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Andrew Warner: Every time I see my buddy, he tells me how much his business is growing. He created a company where he uses AI to create AI software for clients, and it’s really taken off. It’s an interesting model. So I asked him to do an interview to walk me step by step through how we built the business. Here goes Tarun.
Thala is the founder of Press W, the AI engineering firm.
Tarun Thummala: Let’s get it. The
Andrew Warner: next new thing presented by Zapier, the AI automation company. How much revenue are you bringing in right now with your agency?
Tarun Thummala: Um, we’re, we’re doing, we’re gonna be doing well over $2 million this year.
Andrew Warner: How much did you do last year?
Tarun Thummala: Yeah, we did, uh, we did over $2 million last year.
Andrew Warner: Impressive. Gimme an example of a typical thing that you do for your clients.
Tarun Thummala: So, so we’re largely custom AI application developers and so, you know, AI applications come in a lot of flavors. Either we are helping them advance their own products, especially if they’re like something like a SaaS or, um, a lot of our work primarily is on building like internal, um, operation applications that help them do their workflows better, smoother, faster with their, with their teams.
Andrew Warner: Is there an example project that you did that gives us an understanding of what you do?
Tarun Thummala: Um, sure. Like there’s, there’s a lot of companies that, for example, like process, uh, a lot of documents. Um, you know, we have a case study, our website you can go look at. It’s, uh, a background checking company. They, they look at a ton of different, uh, court systems and.
Every single court system in the US they have, there’s over 5,000 of them that pull different records from, and you need to examine that record and each one look looks and feels a little bit different. So this is, you know, unstructured data that we’re looking at and we need to figure out whether or not a person has, uh, any sort of like, infraction in that region.
They just do so many documents, right? ’cause every person that comes in, they have to go and do this work for, um, we were able to like build a little system that, um, you know, can automate up to like 90, 95% plus. Of those types of, uh, documents,
Andrew Warner: what do you charge for something like that?
Tarun Thummala: We have a pretty typical kind of custom software model.
Um, I would say, and I actually think it’s a little bit broken, um, the way that consultants and the other, you know, historically these types of service businesses have built because they’re usually like a price per hour type business, right? And you have like, resources that are spending on it. So we still use that as estimators for effort.
Um, but it’s a. That’s actually probably one of the trickiest parts about what we do because we are constantly getting faster and better at what we do. So how do you charge, you know, more value based rather than just like raw time spent? Um, that’s tough. Usually what we will try and fix is either or, or we’ll try and do, is either sink into a fixed fee model where we just know exactly what we need to go and do.
We can estimate it ourselves internally and just give a, give a fixed cost. Especially if we understand how big of a problem this is for that customer. Mm-hmm. Or. More often than not, we’re like, look, we think that this problem is gonna take us a month to solve. Here’s one engineer. Um, and so we, we have a forward deployed engineer model where we’re like, here’s one engineer.
It’s gonna take them a month. But this is a capacity plan, and you’re just paying for a whole dedicated engineer for as long as it takes them to go solve that problem.
Andrew Warner: Okay, man, I get it. Because the problem now is that the better you are, the faster you are, the less you get paid and you don’t have any incentive to speed up if that’s the way the structure is, right.
Tarun Thummala: Exactly right.
Andrew Warner: You know, the interesting thing about you is that you started out with an idea that many people did when they went into consulting, which is, I’m gonna create software. I don’t know what yet. I don’t know how we’re gonna pay for it. But if I could do consulting where I build software for other people, I’ll be able to find the best developers, bring them in-house.
I’ll be able to understand how to build and how to sell, and how to create by watching what my clients do. That was the original idea. Before we go into how you changed it, what made sense about it?
Tarun Thummala: I think that there’s, there were two macro factors in particular. I actually, let’s call it three. One was a little bit more personal, like when, when we sold our last, you know, AI product company.
Andrew Warner: Mm-hmm.
Tarun Thummala: I was probably 24 at that time. Um, and my entire life had been either spent in academia or on that last company. You know, I had a couple internships and things like that, but I really didn’t understand a lot about how the world worked and AI. Is a very, um, context dependent sort of skill in industry, right?
Like you need to actually understand the workflows and the data and how people are supposed to communic. So we realized that we had a huge gap in understanding my, my co-founders also were all around the same age. And so we knew that we didn’t really understand what enterprises and mid-market businesses tended to look like and operate.
And so we needed to gain that information ourselves. So that was, that was the first thing.
Andrew Warner: Yeah. Uh,
Tarun Thummala: the second thing was that, um. We also understood just being AI practitioners ourselves that the typical way that SaaS type businesses, like software style businesses were built, scaled, and sold in the past 10 years, was not going to be the same formula that was going to work in this new age because.
