Building an Autonomous Enterprise for Real-World Services with Netic Founder Melisa Tokmak

We're joined by Melisa Tokmak, the founder and CEO of Netic, a company that builds AI for real-world services like HVAC, pet care, and roofing. Prior to Netic, Melisa was a director of engineering and worked on various aspects of go-to-market at Scale AI, and she also has experience at Meta. Melisa, thanks for joining us today.

Thank you for having me.

Yeah, maybe we can start off by talking a little bit about your business and what you're building, because I think you're doing something really interesting in the real world and kind of mirroring AI in the real world. Could you tell us more about your company, Netic, and what you're focused on?

Netic builds AI to run millions of real-world businesses that keep the world running. That means we work with large enterprises in essential services. We started in essential services.

What would be an example of an essential service?

Imagine home-services companies with $1 billion in revenue in HVAC, plumbing, or electrical, or consumer-wellness companies where you can become a member and go do a lot of sports or different activities. Hospitality, automotive, and pet services are all examples across the board. Every single thing that you need to run your life or that you want to do is a good example, and a lot of these businesses are quite large and interact with millions of end users themselves, usually consumers or businesses.

Netic exists between the company and its customers. Every single thing to understand the customer's need or want and match that with how we can help the customer within the operational rules of the business—and even deploy the services or the labor—all happens on Netic.

So, basically, say a customer calls an HVAC provider. What happens, or what is Netic doing for them?

Imagine that you are in the middle of nowhere, it's 20 degrees below zero, and your heat stops working. You first find 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 20-degree-below-zero weather. Maybe you have a kid or an elderly person, or something isn't working.

From there, once you find a business—and usually you can find these from aggregators, search engines, or now LLMs—you can reach out to the company through any medium you want. If they're using Netic, you can call them or text them, or go to their website. It's Netic agents that talk to the customer: What kind of home do you live in? Do we have any of your records?

I see. So this could be a voice call, and Netic is actually providing the voice.

Completely.

And then the reasoning around, “Hey, this person needs some help, and we should deploy somebody to fix their HVAC.”

Exactly. A lot of the businesses we work with have complex operational needs, which is why we started with essential services. It's not as simple as, “Oh, Elad's heat broke, and now Melisa goes.” You have to ask: What kind of units do you have? What kind of needs do you have? Can we come to you? Is it something that we need to address today or tomorrow? What is your lifetime value as a customer?

Should we deploy the best person, who can only work on, let's say, boilers or new-age systems, today or later? It's quite complex to first understand what the need is from the customer, whether the company can service it, and, if so, who should do it and when. You want to ensure that it's all optimized to create customer delight and generate more revenue for the company.

That makes sense. What is the incumbent version of what you're doing? What are the other players in the market, or how should people think about what this replaces?

Let's go back. How do people do this today? We're a 2-year-old company, so before us, how were they doing it? It's primarily with people. These companies are extremely large, and they can't grow because they have to keep investing in people to achieve any kind of growth. They're EBITDA businesses, and many times they're owned by private equity. They need to care about their margins and what they make in order to invest back in the business.

The most important labor in the business is the people who are going to deliver the job. You want to focus every single thing on making your end customer happy, because a lot of these businesses are commodities. If you do not answer me, I'm going to go to the next one—the next search result on Google, the next result on an AI search.

It's very important to be able to invest your money into your labor, the blue-collar labor. Until now, that meant 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 the life of a company that makes $1 billion in revenue. The business usually starts at 4:00 or 5:00 a.m., and you don't really have anybody in the company. Maybe your technicians start at 6:00 a.m., but before then, no one is there. You might come in as a manager, but at least 3 people quit that day, or 5 didn't show up.

All these customers are piling in starting at 6:00 a.m. because now there's a heat wave in the country. Actually, this past week, we hit record heat waves in the country. What do you do as a business?

Many of these businesses are cyclical. It's very important in winter, summer, the holiday season, and the season when people start working out. You have to make sure that you're capturing a lot of your value in those months to be able to sustain yourself and your employees.

Because you're providing agents to take overflow—if somebody's giving you a lot of phone calls, your agents can pick up the phone calls for them.

Yeah. That's how many of our customers started. But today, over 70% of our customers are AI-first. We call it Netic-first. They go N1. For over 70% of our customers, the first interaction with the company is with Netic agents.

