Build for Tomorrow's AI, Even If Today Breaks

While every AI startup claims explosive growth, most are building for today's models—and failing. "If your first version works, you're not thinking big enough," says Flo Crivello, whose contrarian approach led to something remarkable: 5x revenue growth in six months while competitors struggle to find product-market fit.

Crivello is the CEO of Lindy, a no-code AI agent platform that's quietly capturing massive enterprise use cases—from HIPAA-compliant healthcare documentation to customer support automation. While Twitter buzzes with AI agent announcements weekly, Lindy is actually solving real problems and making serious money doing it.

In this interview, Crivello reveals his unconventional philosophy: build for tomorrow's AI models, not today's—even if it means your product barely works right now. He also shares the painful pivot from his previous company, why he deliberately "mismanages" his team during the prospecting phase, and his prediction that AI agents will do to business what the internet did to media.

Flo: I'm Flo Crivello, I'm the CEO of Lindy, which is the world's easiest way to build AI agents with no code. Lindy is a set up of building blocks that you can put together to build your own AI agents and to get them to do anything.

One big use case that we have is customer support. Step one, customer support ticket arrives by email. Step two, you can have a conditioned building block that basically branches off the agent, so you can be like, hey, is this a customer asking a question or is this a customer asking for a refund? Step 3, for example, if they're asking a question, you can use our knowledge base building block, your FAQ, your website, your PDF, your notion, whatever you want. Then you can ask Lindy finally step 4, to answer the support ticket based on the knowledge that it's extracted in the knowledge base.

We have quintupled in revenue over the last 6 months and roughly doubled the size of the team since then.

Flo: LinkedIn's founder Reed Hoffman said this famous thing: if you're not embarrassed by your first version, you're shipped too late. In AI, I would even go as far as to say if your first version works, you're not thinking big enough. You should build for the future generations of the model, and the models are improving so rapidly that the current generation of models should barely support your vision, just barely.

That was very much the case at Lindy. For a long time, the product simply did not work because the models were not good enough. The very first version of the product was just a prompt. So instead of building AI agents using these building blocks that I mentioned, it was literally just writing text. Because it's just a prompt, you're just trusting this AI model to basically follow your instructions. It may not follow the instructions, you're praying to the LLM gods.

To this day, even to the frontier models, fast forward 2 or 3 years, Cloud Opus or OpenAI o3, the very most frontier models right now. Even they very often struggle. We are building for the next generation of models. The current product doesn't work, and yet we keep building because we expect that the next generation of models will make it work.

Flo: If you spend any time on Twitter, you feel like there is so much competition in AI agents, you feel like there is a new company coming out every week. And yet when you're out in the market like us, you don't run into competitors that often.

So I sometimes compare it to like there's like trillions of trillions of stars in the universe. And yet the universe is 99.9% empty space. It's the same, right? There's a lot of us nominally, but somehow it feels empty, and I think because the market is just so enormously huge.

Flo: I think it's Jeff Bezos who said something like people always comment about how fast everything is always changing, but he likes to focus on what doesn't change. In a world where everything is always changing, he finds these pillars of stability to hang onto. And I think what doesn't change is the user and a lot of preferences of the user are just immutable.

So that's really surprised us. We released the platform and we started to have quite a few users ask us for HIPAA compliance, which is this regulatory standard in the US that allows you to work with sensitive health information. So people started asking: can you be HIPAA compliant, I want to use Lindy for healthcare use cases.

And we were like, why? What do you want us to be HIPAA compliant for? And that's when we understood the use case, which turns out is huge and it's a big industry today. There's a lot of really big companies dedicated solely to this use case where doctors spend a lot of time taking notes during patient visits. They call it charting because it's like a very specific standard of notes that they take. SOAP notes.

Some of them started building Lindys to help them get their SOAP notes. So they use Lindy on a mobile phone and they recorded the conversation using the record feature that we have, and then they would prompt Lindy to give them the format of the notes.

Flo: I started at Uber as a software engineer. I took a 6 month break after Uber. So COVID broke out, everybody was stuck at home. So I was just on my computer at home and I read a blog post by John Palmer called 'Spatial Interfaces,' sort of extolling the virtues of spatial design. And there was almost a call to action in that blog post that's like, I wonder what a spatial Zoom would look like.

I was like, oh, it's a good question. I started hacking it together. And in the span of a couple of hours, I just had like a prototype of a spatial zoom. You see your video in a bubble, you can move the bubble around on a two dimensional canvas and you can only hear and be heard by people around you.

And again this coincided perfectly with COVID so I started hosting virtual happy hours in there with my friends. I just kept adding features and I realized it would be like a collaboration space. I added a whiteboard and so forth. And then I realized like, oh my God, everybody's working remotely right now, this could be a virtual office. There is a market here. I released it, it got traction, a bunch of users started signing up, raised some money, and then the company was off to the races.

