Pete Koomen
10 statements across 5 episodes · 2 bullish · 5 bearish · 1 people on the record · first statement May 30, 2024 by Pete Koomen · said 3 times in 2 episodes since 2023 · across every show →
On the record as a speaker too: Pete Koomen's record, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
Mentions by year
brought up most by Garry Tan (2), Diana Hu (1)
tap a year for its mentions
2026 2 mentions in 1 episode
2023 1 mention in 1 episode
Everything said about Pete Koomen, oldest first
May 30, 2024
Koomen: Optimizely started as manual A/B testing consulting before building software
“We actually had this example at Optimizely where we were building software to help companies run A-B tests. But at the earliest stages, we got companies to pay us just to go in and manually build A-B tests. For them. Right. And so we're making money. The first…”
May 30, 2024 negative
Koomen: Founders cannot build large, scalable businesses depending on human labor
“The failure mode here though, is getting addicted to that consulting revenue, because like, that's the thing that won't scale quite literally, like it won't scale and you won't be able to build a big business if you depend on human's labor.”
Feb 12, 2025 negative
Feb 12, 2025 negative
Koomen: Ignoring Churn During Rapid Growth Catches Up Within Two Years
“If you're going very quickly and you have a lot of revenue coming in, it's easy to ignore your churn, and that's a problem that will catch up with you in a year or two, and at that point, you've spent a whole bunch of money on growth and marketing chasing afte…”
May 23, 2025 negative
Pete Koomen: Gmail's AI drafter sounds unnatural and saves no effort
“There's two big problems with this. The first problem is like you're pointing out that doesn't sound anything like me, right? If you got this email, you wouldn't, you would assume somebody else wrote this. My account got hacked. I got phished. And then the sec…”
May 23, 2025 positive
Oct 21, 2025
Optimizely began as an internal bookmarklet used to deliver consulting contracts
“At Optimizely, the hardest part of building our first product was building this website editor.
That would work with any other website and would allow a non-technical person to go in and build an A-B test without writing code.
And that ended up taking us at le…”
Oct 21, 2025 negative
Early startup hiring slows founders down instead of speeding them up
“When I have founders that are working in the batch who ask if they should hire almost always the answer is no, right? Founders will make the mistake of thinking it will speed them up, but in reality it ends up doing the opposite.”
Oct 21, 2025
May 27, 2026 positive
Koomen: AI-native software will be agents wrapping tools, not apps wrapping AI
“I think the conclusion that this essay points to is that as we get better at building AI native software. It's going to look a lot more like the agent wrapping software deterministic tools rather than deterministic software wrapping an AI.”