There are a few different approaches you can take for markets like this. I'm excited to be an investor in Netic. I've also invested in AI roll-ups, where a company like Long Lake will buy a bunch of businesses and then optimize them with AI. In some cases, these businesses overlap with the profile of your customer set, and you mentioned that many of them are already owned by private equity.

How did you make the decision to build this service versus doing a roll-up or buying and running the assets? What are the trade-offs between those approaches?

I think there are 3 reasons: what I want to build in the world, my skill set, and scale. Before building this, I was at Scale for about 4 years, and I built a lot of their real-world businesses, from government to large enterprises.

And Scale, by the way, for folks who are watching or listening to this, started off as a data-labeling company. It eventually ended up having some sort of licensing or agreement with Meta, where Meta paid—I think it was $28 billion.

Yeah-ish, a little over $30 billion, around there. So, real money.

You were a very early and important person at Scale in terms of the variety of different businesses you worked on, and then you decided to leave before that happened, actually, to start this business.

For me, there were 2 things that were really important. Scale showed me a lot more about real-world businesses. To give you a sense, I built the government business unit at Scale, as well as large-enterprise businesses in logistics, manufacturing, financial services, and healthcare across the board.

I think the tangible impact you can make in the world is incredible. It is the fulfillment you actually get. In tech, we keep talking about this fulfillment that doesn't usually come to many people, but I love doing that.

My background is that 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. Everyone from my town is actually in these types of industries.

To me, all of us come here and talk about tech and creating impact, but the majority of companies only really serve other startups or tech companies. It was very important to me to ask: What are we building for the real world?

I combined that with a technical pursuit, which was a selfish pursuit. AI is good at assisting consumers or being a co-pilot, but the next most unsolved problem is: How are we using AI in mission-critical workflows? What does it look like to have fully autonomous, actually executing systems?

Netic came out of combining those 2 things for me. In the end, I loved being at Scale. I was a very good culture fit, I think, and I loved my team. Some of my best friends are from there. Obviously, Alex was an amazing person to work with directly as a founder.

But to me, what was missing was the product. What is the product? It is an operationally heavy business to build the infrastructure for AI, even though people don't want to talk about it. It was rewarding, but it was missing that product edge for me, so I knew I wanted to build a product that could scale and compound.

And, 2, personal skill set: I think in a lot of those roll-ups, the main important thing is the M&A itself. I'm not an M&A person.

I'm a builder. I am an engineer. I am a product person. It just doesn't fit my skill set, and I don't want to build a business where clearly what I can provide is not the most important thing. I think the third thing is the scale of the product, too.

What I have seen is that there's a lot of successful roll-ups and tech-enabled roll-ups, but at the end, all the products you're building are for the company you just bought. It can't really be applied to any other company. So you're committing to buying these few companies in whatever industries you're interested in and serving those with your products, versus what I'm interested in, which 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're good at in that business—which is the labor, the differentiation, and the quality of the service—how could Netic run the rest?

Sarah Guo

And so, when people talk about AI for the real world, they mean 2 or 3 things, right? Obviously, there's what you're doing at Netic and serving these businesses that go and implement different services for people in their homes, for their pets, or in different aspects of their lives. There are people who talk about robotics and self-driving. Do you think all these things converge over time? Do you think the timeline for that is very far in the future and doesn't matter in terms of these other types of things?

Yeah, it's almost like you're looking at the same book, maybe, but different chapters. We're talking about many more chapters over the next few decades. I do believe that there's a chapter in the future that is all about robotics, but in some of the industries that I'm working with, that is quite far in the future.

I always say, if you spend a few days with these businesses, which is very important for us—I have to tell you about how I learned about these industries—every single engineer in our company has to go visit customers on-site to build the right product back home in San Francisco. If you look around, if we look outside a window and look at every single building, if robotics is going to do what we're doing with these companies today, every single one of those buildings needs to be either 3D-printed or completely standardized. I don't see that happening.

Sarah Guo

And that's just because you think robotics will be able to navigate the different variations?

I think if you look at robotics capabilities today, they are quite far from what is needed in terms of dexterity and being able to handle different types of screws, or even different types of homes. 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 wall to even see what you need to fix.

On top of that, there is a lot of the human element in these industries, too, because when a lot of people are dealing with these industries, it is the worst day of their lives, right? Either their home is flooded, or they want to take the day to reduce stress and go play some tennis at Bay Club, right? Whatever it is, they're actually going through something, and there's a human element. I do think there's quite a bit of a while before robotics is closer in our chapter.

