Ankur Goyal
Founder & CEO, Braintrust. On 3 shows, 4 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveengineer@ankrgyl ↗LinkedIn ↗ankurgoyal.com ↗
Ankur Goyal is the founder and CEO of Braintrust, an AI observability and evaluations platform for enterprise LLM applications. He previously founded Impira, which was acquired by Figma, and served as VP of Engineering at SingleStore.
3shows
4appearances
102statements
4resolved
4supported
0contradicted
100%fully supported
14said about them ↓ Everything Ankur Goyal said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Goyal: Running LLM workloads at scale is impractical outside OpenAI
“It's just not practical outside of OpenAI to run use cases at scale in a lot of cases. Like, you can do it, but it requires quite a bit of work. And
Because OpenAI is so good at making their models so available, I think they get a lot of credit for the science…”
Goyal: Agent control flow and graph routing will move into models
“It feels very clear to me that this type of logic is going to be built into the model. Anytime there is control flow complexity or uncertainty complexity, I think the history of AI has been to push more and more into the model.”
Goyal: OpenAI o1 will make agentic frameworks obsolete
“And I think O-one is going to do that to agentic frameworks as well. Hey, I think To me, it seems very unlikely that the, you know, you and me sort of like sipping an espresso and thinking about how, like, different personified roles of people should interact …”
Goyal: Open-source inference providers are far less reliable than OpenAI
“They are nowhere near as reliable as, I mean, every single time I use any of those products and run a benchmark, I find a bug, text the CEO, and they fix something. It's nowhere near where OpenAI is.”
Goyal: TypeScript's type system makes it better suited for AI than Python
“Another thing is that TypeScript as a language is inherently better suited for AI workloads because of the type system. So the type system basically allows you to launder, you know, the crazy stuff that comes out of an AI model into a well-defined structure th…”
Goyal: Publishing Public Benchmarks Is Marketing, Not Product Improvement
“It's just that the value proposition of publishing an eval is completely orthogonal to the value proposition of building evals in service of building a good product. I think the purpose of publishing benchmarks is marketing, and it's good marketing.”
Goyal: Providing eval criteria and examples is more effective than writing specs
“In many ways coming to the table of product building with representative examples and criteria that articulate what good versus bad is for a use case is just a more precise and usable form of product management than writing a spec.”
Early AI teams preferred managed evals over brittle open-source tools
“We actually heard early on from people and allergic, no reaction to that. They were like, Hey, we were using open source stuff and it's super brittle and it breaks all the time. And we just evals suck and observability sucks and we just don't want to deal with…”
Braintrust built a terrible go-to-market motion to test product strength
“I wanted at Braintrust to, again, in the spirit of skepticism, Build a terrible go-to-market motion early on, but make the product, make Braintrust only successful if the product was so good that despite being grossly incompetent at selling and marketing our p…”
Overhyped failure is much better for startups than dying in obscurity
“I think there's only one right answer, which is it's much better to be overhyped and then fail. I mean, obviously within the realms of morality and integrity, but I was, I sort of learned like, I don't want to be an obscure product that no one cares about.”
Pre-PMF startups must hire salespeople accustomed to working without PMF
“A classic example of this is when companies hire salespeople from extremely successful product-led companies, and they expect the salesperson to be good for their product-led company that does not have product market fit. That is not the right You actually wan…”
Goyal: Software engineers will drive AI engineering, but ML tools are unusable for them
“The real gap is that software engineers who have a particular way of thinking, a particular set of biases, a particular type of workflow that they run, are going to be the ones who are doing AI engineering, and that the tools that were built for ML are fantast…”
Goyal: Simple tool-calling prompts cover 80% to 90% of AI use cases
“For probably 80 or 90% of the use cases that we see with people doing this, like very, very simple, I create a prompt, it calls some tools. I can like very ergonomically write the tools, plug into popular services, et cetera, and then just call them kind of li…”
Goyal: Vector Search Hard Part Is Application Permissions, Not Search
“The problem is that the challenge in deploying vector search has very little to do with vector search itself, and much more to do with the data adjacent to vector search. So, for example, if you are at Figma, the Vector search is not actually the hard problem.…”
Goyal: Fewer Braintrust customers run fine-tuned models in production than six months ago
“I will say in my own experience with customers as of the recording date today, which is September or something, yeah, very few of our customers are currently fine-tuning models. And I think a very, very small fraction of them are running fine-tuned models in p…”
Goyal: OpenAI dominates production while Anthropic Sonnet leads side projects
“We still see an overwhelming majority of customers using OpenAI, but almost everyone is using Anthropic for the, and Sonnet specifically for their side projects, whether it's
You know, via cursor or prototypes or whatever.”
Goyal: Public clouds fail to match direct OpenAI endpoint experience and capacity
“It hasn't been a smooth journey for people to get the capacity on public clouds that they're able to get through, you know, OpenAI directly. I mean, I think a lot of this is changing, catching up, et cetera. But it hasn't been perfectly smooth. And I think the…”
Goyal: Engineering around LLM limitations guarantees technical obsolescence
“If you make assumptions about the capabilities of models, and you engineer around them, you're almost, like, guaranteed to be screwed.”
Goyal: Under 5% of Braintrust production customers use open source
“Among customers running in production, it's less than five percent.”
Goyal: Nearly all Braintrust clients shifted to simple code with LLM calls
“Almost everyone that we work with has gone into this model that, that I, that actually exactly what you said, which is sprinkle intelligence everywhere and make it easy to write dumb code”
Goyal: Nearly all Braintrust customers have abandoned fine-tuned models
“Almost if not all of our customers have moved off of fine-tuned models onto instruction-tuned models and are seeing really good performance.”
Goyal: Practical adoption of open-source models remains very limited
“So we see very limited practical adoption of open source models, but I think more interest than ever.”
Goyal: Open-source models will struggle until they improve UX or iteration speed
“So I think until open source can really move the needle on one of those two axes, it's going to be tough for it to be adopted broadly.”
Goyal: Internet-trained LLMs outperform models trained on internal enterprise data
“And I think the big insight or the crazy, you know, non-intuitive thing about LLMs is that something trained on the internet outperforms what an enterprise can produce with their own data trained on data in a data warehouse.”
The other half of the tape: Ankur Goyal's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 14 times in 6 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Shawn Wang 4Elad Gil 3
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
Latent Space 11
No Priors 3
2026 9 mentions in 2 episodes 5 per episode
2025 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
2024 1 mention in 1 episode
2023 2 mentions in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Ankur's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| LATENT SPACELEDGER | Founder & CEO, Braintrust | 2 | 51 | 100% 3/3 | full record on Latent Space → |
 IN DEPTHLEDGER | Founder & CEO, Braintrust | 1 | 28 | — | full record on In Depth → |
| NO PRIORSLEDGER | Founder & CEO, Braintrust | 1 | 23 | 100% 1/1 | full record on No Priors → |