How We 5X Our Revenue While Others Chase AI Updates | Lindy, Flo Crivello

Intro

00:00If you're not embarrassed by your first version, you shipped to late in AI. I would even go as far as to say like if your first version works, you're not thinking big enough. You should build for the future generations of the model so much and the models are improving so rapidly that the current generation of models should barely support your vision.

00:17Just barely. If you spend any time on Twitter, you feel like there is so much competition in AI agents. You feel like there is a new a new company coming out every week. And yet when you're out in the market like us, you don't run into competitors that often.

00:30So I sometimes compare it to like there's like trillions of trillions of stars in the universe and yet the universe is 99.9% empty space. It's the same, right? There's a lot of us nominally, but somehow it feels empty. And I think because the market is just so enormously huge.

00:42These people have gone about their entire life hearing everyone tell them the reason why they couldn't do things. But actually, if you do it, you're going to be very, very successful. You're going to make a lot of money. you're going to build something very impactful with the twof world.

00:55It becomes addictive. It's like a ha like tell me you can't I can't do it. I'll show you I can. I'm Flo Killo. I'm the CEO of Lindy which is the world's easiest way to build AI agents with no code. Lindy is a setup of building blocks that you can put together to build your own AI agents and to get them to do anything.

01:17One big use case that we have is a customer support. Step one, customer support ticket arrives by email. Step two, you can have a condition building block that basically branches up the agent. So you can be like, hey, is this a customer asking a question or is this a customer asking for a refund?

01:31Step three, for example, if they're asking a question, you can use our knowledge base building block, your FAQ, your website, a PDF, your notion, whatever you want. Then you can ask maybe finally step four to answer the support ticket based on the knowledge that it extracted in the knowledge base.

01:47We have quintupled uh in revenue over the last 6 months and roughly doubled the size of the team since then.

Focus on What Never Changes

01:58I think it's Jeff Bezos who said something like people always comment about how fast everything is always changing like he likes to focus on what doesn't change right in a world thing is always changing it finds these pillars of stability to hang on to and I think what doesn't change is the user and a lot of preferences of the user will just immutable that really surprised us.

02:14We released the platform and we started to have quite a few users ask us for HIPPA compliance which is this regulatory standard in the US that allows you to work with sensitive health information. So people started to be like can you be HIPPA compliant?

02:29Can you be HIPPA compliant? I want to use legal for healthcare use cases. And we were like why like what do what do you want us to be HIPPA compliant for? And that's when we we understood the use case which is turns out it's huge and it's a big industry today.

02:39There's a lot of really big companies dedicated solely to this use case where doctors spend a lot of time taking notes during patient visits. They call it charting because there's like a very specific standard of notes that they call soap notes.

02:50Some of them started building Lindy's to help them build get their soap notes. So they use Lindy on a mobile phone and they recorded the conversation using the record feature that we have and then they would prompt Lindy to give them the format of notes.

03:02In the case of AI agents, the user wants something that's easy to use. We want something that's effective, something that works, something that's simple to use, something that's affordable, something that's fast. These things are always going to be the case.

03:12And the problem that the user is trying to solve is is fairly constant as well.

Build AI That Barely Works

03:21LinkedIn's founder Hoffman, who said this famous thing, if you're not embarrassed by your first version, you shipped too late in AI. I would even go as far as to say like if your first version works, you're not thinking big enough. You should build for the future generations of the model.

03:34so much and the models are improving so rapidly that the current generation of models should barely support your vision just barely. That was very much our case at Lindy like for a long time the product simply did not work because the models were not good enough.

03:47The very first version of the product was just a prompt. So instead of building this AI agent using these building blocks that I mentioned, it was literally just writing text. Because it's just a prompt, you're just trusting this AI model to basically follow your instructions.

04:02It may not follow the instructions. You're you're like praying the LM gods. Even to this day, even to the frontier models, like fast forward two or three years, to this day, Claude Opus 4 or OpenAI, I use the very most frontier models right now, even they very often struggle.

04:17We are building for the next generation of models. The current product doesn't work and yet we keep building because we expect that the next generation of models will make it work. And the way I characterize it today is it's it's sort of AI in turn.

04:28It can perform simple enough tasks. Anything that you can describe in a step-by-step uh fashion is something that that Lindy can do. Over the long term, the vision is to build a full-blown AI employees, an AI agent that can do anything that the human employee can do on a computer.

04:42So, that's my piece of advice is like skate for the puck is going to be in in Steve Jobs world and skate for where the the next generation of models is going to be and build with that in mind.

Don't Hesitate to Pivot Hard

04:57Don't build a mine until you've you've found gold. I really identified these two different distinct phases in a startup life cycle. One, you prospect. You look for the right mining site where you can find gold. And once you've struck gold, but only then do you build a mine.

05:11And building a mine is basically hiring a team and raising money and all of that stuff. It is really hard to move a mine. And so if if you build too large a mine and you haven't found gold, what you need to do is you need to destroy your mine.

05:21You need to fire your team. So I started at Uber as a software engineer. I took a six months break after Uber. So COVID breakout, everybody was stuck at home. So I was just on my computer at home and I I read a blog post by John Palmer called the spatial interfaces sort of extolling the virtues of of spatial design.

05:39And there's almost a call to action in that blog post that's like I wonder what a special zoom would look like. I was like oh it's a good question like I started like hacking it together and in the span of a couple of hours they just had like a prototype of like a special zoom.

05:50It's like you see your video in a bubble. You can move the bubble around on like a two dimensional canvas and you can only hear and be held by people around you. And again, this coincided perfectly with COVID. And so I started hosting virtual happy hours in there with my friends like, "Hey, join me in that space.

