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We're joined by Melissa Tokmak. Melissa is the founder and CEO of Netic, a company that builds AI for different real world services like H Vac, pet care, a variety of other things like that roofers. Prior to Netic, Melissa was a director of engineering and worked on various aspects of go to market for scale AI and also has experiences from Meta. Welcome to Nopriers. Melissa. Melissa, thanks for joining us today at Nopriers.
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Thank you for having me.
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Yeah, maybe we can start off by talking a little bit about your business and what you're building because I think that you're doing something really interesting in the real world and you're kind of mirroring AI in the real world. So could you tell us more about your company and Natic and what you're focused on?
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Yeah. Netic builds AI to run millions of real world businesses that keep the world running. That means basically we work with large enterprises in essential services. We started in essential services.
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What would be an example of essential service?
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Imagine a billion dollar revenue. Home services companies in H Vac, plumbing, electric or consumer wellness companies like where you can become a member and really go do a lot of sports or different activities. Hospitality, automotive, pet services across the board. So every single thing that you need to run your life or that you want to do are a good example. And a lot of these businesses are actually quite large businesses and they interact with millions of end users themselves, usually that are consumers or businesses themselves. So Netic exists between the company and and its customers. So every single thing to understand the customer need or want and match that with how can we even help that customer with the operational rules of the business and even deploy the services or the labor all happens on Netic.
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So basically say a customer calls an H Vac provider, what happens or what is Netic doing for them?
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Yeah, so imagine that you are in the middle of nowhere, it's minus 20 degrees and your heat stops working. So you first find right A provider. And there are many providers. You want to pick the most trustworthy one and the one that you can get to because you're in a minus 20 degree weather, maybe you have a kid or an elderly or something is not working from there. Once you find a business and usually you can find these from aggregators or by search engines or in now LLMs and you can reach out to the company from any medium you want. If they're using Netic, you can call them or text them or find like go to their website to do an online scheduler. It's Netic Agents that talk to the customer. What kind of home do you live in? Do we have any of your records?
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I said this could be like a voice call. Netic is actually providing the voice completely and then the reasoning around, hey, this person needs some help and we should deploy somebody out to fix their H Vac.
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Exactly. And it's actually a lot of the businesses we work with, this is why we started with essential services. The operational needs are very complex. It's not as simple as oh, Elon's heat broke and now Melissa goes. Is it that actually what kind of even units do you have? What kind of needs do you have? Can we come to you? Is it something that we need to come to you today or tomorrow? What is your lifetime value as a customer? So should we be deploying the best person who can only work on let's say boilers or new age systems today or later? So it's actually quite complex to first of an understand what is the need from the customer? Can this company service it? If so, who, when? And to ensure that it is all optimized to create customer delight to generate more revenue for the company.
B
Right, that makes sense. What is sort of like an incumbent version of you know, what you're doing or what are other players in the market or how should people think about what this replaces?
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So let's go about how do people do this today? Obviously we are a two year old company, so before us too, how were they doing that? So it's primarily with people. These companies are extremely large and if anything, actually they can't grow because they have to keep investing in people to think of any kind of growth. And for them they're EBITDA businesses. Many times they're actually owned by private equity, but they need to care about their margins and what they make to be able to invest back in the business. The most important labor in the business is actually the people who are going to deliver the job right. You want to focus every single thing to make your end customer happy because a lot of these businesses are also commodities. If you do not answer me, I'm going to go to the next one. Next search result on Google. Next result like now ChatGPT. So it's very important to be able to invest your money into your labor, the blue collar labor. So until now it was with hundreds and hundreds of people in these companies trying to figure out how to support customers at all times. The teams that support these workflows in the companies are unreliable as well. Let's look at a Day in a Life with this company that makes a billion dollar revenue you might show up. The business usually start at 4 or 5am you don't really have anybody in the company then even maybe your technicians start at 6am but before then no one is in the company. You might come in as a manager, but there are at least three people that quit that way or that day or five didn't show up. So all these customers are piling in starting at 6am because now it's a heat wave in the country. Actually this past week we have hit record waves last week in the country. What do you do as a business? So many of these businesses are cyclical businesses. It's very important in winter, summer, holiday season season people start working out. Right. So you have to make sure that you're capt a lot of your value in those months to be able to sustain yourself and your employees because you're
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providing like agents, they can overflow. So somebody's giving you a lot of phone calls. They can pick up the phone calls for you.