AI requires a ton more professional services almost to actually get the results from that application because it’s not so like out of the box, right? I can’t just like spend a bunch of time making a bunch of UIs and plug it into something and then it, AI just works naturally for them. You have to go in, make sure that the data’s correct, that the context is being fed right and interconnect interconnected within that organization.
So we knew that like the actual delivery model was changing, um, in the AI ecosystem. Uh, the finite third thing was just that like we, we knew that the big incumbent players had some advantages. It wasn’t clear exactly what those advantages were when we started, but we definitely didn’t want to go and, uh, sink ourselves into another 10 year bet when everything was so primordial.
So I’d say for like those three reasons, we were like, services make sense. We can get cash now. We can watch the world and we can stay on the forefront of what’s possible today. And, um, ideally take those learnings, like just maximize surface area of information. Um, and then from that, you know, start to build something longer term, more scalable.
Andrew Warner: How’d you get your first customer?
Tarun Thummala: Um, honestly, the story of our first customer, and even up till now has been largely the same. It’s it’s relationships and networks. I don’t, I don’t think like service businesses are, um, you know, that that different, especially when they start, they’re largely like relationship based.
Um, I think this is the first
Andrew Warner: relationship.
Tarun Thummala: Somebody that, somebody that we worked with in, uh, in the past, like reached back out to us. They knew us from our first company. Um, one of my partners had worked for them previously and they were like, Hey, we have some like extra project work. And at that time we were like ready to just kind of take whatever came our way.
And that would, it was, I would say the first six months was anybody with a enough to pay us a small team of three to like go and do some work. Like we were taking it. Then we started to really like, say, start saying no after we had a a bit of a base going, former
Andrew Warner: employer is a big way that people get customers, right?
They go back to your boss and say, you like my work? I’m gonna do more of it. But now I’ve got a team. Do you, would you hire me? Is that what it was?
Tarun Thummala: Yeah. La I, yes and no. Um, like we kind. Really, like the relationship was one of my partners and his former employer, and they just knew. But yeah, I mean, it’s, it’s exactly what you said.
They, they knew that he did great work and he was like, well, I have this other vehicle for it. Um, and that kind of gave us our first kind of dollars in the door. But, um, why’d you need three partners? So in my last company, I was the CTO and these guys were my first two, like founding engineers. The. The real answer is that I realized ultimately, I think like with this group of people, like first of all, I enjoyed working with them, which I think is like actually really important.
Andrew Warner: Mm-hmm.
Tarun Thummala: And I also kind of understood that, hey, look, I think as long as like we are in this game, we’re gonna make a lot of money, we’re gonna be successful. Um, I’d rather my story be written with them than without it. And so I think that’s, that’s, that’s fine. Like, lets go do that.
Andrew Warner: You don’t wanna just take more of the money for yourself.
You can. Hire people, you can just do it even as a one or two person operation, can’t you?
Tarun Thummala: Yeah. I, we, I mean, it definitely made it a lot easier, especially with our particular skill sets. Like we, we, we worked really, really well together. Um, I’d say like, I have more BD tendencies and
Andrew Warner: yeah,
Tarun Thummala: I think like my, uh, you know, area that I’m really good at is speaking to a customer and taking something really complicated technically, which, um, you know, my background in ai, computer science is there, and then actually just translating that for people and helping them.
Get excited about it and understand it, whereas their skills are like architecture and AI respectively, and so like just the combination of the three, I think like that, that equated to a much higher, you know, multiple than just like any, any of those. Some parts.
Andrew Warner: You’ve told me a lot then that since this is your role to bring in customers and close them.
Mm-hmm. A lot of it has been through referrals. Do you do anything to juice that up? A lot of it has been through old relationships. What’s your process for turning old people into old relationships, into customers?
Tarun Thummala: Yeah. Um, actually, no. I, I would say only like less than 10% of this business. Less than even.
Yeah, less than 10%. Let’s call it, let’s just make it, um, be generous with it. Less than 10% came from like, old relationships. I’d say 90% were people that I’ve met and interacted with since starting the business. Um, so you can treat that as net new though. They’re all like network driven, right? Um, I think.
For me, like my biggest secret is not always trying to like go out there and like hunt for sales. I just like naturally talk about what we’re doing. I also think I wanna like preface this entire conversation or just like add an asterisk on it by saying. We are in such a big tailwind space where like there’s so much force behind the AI movement that I think like our lanes were always greased and they are greased today.
You know, it’s easier to get, it’s easier to talk to somebody about AI because everyone wants to be in it. Everyone wants to be using it. And so like, I naturally think that’s like helped me start conversations. From there, it’s like, how do we show the value in their business? How do we actually relate our technology and what’s possible?
Like show them the art of the possible, bring them along that journey along with us. Start a conversation.
Andrew Warner: How, where are you starting these conversations?
Tarun Thummala: Oh, at like networking events or people you still go to
Andrew Warner: networking events?
