Anish Agarwal, co-founder of Traversal, explains how Traversal differentiates itself from competing AI observability startups when pitching to enterprise customers and investors.
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Agarwal: AI coding assistants will cause uninterpretable outages and endless firefighting
“And so it's pretty clear to us that, you know, and we were starting to use it ourselves and sometimes we didn't understand what the code was doing, but you know, we shipped it. And so it's like, well, if this is clearly, this is going to happen a lot more. And…”
Insight
Agarwal: Incident troubleshooting requires adaptive search over LLM context dumping
“You cannot just Put all of it into context of an LLM and hope something great happens. You have to search the data sequentially and adaptively, right? And that's what these agentic systems are fundamentally about.”
Insight
Agarwal: LLMs are really bad at processing time series data
“Because most of the data you're looking at is like time series data. And these LLMs are really bad at processing time series data, right? And that's really where like good statistics comes in.”
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Agarwal: Observability incumbents lack incentive to analyze competitor telemetry data
“The typically the way they work is, is they price based on the amount of data they're storing, right? And so, you know, they have very little incentive for company A To provide you any insight on data being stored on, on company, observability company B, right…”
Insight
Agarwal: Rigorous eval suites are core IP for leading AI startups
“The best AI companies will always have to be the edge of what the models can do, right? I think you always want to be threading the line. If everything works all the time, then you're not really pushing the limit and you're not innovating, right? So I think yo…”
Disclosure
Agarwal: Sequoia met 20 AI SRE startups before backing Traversal
“Our first VC backer was Sequoia, and I think they had met, I think, like, I think like 20 VC, 20, ah, companies before this, but unbeknownst to us, and that was the first question, like Bogomol, who's a board member from there asked, like, I've heard this pitc…”