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Yeah. Over that is many customers how they started. But today actually over 70% of our customers are AI first we call it Netic first they go N1 and over 70% actually all of their customers first interaction with the companies with Netic agents.
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So there's a few different approaches you can do for markets like this. And so obviously I'm excited to be an investor in it. I've also invested in AI rollups where people will a company like Long Lake will go and buy a bunch of businesses and then optimize them with AI and in some cases these businesses overlap in the profile with your customer set. And you mentioned many of them are owned by private equity already. How did you make the decision to build this service versus just doing a roll up or buying and running the assets or the trade offs.
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In terms of those approaches I think three reasons. One, what I want to build in the world skill set and scale. Before building this I was at scale for about four years and I built a lot of their real world businesses from government to large enterprises.
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Scale AI by the way for folks who are watching or listening to this. Started off as a data labeling company, ended up eventually having some sort of licensing or agreement with Meta where Meta paid. I think it was $28 billion.
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Yeah, a little 30 around there.
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So real money. And so you were a very early and like important person I think at scale in terms of the the variety of the different businesses you worked on. And then you decided to leave before that happened actually to to start this business?
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Yeah. For me there were two things really important. It's scale that showed me a lot more about the real world businesses. So a lot of my business units, to give you a sense, I built at scale the government business unit and large enterprises in logistics, manufacturing, financial services, healthcare, across the board. And I think the tangible impact you can make in the world is incredible. It is the fulfillment you actually get. You know, in tech we keep talking about this fulfillment that doesn't usually come to many people, but I love doing that. My background, I grew up in a very small town in Turkey. I grew up with nothing and really came here only for college when I got a full scholarship to Stanford. I didn't even own a computer before and all of my town is actually in these type of industries. So to me all of us come here and we talk about tech, we talk about creating impact. But majority of the companies that only really serve other startups or tech companies. So to me that was very important. What are we building for the real world? And I combined that with a technical pursuit, which was a selfish pursuit, is that AI is good at assisting consumers or being a co pilot. But the next most unsolved problem is that how are we using AI in mission critical workflows? What does that look like to have a fully autonomously executing actually systems. So Netic came out of really combining these two for me. And at the end I loved being at scale. I was a very good culture there, I think and I loved my team. Some of my best friends actually are from there. Obviously Alex was amazing person to work with directly as a founder and but to me it was missing the product. Right? What is the product? Because it is an operationally heavy business to build the infrastructure for AI even though people don't want to talk about it. And it was rewarding but missing that product edge for me. So I knew I want to build a product that can scale, scale and compound and two personal skill set. I think in a lot of those roll ups the main important thing is the M and A itself. I'm not an M and A person, I'm a builder, I am an engineer, I'm a product person. It just doesn't fit my skillset and I don't want to build a business where clearly what I can provide is not the most important thing. And I think third is the scale of the product too. What I have seen there's a lot of successful rollups and tech enabled rollups but at the end all the products you' for the company you just bought it can't really be actually applied to any other company. So you are committing to buying these a few companies in whatever industries that you are interested in and serving those with your products versus what I'm interested in is how every real world business can run on Netic. Right. If we didn't have to limit them, if they could focus on what they are good at in that business, which is the labor, which is the differentiation, quality of the service, how could Netic run the rest?
B
So when people talk about AI for the real world, they mean two or three things, right? So obviously there's what you're doing at Nettic and serving these businesses that go and implement different services for people in their homes or their pets or different aspects of their life. There's people who talk about robotics, there's self driving. Do you think all these things converge over time? Do you think the timeline on that is very far in the future and doesn't kind of matter in terms of these other types of things?
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Yeah, it's almost. You're looking at the same book maybe, but different chapters. We're talking about much more now chapters and for the next few decades. I do believe that there's a chapter in the future, it is all about robotics. But in some of the industries that I'm working with, that is quite far in the future. And I always say, you know, if you spend a few days with these businesses, which is very important for us, like, you know, I have to tell you about how I learned about these industries. And every single engineer in our company do have to go visit customers on site to build the right product back home in San Francisco. And if you look around, if we look outside of a window, look at every single building, if robotics is going to do what we're doing with these companies today, every single of those buildings need to be either 3D printed or completely standardized. I don't see that happening.
B
And that's just because you just think robotics will be able to navigate the different variation or variety in terms of.
