow builder access management help desk automation... we wouldn't really have a product to test until we built the platform. And so that's how we kind of kept the conviction during that one-year period... the tenor of the conversation changed almost overnight over a few week period in April or May of 2025 where it went from this is really neat keep us posted to how much does it cost how do we get started... So, you become very neutral to the customer feedback. Whereas, I think in the early part of my career, every customer conversation, you know, you just you're a pendulum... I want to be embedded with customers. So, I don't think about customer interviews or customer conversations. Like, I'm just talking to customers all the time. I'm in their Slack channels... That builds just an intuition for our customers that is much much more powerful than these kind of point in time customer interviews... It has to be a genuine interest in them and in making their lives better that drives that relationship forward.

I think when you're building an AI product today, one of the most challenging things to always be thinking about is what's going to happen with the models and how are these capabilities going to change over time... the workflow builder did not allow you to just describe any arbitrary automation and have that build out automatically without intervention. It took a iteration. It took um prompting. It took a lot of behind-the-scenes minations to make that all work... And I think the bet that we took was that between our efforts and improving the product and doing a lot of clever things under the hood and the improvements in the underlying models that we would be able to build a product that delivered on this vision... Are you building for how the models work and behave today or are you building for a future where they're a little bit better or are you building for a future where they're a lot better... And on the one hand, you want to kind of be skating ahead a little bit and knowing, hey, like we did where it's like the models are not good enough for what we want to do yet, but they will be very soon. In the same way, you can delude yourself into thinking, oh, this doesn't work today, but all we need is the models to get better and then all of a sudden we'll have a company. I think that's a bad idea. But I think it is smart to embrace challenges that are almost possible and you could with a small leap of faith believe that they're going to be possible in the near future.