Tarun Thummala: Oh, uh, yeah, a hundred percent. I’m a one more now. Um. Yeah, there’s like meetups in town.
Like for example, I like still on like the bridgepoint event. Most of the time nowadays it’s somebody in my network knows about an event. Mm-hmm. And will into it. Or there’s a second way more recently, which is I just host my own events now and I tell people that I like and that I have found a lot of value for like yourself to come and bring a friend or bring two friends and I meet people that way as well.
Andrew Warner: I see. So you’ve gone out to these like tech events here in Austin, and I’m sure when people say, what do you do? Which is part of the conversation, you say that you’ve got an AI dev shop or AI automation, we can talk about how you present it, and then people naturally get into a conversation and then they might say, yeah, you know, we can use it.
Or you start a relationship with, they’ll introduce you to someone. That’s the approach.
Tarun Thummala: Yeah, exactly. Um, we’ve also, I, I have a lot of, um, I’ve spent a lot of time in like. Forming relationships with VC and PE people, mostly because I’m interested in finance and investing almost personally myself too. Um, and that’s also been like a really great, I wouldn’t say it’s like a conscious pipeline, but it’s been a great pipeline in the sense that they’re like, oh, I have like this portfolio company that could use your guys’ help.
How you get them
Andrew Warner: to take, to take your call or to get in a conversation with you. Because everybody wants them. Everyone wants them because they think if I could get them to start introducing me to their portfolio I’m in and I’ve got a whole bunch of customers at once. How did you get them to pay attention to you?
Tarun Thummala: I, I, I don’t go into these conversations with an agenda typically. Like genuinely, if you look, if I were to like dissect and reflect on my conversations with these people, it’s like 80% me just really excited about AI and them talking about that with them. And I’m like, this is all the cool stuff that’s going on.
This is how it can work. I see like, this is what we’re doing over here and like, I’m not even telling them how I could help their business, but. They get, they walk away from that conversation. I think I’m speaking on their behalf. Maybe they, they might have a different answer. Like, I think they walk away from it being like, that guy understands ai, he’s excited about it.
He would be somebody like who, if I would, to interview, like he would have a good conversation with them about ai. And that’s the worst case that could happen. And I think that’s, that’s the impression I’m that, um, hoping that I leave with people.
Andrew Warner: How many nights a week would you say that you went out in the beginning when you were doing your early networking?
Tarun Thummala: Um. Not as, not as much as many other people I’ve met. I’ve met some serious networkers. Um, yeah, maybe, maybe like once a week, once every other week, like not too many. I, I’m, I’m, I, I’m also a big believer in like, you go to the right spots. Mm-hmm. Like, you’ll, you find this stuff a lot more readily, I would say, like I was pretty particular about where and when I was spending my time.
Um, and then the other thing, the other side of that, rather than going and just trying to meet a volume, like a net volume of new people, I was really, I was, I spent a lot of time like culturing and work, like culturing, my cultivating, sorry, my, my relationships that have already formed. Right. And, um, it’s really easy when those people are also very interesting and they’re working on interesting things in their business or in their industries, like, ’cause I, that’s how I get to learn.
And that’s like the best part I think about what I get to do is I’m talking to people. That are experts in their own field, and I get to translate that information back and I, I like, I, I just like to learn about all these different things. And so, um, it’s easy for me to be like, oh, let’s get, let’s get dinner, let’s get drinks.
Let’s catch up. Um, let’s see what’s happening. Um, and, and, and that’s like translated really well.
Andrew Warner: He’s a big networker. I can’t think of his last name right now, but Chris, the guy who hosts events,
Tarun Thummala: who is it? Chris Beman. Yeah. I think I’m doing a like fireside chat for, for his astronomic thing like next week.
Yeah, he’s out so much. I could not, I, I’m not, I’m not that type of person. I know people are, I’m not, uh, in fact, most of the time at these memory events, I go into it with a lot of like, dread. Like, I don’t want to meet all these new people. I end up always having a good time, but it’s taxing for me. Um, I’m not the type of person, I’m much more of like a one-on-one person.
Like, I genuinely liked meeting people for coffee, and I, I always get a lot more from that than. Trying to stick my hand in everyone’s face and hope that something pans out.
Andrew Warner: Yeah, we had a good dinner together. I think you and I are both good at one-on-one, though. I also enjoy the big ones. The big events.
Yeah. By the way, I’ve gotta tell you. So we went out for drinks and then we met people, which I love to do when I go out. I like to spend time one-on-one with someone, but I inevitably will also expand and then contract like we did. So the two of us went out for coffee after that. I looked at my credit card the next day.
I go, I guess we had a much better time. Or maybe Tarro drank more than I expected. Okay. It is what it is, and it didn’t occur to me till later. We were talking to this group of people who, I think they thought that we, I don’t think they were taking advantage, but I think they thought that we were buying around, right?