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I think if you look at robotics capabilities today, it is quite far in terms of dexterity on how to be able to handle different types of screws. Even what type of homes are this. How am I going up, how am I going into the tiny areas to be able to fix something? Many times it's not clear, you have to open up the whole walls to even see what do you need to fix how. And on top of that, there is in these industries, there's a lot of the human element too. Because when a Lot of people are dealing with these industries. It is worst day of their lives, right? It's either their home is flooded or they want to take the day and reduce stress and go play some tennis at the Bay Club. Right? But whatever it is that they're actually going through something and there's a human element, I do think there's quite a bit of a while for robotics to be closer in our chapter.
B
And then I've kind of heard you talk about the big labs, so OpenAI, anthropic, maybe Google, meta, et cetera. How do you think the leprosys industry or how do you think what you're doing is different from what they can do?
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Different way of asking that maybe can labs do this? I think that's a fair question because there's a lot of startups in today's world that build things functionally and visually very similar to the labs, key products, right. It's either a chatbot or a coding agent. I do chuckle at the question a little bit though, because I think 10 years ago that same exact question was can Google do this? And then now it became can labs do this?
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Sure.
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Some of the things, the core competencies, they can do it, but some of the other things, they're not investing in it. For Natic's case, I don't see them as a competitive risk. It's actually, I think the two, especially the leading labs there are amazing businesses. They're also great partners to companies like us. So I really respect that. But in terms of looking at what we provide to these industries and companies, I actually think two things are very important. One in focus in what you're building. And I will say, you know, it would be a funny question to these enterprises, right? OpenAI builds amazing products really fast, but also it kills them really fast. So I don't think enterprises are at least enterprise in these industries looking for that really fast. We, or in anthropic case, Silicon Valley, converged in the idea that they pulled ahead in coding agents or Claude because they had focus. But you see exactly the opposite. In the enterprise case, there's about 20 products. What is really happening? And I don't really see that. And meta focus question maybe about the labs and specifically researchers, they really care about solving the most generalizable way of the problem, right? So in this case, maybe looking at the problem we're solving, the answer would be, well, when we get the AGI, we'll ask how to solve it for essential services. And I think that is both operationally and intellectually A bit lazy thinking and the finally is for to solve these type of extremely difficult problems with millions in the country that have completely different worries, different accents, how do they want to engage different contexts and also even engage them again to make them multi time customers. There's quite a bit of last mile that you really have to do that doesn't only come from models, that has to come from your harnesses and orchestration, the software and the product that you have to build on top. So if anything, actually companies like us and Netic have to be good at all three layers.
B
That makes sense. One thing I've noticed, which is more sort of a side comment on what you're saying, is that one big shift I see from four years ago and now four years ago I was funding things like Harvey and Perplexity and a little bit later Decagon and Abridge and a lot of the sort of vertical applications. Obviously Netic and I feel like a lot of founders now are almost a little bit too worried about the labs they're doing. And so they're not entering new verticals or sort of staying away from things that they think is in the roadmap of the lab. When I think in traditional times people would have kind of fought it out a bit more. And so I think that's a little bit surprising.
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Yeah, I do think that's because there's a lot of building going on currently that's focused on how can I exit immediately.
B
Oh, interesting.
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Instead of, I think being a founder I actually think was a more honorable thing before, like you knew you're dedicating your life to it. Like I'll give you an example. Before I built Netic, I actually really looked for a job. Is there something I want to build? I looked at the fourth thing I want to build and scale. Is there anything else I'm interested in? And afterwards, is there someone that I really want to help further the mission? I think being a founder is a very difficult thing that you have to dedicate your whole, whole life for decades. It is not something to be taken lightly. But people are worried about this too much because I think they're looking at it on like, oh, will I be able to exit the short timeframe exits? And then the second thing is maybe this goes into hiring philosophy a little bit. People who are at Netic who deeply care about what they are building themselves customer obsessed for the long term, have the agency to start things, urgency to solve problems, but at the same time to really rigor and patience to carry it forward. Right. I See especially Gen Z in these days when I'm, you know, looking at hiring, obsessed with this permanent underclass mentality. If I don't make my money in the next 18 months, or if I don't learn everything in the world in the next six months, then I am forever poor or my intellectual.
B
This is an AGI pelt version of, you know, in 18 months AI will subsume a lot of people.
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I won't have any of that.
