Most startup advice sounds pretty good — right up until you try to turn it into action:

“Talk to customers.”
“Find product-market fit.”
“Build with focus.”

All accurate statements. Not especially useful on their own.

That’s why I wanted to talk to Lexi Reese.

She’s scaled companies at every stage — from building Google’s programmatic advertising business to helping Gusto grow revenue from $10M to $300M. Today, she’s co-founder and CEO of Lanai, an observability platform that helps organizations see how AI is actually being used and whether it’s driving real outcomes.

In our conversation, we skipped the vibes and mythology and got specific about how the work actually gets done. Here are a few of the most tactical takeaways from the episode:

Lexi ran roughly 200 customer interviews before she and Lanai co-founder Steve Herrod locked down the product scope. The process took months and was done intentionally before hiring a dev team.

Takeaway: Don’t write production code until you hear the same problem phrased the same way, repeatedly. If you’re still guessing about your customers’ biggest problems, you can’t rank them in a clear order of operations.

You don’t reach PMF because people like your demo. You have it when customers buy, buy again, and you can see repeatability.

“I would be so old-school as to say you only have product-market fit when you actually earn more than it costs you to build the product,” Lexi says.

Lexi and Steve are experienced operators, but they didn’t rush into the AI observability market. Steve spent about six months firming up the idea before Lexi began actively leading discovery.

Lanai officially launched in May 2024, but “officially, we’re still in beta,” she says. If you’re pre-PMF and feeling slow, you’re probably right on schedule — especially in enterprise.

Seed-stage investors aren’t looking for perfect metrics. They want proof that a founder is deeply connected to real buyers, can recruit people who will build with them, and is obsessed with a problem that actually matters.

“Show me the ten people who are going to buy the product if you build it,” Lexi says. “You also need to have the first three people you’re going to hire defined — and they need to be able to reference you.”

Lexi shared a sharp lesson from her time at Google. After the company acquired Waze, one of its founders explained that he obsessed over a single metric: the wow moment. At Waze, it was simple — “This app saved me 10 minutes on my commute.”

Lexi carried that discipline into building Lanai. Instead of shipping dashboards, the team engineered for concrete outcomes: “You helped us discover 80 AI tools we didn’t know existed,” or “We just reallocated $180,000 in unused AI licenses.” AI behaves more like teammates than tools — static inventories don’t tell you where AI is helping or hurting.

If your product doesn’t create a moment that makes a customer say “wow” and change a decision, you’re not creating leverage.

(2:01) What Lanai does

(5:05) Lexi’s customer discovery process — “definitely 200 interviews”

(12:03) Why customer delight should be a founder’s obsession metric

(15:36) What “AI productivity” actually means

(19:12) Lexi’s framework for managing small, early-stage teams

(26:23) Her take on seed-stage fundraising in late 2025

(31:54) How to integrate customer feedback into product strategy

(38:00) The most meaningful proof a first-time founder can show an investor

(40:53) Why “trust has a code” when it comes to teamwork

(44:08) How Lexi stays obsessed with customers in every meeting

(48:15) The final question

I moved everything off Substack so I can centralize here.

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Thanks for reading,

— Walter.