00:15:38 · Ruby Justice Thelot, Ben Hylak
[00:15:38] S1: This also happened to me. [00:15:39] S0: Yeah. Exactly. Like, I... Because it was kind of like all the things I loved about, like, human robot interaction, but without the hard parts, like, literally the hard parts. Like, was like, you don't have to worry about how does, you know, how do robots walk upstairs or something. Just like, And you so, I think that unifying theme throughout my whole life is I love what I kind of call unbounded interfaces, where there's no really huge input space and really huge output space, or infinite. If you think about AR or robots or rockets are certainly unbounded, it's like, they're just like... There's all these things, like, AR can use your entire, you know, field of view. It can use Yeah. You know, and it can come close to you. It can come far to you. And and I was obsessed with solving that. So... Yeah. I was so I was a designer at Apple for, yeah, like, almost four years working on VisionOS. [00:16:28] S1: Yeah. Yeah. That... That's awesome. So what is, in your view, like, the mission of Raindrop? Do you... Where do you see it, like, possibly evolving after, like, simulations?
00:16:28 · Ruby Justice Thelot, Ben Hylak
[00:16:28] S1: Yeah. Yeah. That... That's awesome. So what is, in your view, like, the mission of Raindrop? Do you... Where do you see it, like, possibly evolving after, like, simulations? [00:16:39] S0: Yeah. So our mission is to protect the world from agent failures in both big ones and small ones. And so I think both parts are important. And I think it's actually been really humbling over the last few months seeing both as agents get deployed into more critical sectors, but also as our kind of customers have grown larger and larger, the issues we detect suddenly, you know, actually start to touch, like, human lives in really meaningful ways, like, where people's safety are concerned, etcetera. Mhmm. And, that's actually been we... We've, as a company, seen, you know, what we do change, like, a lot and and just the importance of it change. So it's been pretty cool. [00:17:17] S1: Yeah. And how do you think about building for, like, personal use cases versus for companies? [00:17:24] S0: You mean, like, individual developers? [00:17:26] S1: Yeah. Like, individual develop... I guess, yeah, I guess that... I'm speaking from a very SF, like, point of view where everyone is, like, a quasi developer.
00:17:26 · Ruby Justice Thelot, Ben Hylak
[00:17:26] S1: Yeah. Like, individual develop... I guess, yeah, I guess that... I'm speaking from a very SF, like, point of view where everyone is, like, a quasi developer. [00:17:32] S0: Yeah. Yeah. But but, yeah, I guess, like, for individual people versus teams, that sort of thing. Yeah. I think both are really, really important. Right? Like, I think you want to have a product that just, like, any random developer can sign up for or get value out of. At the same time, especially when when we started, a lot of the pitch was, you know... Like, we were working with companies that have, you know, millions of, you know, like, messages or events a day, and it's like making sense of that is insanely hard. So that was our focus at first. Yeah. I think simulations is our first step towards, you know, something that's useful even with like n equals one, where it's like... And I use it for things that I'm building. Yeah. And so it's like, just being able to say like, okay, I'm gonna merge, you know, I don't like the tone of this, or like, I don't like when it asks, you know, proposes a calendar event at this point in time. Let's try changing the prompt. Let's see if it actually fixes it. So that's been a really powerful flow for me. [00:18:26] S1: Yeah. That was gonna be my next question. Like, how have you personally seen, you know, efficiency improvement, process improvements from using simulations?
00:18:26 · Ruby Justice Thelot, Ben Hylak
[00:18:26] S1: Yeah. That was gonna be my next question. Like, how have you personally seen, you know, efficiency improvement, process improvements from using simulations? [00:18:34] S0: Well, yeah. We we use it a ton. I mean, Raindrop broadly, especially, like, we use a ton within Raindrop, which is kinda funny. Like, we have lot of agents actually. Everything is now [00:18:42] S1: so, like, recursive.
00:18:44 · Ben Hylak
[00:18:44] S0: Yeah. I mean, just to be very clear, like, that that is, like, I think for us, we've always been very focused on that problem of, there's clearly too much to go through by hand. If we had to make sense and build agents without using AI, it would actually be impossible. Mhmm. Yeah. And even the level of complexity of the agents that we're building now would not be possible without agents. It's, like, very obvious. And so we've been really focused on, like, well, what do you need to close that loop? Like, where you get an issue, and you could actually solve that and know you solved it and push it, which is like... You like... Again, the loop is like recursive self improvement, essentially. At least at least some numbers of loops. Right? Like, wanna push... Get as many loops in before you hit a wall. And I think for us, what we realized very quickly was like, simulations is the way to solve that. Because you get an issue, and you just need to be able to know... Like, teams right now are very, very scared of making changes to their agents, because they don't know what's going to happen. Like Yeah. They're like, well, you know, we're paying x much for, you know, you know, to use Opus five five. Should... You know, Sonnet comes out. And you're like, well, we could save this much amount of money if we switched, but should we? It's like very unclear. Mhmm. And, you know, you could put it into production and do a feature flag or whatever, and we help with that too. But I think the best way we have found to get confidence before is simulations.
00:20:09 · Ruby Justice Thelot, Ben Hylak
[00:20:09] S1: Yeah. Well, very well put. You so much for coming on. We're coming up on time. It was great having you on and hearing about Raindrop. So, yeah, thanks so much. [00:20:16] S0: Good. Good to be here. [00:20:18] S1: A huge thanks to MTS sponsors.