quote: Lio co-founder and CEO Vlad Keil on the KPI for the company's forward-deployed engineers: automate your own job, then move to the next one. "When you look at the org structure of Lio, 85% of the people are engineers." "And even the people who don't have an engineering title mostly have an engineering background. The reason for that is we don't want to be a consulting company." "There is a lot of forward-deployed work to do if you go to enterprises because they have different nuances in their processes. But how we work is... building a product in a way where we're reducing this customization, but also where it's a lot of self-service." "The job of our FDEs is on the one hand making it self-service, but internally it's automating their own job. Their KPI is... literally your job is to automate yourself. And then if you automate yourself, you go to the next task." @askvladi | Lio co-founder and CEO Vladimir Keil joins a16z's Seema Amble and Elena Burger to discuss where AI-native startups have an advantage when incumbent software companies already own the customer, the data, and the system of record: Their answer comes down to the work that happens outside those systems. In procurement, a final price in an ERP can hide hundreds of emails, spreadsheets, supplier conversations, engineering analyses, and decisions across legal, finance, and operations. Vlad explains how Lio uses multi-agent systems to take on more of that end-to-end work, from sourcing and RFQs to negotiation, shipment tracking, and invoices. They also discuss how enterprises learn to trust agents with increasingly consequential decisions, why the last 20% of an internal AI build can require most of the effort, and what happens when both buyers and suppliers have agents working on their behalf. 00:58 Why AI startups still beat incumbents 04:19 The hidden work behind an $8K line item 06:18 Retrieval, process, policy, principal 09:27 The incumbent's internal conflict 14:48 What procurement actually looks like 21:13 Procurement at Boeing-scale 28:03 A bolt order, end-to-end 37:57 What a durable vertical AI company looks like 44:46 When both sides deploy agents YouTube: https://t.co/xfipxFaUYM @askvladi @seema_amble @VirtualElena