Yasser Elsaid
Founder & CEO, Chatbase · 1 appearance on the record.
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founderexecutiveengineer@yasser_elsaid_ ↗LinkedIn ↗chatbase.co ↗
Yasser Elsaid is the founder and CEO of Chatbase, a platform for building custom AI chatbots trained on user data. After interning at Tesla and Meta, he launched Chatbase in 2023 and bootstrapped it into an eight-figure ARR business.
26statements → 9claims → 1claims resolved → 3.58/5average certainty → 2.19/5average debate potential →
0 supported 0 partly supported 1 contradicted 1 not yet assessed 7 not checkable as stated how the 9 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
1 prediction · 8 assertions · 3 opinions · 8 insights · 6 disclosures · every statement was checked. The prediction and assertions are the 9 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 1 is resolved, 1 is not yet assessed, and 7 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
The record, in short
What the tape says about how Yasser argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
Everything Yasser Elsaid said on Latent Space that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
Yasser Elsaid: 95% of AI customer service limitations stem from harness architecture
“I would say like, 95% of the limitation is not from the model. It's from the harness. So like, it's my job to fix, but I think the intelligence is there and like, I think has been there for a while, especially for like, if you're only thinking about customer s…”
Proper AI harnesses enable 80% to 90% customer issue resolution rates
“If the harness is good enough, I would say, of course, it depends on the industry, but on average, you can get to 80, 90% of resolutions for, like, customer product issues, but to get there, it's the job of the harness”
Open-source AI demand spiked on hype before reverting to frontier labs
“Like all the open source models, I think what happened was they got like very hyped and people were very interested in using them. But I think like over time, like there was a spike in usage for these models. And then it goes back to open AI, Anthropic and Goo…”
AI model switching costs remain non-zero due to fragile harness optimizations
“People keep saying like the cost of switching between models is zero. It's cheap, but it's not zero because sometimes you like spend, you know, three, four months, like fine tuning exactly how the model should be, or like how the, Product should be. And then o…”
Employee-generated content is replacing ineffective influencer marketing strategies
“I think EGC is very underrated. I think that's the new influencer marketing. Influencer marketing, I feel like, doesn't work anymore. So I think that's, yeah, that's the new thing.”
Pure self-serve PLG fails for enterprise adoption without human outbound assistance
“I think a big mistake that PLG companies do is that, like, we're a PLG company, like, here's the pricing page, just, like, do your thing and pay us every month. But I think, one, like, even if your product is extremely intuitive and, like, everyone is able to …”
AI Engine Optimization is fundamentally no different from traditional SEO
“So I don't think it's very different, honestly, no, because What the AI does is, is it searches the web and like finds answers and then it gives it to you. So it is very similar.”
Defining what qualifies as a resolution is the flaw in outcome-based pricing
“I think the only bigger, big problem with the outcome based is the definition of the outcome. Like you can call anything a resolution.”
Chatbase is actively replacing Zendesk as customers migrate to AI-native solutions
“Yeah, I think then, yeah, we are replacing Zendesk. So a lot of people are moving off of Zendesk to using it.”
Outcome-driven engineers will thrive; craft-focused coders will struggle in the AI era
“The people that like coding because of what, how powerful it is, those people will thrive in, in this era. And I think people who like coding for the craft of coding will Probably have a bad time because that's not gonna be like the biggest thing in coding any…”
Bootstrapped company equity is more tangible than high-valuation VC options
“I actually think it's more real than when you're raised, like, at a high valuation that the company needs to, one, live up to, but then surpass for your options to, like, start to be worth something.”
No commercial products augmented GPT models with custom data pre-ChatGPT
“Like I saw some people doing demos, but like in like a CLI or something like that, but there was no product doing like this model, but with additional data on top of it.”
Building viable AI startups still requires traditional sales and user calls
“I think a lot of people were saying, oh, like, AI is going to change how you build a business, but I think what helped me actually, like, make this a business is I did all the, you know, like, the normal business stuff, you know, like, talking to users, gettin…”
Chatbase scaled from zero to $1 million ARR in 117 days
“I think doing that helped a lot into, Getting me from like zero, basically to one million AR in a 117 days.”
Chatbase skipped VC fundraising because rapid traction left no time to pitch
“I thought I was going to do that, but because the product went so, like, it got so much traction so quickly, the reason I didn't do this is I didn't have the time.”
Chatbase customer model usage is split 50% OpenAI, 50% Anthropic and Google
“Maybe 50% is still on Okunai. Yeah. Yeah. And then 50 on everything else. Yeah. But everything else is like mainly Anthropic and Google.”
The United Nations uses Chatbase on Facebook Messenger for regional crisis support
“Like, the UN is using us right now on their Facebook messenger. So when people reach out to them, specifically for, like, specific regions, it gets drafted to Chatbase, and Chatbase helps them.”
Self-serve GTM reveals lucrative niche verticals that sales-led assumptions often miss
“When you're not doing self-serve, when you're doing sales-led, you make a lot of assumptions. You assume, oh, like, of course, like, I'm gonna go into banks, or I'm gonna go into like startups or something like that, which is probably a good idea, but you woul…”
Offering custom demos to free signups functions as highly converting warm outbound
“You do content, you have the PLG motion, and then you put people in an email flow and in a calling flow where if they sign up, even if they don't subscribe or if they Like one of your posts, you reach out to them and say, hey, like, we want to build you a demo…”
Most Chatbase enterprise customers still prefer usage-based pricing over outcome-based pricing
“We started to like give some bigger customers the option to do that. And I think most of them still choose like the usage based, but some do choose the outcome based.”
Chatbase's sustained profitability enables aggressive VC-style hiring and scaling
“We're now at a point that we can function as a VCVAC company because we've been profitable for so long that it's as if we raised already, and, like, we can, now I have the mindset of being as aggressive with things like hiring and scaling,”
Toronto hub lets startups attract top Waterloo graduates avoiding Silicon Valley
“So the good thing about Toronto is you get all the Waterloo kids that don't come here.”
Appearances (1)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| ⚡️ Competing with ChatGPT and Sierra, building a $10M ARR company — Yasser Elsaid, Founder | May 2, 2026 | 40m |