Software Developers Turned Founders — Lessons from Building an AI Assistant (Massi & Avinash of Metabob)
Massi and Avinash discuss their experiences and insights in the AI industry and their start-up building journey. They discuss lessons they learned from mistakes they’ve made and what they look for from investors.
About
Welcome to the 28th installment of Foothill Ventures’ Lessons from Founders series. Every week, we publish an in-depth founder interview, ranging from early-stage entrepreneurs to successful businesses. Our conversations cover their personal journeys, the lessons that shaped them, their visions for the future, and their failures. We also learn more about their companies and about the challenges they try to solve. These insights and lessons are applicable to any entrepreneur — current or future.
Metabob provides a machine learning analysis tool that can identify complex bugs in python code, and then analyze their causes and recommend potential solutions. While existing solutions only detect line-level bugs, the Metabob AI is trained through large repos of code and bug fixes to be able to find logic and context-based problems throughout the whole code.
Massi, the CEO of Metabob, is a serial entrepreneur with Successful track record as founder of deep tech startups in IoT and AI industry. Massi turned from a python developer and active open source enthusiast to an entrepreneur in the AI space to pursue his mission to make software development easier and accessible.
Avinash, the CTO at Metabob, has a background in aerospace engineering, with a specific focus in GNC and automation using AI and ML.
Why we invested in Metabob: Metabob is in a rapidly growing sector with enormous numbers of applications under development. The Metabob product demonstrated superior technical performance over established competitors (when we checked with customers who had tried multiple products, Metabob consistently received top marks). Automated testing is a crowded industry, but we believe that Metabob has the chance to become a segment leader.
What was the inspiration that led you to found Metabob?
We are a team of software developers. As a technical team, we all went through the tedious task of debugging, which is a very time-consuming, very costly aspect of every software developer’s day today. Therefore, we decided to tackle this problem, and built Metabob: an AI assistant tool. It automates the code review process and saves time debugging by up to 50%. Thanks to our bug detection tool we also help our customers by providing recommendations to directly solve the issues that we identify for them. So, you could say that we built Metabob to solve a problem that we ourselves faced every day.
What is the most interesting trend in the AI space
Thanks to the advances in AI research, we’re starting to see a lot more machine learning or AI-based tools to both create new code. The ability for software to write software is a profound achievement, and will have huge implications on our industry in the very near future.
Best decision you have made so far
Looking back, some of the good decisions we made were always being very conservative in terms of our spending and also on the hiring side. I’ve seen a lot of companies hire aggressively immediately, before achieving product market fit. As entrepreneurs, there is always a lot of pressure to grow quickly, but we remained very conservative with cash, and wanted to keep improving our product without investing a lot in other areas. Thanks to that we were able to have a long run and currently, the market is definitely helping us because we now are achieving product market fit. We’re getting closer and so we actually still have the resources to keep hiring and to start growing.
Looking back, what would you have done differently
In terms of the things I would have done differently — from a technical standpoint, definitely keeping everything, including our codes and documentation, cleaner. So a lot of the things we did in the beginning is to get things done as fast as possible. But then over time, it played against us because there were some issues with the tool.
For me, having a good process built internally is important, that means something you can easily build off of. It will help you especially if you’re a software engineering company, it helps creating something that’s very easy for newer people to get into, so it’s just good practice.
What do you look for from an investor
I think that depends on the type of investor. But, overall for VC, I think helping with recruiting is always important. Especially when the job market is very competitive right now. So that’s one of the things and our investor has been very helpful. Another thing would be giving us insights, a lot of time specific investors that invest in a certain area have seen from other companies in their portfolio. They could tell us about mistakes other companies made, so we could avoid that — feedback is very important because that can help us save time, and not make the same mistakes. Overall, the key is to learn from the company of their portfolio since they have similar go to market strategy, similar products, etc. And also introducing us to other investors. It’s always the best thing to do if your investors send the intro to other VCs — it’s way better than just you sending cold emails.
The most important factor you look for in a board member/advisor
Similarly, a desirable board member is someone that understands this market and the space. Again, feedbacks in terms of the product and customer introduction is something that’s always great to get. For example in early stages, when you need design partners, having someone that can send your intro to a company that can really support you on product building is very relevant and helpful. The key is getting someone very targeted toward you.
The most difficult/contrarian decision you’ve made
On my end, changing some team members is always the biggest challenge, especially in a small startup where everyone in the team works hard to make things happen. It’s almost like a family we spent all the time together. But as an entrepreneur, you need to know when you need to change or replace some positions. And that has been the biggest challenge for sure.
Most of the challenging decisions from a technical side is about how to best fit the product and the needs that we’re trying to solve. Also cutting or getting rid of stuff that may be helpful, but not to the niche that’s going to help you grow is difficult. You need to make sure that everything that you’re building is going to be useful for the customers that you’re trying to help. If not, then even if it works for some subset of your customers, that’s still not going to be part of your overall strategy and it’s better to remove that.
A time you made a mistake and the lesson from that experience
So earlier on, we also want to help developers to better understand how these design decisions that they were making were affecting their entire companies. So we used ways that are more visually focused. While some developers could benefit from the visuals, especially for newer developers, as they could understand how everything fits together and why certain decisions would cause problems down the line, it didn’t help the core users. So we had to get rid of the visuals because it just wasn’t being used by anybody that really wanted to use the product. It was only really helpful for some people who weren’t going to eventually become our main customers. Even though they liked it, it wasn’t something that we wanted to continue to support.
To get the full version of the interview: https://youtu.be/gIYS1A4xWTI
To get updates on this series, please follow our publication on Medium.
Follow us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/foothillventures
Follow us on Twitter: @FoothillVenture
Foothill Ventures is a $150M seed-stage technology firm. We back technical founders across software, life sciences, and frontier technologies.
Questions, thoughts, reflections? Let us know in the comments below. We’re always looking for great entrepreneurs and early-stage ideas, and we’re always interested in having a discussion about venture, technology, and anything related. To see more about Foothill Ventures, please visit our website: foothill.ventures.