B
And so your value decreases. Yeah.
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Which I think is actually a very dangerous mindset. In fact, building really good things take a very long time. I have learned some of the most important lessons in my life from, you know, committing to things and keeping up with it with all the problems and with especially at scale, for example, over really those four years and now with building a company because you have to see not just what's the first version of a thing. How are you thinking about what does it do in the world? What do you have to improve? How do you keep up with other research? How do you keep up with people? How do you need to improve that? Right. I think especially we look for that. We really avoid shiny object seekers. And there's recently I was reading this quote attributed to Martin Luther actually. It says the Christian shoemaker, you know, doesn't honor God by putting little crosses on the shoes. It does so by building the best shoe. Right? The best shoes. Because God cares about craftsmanship. And I think I really resonate with that. When you think about as a founder, what are you building? Why are you doing this? Right. It really is about building the best product that are solving the problems of the people you care about. If anything, you actually achieve more, more with less, with more focus and with a small group of people that are really that came together to take down the whole world. Right.
B
You mentioned selecting for people with agency. How do you screen for agency? Like what do you look for? Is it an interview question? Is it experiences? Is it something else?
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I think agency. What I look for is not agency. Now if you have agency, you care about agency. You have shown agency continuously in your life. So I will actually dig in. How was it like if you're a new grad, you don't have to have a job? Did you do something in college? Did you do something to be able to get into college? Do you have a project? Do you really care about? And not just that, like I did this for a weekend, but did you keep up with it? Right. So what are really those examples? And I think I do ask many times. It's just one question I'd like to know about what people, what has been the hardest thing they have ever done in life? And they can take it anywhere. But it's not just one question. But we'll really dig in to understand the why or you pull that apart from someone's life story. Right? But the most important thing I care about not to have one agency example is just however long you have been alive and conscious, have you been showing agency in things that you did in life and did you keep up with them? Did you stick through the follow through?
B
You started something, you did something unique that most people don't do and then you kept going on it. It's funny, I used to ask the same question of what's the hardest thing you've ever done? And I got such bad answers that I stopped asking it.
A
But I mean, you know, I don't know why you asked it but you know, if you get bad answers, you know, maybe that person is not really a good.
B
Well, it's just consistently I just mean like the hiring pool that I was at least looking after that I do
A
get really good answers. I think they're very different answers. Right. Some will really open up and I, I'm not looking for a work work answer. Like it can be anything that truly the hardest thing. And sometimes you learn a lot about people's personal lives that something they had to go through, they didn't choose but it was all about how they reacted, what they controlled, how did they take something they can control in their hands and actually change the future. Right. And sometimes it's about, you know, it also doesn't have to be this grandiose thing. I'll give you an example of someone we just hired actually he's starting next week and you know, he gave this answer. This was the first time someone gave an answer like this. He said, I live a very simple life. I deeply care about my work and I have a crazy regimen about how I think about my health and really outlined a little bit what they meant. Right. Like outside of that I don't really have a lot. But the hardest thing for me has been I kept up with this for X amount of years every single day. Like waking up this hour doing these things every other hour at night, every day, single and showing up for my co workers. And the hardest thing has been doing that for over 15 years and without getting bored, without really thinking about anything else and committing myself to what I care about. And I thought that was also a very creative answer. Right. Like I'm not really looking for, you know, maybe when I gave that answer, like my answer is a lot about building a company or about how I came from a very tiny town when my parents didn't have anything to hear. But I'm not looking for that. Everybody's story is different. How did you make your own story? Right. I thought that was a great answer and we're very happy to have him.
B
That's amazing. How do you think about where you want to be with the company in five years? Or what's your longer term vision for what you folks have accomplished, what you're doing? What's your sort of North Star?
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In terms of our vision, we are building an autonomous enterprise. We want every single thing in these companies to be handled autonomously with netic. Accept the actual services and the labor itself, that human component, so that these companies can fully focus on that to deliver and create customer delight. That is number one thing with the company. Every single product, every single thing that we build on top of our intelligence layer that compounds and connected to the other products is for that purpose. Second is, you know, building a company is very hard and I'm also doing that for the vision, but also to work with remarkable people. I think for me, as the company grows, something I deeply care about, how do we keep working with only remarkable people? And there's no one answer. I think every single company that I know, that I respect, that even thought about these things for the long term, like imagine, Palantir or SpaceX or Notion, who really care about craftsmanship and really delivering for their audience for many, many years have struggled with this. So for me, deeply thinking about that and achieving that is very important in the company.
