Lightfield's bet on generalists over fixed roles

Lightfield CEO Keith Peiris tells a16z that rigid departmental boundaries slowed its predecessor, Tome, to a crawl and made pivoting impossible. At Lightfield, he says, all 40 employees attend the same morning standup, rank the most important problems and assign them to whoever is free. Engineers, designers and customer success managers all run projects.

A16z says Peiris shut down the predecessor AI presentation tool despite its two million monthly users. It describes Lightfield's new bet: a customer relationship management system intended to reconcile conflicting customer records into what the company calls a “business world model,” with agents operating downstream of it.