Hello world!

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We have so much to share with you today as we officially move Ambient, our AI Assistant for Chiefs of Staff, out of Beta.

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We have a new brand.

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We have some new investors.

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We have a fully redesigned product (try it, it’s super slick!)

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But perhaps most importantly, we have a piercing clarity of focus.

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I think I will start with the “focus” part. 

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On Focus 

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We first started talking about Ambient back in December as a generative AI powered newsfeed for everyone within a company.  Imagine Yammer with an AI Narrator, listening to what’s happening in various systems around the org.  

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The idea was big and exciting, but it lacked some sharpness around the edges.  We knew we wanted to focus on cross org, and we saw the opportunity to build a generative AI product that helped connect the dots across systems, teams, and geographies.  

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So we started talking to people.  We spoke to founders, we spoke to ops folks, and once we got on the scent, we spoke to more than one hundred Chiefs of Staff at orgs of varying size.  We of course used Ambient to track and summarize these conversations, helping us detect patterns on the quest for PMF.

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And we were excited by what we heard.  I have had immense respect for the CoS role for years now (ever since I hired one).  But somehow, nobody was building tools for this high leverage role.

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More importantly, it felt like we could immediately give time back to Chiefs of Staff (initially through AI powered note taking and Next Step extraction and tracking), allowing them to focus on the strategic projects that only a human CoS can pull off, from day one.

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We think there are about 700K CoS in the world, and we’d like to meet as many of them as we can.

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If you are interested in hearing all of the big learnings from these 100+ convos, you can do so HERE.

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On Brand

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After a chance encounter at Gus’ supermarket in the Mission District with the amazing Amanda Buzard, we somehow convinced her to take on our logo and brand project.

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We knew what we wanted - we wanted to embrace the literal definition of the word and the adjacent definitions of Ambient Sound and Ambient Light, particularly: 

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“Present on All Sides, Encompassing, Atmospheric, Textural Layers, Tone and Atmosphere,  and Unobtrusive Accompaniment to other activities.”

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There was a lot to work with here, and Amanda was exceptionally thoughtful about how she tackled it.  We ended up going with a prism metaphor - there is something about the idea of refracting a world of light that felt perfect - and embracing gradients that felt to us like ambient light.

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On Funding

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We are thrilled to welcome some new investors on our journey; Startup Haven Ventures, Sequoia (Scout), First Check Ventures, Zero Knowledge Ventures, D Global, and others join team Ambient, as well as continued support from Moment Ventures, Coelius Capital, Maven Ventures, and others.

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On Product

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And last but certainly not least, let’s talk about the product. 

We publicly launched the first version of Ambient in mid-June of this year. Since then product engagement has been growing an average of 50%+ each month.

One of the beautiful things about having a more focused ICP is you can sharpen the product with precision.

Since launch we’ve made manual meeting note taking a thing of the past. We added content tagging, search, and filtering to make it easy to find insights across different meetings.

Now we’re barreling ahead towards making action item extraction and follow up a routine job that Chiefs of Staff can rely on Ambient to do.

Today we’re proud to launch a completely redesigned and rebranded product that is mobile friendly and customizable.

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Let’s Go

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We are excited to bring Ambient to market.  If you are a Chief of Staff, we want to talk to you and get your hands on the product.  Our commitment to you - we are determined to get you back 10-15 hours per week so that you can focus on the things that only you can do.

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Thanks for coming on the journey with us!

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