Textio’s Founder Kieran Snyder on the Two Advantages Startups Have in AI (While Remaining Skeptical Of The Funding Gold Rush)

“Admirer from outside of the cap table” is how I approached Kieran Snyder, Cofounder of Textio. That is to say, I DMed her on Twitter in 2016, impressed by the work she was doing but without a preexisting relationship. Thankfully the interest was mutual and we’ve had the chance to exchange thoughts here and there in the time since. When Kieran announced earlier this year she was stepping back from the CEO role at her company it seemed like a great time to (a) learn from her tenure and (b) promote her awesome weekly newsletter.

Hunter Walk: Textio, the startup you founded and CEO’ed until a few months ago, is almost 10 years old. When you think back to the founding vision/mission, what played out the way you expected and what was most different?

Kieran Snyder: We started off with a premise about AI and writing. Specifically, we thought that if you could use piles and piles of data to figure out which phrases, structures, and other linguistic characteristics performed the best with real audiences, then you could expose that data to help people write stuff that performed better. That premise turned out to be true, as we’re all seeing play out today with the rise of AI APIs that many applications are rushing to adopt.

Textio brought this vision to market with our first product, designed to help people write job posts that attracted diverse and qualified candidates. We had initially wanted to begin with a performance review product or a more conventional marketing product, but we started off in recruiting for very practical reasons: 1) We cared about the problem and 2) We were pretty sure we were going to win. We had some unfair competitive advantages in serving HR buyers: we knew them all. I was publishing quite a bit of original research about bias in workplace documents like performance reviews and job posts, a bunch of it went viral, and I got to know a lot of people who eventually became Textio customers.

However, we thought our initial focus on recruiting was a wedge — an important but small part of the enterprise communication market that we were going after. We way underestimated Textio’s stickiness within HR and how deeply HR execs…