Braintrust

12 statements across 1 episodes · 4 bullish · 1 bearish · 1 people on the record · first statement Jul 24, 2025 by Ankur Goyal · said 43 times in 1 episodes since 2025 · across every show →

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brought up most by Ankur Goyal (28), Brett Berson (15)

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Everything said about Braintrust, oldest first

Jul 24, 2025
Disclosure
Braintrust operates with only one company-wide meeting per week
“Like, we don't have, we have one meeting per week as a company, and that's it.”
Ankur Goyal Jul 24, 2025 ▶ 57:06 What Braintrust got right about product-market fit | Ankur Goyal (Founder and CEO)
Jul 24, 2025 positive
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Tantivi was the only search library to survive Braintrust's 100x benchmark
“There's one library called Tantivi, which is a Rust re-implementation of the Lucene search index, which is a very popular and well-regarded and used search technology. It's the technology behind Elasticsearch as well. And that was the only piece of code that w…”
Ankur Goyal Jul 24, 2025 ▶ 39:34 What Braintrust got right about product-market fit | Ankur Goyal (Founder and CEO)
Jul 24, 2025
Disclosure
Alana Goyal and Elad Gil were the first investors in Braintrust
“Honestly, I think there's two people I'd point to and these were the first two people that invested in BrainTrust and really helped us. The first is Alana”
Ankur Goyal Jul 24, 2025 ▶ 1:05:17 What Braintrust got right about product-market fit | Ankur Goyal (Founder and CEO)
Jul 24, 2025
Insight
Requiring 40-to-50-person startup teams to work weekends is very challenging
“I think personally, my perspective is even if you're trying to hire like a pretty good, well-rounded and, you know, skilled group of people that's even, you know, 40 or 50 people, it's very challenging to get everyone to work on weekends. And so we don't, that…”
Ankur Goyal Jul 24, 2025 ▶ 59:20 What Braintrust got right about product-market fit | Ankur Goyal (Founder and CEO)
Jul 24, 2025
Assertion Not checkable as stated
AI observability logs average 50KB per row compared to 900B traditionally
“Every span in brain trust land, which is like a row of something that you'd log in brain trust, the average size is 50 kilobytes. In traditional observability, it's 900 bytes.”
Ankur Goyal Jul 24, 2025 ▶ 37:56 What Braintrust got right about product-market fit | Ankur Goyal (Founder and CEO)
Jul 24, 2025
Disclosure
Goyal cuts off all meetings at noon to protect afternoon focus
“So I cut off meetings at noon every day. I don't take any meetings afternoon.”
Ankur Goyal Jul 24, 2025 ▶ 58:00 What Braintrust got right about product-market fit | Ankur Goyal (Founder and CEO)
Jul 24, 2025 positive
Disclosure
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…”
Ankur Goyal Jul 24, 2025 ▶ 29:30 What Braintrust got right about product-market fit | Ankur Goyal (Founder and CEO)
Jul 24, 2025 positive
Insight
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.”
Ankur Goyal Jul 24, 2025 ▶ 35:15 What Braintrust got right about product-market fit | Ankur Goyal (Founder and CEO)
Jul 24, 2025 positive
Insight
Intellectually fascinating technical problems efficiently drive peer-to-peer customer acquisition
“I think that people without us having to force them to or ask them to, they are just interested in solving the problem around evals and they find it intellectually fascinating on their own. And I think that leads to a lot of organic knowledge sharing. A lot of…”
Ankur Goyal Jul 24, 2025 ▶ 33:31 What Braintrust got right about product-market fit | Ankur Goyal (Founder and CEO)
Jul 24, 2025
Insight
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…”
Ankur Goyal Jul 24, 2025 ▶ 1:07:40 What Braintrust got right about product-market fit | Ankur Goyal (Founder and CEO)
Jul 24, 2025 neutral
Disclosure
Braintrust deliberately excluded traditional enterprises early to focus on product engineers
“We say our product is for product engineering teams that are trying to incorporate AI into their core products and services. And that description excludes and excluded a lot of, ah, sort of traditional enterprises, for example, early on, and we were okay with …”
Ankur Goyal Jul 24, 2025 ▶ 48:17 What Braintrust got right about product-market fit | Ankur Goyal (Founder and CEO)
Jul 24, 2025 negative
Insight
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…”
Ankur Goyal Jul 24, 2025 ▶ 23:34 What Braintrust got right about product-market fit | Ankur Goyal (Founder and CEO)
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