And so round at this place, which was expensive, was on ours. And that also explains why the guy goes to me. I’m, I’m having a guy deliver Coke here. Do you want any, like, he was being like exceptionally generous and I think it was his way of returning the favor of us getting him drinks.
Tarun Thummala: I know exactly what you’re talking about.
Um, well, I, I, I know exactly about what you’re talking a hundred percent. That’s what was happening.
Andrew Warner: It did not occur to me until later on. I thought he just liked me and wa and I’m sure he did. But, um, I guess we, no, I mean, things differently mean
Tarun Thummala: you, you have a, you have an. Insane. In the best way possible, like energy about you when you’re out.
That I was like so happy to be a part of in that moment. I love that night actually. I had a lot of fun.
Andrew Warner: Yeah, we gotta do that again. And so for you, that’s the way that you like doing things, maybe a little more low key than we did it, but essentially it’s that and then, uh, and then eventually some business comes from that.
You mentioned that you did, um, an event. I went to the event. Did you get any business from it?
Tarun Thummala: Uh, yeah. Definitely same way that it happened that we’re talking about this time, which is somebody at the event knew somebody that was looking, or maybe they were an investor and had a port code, like same type of thing.
Um, what I find with those events is like, it’s, it’s almost never direct in the sense that somebody comes to that event is like, I wanna hire you tomorrow. Like that, that almost never happens though, though. It’s, it has, it’s, it’s mostly just increasing torun surface area, like in the world and more. And, you know, I don’t.
We are very fortunate in the sense that I actually don’t think that there’s very many firms that can do what we do technically. Mm-hmm. And with the level of specification that we’ve had, like we’ve been in the generative AI space, like January 23, Chachi, BT came out November 20th, or November 30th, 2022.
So like basically a month after we were in the game. And we’d been in the game since then. So like our volume of work and our ability to speak about it and the breadth of projects that we have. Um, I think just like place us in a very special category and, and so when I get to meet people, you know, I’m not just like another marketing agency or, you know, a PR firm or anything like that, where there’s a lot more competition.
We’ve, we’ve definitely specialized very heavily.
Andrew Warner: You did this at the, uh, proper hotel in downtown Austin. Beautiful layout. Gave everyone nice notebooks. You had like open bar. What did that run you?
Tarun Thummala: Um, I think like all in, we maybe spent. Somewhere between like 20 and 20 5K and like we had sponsors and stuff that helped out with a lot of that.
But I’d say like, we spent easily, like 15,
Andrew Warner: 15 of that was you, maybe 10 from the sponsors to cover that, that something like that. In last year, you had, um, I was sitting next to someone who was, man, what was the name of the car company? It wasn’t, it might’ve been Maserati or something. She was sitting there and I said, why are you here?
She says, I wanna understand how we can include AI in our business. Um, and she didn’t really know you. You just had connected at one time and Yeah. And she came in. That seemed typical ish. I guess There were definitely a group of people who were like that. How did you fill up the place?
Tarun Thummala: Um, so I, I did it, um, the credit credits due with, uh, one, one of my.
Friends, and also we had like a, a joy venture together. Um, rodeo Turtle one, one of my friends Logan, he, he has a great Austin network. I have a great Austin network. We came together and we’re like, we’re very particular about, again, because we’re not just like volume people, both of us, we prefer these one-on-one things.
I was like, I have probably about 40 people that I could invite. You have about a 40 people. Let’s do that. You know, out of that maybe 50 to 60 showed up and we asked them to like, bring along one person that you know was. We thought would be a good fit. And then we probably, we did, we did some cold outreach as well.
Like we found other founders in the area, um, that, you know, were we respected or had heard about and asked them to come. Um, and that, that’s pretty much how we did it. Shock them an email? Uh, yeah, like LinkedIn or email. One of those two. Yep.
Andrew Warner: Wow. All right. Did you make back the 15,000 from the one deal that you got from a friend?
Of a friend?
Tarun Thummala: Yeah. You did?
Andrew Warner: Yeah. Yeah.
Tarun Thummala: Okay.
Andrew Warner: That’s fantastic. So why aren’t you do more of them?
Tarun Thummala: I think we are, yeah, we’re doing, um, we, we are working on, uh, a secret Okay. Sort of event project right now. I think that, um, the little teaser, or I’ll just give you the title is like AI world Fair. Um, and we’re gonna do that closer to the suburb and then we’re probably gonna do sprinkling of smaller events from now till then.
Um, I think when I, when I did the event, it was never, it’s gonna sound weird. I know it’s a big investment too. My goal was always just like, like from that event was to cement ourselves as like a real player in the Austin space. Like get people to know myself and my team, my company’s name. Um, and that was really the goal.
