AI Summary
5 min readKeith Paris had built Tome to 25 million users and explosive growth on GPT-3, then walked away. The reason was brutally honest: none of the founders liked the product they were making. They could not see a path to a tool that a discerning professional would use for a high-stakes memo. The technology, they concluded, was fundamentally constrained—no amount of general reasoning would give the model enough context to understand the presenter, the audience, and the relationship between them. So Paris and his team ignored the 25 million users and started over.
The pivot path: follow the heat, not the hopium
Rather than shrink the team and wait for better models, Paris looked inside his existing user base for a B2B use case. The heaviest users were in sales and marketing. He ran 12 free pilots inside large companies, offering to build presentations. The sales teams immediately asked for something else: research, lead qualification, account intelligence. Paris followed the heat. "I think what makes early stage founders good at this is that you sort of have no priors. You're willing to ignore the thing you built."
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What you'll learn
- 1 (01:10) **From Tome to Lightfield: The Pivot Story** - Keith Paris explains why he walked away from Tome, a presentation tool with 25 million users, to start an AI-native CRM.
- 2 (05:33) **Finding the Real Problem Through Customer Heat** - Keith describes how following B2B users led them to discover a deeper, more valuable problem than presentations.
- 3 (07:43) **The Negative Pricing Experiment** - After building a go-to-market assistant that people used daily but wouldn't pay for, the team had to start from scratch with a radical customer acquisition strategy.
- 4 (08:50) **When Feedback Becomes Addiction** - The moment Keith knew they were onto something was when customers were mad about everything missing but still used the product every day.
- 5 (11:33) **Architecture from First Principles: The Activity Log** - Three of five founding members came from Facebook, bringing a consumer mental model to enterprise software.
- 6 (14:48) **Intelligence is Greater Than Schema** - Keith explains how Lightfield eliminates the most consequential and risky decision in CRM: choosing the right data model.
- 7 (17:31) **The Most Exciting Use Case: Finding Alzheimer's Treatment** - A customer called Power is using Lightfield to model both B2B and B2C sides of their clinical trial marketplace.
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Show Notes
a16z’s Alex Rampell and Joe Schmidt sit down with Lightfield co-founder and CEO Keith Peiris to discuss what it takes to rethink the CRM for an AI-native world, and the unusual pivot that got him there.
Keith previously built Tome to 25 million users, but eventually walked away from the product after concluding that the underlying technology couldn’t capture enough context about a presenter, their audience, and the relationship between them. Starting again, his team followed customers from AI presentations into sales workflows and eventually found a harder problem: making sense of the fragmented and often conflicting data spread across a company’s emails, calls, CRM, and other systems.
They unpack Lightfield’s idea of a “business world model,” why Keith believes intelligence can replace much of the rigid schema behind traditional software, and what changes when AI has enough context to reason about a company and its customers. They also get into building for greenfield versus brownfield markets, AI-era pricing, running a company where everyone is a generalist, and Keith’s lessons from making a hard pivot.
Resources:
Follow Keith Peiris on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithpeiris
Follow Alex Rampell on X: https://x.com/arampell
Follow Joe Schmidt on X: https://x.com/joeschmidtiv
Learn more about Lightfield: https://lightfield.app
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