Why do you think Glean and other top company GPT startups who are doing this for longer and have more resources cannot get this level of performance (helpful and accurate)? What makes your approach different and not easy to replicate?
Launch HN: Grapevine (YC S19) – A company GPT that actually works
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Re: Launch HN: Grapevine (YC S19) – A company GPT that actually works
#42YCS19 - so 6 years. Obviously you did well enough to survive. Interesting that the pivot is something so basic after all this time. Kind of interested in the story there.
2019-2020: We prototyped lots of telepresence ideas, our work shown here: https://siemprecollective.com/
2020-2022: We built https://gather.town, which during COVID blew up across every use-case possible: conferences, birthday parties, weddings, universities. It was a good business during COVID but eventually started to shrink.
2022-2025: We built Gather for remote workers, which was a long grind into in Audio/Video, performance, and making a game-interface that was good for work but replicated the parts of in-person work people enjoyed. It's a decent business, but didn't match our ambitions with how we wanted to change work for the better.
2025+: We have lots of ideas for how we can make work a lot better with AI. The general theme is, "can we make work as fun as a video game?" Idea being: video games are super similar to work at its core, and AI can both 1.) dramatically change how people need to spend their days, and 2.) help you "game design" someone's work day.
The Grapevine system is the first tablestakes layer people need to have for us to build the products we're excited about. Surprisingly, "company context" was not as good as we thought despite it being such an obvious, big business opportunity. So while I agree it's "basic," it does seem necessary, and is also not the full-scale of what we want to achieve still :)
Re: Launch HN: Grapevine (YC S19) – A company GPT that actually works
#43Why do you think Glean and other top company GPT startups who are doing this for longer and have more resources cannot get this level of performance (helpful and accurate)? What makes your approach different and not easy to replicate?
Great question. We are actually surprised more than anything that existing products aren't better. Other companies' algo work DID get disrupted by reasoning models, because newer models don't care about what the top 3 search results are, they're really great at reading hundreds of documents and picking up signal from noise.
I can't speculate exactly on the work that other companies have done, but my guess is we were way more focused on the type of questions people actually ask to each other. We know there's still a lot more you can do to continue to improve it, and so it's up to other folks if they do it too.
Lastly, a few ways we want to be distinguished from all the other offerings are: 1) super easy to setup, 2.) very developer friendly
Re: Launch HN: Grapevine (YC S19) – A company GPT that actually works
#44Offer self-hosted and I would buy. Do not assume that companies are willing to put ALL of their intellectual property into your hands. Even if you would not be some startup where any sysadmin could steal and sell my data any time without you even noticing it, you will get hacked just like everyone else that stores interesting data. The data you have access to is absolutely perfect for the global data blackmailing gan…
Yep, makes a lot of sense. We architected our system to be easy to self-host & open-source in the future for this very reason, though we decided to launch with hosted because it's easier to improve and iterate.
Understood. Not my startup, but I would have started the other way round.
Businesses that would be willing to pay (a lot) for such a benefit often will be very conservative. In Germany the majority of medium sized businesses using SAP for example still refuse to be moved to SAP's cloud instead of on-premise.
C-Level types typically are not worried putting their email credentials etc into Outlook cloud and getting hacked this way. They are used to "everything is in the cloud". However, as soon as you mention, depending on the type of business "patents", "sales contacts", "production plans" C's will change their mind.
In Germany, where I am originally come from, all of these businesses are worried about their trade secrets to end up in China, and rightly so.
As self-hosting is very complex you could either make good money with consulting (but this means setting up tech teams in all target markets around the globe, using actual competent humans), or by selling it as a plug&play appliance. With that appliance simply being a rack server with a suitable GPU installed.
And again, for your business strategy the long-term risk of pretty much everyone trying to hack you on a daily basis appears too high to me. You might not have on your radar how serious industry spionage is. You will definitely have a fake utility company worker coming into your offices, trying to plug in a USB keylogger into some PC while nobody is looking.
As an example, proven strategy: Find targets internet uplink. Cut it. Customer calls ISP for help. You then send a fake ISP technician that arrives before the real one does. You put a data exfiltration dongle between the modem and the LAN. You then fix the cut outdoor line. Customer is happy that you have fixed it. Later the actual ISP guy arrives. Everyone will be a bit confused that the problem was already fixed, but then agree that it's probably just the ISP once again having screwed up their resource management. Works pretty much every time.
Re: Launch HN: Grapevine (YC S19) – A company GPT that actually works
#45Congratulations on the launch.
I was recently trying to tackle the same problem (@howie.systems). The hardest 2 problems we had to face were ACL and large files (and large volumes).
How did you solve the ACL part? I worked with a customer that had 200k pdf/images/dwg files on SharePoint and other 1M on samba. It took like a week to sync it all and keep tabs on the access rights of each employee.
How did you solve unpredictable large files: a pdf 2000pages, maybe some A0 in the mix. Or some 4GB power point presentations?
PS: great fan of gather. PPS: say hi to Clinton from me (amy.app) if he is still around. He was our mentor back in New Zealand at the flux accelerator (2016)
Re: Launch HN: Grapevine (YC S19) – A company GPT that actually works
#46">85% of answers are helpful & accurate" People can usually tell if an answer isn't helpful, but not always that it isn't accurate. Depending on the context, 85% accurate might not be good enough.
95% of answers could be accurate. Combined with the 85% that are helpful and you have “85% of answers are helpful & accurate.”
Who would intentionally downplay their accuracy in marketing materials by conflating the statistic with another?
Re: Launch HN: Grapevine (YC S19) – A company GPT that actually works
#47Offer self-hosted and I would buy. Do not assume that companies are willing to put ALL of their intellectual property into your hands. Even if you would not be some startup where any sysadmin could steal and sell my data any time without you even noticing it, you will get hacked just like everyone else that stores interesting data. The data you have access to is absolutely perfect for the global data blackmailing gan…
Yep, makes a lot of sense. We architected our system to be easy to self-host & open-source in the future for this very reason, though we decided to launch with hosted because it's easier to improve and iterate.
Two things to think about:
a) Due to privacy laws, no European country would right now be allowed to use your service. The data your customers wants to index will always contain stuff that allows to identify a human, and once you are there it's basically "game over" for handing over data to a third party provider like you.
b) My organization is tiny. But we are in a sector were we must be ultra paranoid when it comes to security. We do not use a single external service whatsoever, everything is self-hosted. I would love to be able to AI-index all of our collected knowledge and would pay for the value this provides. So far have been unable to find any plug & play solution. Then open source nature you have mentioned is important so that your system security can be be validated, but in the end I would rather want to pay for it being plug&play AND on-premise AND open source.
Re: Launch HN: Grapevine (YC S19) – A company GPT that actually works
#48Re: Launch HN: Grapevine (YC S19) – A company GPT that actually works
#49[flagged]
Re: Launch HN: Grapevine (YC S19) – A company GPT that actually works
#50Is this self-hosted? If not, am I to work under the assumption that my company's IP is worth ~$0?
No self-hosted version yet. You would need to trust us in the same way you trust your other SaaS apps that host company IP (e.g. Slack, Notion, Github, etc.) I get that's a big ask from a startup. If it helps, we are a company that's been around for 4+ years and have built a work tool ( https://gather.town ) used for 100k+ people for their daily work, Sequoia-backed, are SOC II certified, and go way beyond that for t…
Build the on-prem thing. Companies will be much more trusting.