Sarah Guo

And then I've kind of heard you talk about the big labs—OpenAI, Anthropic, maybe Google, Meta, and so on. How do you think they'll approach this industry, or how do you think what you're doing is different from what they can do? A different way of asking that, maybe, is: can the 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?” Now it has become, “Can the labs do this?” Sure, some of the things—their core competencies—they can do, but some of the other things, they're not investing in. In Netic's case, I don't see them as a competitive risk.

Actually, I think the 2 leading labs 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 think 2 things are very important.

One is focus on what you're building. It would be a funny question to ask these enterprises, right? OpenAI builds amazing products really fast, but it also kills them really fast. I don't think enterprises, or at least enterprises in these industries, are looking for that really fast pace. In Anthropic's case, Silicon Valley converged on the idea that they pulled ahead in coding agents, like Claude, because they had focus. But you see exactly the opposite in the enterprise case. There's about 20 products. What is really happening? I don't really see that.

A meta-focused question, maybe about the labs and specifically researchers, is that they really care about solving problems in the most generalizable way, right? So in this case, maybe looking at the problem we're solving, the answer would be, “Well, when we get to AGI, we'll ask how to solve it for essential services.” I think that is both operationally and intellectually a bit lazy thinking.

And finally, to solve these types of extremely difficult problems for millions in the country who have completely different worries, different accents, different contexts, and different ways they want to engage—and to 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. It has to come from your harnesses and orchestration, the software, and the product that you have to build on top. So if anything, companies like us and Netic have to be good at all 3 layers.

Sarah Guo

Yeah, that makes sense. One thing I've noticed, which is more of a side comment on what you're saying, is that one big shift I see from 4 years ago to now is that, 4 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.

I feel like a lot of founders now are almost a little bit too worried about the labs and what they're doing, so they're not entering new verticals or staying away from things that they think are in the roadmap of the labs. In traditional times, I think people would have fought it out a bit more, and so I think that's a little bit surprising.

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?”

Sarah Guo

Oh, interesting.

Instead, I think being a founder was a more honorable thing before. You knew you were dedicating your life to it. 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 life to 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 like, “Oh, will I be able to exit?”—the short-time-frame exits.

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, are customer-obsessed for the long term. They have the agency to start things, urgency to solve problems, but at the same time, the rigor and patience to carry them forward.

I see, especially Gen Z these days, when I'm looking at hiring, an obsession 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 6 months, then I am forever poor. Or this is an AGI-pilled view: in 18 months, AI will subsume a lot of people's skill sets, and so your value decreases.

Sarah Guo

Which I think is actually a very dangerous mindset. In fact, building really good things takes a very long time.

I have learned some of the most important lessons in my life from committing to things and keeping up with them through all the problems, especially at Scale—for example, over those 4 years and now with building a company—because you have to see not just what's the first version of a thing.

Sarah Guo

How are you thinking about what it does in the world, what you have to improve, how you keep up with other research, how you keep up with people, and how you need to improve that?

I think we especially look for that. We really avoid shiny-object seekers. Recently, I was reading this quote attributed to Martin Luther. It says, “The Christian shoemaker doesn't honor God by putting little crosses on the shoes. He does so by building the best shoe.”

Sarah Guo

Right? The best shoes.

Because God cares about craftsmanship. I really resonate with that when you think about, as a founder, what are you building? Why are you doing this? It really is about building the best product that solves the problems of the people you care about.

If anything, you actually achieve more with less, with more focus, and with a small group of people that really came together to take down the whole world, right?

Sarah Guo

You mentioned selecting for people with agency. How do you screen for agency? What do you look for? Is it an interview question, experiences, or something else?

I think agency—what I look for is not agency.

Now, if you have agency, care about agency, and have shown agency continuously in your life, I will actually dig in. How was it? 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 you really care about? And not just, “I did this for a weekend,” but did you keep up with it? What are really those examples?

I think I do ask many times. It's just one question. I'd like to know what people do and what has been the hardest thing they have ever done in life. They can take it anywhere, but it's not just one question—we'll really dig in to understand the why, or pull that apart from someone's life story. The most important thing I care about is not having one agency example. It's this: however long you have been alive and conscious, have you been showing agency in the things that you did in life? Did you keep up with them? Did you stick through?

