Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast
00:55:57 · S2, Mihail Eric, Shawn Wang
[00:55:57] S2: I'll keep [00:55:58] S1: it I'll keep it neutral. I'll stay I'll stay Switzerland in this today. But, yeah, I know. So so... And then, of course, we do our own version of enrichment as well. So we... It's it's like most of our data systems... I mean, part of, one of... When I think the most valuable pieces of software that we build or most valuable systems is kinda like our world database, like the database of companies, enriched companies, enriched accounts, enriched contacts. So, like, that whenever we are constructing ICPs for folks, we have the most up to date information about who you should reach out to at which company at this point in time. Like, I would say that one of our... Like, I think where we are, like, world class, hands down, is just demand. Like, are a very good demand company. Like, we help companies increase their meetings booked in a [00:56:36] S0: way So that find buyer at... Find buyer at the [00:56:38] S1: right time. Right? And it's kind of [00:56:39] S0: like the combination of What do mean at the right time?
00:56:39 · Shawn Wang, Mihail Eric, S2
[00:56:39] S0: like the combination of What do mean at the right time? [00:56:41] S1: Like, there's there's times when... Like, here's an example. Like, if you are if you are targeting someone that just... You are selling to VPs of sales, let's say. Okay? Like, the the the right time to to reach out to them is not when they are, like, sort of in the middle of some... Like, they've been at the same place for the last, like, five years. If they are now in the middle of, like, a job... Like, a good signal is, like, once... If they've gone from one job to a new job, they're now entering a new place where they're more likely to be to purchase or be open to a purchase of a new sales platform because they're in the middle of a job transition. So going from company to company B for VP of sales, a good signal of, hey, should you reach out to them at this point in time is, did you detect that their LinkedIn changed or something like that? [00:57:19] S2: How much of this is your expertise put into model and harness versus models are good, there's generic best practices? Like, is there, there's obviously some value in both. Yeah. Is it just the glue getting it reliable, doing it all in one platform, doing it well? It seems like there's also stuff that we wouldn't know that you guys are also domain experts in that's baked in. [00:57:43] S1: Yeah. I think without the former, would, it would be like a fully commoditized... [00:57:47] S0: I mean,
00:57:47 · Shawn Wang, Mihail Eric
[00:57:47] S0: I mean, [00:57:48] S1: not fully... I mean, because there's still a lot of value in the all in one. I think, like, that is something that we definitely pioneered. Like, most companies in the sales space started as just, like, point solutions. And I think they're... They try more of, like, the y c approach of you kinda, land and expand. You kinda pick a niche and then you expand from there. And we, from the get go, I mean, that's why we stayed in stealth for the greater part of a year and some months, was just building, because we knew we wanted to be the all in one from the start. But, you know, that alone is is powerful, it's meaningful, but I think the real power is the fact that today, Monaco as Monaco has, like, a world class go to market team, like, truly, like, world class go to market team selling Monaco, of course. But we also have the same go to market people that sell Monaco are the ones that are, like, what we call for deploy account executives. They're FDAEs. They're effectively, like, well, it's like human human salespeople that are like the consultants of sorts that help onboard all of our customers, get them like building agentic workflows, and are effectively there to like help guide them through every part of their own sales go to market life cycle. And so, to your question, it's the all in one yes, but it's also the fact that we have these, like, you know, Sam and we have brought on a lot of former Sam's team members and stuff like that, who were the best people in GTM at Brex and other places. So we're codifying all of that in the platform.
00:58:56 · Shawn Wang
[00:58:56] S0: Yeah. Interesting to have... You talk very differently than a normal head of AI that I might also talk to, because you're also a former founder. And you're also used to thinking about these things in this way. And it's interesting to... It's important to have that Right. In your role. Yeah. Cool. I I I think you've you've introduced Monaco enough there. And then and obviously, I think as Monaco, the story develops, we can revisit. Sure. Sure. Maybe the bridge back is also what is coding or agent native coding or modern software development like inside of Monaco? You know, I think you're... When you're teaching, you're maybe trying to be here's a lay of the land, but maybe inside of Monaco, you guys are more opinionated on one thing versus the other?
00:59:40 · Mihail Eric, Shawn Wang
[00:59:40] S1: Yeah. Yeah. No. I mean, have... So we've made investments in coding agents from basically day one, and we've learned a lot. We have our own scars that we picked up in learnings. And I think we've now been getting much deeper into sharing some of our learnings. So in our blog, which might be worth sharing here, we've been increasingly posting some of what, maybe not that. So that one is more of a product, the one at the very top. This stuff, I would say, yeah, when AI gets desperate and before, like scaling contributions, build or buy, SRE. So we spend a lot of time looking at different providers, looking at vendors, end up building a lot of things in house. So for us, something like a background agent platform, we have our own version of like a Ramp Inspect that we call MonacoDR, which is... It's built on the Coder platform, but it is what we use to essentially scale up our engineering product. [01:00:26] S0: Coder like coder.com?
01:00:26 · Shawn Wang, Mihail Eric, S2
[01:00:26] S0: Coder like coder.com? [01:00:27] S1: Coder.com. Yeah. Oh. Yeah. Okay. We actually... Yeah. But have sort of adapted it to some of our use cases. And, yeah, it's where a lot of our agent development happens. It's just this really well designed piece of software for essentially isolating of of sort of, development environments, scaling out to multi agents, you know, being able to run these, like, long long horizon agentic coding agent tasks. So Monaco, shout out to John Tracy and and co for for building that out. And and then, yeah, like, from there, we've also built our own versions of, like, you know, like a like a Slack bot, which is called HAL. But, you know, effectively HAL is, like, this part AI SRE, part like customer success, part like kind of QA Engineer, because it it it lives in our Slack, it serves all the purposes of helping us debug things and put up PRs when things are broken, but also used by our own salespeople to find out how the product works, find out, like, how to get to the bottom of something. So there's, like, interesting questions we've had to answer around the different personalities that Hal has, depending on whether he's talking, like, a salesperson versus a versus, like, a develop... Developer. And so systems like this that we built out over time a lot in the last, like, year. So shout out to Yunja for for Hal and and John Tracy as well. [01:01:40] S0: So you're building a lot in house. Yeah. You also use other tools? [01:01:45] S1: We do use other tools. [01:01:46] S0: So what is the line? [01:01:48] S2: Builders versus buy.