In early 2023, Keith Peiris’s AI-powered presentation startup Tome was growing quickly. It had become the fastest productivity tool to reach 1 million users, Forbes reported at the time, a number that eventually climbed to 25 million. He raised $80 million from top Silicon Valley investors like Lightspeed Venture Partners, Coatue, Greylock and billionaire Reid Hoffman.But by late 2024, Peiris realized he was building the wrong company. It turned out that most people didn’t want to pay for its tools, which generated beautiful slides within minutes. Tome’s users, mainly students and small business owners, were largely on free plans or paying $10 monthly subscriptions—not nearly enough to sustain the business. And the startup couldn’t quite crack the market for professionals like marketers and salespeople because it wasn’t connected to their data and did not have the context needed to make good presentations. Users were still growing, but the company’s annual revenue plateaued at around just $3 million. “Being frank about Tome, our technology thesis and our cultural thesis was very immature,” Peiris admits now. With about half of Tome’s funding still in the bank and lots of GPU capacity on reserve, Peiris decided to pivot. “We were looking at this being like, ‘There's no way that we've missed the boat in year two here. We've got a great team, a lot of capital. Why don't we try again?’” he says. So Peiris turned to billionaire Stewart Butterfield— who had twice turned his failed attempts at starting gaming companies into iconic businesses like Slack and Flickr— for “great sage advice” on pivoting. Butterfield told him to start fresh with a team small enough that it could be fed with two large pizzas. More importantly, Butterfield said, Peiris needed enough customer traction on a new product to keep investors and employees too busy to talk about the old days. In March 2025, Peiris shut down Tome and laid off most of his 70 employees, leaving a team of six. Eight months later, he launched Lightfield, AI software that helps salespeople with busywork like summarizing calls, writing follow up emails and keeping track of client interactions. “We've got a great team, a lot of capital. Why don't we try again?”