06/24/2026
How does .it make product decisions for 60M+ users, especially when the majority are non-technical and use very little technology for the work they do?
“Six months before that initial launch, the company was tiny—barely 60 people, almost exclusively technical folks. A few executives, the co-founders, our head of design. The vast majority of us were AI researchers and software engineers.
So one of the first principles I kept repeating was:
We’re not building this for us.
Don’t get excited about what we’re building because you’d use it daily. Get excited because we’re building something for people who’ve never written a single line of code in their lives—people who are going to have their first “aha” moment when their software runs for the very first time.
As we grew, that became part of the company’s DNA. Every designer we hire, every PM, keeps reminding us daily that this is the most important principle we follow. Our ideal customer is the knowledge worker—a group nobody else was really talking about, and it’s worked well.
There’s a constant tension between design quality and engineering. Early on I struggled with it myself, because I spent my whole career on the technical side, with a fixation on moving fast and shipping as soon as possible—which the AI space forces on you anyway.
Things move so fast that if you wait even a few days, your product is already deprecated. But over time I’ve learned to value the teams that pull the handbrake and say, “No, we need to take our time on user journeys, we need to do the interviews to understand whether this is actually exciting for our customer.” That tension can feel like your startup is slowing down. In reality, it’s exactly what keeps you on track.