Flo: When COVID subsided and when people returned to the office, TeamFlow started not going so well and the growth stalled completely. What finally convinced me that there was simply no market anymore was looking around and seeing all the competitors of which we had many. Good teams, really good people, and they had raised a lot of money, and none of them were taking off, so that's when I just realized there is no market.

That's what I did, it was extremely painful, but I fired 2/3 of the team, and it coincided with the release of the GPT-3 API, so it was like mid 2022. We built a meeting recorder in TeamFlow, and we were very interested in the GPT-3 API so we were like, what can we do with it? So we did what now a lot of applications do, which is meeting summarization.

And then the sales team came to me and they were like, Flo, can this thing also update Salesforce after sales calls? And we were like, sure, I don't see why not. And so we basically kept building and kept fleshing out that Salesforce integration and then HubSpot integration, and that's when it clicked for us. We realized, wait a minute, we can get LLMs to not just generate text for us but generate API calls, generate actual actions for us. And so that's when we were like, wait a minute, this can be an entire AI employee, basically.

Flo: Don't build a mine until you've found gold. I really identified these two different distinct phases in a startup's life cycle. One, you prospect, you look for the right mining site where you can find gold, and once you've struck gold, but only then do you build a mine, and building a mine is basically hiring a team and raising money and all of that stuff.

It is really hard to move a mine, and so if you build too large a mine and you haven't found gold, what you need to do is you need to destroy your mine, you need to fire your team.

And I did that very deliberately, and it's painful. You need to deliberately mismanage your team. You need to let them alone and they're going to hate you. They're like, where is our CEO? What's he doing all day? I'm looking for gold. The mine doesn't matter. The mine is so very mismanaged right now and you guys are lost at sea and I decide not to care because I'm going to spend my time digging for gold. That's what I learned.

Flo: My leadership philosophy is the job of a CEO is to win, and so that's my guiding light, epistemologically that is how I will define what is right or wrong.

Perhaps I would compare it to gardening. It starts with selecting the seeds. So I really do believe half the job is just recruiting, getting the right people into the door. I think it's Kasparov who said the people you hire is the company you build, and I'm reminded every day of how true that is, it's half the job. So just getting the right seeds, if you don't have that, the plant won't be good.

And then giving direction to the team and to the seed. That's the sun. You grow in this direction. So that's the second big part of the job. It's just setting the vision and guiding the plant as it grows. But you can't grow for the plant.

There's this amazing book by Bill Walsh called 'The Score Takes Care of Itself.' And so the philosophy of Bill Walsh is success consists of just two things. One, identifying the right inputs that lead to success, and two, nailing each and every one of these inputs perfectly. If you do these two things, you will win. If you don't win, it means you either don't understand what it takes to win or you're not doing what it takes to win.

Flo: Absolutely you should micromanage. The reason why you are in a position of authority is because someone with capital most likely trusted you and your taste. So you are entitled, you are in fact obligated to micromanage. That's why you're in your seat. You exercise your taste, you exercise your judgment, you exercise your knowledge about your business, your industry, your user, your product, and you guide the plant. That's my philosophy.

It's actually funny, we onboarded a new employee this morning. He's the first one of his function, and I spent the day yesterday, Sunday, literally 7+ hours just writing an 18 pages long document about this is precisely exactly—we call it the standard of excellence. Step by step by step. This is the job. If you see them doing something wrong, it's like, no, this is not what you do. And you just keep putting these guardrails and you refer back to the doc that you wrote.

Flo: I view building a company as a way to bring an ambitious, bold vision to reality. I don't think the lean startup model leads you there. I'm a huge fan of Peter Thiel's thinking on this. He calls it definite optimism. It's like a 2x2. You've got definite and indefinite and optimism and pessimism.

There's a lot of indefinite optimism in tech. I view crypto as the eternal indefinite optimist industry. It's like we don't know what's going to happen, we don't know why things are gonna go well, but wagmi, we're all gonna make it, everything's gonna go so well, but we can't exactly tell you how.

Instead, Peter Thiel pushes for this vision of definite optimism. It's like you must have a crisp opinion, a well defined opinion of what the world will look like in the future, what it should look like, and bring that vision to life.

What percent of your time did you spend in 2022 speaking to an AI? Zero percent. Today in 2025, it's a lot more than that. And I think the trend is going to continue and continue and continue. AI agents are basically in the short term going to turn us all into managers. Instead of doing individual contributor work, you're going to manage a swarm of AI agents doing your work.

I sometimes describe it as imagine if any random 25-year-old could have the same impact in the world as Google. So I think that AI agents are going to do to the world of business at large what the internet has done to media. It's going to be a very powerful leveling of the playing field. It's going to unlock opportunity for everyone regardless of their network or their capital or their access or their geography. It's just really going to come down to their vision and the ideas they have and their ability to leverage AI agents.