Sarah Guo

So, you care about the follow-through. You started something, did something unique that most people don't do, and then kept going on it. It's funny. I used to ask the same question: “What's the hardest thing you've ever done?” And I got such bad answers that I stopped asking it.

Maybe that person isn't really a good fit.

Sarah Guo

Well, it's just consistently bad. I just mean the hiring pool that I was at least looking at.

I do get really good answers. I think they're very different answers. Some people will really open up, and I'm not looking for a work answer. It can be anything in your life that was truly the hardest thing. Sometimes you learn a lot about people's personal lives—something they had to go through that they didn't choose—but it's all about how they reacted, what they controlled, and how they took something they could control into their own hands and actually changed the future.

Sometimes it's also about—you know, it doesn't have to be this grandiose thing. I'll give you an example of someone we just hired. He's starting next week, and 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 for how I think about my health,” and really outlined a little bit of what he meant.

“Outside of that, I don't really have a lot, but the hardest thing for me has been keeping up with this for X amount of years, every single day: waking up at this hour, doing these things every other hour at night, showing up for my coworkers. The hardest thing has been doing that for over 15 years without getting bored, without really thinking about anything else, and committing myself to what I care about.”

I thought that was also a very creative answer. Maybe when I gave that answer, mine would be a lot about building a company or about how I came from a very tiny town, where my parents didn't have anything, to here. But I'm not looking for that. Everybody's story is different. How did you make your own story? I thought that was a great answer, and we're very happy to have him.

Sarah Guo

That's amazing. How do you think about where you want to be with the company in 5 years, or what's your longer-term vision for what you folks have accomplished and what you're doing? What's your sort of north star?

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, except the actual services and the labor itself—that human component—so that these companies can fully focus on delivering and creating customer delight. That is the number-one thing with the company. Every single product, every single thing that we build on top of our intelligence layer, which compounds and is connected to the other products, is for that purpose. Mhm.

Second, building a company is very hard, and I'm also doing that for the vision, but also to work with remarkable people. For me, as the company grows, something I deeply care about is: how do we keep working with only remarkable people? There's no one answer. I think every single company that I know and respect—even those that have thought about these things for the long term, like Palantir, SpaceX, or Notion, which really care about craftsmanship and delivering for their audience for many, many years—have struggled with this. So, for me, deeply thinking about that and achieving it is very important in the company.

Sarah Guo

You're serving a lot of industries that are perceived as very slow to adopt technology, not at the cutting edge, or just things that take a long time to use new things. You're selling AI solutions and agents to them. Has that been challenging? Has that been straightforward? Is that perception correct? How do you think about your customer base in terms of the rate at which they'll adopt new things or try new things?

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 and founders—I have met have been in these industries. First of all, we work with large enterprises, so they're extremely value-focused, and they have to be tech-forward. For example, to give you a sense, one of the businesses we closed had a $500,000 contract, and it took 14 days from end to end.

It's not because there's some magic potion. The company isn't one, and AI isn't one. They're very thoughtful about what they have to do and checking whether the value is there, even in their buying behavior.

That being said, I think the way to think about these industries is that they're extremely primal and tech-forward at the same time. If you think about a large roofing company, they actually have to have door knockers. Door knockers means going neighborhood to neighborhood, thinking about different roofs, and trying to talk to you about why you should think about a new roof or having solar on your roof.

At the same time, today in Netic, it's a compilation of products handling everything inbound, outbound, analytics, and even the delivery of their labor. We connect to satellite data to think about, in different neighborhoods, how hurricanes affect different roofs and how you should think about different materials. That should be autonomously fed into the context of our agents so that not only are you better equipped to handle that conversation with the customer, but you can also spot whom to go after.

Sarah Guo

Is this technology they were using before, or is this something you adopted for the Netic platform?

Yeah, I think so. They were always interested in how to serve their customers better, but they had to figure out how to do that. Do we get this data somewhere else? Who looks at it? Do we look at it manually?

Now imagine having one platform. Not only am I assisting with the inbound that's coming from the ads we have to run, but at the same time I'm building context about the neighborhoods that I have to serve and reaching out to bring in net-new revenue. So now they can do it very easily in one platform with Netic. They were already thinking about this additional data and sifting through it with different tools or humans, and then sending door knockers before. And that's just one industry.