The BD stuff was like honestly a bonus. And um, that continues to be it. Like I don’t think that Austin really has like a powerful AI event scene, an AI event network almost. Um, I don’t see any reason like why we can’t own that space. And so I’m gonna keep doing, I, I enjoy doing those types of things, so that’s like a more personal thing for me.
Andrew Warner: I’m surprised because it is a lot of work and then if it doesn’t work out, then you’ve got the space and it, look, you look foolish if people don’t show up. And when you’re offering free tickets as a big reason why people won’t show up, they’ll say yes, right? Because they wanna hold onto the ticket. And so for me it’s nerve wracking, but um, here’s the upside.
Even if you don’t get customers, you are sitting up on stage with somebody from Dell, with someone from Atlassian. With these big companies here locally, it gives you an opportunity to really talk to them, start a relationship with them, and then everyone else sees you on stage with them, which also adds to the halo effect, right?
It just rubs off from them to you. And then you end up with all these people who you invited who feel grateful that you invited them and maybe are nicer or reaching out so that they might get invited to the next one. They also know you as a guy who hosted an AI event, so maybe they’ll ask you if you know of somebody else and big, big upsides to doing that.
Alright, I think so. So first network of people, uh, who you had worked with. Then you started reaching out beyond, you went to events, you then hosted your own events, you’re gonna continue doing more events beyond that. Um, what else worked for you for getting customers?
Tarun Thummala: Yeah, I mean, I did, uh, so I think when we launched, so we built, uh, like a SaaS product, like we wanted to get more in the private equity space.
I had a big vision, um, probably about like two years ago now, which was like, Hey, like if we can form relationships and provide value to private equity firms, um, AI is naturally a fantastic addition to their playbook, right? When you think about their portfolio and like what they’re trying to do with those businesses that they’re acquiring.
Um, and this is, you know, tale as old as time. People always wanna break into this stuff. Um, again, I had like first mover advantage here, so I went to conference. I literally, but I didn’t know anyone in private equity at that time. I literally, I am, none of us are from finance, finance background. And so I just, um, I think I called outreach to somebody here in town who works at like Bridgepoint.
He pointed me at this conference. I went to the conference and from that landed like our first and what eventually became our. Um, a, a couple other, uh, pilot customers for our SaaS platform and just got started from there and like, went to more conferences, asked them. I’m big on like asking people who they know that could all also like, be interesting to speak to.
And, um, yeah. And the whole time I’m really just like, how can I make this conversation valuable to them, um, and like help them out even if I don’t get anything from it. And so I’d say only like maybe one out of 10 conversations proves itself out for me. Um, and I’m perfectly okay doing that ’cause I like to talk about ai.
Luckily.
Andrew Warner: Uh, how do you describe what the company does? ’cause on LinkedIn you say custom AI and automation agency,
Tarun Thummala: right? I don’t know if
Andrew Warner: that really does it.
Tarun Thummala: You know, I, I’ve gone back and forth on the, the description of it many times. Most of the time when I’m talking, you know, more informally in person, I just say I run an AI engineering firm.
Um, which I think is, you know. I used to say consultancy and people then thought that we were mostly doing advising work. Mm-hmm. Um, and strategy work, which is actually like less than 10% of our business, like a majority of our, almost 80% of my team are engineers. And so I, I typically am like, we’re an AI engineering firm.
We specialize in generative AI apps. And, uh, if you, all the stuff that you read about on LinkedIn and Twitter as it pertains to LLMs agents and stuff, we built that for businesses.
Andrew Warner: Let me take a moment and tell you about my sponsor. Zapier, you’re familiar with them, right? Of course. Here’s, here’s what I’ve been discovering.
A lot of people are now creating whole agencies based on Zapier. Mm-hmm. Like what they will do is they’ll go into a company and they’ll say, I think you need this thing. You’re probably doing it over and over again. How about if I create an automation for you that doesn’t, and then on the back end, they end up having Zapier do the work for them and it’s.
And it’s everything from internal trainings and feedback to actually, um, what was it that I saw? I saw one person who created a voice agent that did outbound calls for his customers using an automation. Uh, you’ve seen these people too, of course. I think it’s interesting. I, I imagine that you’re laughing to yourself saying, I don’t think that this is gonna be a long term success.
It has to be developed like you do from scratch for the software to really hold up. Am I right about that?
Tarun Thummala: You know, that’s, that’s my thesis, that there is a class of problems and a class of businesses that are associated with those problems that require more custom solutions. But at the end of the day, who, who really cares?
Like, who really cares about what it’s made in, or if it’s custom or if it’s Zapier, like the thing that you’re should be buying is the outcome for the business. And if. People are able to deliver that value with a Zapier automation. Great. If that’s the, if that’s genuinely the easiest and most efficient way of generating that business outcome and it grows in scale, go do that.
