The AI-Native CRM
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What motivated Keith Peiris to leave Tome and start a new venture?
Three out of our five founding members came from Facebook. Building a revenue team is a very rich problem set. It's something that everyone cares about. It could always be done better. What's the most exciting thing someone's doing with Lightfield today? We have this company, Power. They have this marketplace where they're aggregating folks that have various illnesses and complications that are looking for frontier treatment. So they've modeled all of this in Lightfield, and Lightfield actually helped. someone with Alzheimer's find frontier treatment within days. Is there anything that you've done differently in this kind of AI era? As a CRM company in a red ocean space, we have to be an expansion company.
If we can help you completely model your business and your customer reality, then the rest will be easy.
What would be the one piece of advice that you'd go back and give yourself if you were just starting the pivot journey again? Um
Keith Perez built Tome to 25 million users. Then he decided to start over. In this episode, A16Z's Alex Rampel and Joe Schmidt sit down with the Lightfield co-founder and CEO to unpack why he walked away from a fast-growing AI product and what he learned from the pivot. That journey led Keith to a problem inside the CRM. Companies have huge amounts of customer data spread across emails, meetings, product usage, and databases, but no single system that understands the full relationship. They discuss Lightfield's approach to building a business world model. Why Alex calls the shift intelligence is greater than schema. And how AI could rethink systems of record. They also get into how AI is changing the way Keith builds and operates, and why his advice to founders is simple ignore the noise, find real pain, and stay focused on customers.
Welcome back to the A60Z Podcast. I'm Joe Schmidt. I'm joined by my partner Alex Rampel and Keith Paris. Keith is the CEO at Lightfield. Lightfield just raised a $47 million Series A led by us, and they're building a business world model. A business world model turns customer emails, calls, and meetings into a record that AI agents can use to get work done. We'll explore how Keith pivoted, which is very interesting, to Lightfield, how they built the initial product. and what customers can do with it. Keith, thanks for joining us. Excited to be here. Yeah. Maybe we'll start just going back to the tome journey and how you got to Lightfield. Very atypical journey. You got two products now to explosive scale.
Tell us a little bit about that experience and how you ended up at Lightfield.
We started Tome mostly because we were consumer people and we thought L LMs were gonna change the way people communicate. And we were working on selfie design, you know, at Instagram and Messenger, and we decided to go into the storytelling of ideas. We got this product out to launch around the time of GPT three. Yeah. And tell us a little bit about the product. So it was a presentation product where you could use GPT to generate presentations and generate pages and so forth. And we launched it around the same time as Chat GPT. And we just got explosive growth. We got two million users a month. People were lining up when we didn't have enough inference to support them. Wow.
Oh my gosh. And so you got that to amazing scale. You then decided to stop and completely hard pivot. What was that decision like? How'd you make that choice? Why?
So I'd say there are a lot of metrics behind it, but deep down, I think at an instinctual level, none of us like the product. Which is kind of a funny thing to say. Like I think at the end of the day, if you're a founder, you have to love the product that you're building and you have to be excited for your customers to use it. Yeah. And we just couldn't, for the life of us, make good presentations. Wow. And what I mean by that is we could not see the path of a high-quality, discerning presentation maker using this tool in an indispensable way. We couldn't see people like yourselves using it for memo. We couldn't see people using it in investment banking or consulting.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
What motivated Keith Peiris to leave Tome and start a new venture?
0:00–12:17
2
How did the team discover the need for a “business world model” in CRM?
12:17–25:09
3
Why did Lightfield decide to shift from a schema‑heavy CRM to intelligence‑driven modeling?
25:09–36:09
4
What architectural choices enable Lightfield’s activity‑log and semi‑structured data approach?
36:09–43:30
5
How does Lightfield price its platform—seat‑based, consumption, or outcome models?
43:30–49:16
6
What strategies does Lightfield use to stay agile and prioritize features across greenfield and brownfield markets?
49:16–51:32
7
What are Keith’s biggest lessons from the hard pivot and how does he advise founders facing similar decisions?
51:32–52:34
Speakers
3 identifiedMore from The a16z Show
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