Scaling and selling AI products for enterprise | May Habib (Co-founder and CEO of Writer)

May Habib is the co-founder and CEO of Writer, a full-stack generative AI platform built for enterprises. The model is trained on a customer’s own data to create content that is consistent with their brand style and voice. Writer recently raised $100M at a valuation of around $500M. Prior to Writer, May co-founded Qordoba, an AI writing assistant. — In today’s episode, we discuss: • Advice for AI founders in 2024 • Why it’s difficult to scale AI products for enterprise • The secret to finding champions • Signs of a healthy co-founder relationship • The future of agentic AI — Referenced: • Accenture: https://www.accenture.com • ChatGPT: https://chat.openai.com/ • Dropbox: https://www.dropbox.com • Goldman Sachs: https://www.goldmansachs.com/ • Grammarly: https://www.grammarly.com • Jill Kramer: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jill-kramer-64230840/ • L’Oreal: https://www.loreal.com/ • Northwestern Mutual: https://www.northwesternmutual.com/ • Palmyra: https://writer.com/blog/palmyra/ • Retrieved Augmented Generation: https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/what-is-retrieval-augmented-generation/ • United Healthcare: https://www.uhc.com/ • Vanguard: https://global.vanguard.com/ • Waseem Alshikh: https://www.linkedin.com/in/waseemalshikh/ • Writer: https://writer.com/ — Where to find May Habib: • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/may-habib/ • Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/may_habib — Where to find Todd Jackson: • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/toddj0/ • Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/tjack — Where to find First Round Capital: • Website: https://firstround.com/ • First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/ • Twitter: https://twitter.com/firstround • YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstRoundCapital • This podcast on all platforms: https://review.firstround.com/podcast — Timestamps [00:00:00] Introduction [00:02:34] Writer’s origin story [00:06:30] Building a full-stack generative AI platform for enterprise [00:11:56] The #1 challenge building Writer [00:15:41] Writer’s approach to finding champion customers [00:20:29] How Writer is winning the enterprise space [00:27:11] Signs Writer found product-market-fit [00:29:26] Scaling LLMs for specific use cases [00:31:53] Writer’s goals for 2024 [00:33:57] Advice for 0 to 1 founders [00:35:53] Creating a culture of “connect, challenge, and own”