Bialecki: Treat foundation LLMs like athletic youth who need domain coaching
Andrew Bialecki · Agents Are Your New Power Users: How Klaviyo CEO Andrew Bialecki Is Remaking a $1.4B Business · Aug 14, 2026 · at 15:57
Klaviyo CEO Andrew Bialecki uses a Tom Brady sports analogy to explain how to train foundation models for specialized B2B workflows.
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“So one of the mental models we have is I often tell folks like, look, you should treat the underlying, especially if you're building agentic products, you should treat the underlying LLM as like a very athletic middle schooler or high schooler, right? They're really good at a lot of sports. But if you want to make them great at one thing, so for Tom Brady, it's funny, he almost, he got drafted to go play baseball to the now defunct Montreal Expos, so he might have had a great career there. But instead, he went and played football, and we all know how that ended up, and we're very thankful for that in New England. But the reality is like, it took a lot of coaching and tailoring to turn that general purpose athletes into something that was great at a specific domain.”
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