10 years ago I made a decision that changed my life.
When I quit my finance job to teach English in South Korea, I asked myself 4 questions:
1. What's the worst that can happen?
I'd spend a year abroad, learn a new language, and come back with a completely different perspective. Even the "worst case" would push me out of my comfort zone and force me to grow.
2. What's the best case scenario?
I'd break out of the conveyor belt my peers were on (banks, hedge funds, same path). I'd actually expand my horizons instead of settling into an office at 21.
3. Is this reversible?
Finance jobs weren't going anywhere. I could always go back to the traditional path if it didn’t work out. But the window to take risks before life gets complicated? That was closing.
4. Will I regret this?
Definitely not! I'd regret playing it safe rather than taking the risk.
That decision led to everything: a university scholarship, an MBA, meeting my wife, corporate training for Hyundai, building an AI education business in Thailand, working in customer success at @TheRundownAI and now at @Chatbase as the first sales hire.
Most “risky” decisions aren’t that risky when you actually break them down.
@AnthropicAI More fear-mongering by Anthropic. We’ll prob see SaaS stocks take a hit again, albeit smaller ripple effect. Trying to raise round Z this year
We just crossed $10M in ARR at @Chatbase! 🎉 🎉
And today, we're launching Chatbase as the full harness for customer-facing AI agents.
Similar to how Claude code is a harness for coding agents, Chatbase is the harness for customer experience agents.
That means we give the model the context, tools, workflows, guardrails, and human-in-the-loop systems to be the best ambassador for your brand.
It's going beyond just solving issues and is giving your customers the best experiences across every channel.
This is a milestone I have been thinking about and obsessed with since day 1, and I am super excited to bring my vision for customer facing agents to life with Chatbase.
Thank you to every one of our customers and to the amazing Chatbase team for getting us here!
Next stop: $100M ARR
@yasser_elsaid_@chatbase Incredibly proud of this hard-working team. Shipping daily, selling, and changing the lives of thousands of business owners in improving their customer experiences!
Agreed, I feel some sellers are listing now at relatively high prices to match with a few eager buyers.
My rent is quite expensive at this moment, but moving costs are at least 2k and you always run the risk of dealing with bad landlords, so it might make sense to switch to the month-to-month after the lease ends and enjoy the flexibility versus being tied up with another year lease or purchasing.
It's hard to see the market suddenly rise to the highs it's been with the massive supply, low immigration, and bleak jobs outlook with AI.
@JonFlynnREstats Appreciate this, Jon. That’s exactly what I was trying to sanity-check - whether “bottomed” is actually showing up in the data.
Looks like it does not as yet, better to remain patient and see how things turn out.
Someone's Claude agent deleted prod and the backups in 9 seconds.
That's a 0.5x engineer pretending to be a 10x engineer.
The CTO is going to walk into Tuesday standup and ask who approved the PR.
The PR approved itself.