B
So you're serving a lot of industries that are perceived as very slow to adopt technology or not at the cutting edge or things that take a long time to use new things and you're selling AI solutions and agents to them. Has that been challenging? Has that been straightforward? Like is that perception correct? Like how do you think about your customer base in terms of just like the rate at which they'll adopt new things or try new things?
A
I think it's a big misconception to think about these industries as old school. Actually some of the most tech forward, business focused people, owners, founders I have met have been in these industries. So first of all we work with large enterprises so they're extremely value focused and they have to be tech forward. Right. For example, to give you a sense, you know, like just one of the businesses we close, it can be like a Half a million contract and it took from end to end 14 days. And it's not because, you know, there is, you know, they, I'm not a magic potion and the company is not or just AI is not. They're very thoughtful about what they have to do and checking if the value is there. Right. Even in their buying behavior. That being said, I think the way that I think about these industries is that they are extremely primal and tech forward at the same time. So if you think about a large roofing company, right, is actually they have to have door knockers. So door knockers mean, you know, going neighborhood to neighborhood thinking about the friend, you know, roofs and trying to talk to you about why you should think about a new way or like having solar on your roof. Right. But at the same time today in Netic, it's a compilation of product from handling everything inbound, outbound, analytics and even delivery of their labor. So we connect to satellite data to be able to think about in different neighborhoods, how the hurricanes affect different roofs, how should you think about different materials, should that be autonomously fed into the context of our agents so that not only you're better equipped to handle that conversation with the customer, but also you can spot who to go after. So these are not new.
B
Is this technology they were using before or is this, you know, and then you adopted it for the Netic platform or.
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Yeah, I think so. They were always interested in how do we serve our customers better, but they had to figure out how to do that, right? Do we get this data somewhere else or who looks at it? Do we look at it manually? So now imagine with one platform, okay. Not only I am actually assisting with the inbound, that's coming from the ads we have to do, but at the same time I'm building context about the neighborhoods that I have to serve and reaching out to bring net new revenue. So that is now they can do it very easily in one platform with netting, but they were already thinking about these like additional data and sifting through that with different tools or humans, et cetera, and then send door knockers before and that's just one industry, right. And then we talked a little bit about roll ups on being private equity owned. Now imagine being a private equity and you own maybe 20, 30 of these businesses in different industries. So now if those are on Netch, what you can do is, well, if you're going to go after someone for a wellness offering, right. And I have a dog that I love and if I'm going to be a member in a Wellness offering. I would actually very much like to pick the one that has pet care. Right. So if you know that about me and as the owner of the company, how would you think about talking to me about that? That is all about context and really understanding and doing that easily for your business.
B
How well do you or how do you view private equity firms as responding to this wave of AI? I think there are varying opinions in terms of everything from people are really leaning in and they're trying new things and in some cases they're hiring deploy companies, they're working with folks like Brainco or other companies. In other cases they're slower to move on it. What's your perception of how private equity is interacting with AI?
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I think already the private equity playbook has changed. Before it used to be right, we're going to find a gem and that has an amazing multiple and that we are going to go change the team and create the value and then sell it again. But those gems don't really exist anymore like undiscovered. So I think generally the playbook has changed to how do we create tangible value with these businesses that we're working. I think you are right that some are leaning in maybe a bit too much like without, you know, trying everything, as if it's software and you know it that any product I use in AI, it's not like, you know, the first week, that shouldn't be how you look at the platform. It should be the beginning of the relationship, if anything. Actually you want to make sure those results exist throughout the year and keep getting better and not keep getting worse. Right. So I think that's important to change the shift on testing the like AI and separating from vaporware to true roi. And how do you do that? I think a lot of them at times can be more software oriented, you know, deterministical. But why can I not try that like in a week and tell. But many, I think do understand with this new role that private equity companies hire, it's like different operating partners in AI or they'll have a few engineers that might be AI forward and they'll educate it as well. And in our job, you know, I always see in the company too, something is not hard is that like, what can we do better? So in a lot of these conversations, the conversation is all about the value they're gonna get and what they can see. Tangibly now it's not demos we'll pull up and show a live deployment, right? Because if it's working and I have it, why can't you just show you what this customer is making that we have. You asked me about my North Star recently. We have made so far, I think over $600 million for our customers that have been really generated from AI handled interactions show that how does it work? How is the real world customers interacting with this technology? So I think once you do that, they also get educated and they guide their companies. But still it is not taking away the notion of you have to have a relationship direct to the company because at the end private equity is more of a guidance for the companies they own. There's not many types of relationships where you can just shove it down the throats of the companies, but you can be a good counselor and you can be a good advisor to the companies on what to check for.