We talked a little bit about rollups and being private-equity-owned. Now imagine being a private equity firm and owning maybe 20 or 30 of these businesses in different industries. If those are on Netic, what you can do is—well, if you're going to go after someone for a wellness offering, and I have a dog that I love, and if I'm going to be a member in a wellness offering, I would very much like to pick the one that has pet care.

If you know that about me, 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.

Sarah Guo

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, everything from people who are really leaning in and trying new things, and in some cases having to deploy it in 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?

I think the private equity playbook has already changed. Before, it used to be, “We're going to find a gem that has an amazing multiple, and we're going to change the team, create the value, and then sell it again.” But those gems don't really exist anymore as undiscovered assets. So, generally, I think the playbook has changed to: how do we create tangible value with the businesses that we're working with?

I think you're right that some are leaning in maybe a bit too much, without trying everything as if it's software. Any product I use in AI—it's not like the first week should be how you look at the platform. It should be the beginning of the relationship. If anything, you want to make sure those results exist throughout the year and keep getting better, not getting worse.

So I think it's important to shift the focus when testing AI and separate vaporware from true ROI. How do you do that? I think a lot of them can be more software-oriented and deterministic at times, but why can I not try that in a week and tell?

Many, I think, do understand. With these new roles that private equity companies hire, there are different operating partners in AI, or they'll have a few engineers who might be AI-forward, and they'll educate themselves as well. In our job, I always see the same thing in the company: it's about what we can do better. So, in a lot of these conversations...

The conversation is all about the value they’re going to get and what they can see tangibly now. It’s not demos. We’ll pull up and show a live deployment, right? If it’s working and I have it, why can’t I just show you what this customer is making? We’ve made, so far, I think over $600 million for our customers that has been generated from AI-handled interactions.

Show that. How does it work? How are real-world customers interacting with this technology? Once you do that, they also get educated and can guide their companies. Still, it doesn’t take away the notion that you have to have a direct relationship with the company, because private equity is more about guidance for the companies they own. There aren’t many times where you can just shove things down the throats of the companies, but you can be a good counselor and a good adviser on what to check for.

Sarah Guo

Yeah, it seems like a lot of private equity shops, as well, have shifted from the ’80s style—come in, do big layoffs, take apart a conglomerate—to much more of your point: How do you optimize value or increase the value of something?

I will say, though, that the first conversations are still always 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 how you’re going to make net-new revenue. That is new. You have to actually start that conversation. You have to show them tangible examples, because otherwise it still focuses on, “How do we get to the bottom line and cut some costs?” But they have to almost expand their horizon on thinking about what else is possible with AI. It would be pretty sad if we used AI only for cost-cutting.

Sarah Guo

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Sure. What, outside of what Netic is doing, are you most excited about in terms of the future of AI?

I’m really excited about my personal story. When I didn’t have access to anything, one of the technologies that helped me was finding 1 or 2 people who had graduated from my high school to read some of my essays or look at my work and give feedback. I would Facebook Messenger them, and it was just being able to talk when they were in the U.S. at colleges and I was in Turkey. It was pretty crazy.

I’ll give the answer of education, because I think it will change so many lives of people who otherwise would not even think this world exists. I’m personally really excited about that, and no one will be limited anymore. Everything you want to learn and everything you want to do is in your pocket, right? We made the world a lot more about agency, which I’m excited about, and I cannot wait to see that unfold.

Sarah Guo

Yeah, it’s very exciting. I think one big lesson for me is that you can just go do stuff. You don’t need permission, you don’t need to learn everything—you can just go do things.

But you know, that makes it also a little bit scary. When you see people not doing stuff, 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 stays with the choice you have to make. We keep making it easier and easier to make that choice, but still, I guarantee you the majority of the world will not be making that choice. It’s something to think about a little bit more negatively.

I’m 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’m really excited about is that, in America and generally right now, the mainstream conversation about AI is very negative.

With the use cases I’m working on, it’s many times people’s worst day in their lives, and they really need help. How do we make sure that they get help? Or in education, or being able to look at your health records and really understand them? I was recently using the health feature and trying to understand how I could sleep better, and there’s no answer. It’s, “You’ve 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. People’s first interaction with AI won’t only be about why X, Y, and Z is going away or jobs are going away, but about the positive impact of AI. That’s what I’m more excited about in terms of the conversation in the world.

Sarah Guo

Amazing. Thank you so much for joining us today, Melisa. It was a pleasure.

Thank you for having me.