What Braintrust got right about product-market fit | Ankur Goyal (Founder and CEO)

Ankur Goyal, CEO of Braintrust and founder of Impura, shares his journey building AI products and the lessons he has learned along the way. Goyal emphasizes the importance of paranoia about software quality, recalling a pivotal moment at MemSQL when a managing director at Goldman Sachs stressed the real-world consequences of software failures. He also discusses recruiting, highlighting the need for long-term relationship building rather than transactional interactions. Reflecting on his first company, Empyra, Goyal admits to technical problem-solving without truly understanding market demand, a mistake he avoided with Braintrust by focusing on solving a repeatable, urgent problem: AI evals. This led to the development of Brainstore, a purpose-built database technology, driven by the needs of early customers like Notion.