Like, I think that’s, I think that’s perfectly okay. Mm-hmm. Um, I know, yeah. I work the other way, which is like, who needs the custom stuff? Right. And like, who, who can’t work with a, like, just a Zapier and then that’s where we fit in.
Andrew Warner: There is a whole class of agencies that are doing this. I’ve gotta start interviewing some of them, because in the backend, many of them aren’t even saying that they’re using Zapier in order to do this.
They’re just saying, I can do this. And most customers don’t really care. I, I happen to be a Nik who gets on and says, show me how you’re doing it. Walk me through it. And to me it matters ’cause I’m curious. Most people just care about the results. Whether you’re doing this for yourself or for someone else, if you need AI automation, I urge you to go check out Zapier, my sponsor, and I’ll tell more of the stories of how they’ve done this, um, and how their customers are doing it as these podcasts continue.
Alright, I what, what happened to like this AI transformation? Nobody’s saying that anymore. It used to be the companies like yours would sell AI transformation. I think it was like 10 x Alex Lieberman’s company that started out that way and no more. Yeah,
Tarun Thummala: we used to, we used to say it all the time as well.
You did? I think. I think, um. Yeah, it was a great, it’s a great buzzword for sure, and it is technically true. Like I do think that most businesses need to transform into their AI native variance or whatever. The problem that that term lacks is all of the context and even the, the how behind how you do that transfer.
Like how is that transformation accomplished? Right? And ultimately, what I think. People have come to understand, they’ve kind of gotten burnt out by that term because it’s kind of a big black box with no instructions and no clear outcome for the business. And I think that’s what people are starting to really get at.
I mean, you can see this even in our sales cycles today. Like when we first started, people were like, I want this chat bot, you know, I want ai, I want transformation, I want all this stuff. Like they, or it was the buzzword era for the first like year and a half, two years I would say. In the last year, people are now sharpening up their budgets, they’re sharpening their pencils, and they’re like, okay, we know AI is effective.
We know it’s a hundred percent going to be transformative. How? Like what are the specific workflows, outcomes, ROI KPIs that we can look at and how can we justify this price tag for this implementation? Not just like another piece of ai slop is a popular term as well. Like that, that one, right? Like how do we, how do we avoid that?
Um, and so I. I imagine that most services based companies are not selling that because there is no one size fits all playbook when it comes to that. And it’s really difficult for a customer to understand that ROI because it’s so broad sweeping over an organization. Right.
Andrew Warner: I’ve heard you say also we build AI for you.
We’ll automate your AP and AR function, save you 50%. It’s stuff like that. You’re, why are you smiling at that?
Tarun Thummala: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I’ve try, I’ve, I’ve just said so many things over the, you know, I was trying to figure out what works and what doesn’t work. It’s such a fast moving space. Both the company itself is fast moving and the AI space is fast moving that, um, I think the marketing term, like the marketing phrases that we’re using is always evolving as well.
Very quickly.
Andrew Warner: At the heart of it, it feels like you’re a dev shop that uses AI to build, and naturally you’re gonna include AI in your solutions because everything is gonna get better with ai. Am I right? No.
Tarun Thummala: Yeah. Yeah. I, I mean, I think that’s fair. The, but I would, I would’ve just like reversed the order probably.
Okay. Is like, we are specifically looking like, just to be clear, we are specifically looking for what are the solutions that provide the most value and the outcomes to the customer. And we also happen to have this like beautiful flywheel where the solutions we’re building have AI in them, and we are also using AI to power the building of set solutions.
I, I would’ve just flipped the order. Small new ones.
Andrew Warner: Gimme an example. Like what’s, what’s, um, what’s a way that you’re able to build faster with ai, and what’s an outcome that you’re able to give? Because AI is part of it.
Be specific.
Tarun Thummala: Yeah. I mean, they’re not necessarily the same, um, the same answer. So I’ll break it into like two parts. Like the, the latter question can be answered by. Um, what are the, what are the solutions that are now possible using large language models in this layer of like, sort of generalized intelligence that these large frontier labs have created that were not possible before?
Um, a good example of that could be, um, feedback driven and like natural. Like, so like for example, we worked with a, a really big, one of the biggest like family law, um, offices here in Texas. And, you know, they wanted to build something similar to like a Harvey, but very specifically around their data and their sort of SME feedback, guiding a chat-based system that they could use both internally as a training agent as well as externally to help new prospects and customers answer questions.
Um, or new clients, I should say. Um, answer questions about their divorce proceedings, for example. Um, that’s something that requires a high amount of reasoning, right, in order to provide the correct answer, and that’s the type of knowledge work that was previously gated. There was no computer application system that could really help with that because the corpus, the possibility, the world of possible questions is so massive, right?
Like there’s no way to, to hard code all those answers. So that’s something that we were able to build. That’s a brand new technology. Um, and it’s a very simple chat bot. The cool parts about it are how it collects feedback from the lawyers, how it improves over time, and how it can actually like, grow with the firm as they expand the number of cases that they’re doing and stuff like that.
