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

Ankur Goyal, founder and CEO of Braintrust and former AI lead at Figma, shares his journey in technology and lessons learned from building multiple AI products. Goyal emphasizes the importance of paranoia about software quality, recalling how a managing director at Goldman Sachs stressed the real-world consequences of software failures. He also discusses recruiting, highlighting that it's a long-term relationship-building process, not a transactional one. Goyal contrasts his experiences at MemSQL, where he related closely to technical customers, with Empyra, where he realized the value of shared understanding with users. He recounts the founding of Braintrust, born out of frustrations with the AI evaluation process at Figma, and the surprising product-market fit they discovered through user interviews and early customer feedback.