Clintin Lyle Kruger

10 years ago I made a decision that changed my life. When I quit my finance job to teach English in South Korea, I asked myself 4 questions: 1. What's the worst that can happen? I'd spend a year abroad, learn a new language, and come back with a completely different perspective. Even the "worst case" would push me out of my comfort zone and force me to grow. 2. What's the best case scenario? I'd break out of the conveyor belt my peers were on (banks, hedge funds, same path). I'd actually expand my horizons instead of settling into an office at 21. 3. Is this reversible? Finance jobs weren't going anywhere. I could always go back to the traditional path if it didn’t work out. But the window to take risks before life gets complicated? That was closing. 4. Will I regret this? Definitely not! I'd regret playing it safe rather than taking the risk. That decision led to everything: a university scholarship, an MBA, meeting my wife, corporate training for Hyundai, building an AI education business in Thailand, working in customer success at @TheRundownAI and now at @Chatbase as the first sales hire. Most “risky” decisions aren’t that risky when you actually break them down.

Everyone thinks Travis Kalanick just pivoted into robotics. That is what they want you to believe. Ghost kitchens. Pandemic hype. The Uber guy who got pushed out and decided to rent kitchen space to delivery brands. Easy to laugh at. But he stayed with it for 8 years. Now he is launching Atoms, building wheeled robots for food, logistics, and mining. No humanoids or viral demos. Just machines doing real work. And the part many miss to see is: CloudKitchens did not die. It became the foundation for Atoms. No press tour. No manifesto. Just building. I keep thinking about that because I have watched people quit early. Month 6, maybe month 8. Nothing works, nobody cares, so they start over. Same reset. The surface area of luck does not work when you keep going back to zero. Kalanick got fired from his own company at 40. Most would have taken the money and disappeared. He built something people laughed at and stuck with it for nearly a decade. You have to respect the math here. Eight years of compounding beats starting over again and again. Same way Yasser Elsaid, who just kept building and building, bootstrapped Chatbase to $8million ARR in 3 years.

@Dkpower33 @ronmortgageguy Gotcha. Yeah for first home I think it makes more sense to wait for now, hopefully until rates start coming down and prices correct a bit more

@Lyle_AI @ronmortgageguy He's talking about the renewal wave. Very little buying going on at the moment

2 - Yr & 3 - Yr Canada Bond Yields RIPPING Fixed 2 & 3 Yr Mortgage Rates Will Keep Rising BTW "Ripping" in the Mortgage business is "Oh look, went up a bit" in other businesses But as I posted a few days ago: if you CAN lock in a 3 or 5 Yr Fixed Rate below 4% I would do it

@TakoTreba Yoooo Sandra you gotta up your game ;)

Random question, but what’s your interest speed?

The kid didn’t care about AI. He just wanted to know where his rugby boots were. That is how I imagine explaining Chatbase to a room of 12 year olds He’s 12. Season starts in 3 days. His parents finally bought him a brand new pair. They still haven’t shown up. Now he’s stressed. So he does what anyone would do. He goes to the website to check. And it’s a nightmare. Random products all over the page. Too many buttons. Pop-ups in his face. Ten places to click, none of them helpful. He’s about two seconds away from giving up. Then he sees the little chat icon in the bottom right corner. He clicks it and types, “Where are my shoes?” That’s it. The Chatbase agent asks for the product id, his name, and his email. A few seconds later, it gives him the answer he was trying to find the whole time. "They’re arriving tonight at 7:20pm." Done. Now he’s not sitting there annoyed at a bad website. He’s thinking about next week. About getting on the field. About playing in those new boots. That’s @chatbase . You ask a simple question, and it gives you a simple answer. No digging through the site, opening 15 tabs, or guessing. Just the answer you needed, right when you needed it.