Internally, we use all of the coding agents underneath the sun, and we’ve created a really beautiful system, in my opinion. Describe it. What did you create? What, what we essentially realized. It was that obviously coding agents and coding tools and AI was helping us produce more with a individual resource than ever before because.
The actual generation of that code, which was the previous thing that took the most amount of time, um, was now significantly sped up, right? You can go into something like a cursor or a quad, and as long as you have the technical know-hows about how that system should work and should operate and what the end points and everything should be, you can describe it and it can generate the code.
And so really what’s happened is that it took a coating and I think this is actually a pretty general principle. The time spent on coding was probably 80% generation, 20% review. It’s flipped that into 80% review, 20% generation. But the key is, is that the actual amount of, like the raw time has dropped by like 10 x um, when you make that kind of switch, right?
And so for us, we have a. A bunch of agents that are specialized for some of the tasks that we do. So for example, we build a lot of chat front ends, right? And so we have a collection of small agents that are really specialized into building those front ends the way that we like to do them. And so when we say, Hey, for this application, we want like a new, a new ui, it’s using all of our historical context and things that we’ve built up over time, the rules and the guidance that we’ve given it to generate it in the style and the format and the structure and the layout that we like.
And so that gives us a significant le leg up every single time we start, like a new project or a new engagement. And we get a lot of delta from that.
Andrew Warner: Isn’t that what everyone’s doing though?
Tarun Thummala: Oh, they should be if they, if they’re not. And
Andrew Warner: what’s, what’s unique and special then here? Essentially you’re doing what everyone else is doing.
Tarun Thummala: Internal, like the operations of my business. Look, first of all, I think, I think we, we have like a more advanced application than, than the typical firms have picked up on, at least in my experience. That’s a short-lived win, right? In the sense that eventually everyone’s gonna have the same sort of like technical architecture behind it.
The key for us though, is that that’s just helping my business run more efficiently. Ultimately, if I don’t create outcomes for the customer, then it doesn’t really matter. And that’s, that’s really what the, um. Your question I think is like more relevant if we’re considering and like a sale of my business, right?
Like how would you value press w versus the other agencies in the world? Maybe over time, that gap that we have, all of this accrual of skills and knowledge and agents might shrink because every firm will have it. So maybe for the right now, my, my company could be deemed more valuable than the others that will get trouble.
If the outcomes that we are generating for our customers are much more specific, that’s where there’s differences in the businesses, right? So like what I’m trying to do as a business owner right now is not stay so broad, not answer every type of AI question and, and, um, requests that we get. And instead focus on very, very specific workflows that we know when we solve, have tangible outcomes for, um, our customers.
I mean ultimately I think that’s, that’s what every business is gonna do. Our specialization difference is gonna be like how well we execute on that outcome. And that’s just like a standard,
Andrew Warner: you know, that’s just competition. What’s the focus
Tarun Thummala: for us? We perform really, really well in like highly regulated industry, so we have a ton of, just like our case studies and our examples are a lot in financial services, healthcare, legal, things like that.
And so we’ve started to like niche down in there and then even to to layer on another niche. On top of that, we are really, really good at document intelligent document processing workflows. Where you might need a lot of, uh, escalation handling or, um, you might need a lot of context about the way that that particular work, uh, workflow, uh, exists in that industry.
And so that’s, that’s where our specialization comes in, is by layering those kind of, um, factors together.
Andrew Warner: I think I’m getting where this is. Do you think there’s room for other people to do what you’re doing now?
Tarun Thummala: Yeah, definitely. I, I think it’s actually a pretty blue ocean space. I, I, I probably talked to a competitor.
Um, maybe once every other week. Once a week, you know, once every like, and, you know, right. I think, I think it’s a, I think it’s really blue ocean, like the, the original thing that we talked about, which is like, AI transformation is true. I think that every business that exists today will have ai, um, in their business moving forward.
So I actually think that the opportunity space is expanding actually over time, because today most businesses have zero, zero or one agent or AI integrated into their business, if that, um. In the future, I’m sure that they’re going to have hundreds of agents running within their business, and that unlocks an entirely new class of problems.
Right? Wouldn’t they be doing
Andrew Warner: this themselves?
Tarun Thummala: Many of them. Many of them can, if they build up, if they build the infrastructure correctly. There is a, there’s a tremendous amount of work when it comes to like the actual data management set up collection, how that whole architecture, um, works. That’s actually why, you know, if you see like the MIT report, 95% of things didn’t.
95% of like AI pilots never made it to production. I think it’s because a lot of the people lacked the expertise on actually setting up the infrastructure correctly from an agent perspective.
Andrew Warner: Yeah,
Tarun Thummala: that gap will shrink. I think a lot of them can do it themselves, uh, over time.
