Lightfield CEO killed a 2M-MAU product to rebuild CRM from first principles
SethGRosenberg · x · 2026-09-17
In an a16z interview, Lightfield co-founder and CEO Keith Peiris explains shutting down an AI presentation tool with 2 million monthly users — it was growing faster than the team could buy inference, but nobody on the team liked it — to attack the notoriously hard CRM market.
The playbook: an initial GTM assistant was used daily by AEs but had no pricing power since it wasn't their data. So the team shrank, rebuilt a CRM from first principles in four months of building in the dark. For cold start, they offered their unused giant office space to startups in exchange for using the CRM, landing 10 companies as daily (and vocal) users.
His thesis: reconcile contradictory customer records scattered across systems into one source of truth — a "business world model" that every future agent sits downstream of.
Related event: Lightfield Founder Killed His 2M-MAU Product to Rebuild AI CRM(4 posts)→
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