Dilani Kahawala has three kids, a partner with a busy job in tech, and a startup to run. At the dinner table, with twenty minutes to get the kids fed, all too often she’d be thinking about what goes in tomorrow’s lunchboxes and planning logistics for the week ahead, rather than simply being present with her kids. That’s the mental load that Anna, the AI assistant for parents, was designed to carry.
Dilani path to co-founding a startup was a winding one. She got a PhD in theoretical physics, before deciding physics and academia moved too slowly for her tastes. Following a stint at McKinsey, and working product roles at Etsy, Meta and Atlassian, she co-founded a company and developed Braid, an AI powered tool designed to help software teams with project management. After deciding Braid didn’t have product market fit, the team went through a period of rapid exploration, experimenting with eight or nine different product ideas in a five month period. After gaining strong early traction, Anna was the idea that stuck.
In this episode, Kate Glazebrook sits down with Dilani about the decision to move away from using frontier models in favour of open source AI models, how the Anna team internally leverage AI agents “up the wazoo”, the surprising fact that most of their users eschew the Anna app in favour of communicating with Anna directly in messaging apps, and why Dilani isn't too worried about OpenAI launching a parent product.
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