Andrew Warner: All right, I think I see where this is going.
I think I’ve got a full picture here. Let me close out with this. Gimme one specific example of what you’re doing that shows your unique way of operating, like the whole sales process. There’s a whole automation that happens after somebody signs up. Walk me through that.
Tarun Thummala: Okay, so this is actually the part of my business that I’m perhaps the most excited about.
There was a blessing in the sense, uh, of us. There was a blessing and a curse of us entering a services based business three years ago. None of us are consultants. None of us worked at Big Four. None of us even come from that. We are all software people. Um, 80% of my team is still, so in fact, I don’t have any big four consultants still to this day.
I don’t have any formal consulting type service people in my business. What I have is a bunch of like product people, and actually most of them are former entrepreneurs themselves. And so what that, what that gave us is. Uh, it made us, it made it hard to build a services business. ’cause we didn’t know how they should look and operate, um, from like a professionalization perspective, but it gave us a new way of thinking about how a services based business could run.
Andrew Warner: Because you’re not trying to reproduce what, you know, you’re just creating whatever makes sense. Now,
Tarun Thummala: we’re just, we’re just problem solving. We’re like product people. We’re like, okay, we have to run this business. What’s the best way we know how to run this? Like we, we know how to build product and stuff.
So, like to, to, to answer your question directly. For us, the way that it works is like we, we are building this like AI native, uh, we, we call it Atlas internally. Um, unfortunately Chat, BT stole that name and now that’s their browser. But we have, we have something called Atlas. What, what, what this is, is.
When you think about data and people in an organization, historically, data and people live right on top of each other. Meaning that if you want, if I wanted to to ask you a question about bootstrap giants or anything that you’re working on, you’re probably gonna go dig into some dashboard somewhere.
You’re gonna go dig into an Excel spreadsheet somewhere, or email or whatever, and you live right on top of that data. Anytime that something needs to happen, humans need to go interact with data, pull it out, generate insights from there. AI is entering as this layer in between.
Andrew Warner: Yep.
Tarun Thummala: And so what we do is.
For example, when I have a sales call with a prospect, that transcript gets taken and automatically put into a series of agents that are taking all of the insights that I’ve, that we’ve talked about on the call.
Andrew Warner: Yeah. It
Tarun Thummala: knows how we like to generate our proposals and our statements of work. It will generate that with often in the loop guiding it and giving it different, um, areas to focus on.
It also knows what our rate cards look like, and it also knows what our current allocation looks like as a team capacity. Right. So as it moves closer to a contract, we can start to actually. Our agents are the ones that are driving who needs to be assigned to this work, who has the best skillset for this work, et cetera, et cetera, once the contract gets signed.
Um, and all of this is like basically being led through agents. Uh, all of the tickets for all of the work, for the project itself get created. All of that lives in a centralized kind of microsite that shares the documentation and the code together. Uhhuh, so all of our coding agents have full contact. Our coding agents don’t just have context about the project and the code.
They have context about the very first customer conversation that ever happened all the way through to every playback that we’re doing with them, sprint playback, where we’re checking in every sync, every email, they understand exactly what’s going on in the project and that allows them to plan, strategize, and execute far, far better, um, than anything else.
So, I mean, what I like to say is, technically speaking, I think we are approaching the point where our business could go from one sales call to a finished project. With very, very little human in the loop, basically just prompting and nudging
Andrew Warner: and tell me how you’re doing all this. How are you getting it all in there together?
All that data? Yeah. This,
Tarun Thummala: this is, this is the complex part. Like, so we have, we have, we’ve built some like custom kind of connectors that suck up the data from our fireflies, which is what we use to record, um, calls. Uh, to notion, which is where we store kind of proposals and things, um, all the way to like GitHub, where, you know, so there’s different data repositories within the business.
We’ve built small connectors that are able to suck that data, um, out as well as put it back in when it makes sense. Okay. And, uh, then we orchestrated all, uh, in our own little application that is largely built on top of, uh, Claude and Claude Code both together. And, um. All those agents are like largely skills and things like that that exist in that sort of repository.
But yeah, we’re, it’s the, it’s definitely like the operating system. It knows all of the data and we’re just interacting with the agents to get the sort of outcomes that we want.
Andrew Warner: Right. Why is it called Press W
Tarun Thummala: when me and my two partners started the company. We, we were all sitting in a WeWork trying to think about a name, and we had just gone through a very painful process of renaming our last company right before, um, our, our acquisition.
And so we wanted to just find something that worked. And the three of us came from playing computer games. Like the reason that we all got into computers in the first place was, was gaming. And on a keyboard, WASD is typically a lot of games move around like that way w is always the forward key. So press w means to move forward.
That
Andrew Warner: makes sense. All right everyone. Right on. Thanks.
Tarun Thummala: Alright, thank you Andrew.