06:02I I built and I sort of got sucked in little by little. I just kept adding features and I realized it could be like a collaboration space. I added a whiteboard and so forth. And then I realized like oh my god, like everybody's working remotely right now.

06:14Like you know this could be a virtual office. Like there is a market here." I released it. It got traction. like bunch of users started sagging up, raised some money and then like the company was just after the races. When COVID subsided and when people returned to the office, Team Flow started not going so well and the growth stalled completely.

06:30What finally convinced me that there was simply no market anymore was like looking around and seeing all the competitors of which we had many like good teams like really good people and they had raised a lot of money and none of them were taking off.

06:44So that's when I just realized like there is no there is no market. That's what I did. It was extremely painful, but I fired twothirds of the team and it coincided with the release of the GPT3 API. So, it was before the GPT. It was like mid 2022 and we built a meeting recorder in team flow and we were very interested in the GP3 API and so we were like what can we do with it?

07:04So, we we did what now a lot of applications do which is a meeting summarization. And then sales team came to me and they were like flow can this thing also update our sales force after sales calls and we were like sure I don't see why not.

07:15And so we basically kept building and kept fleshing out that like Salesforce integration and then HubSpot integration and and that's when it clicked for us like we realized like wait a minute we can get the LLM to not just generate text for us but generate API calls like generate actual actions for us and so that's when we were like wait a minute like this can be like an an entire AI employee basically we got sucked in to that and again it coincided with first team flow stalling out we got excited about this AI thing jp came about in the middle exploded and like oh my god like

07:47AI is real it's happening and so we just decided in 2023 to completely fool the team flow and just focus on the AI opportunity and and I I did that very deliberately and it's painful as a founder you need to deliberately mismanage your team you need to let them alone and they're going to hate you like where is our CEO what's he doing all day I'm looking for gold like the mind doesn't matter the mind is so very mismanaged right now and you guys are lost at sea and I decide not to care because I'm going to spend my time digging for gold um that's that's what I

08:16Don't don't don't build a mind before you you found the gold.

Stop Avoiding Micromanagement

08:24My leadership philosophy is the job of a CEO is to win. And so that that's my guiding light. Epistemologically that is how I will define what is right or wrong. Perhaps I would compare it to gardening. You know it starts with like selecting the seeds.

08:35So I really do believe like half the job is just recruiting like getting the right people into the door. Like again I think it's Kra Boy who said the people you hire is the company you build. and I'm reminded every day of how true that is. It's half the job.

08:46So just getting the right seeds. If you don't have that, the plant won't be good. And then giving a direction to the team and to the seed like that's the sign. You grow in this direction, you know. So that's that's the second big part of the job is just setting the vision and guiding the plant as it grows, but you can't grow for the plant.

09:02Plant won't grow the way you want it to. So you've got to fire people. There's this amazing book by Bill Walsh called The School Takes of Itself, right? And so the philosophy of Bill Walsh is like success consists of just two things. one, identifying the right inputs that lead to success.

09:14And two, nailing each and every one of these inputs perfectly, right? If you do these two things, you will win. If you don't win, it means you either don't understand what it takes to win or you're not doing what it takes to win. That's just one of these two things.

09:24And so, it's actually funny. We on boarded a new employee this morning. He's the first one of his function. And I spent the day yesterday, Sunday, like literally seven plus hours just writing an 18 pages long document about this is precisely exactly we we call it a standard of excellence.

09:39Step by step by step. This is the job. Again, that's the plan. It's like if you if you see them doing something wrong, it's like no. It's like your guard is like, "No, this is not what you this is not what this is what you do." And you just keep putting these guardrails and you refer back to the dock that you wrote.

09:50Absolutely, you should micromanage. The reason why you are in a position of of of authority is because someone with capital most likely trusted you and your taste. So you you are entitled, you are in fact obligated to micromanage. That that's why you're in your seat.

10:03You exercise your taste. You exercise your judgment. You exercise your your knowledge about your business, your industry, your user, your product, and you guide the plant. That's my philosophy.

Be a Definite Optimist

10:17I view building a company as a way to bring an ambitious bold vision to reality. I don't think the Lin startup model leads you there. I'm a huge fan of Peter Thiel's thinking on this. He calls it definite optimism. It's like a 2x2. You've got a definite and indefinite and optimism and pessimism.

10:34And so definite or indefinite is like do you know or do you not know? There's a lot of indefinite optimists in tech. I view crypto as the the eternal indefinite optimist industry. It's like we don't know what's going to happen. We don't know why things are going to go well, but wag me, we're all going to make it.

10:50You know, everything's going to go so well, but we we can't exactly tell you half. Instead, Peter Tiel pushes for this vision of a definite optimism. Like, you must have a crisp opinion, a well-defined opinion of what the world will look like in the future, what it should look like, what it must look like, and bring that vision to life.

11:07What percent of your time did you spend in 2022 speaking to an AI? It was 0%. Today in 2025, it's it's a lot more than that. And I think the trend is going to continue and continue and continue. AI agents are basically in the short term going to turn us all into managers.

11:20Instead of doing individual contributor work, you're going to manage a swoop of AI agents doing your work. I sometimes describe it as like imagine if any random 25year-old could have the same impact in the world as Google. And so I I think that AI agents are going to do to the world of business at large what the internet has done to media.

11:39It's going to be a very powerful leveling of the playing field. It's going to unlock opportunity to for everyone regardless of their network or their capital or their access or their geography. It's just really going to come down to their vision and the ideas they have and their ability to leverage AI agents.