B
Yeah, it seems like a lot of private equity shops as well have kind of shifted from the 80s style, you know, come in, do big layoffs take apart a conglomerate and much more to your point, how do you optimize value or increase the value of something?
A
I will say though, it's still they are always the first conversations very focused on cost cutting because I think they don't see a lot of products or platforms like ours. I'm not really there to cut your costs. Sure that is happening in this way. But I'm really interested in this is how you're going to make net new revenue. So that is new. You have to actually start that conversation. You have to show them intangible examples because otherwise it still focuses on how do we get to the bottom line and cut some costs. Right. But they have to almost expand their horizon on thinking about what else is possible with AI. Right. It would be pretty sad if we used AI only for cost cutting.
B
Yeah, sure. Outside of what Netic is doing, what are you excited about in terms of the future in AI?
A
I am really excited. So I told you a little bit about my personal story. So one of the, you know, when I didn't have access to anything, one of the in my time maybe the technology that helped is that I would find one or two people who graduated from my high school like to read some of my essays or look at my work and give feedback or Facebook messenger them. And it was, it was just being able to talk when they were in the US in colleges and they went from Turkey. It was pretty crazy. So like I will give the answer of education because I think it will change so many lives of people who otherwise would not even think about this world exists. So I'm personally really excited about that. And no one will be limited anymore. That like everything you want to learn and everything you want to do is kind of in your pocket. Right. So we made the world a lot more about agency, which I'm excited about and I cannot wait to see that unfold.
B
Yeah, it's very exciting. I think one big lesson for me is always you can just go do stuff. Like you don't need permission, you don't need to learn stuff, you can just go do things.
A
But you know, that makes it also a little bit scary too. Then when you see people not doing stuff, then it's a little bit of a dystopian version of it because in any era or technology you live with, you can always do stuff. It ends up, it stays with the choice you have to make. We keep making it easy and easier, easier and easier to make that choice. But still, I guarantee you majority of the world will not be making that choice. So it is something to think about. A little bit more negative, but I am happy that at least we're taking away the resourcing as a question whether you have access to something or not. The second thing I am really excited about a lot in America or in generally right now, more mainstream topic about AI is very negative. What I'm excited about with use cases like I'm working on, it's many times the people's worst day in their lives and they really need help and how do we make sure that you get help or in education or in about being able to look at your health records and really understand. You know, I was recently using the health future and trying to understand how can I sleep better and there's no answer. You got to stop being a founder. But I think there are a lot more positive ways that we are going to start talking about AI and how people's first interaction with AI is not only about why XYZ is going away or jobs are going away, but positive impact of AI. That's more in terms of the conversation in the world I'm most excited about.
B
Amazing. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for joining us today on no Priors. It was a pleasure.
A
Thank you for having me. Find us on Twitter nopriorspod. Subscribe to our YouTube channel if you want to see our faces. Follow the show on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen. That way you get a new episode every week and sign up for emails or find transcripts for every episode@no-priors.com.
Guest: Melisa Tokmak (Founder & CEO, Netic)
Hosts: Sarah Guo and Elad Gil
Date: July 31, 2026
This episode explores how artificial intelligence is transforming essential real-world service businesses. Melisa Tokmak, founder of Netic, discusses building AI-driven platforms that autonomously operate mission-critical workflows for industries like HVAC, plumbing, pet care, and more. The conversation dives into the complexity of these “unsexy but essential” enterprises, the nuances of deploying AI outside of Silicon Valley, competing with big AI labs, the realities of selling to “old school” industries, and visionary takes on the future of autonomous enterprise and AI’s broader impact.
The conversation is candid, optimistic, and deeply rooted in Melisa’s engineering and immigrant background. She champions focus, resilience, and true builder mentality over the hype or “quick win” exits. The tone stresses how AI can truly empower both businesses and individuals and how meaningful transformation requires long-term commitment, real problem-solving, and operational excellence.
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