The kid didn’t care about AI. He just wanted to know where his rugby boots were. That is how I imagine explaining Chatbase to a room of 12 year olds He’s 12. Season starts in 3 days. His parents finally bought him a brand new pair. They still haven’t shown up. Now he’s stressed. So he does what anyone would do. He goes to the website to check. And it’s a nightmare. Random products all over the page. Too many buttons. Pop-ups in his face. Ten places to click, none of them helpful. He’s about two seconds away from giving up. Then he sees the little chat icon in the bottom right corner. He clicks it and types, “Where are my shoes?” That’s it. The Chatbase agent asks for the product id, his name, and his email. A few seconds later, it gives him the answer he was trying to find the whole time. "They’re arriving tonight at 7:20pm." Done. Now he’s not sitting there annoyed at a bad website. He’s thinking about next week. About getting on the field. About playing in those new boots. That’s @chatbase . You ask a simple question, and it gives you a simple answer. No digging through the site, opening 15 tabs, or guessing. Just the answer you needed, right when you needed it.

Where are you on that spectrum right now?

The people who refuse to touch AI are going to get lapped. The people who think AI replaces the human part entirely are going to produce forgettable work. The ones who win are somewhere in the middle. Using AI to move faster, then bringing in real people to make it land.

Most people hear "AI music" and picture soulless garbage. Nope. A producer going by "Kage" built a fictional Japanese metal band called Neon Oni using Suno. AI-generated tracks. AI-generated music videos. Fictional member bios.

You don't get a greater visionary than Steve Jobs.

Simple but incredibly effective. Don't wait for the perfect conditions. A messy start is the perfect condition.

@yasser_elsaid_ @chatbase Let’s gooo!!

.@Chatbase just turned 3. I started building Chatbase in college when I was deep into AI before chatgpt even launched. I saw early that every business would eventually need an AI agent to talk to their customers. 3 years later: 10,000+ customers. $8M ARR. more enterprise deals closing weekly than we did in the first 2 years combined. And a team I'm very proud of and excited to be working with. A few months ago there was a study saying that most enterprise deployments of AI fail. That hasn't been the case for Chatbase. Customer facing AI agents work. Our customers connect their CRMs, help desk, payment systems, and handle real customer conversations end to end. Production ready. Year 4 is about Chatbase becoming a household name. Every company will need an AI agent for their customers, and more and more of them are going to realize Chatbase is the best choice. Grateful for every customer and teammate who's been part of this.

Most people think experience protects them. I used to think that too. When I landed in Seoul at 21, I had no idea what I was doing. No real resume. No plan. Just a tennis racket and a coaching job I probably didn’t deserve yet. First week on court I remember standing there thinking I might get exposed. Kids speaking Korean. Parents watching from the side. Other coaches who had been doing this for years. They looked like they had everything under control. I didn’t. Every night I went back to my apartment replaying the day in my head. What drill worked. What didn’t. Which kid lost focus. Why the timing of the session felt off. Some days I felt like I was stealing a living. The coaches who had been there longer were good. Way more experienced than me. But they were running the same sessions they had run for years. Same drills. Same pace. Same routines. I was the only one trying new things because I was scared of being the weak link. Over time that gap started to close. Not because I suddenly became more talented. I was just learning faster because I had no comfort to fall back on. Today I heard Rajeev Rajan from Atlassian say something that brought me right back to that period. He said the edge may not belong to the most senior person anymore. It goes to whoever learns to direct AI the fastest. I felt that in my stomach a bit. Because I know what it’s like to be the least experienced person in the room hoping nobody notices. Right now AI is doing the same thing to a lot of industries. The junior person experimenting every night is going to catch the senior person who thinks their past experience is enough. Not because the junior is smarter. Because they’re still uncomfortable. I’ve found discomfort is usually where the learning happens. Comfort is where people stop paying attention.

Happy go-lucky is the best way to live life. Insatiable curiosity, thrill and joy in everything you do

And sometimes the opportunity ends up sitting with the person who was stubborn enough to keep working on the idea long after everyone else got distracted by the trend.

Then he walked away from one of the best positions in AI to actually build the thing he’d been talking about. That’s the move most people never make. Having a belief is one thing. Leaving the comfortable seat to go prove it is something else entirely.

A few years ago I remember watching interviews with Yann LeCun where he kept repeating the same idea. Large language models weren’t the endgame.