Customer demand convinced Daytona to pivot to agents

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 7:19

   bit about this pivot so i know you guys launched three years ago uh about a year and a half ago you pivoted in this area what were the specific trends you were noticing that made you decide all right we need to go all in on this sure uh the thing as i alluded to at the beginning so we were doing okay we had raised a pre-seed and a seed round our pre-seed was two million and seed was five those were the numbers back then not like today that was crazy i remember also when i graduated everyone is a startup founder and i'd be like wow like a 10 million dollar round like oh my gosh and now i'm like all right so you guys raised your 100 million series a no i'm just crazy numbers they've learned and so we're doing okay and as i mentioned we had given some people there was some interest for infrastructure for agents but it's very new or the execution

2. 8:00

   infrastructure and the product we had given given them which was made for humans they didn't was not satisfactory and so we went right down the rabbit hole of like reading we were not very savvy in what was going on in the ai space and so we were like reading everything watching every podcast like everything that we could to get our our minds around that and then we started understanding what what are the differences that agents need and human need and what are these scales and whatnot.

3. 8:24

   And so we created this MVP a year and a half ago and we basically call back all the people that we had, they originally said that they needed it, but they didn't like what we had built out. And we showed it to everyone and they were literally DMing us every day until we give them access post demo. And I've never seen that in my life. I've had four different companies of different scales. I've never seen people beg me, please send me the API key, right?

4. 8:47

   And then we're like, holy shit, right? This isn't- this this is it and on the other side if you think we were doing an enterprise place was a top-down motion enterprise play if we had given sold to every enterprise customer in the world that would be great you can maybe be a fortune 500 company awesome like you have a bunch of companies that the average person has never heard of that sells to this type of buyer but if you think of at that point in time there was no leader in the market it wasn't really 100 clear that there was a market which was good for us but we had the insight that was there and how many agents will there be a trillion exactly right and can you if you serve them or it's just like enormous opportunity so right and so when i think about it i had to talk about this earlier like all everyone building

5. 9:32

   software any technical solutions your number one customer will be agent yeah right and if you're not building for agents today you're just missing an opportunity because like if the if there's like eight billion people in the world and there's a hundred trillion agents or whatever that number will be what's the point right you're trying to solve for the agent because the human's going to interact just with the agent and the agent's going to get the job done for you wow so you did announce your series b earlier this morning why now what's the plan i mean a lot of things uh compute is one