The moment you stop accepting “that’s just how it works” is the moment breakthrough innovation begins.
Most companies reason by analogy, by assumptions, locked into the way that other people have been doing things. And over time, those assumptions turn into bloated systems, stale strategies and limited growth.
At Vendasta, we reject that incrementalism. We strip problems down to first principles, the foundational truths beneath the noise, and then rebuild from the ground up, not from habit. This approach fuels our 10X thinking, the kind of thinking that births breakthrough products and shapes every decision, product design, goal, and accountability measure we set. It’s why our ambitions are unconstrained by precedent and why we’re committed to changing the very surface area of what is possible in SMB technology distribution.
We don’t follow a playbook, and we don’t optimize someone else’s solution. We aim to rewire the ecosystem entirely. True innovation demands questioning the questions themselves, that’s where you discover the fundamental truths others overlook, unlocking a path to radical improvement and fresh discovery. It means focusing relentlessly on what moves the needle, cutting through busy work, shattering constraints through innovation, and making bold, transformative goals non-negotiable.
This same moonshot instinct, the relentless pursuit of what others say can’t be done, is what has consistently driven innovation here at Vendasta.
The Bold 10X question we ask every day
To build products and services that actually matter to our partners and their customers, we insist on asking a simple yet audacious question:
“What would it take to make this ten times better, faster, or more affordable?”
We ground that question in reality with three steps.
- We do not accept the current approach as a given.
We absolutely refuse to emulate industry patterns unless they survive a first principles review. Our approach is to start with the customer experience and work backwards. That’s Day 1 thinking. You begin by imagining the future headline, the press release you’d be proud of, and you build only what serves that vision. This discipline protects us from falling into the trap of past optimization and forces big, bold bets that matter for the long haul. - Run bold experiments with clear upside and stop rules.
We encourage experiments that carry real payoff, even if they carry risk. We attack the riskiest assumption head-on, on a small surface, measuring outcomes that actually move the needle. Every test comes with a clear stop rule. We learn, we pivot, and we either scale or shut down without remorse. - Set order of magnitude goals and compound them.
Third, we set goals that move the world; in powers of ten, 10%, then stack gains over time. For AI, that means aiming for million fold capability over a multi-year horizon by compounding improvements in algorithms, chips, data, and computation.
This process sounds obvious. It isn’t easy. But it’s worth every ounce of effort. That’s how moonshots happen.
How First principles thinking shows up in our products; Conversations AI and the end of missed calls.
I am a staunch believer of solving real problems, not just symptoms.
We noticed that 60% of small business customers prefer calling when ready to book a service, yet on average, 45% of those inbound calls go unanswered. Traditional solutions call for better call forwarding, longer ring times, more voicemail prompts, even though the data is blunt and callers hate IVRs and abandon at high rates.
Questioning Everything We Knew About Customer Communication
When we aimed to differentiate in a crowded market, we didn’t mimic competitors. We started by asking a fundamental question. Why do missed calls happen, and what do customers truly need?
The core truth we uncovered was responsiveness. Identifying this truth led us to reinvent from the ground up. Instead of asking “How can we slightly improve call handling?” we asked, “What if no business ever missed a conversation again, and the experience still felt undeniably human?
Building from the Ground Up: Conversations AI
Conversations AI was the breakthrough born from that first-principles thinking. An AI-powered voice and web chat system that ensures businesses never miss a customer conversation.
Key decisions steered what we wanted out of Conversations AI. Recognizing the need to deliver the empathy and intelligence customers crave without the limitations of human availability, we designed Conversations AI to mimic the personality, empathy and warmth of human conversations. We came up with custom capabilities that allowed businesses to train their AI employee on their proprietary data and instill their tone and voice, while keeping the replies tight and on-brand with intent checks, entity capture, and hard guardrails for accuracy and safety.
Importantly, if the AI doesn’t understand or the issue is complex, it gracefully escalates to a human operator, including transferring the call or alerting a staff member to jump in. We also bypassed vanity metrics like calls handled and questions answered, and chose to measure what truly drives business outcomes: appointments booked, inquiries that turn into sales, real revenue generated. The result feels human, not like a phone tree, and it moves the conversation to a booking or a clear next step.
The Courage to Test in the Real World
We didn’t spend years perfecting Conversations AI in isolation. We partnered with brave business owners through our Fast Track program and put the system into real operations from day one. Our partners became co-inventors, surfacing challenges and features we never anticipated: seamless call transfer, no integration with Shopify, bilingual customer needs, seasonal pricing complexities. We instrumented everything. This is how we co-created conversations with AI with the people who understood the problems most intimately.
The First Principles Advantage
As leaders, our job isn’t to optimize the status quo. The success of Conversations AI, from agencies eager to resell it to local businesses who swear by it, comes from the power of that first-principles foundation: Not accepting false choices, but reimagining what’s possible when you combine the best of multiple worlds.
These Same First Principles shape how we operate Everyday at Vendasta
1. Goal setting by orders of magnitude
At Vendasta, we set goals in powers of ten. We borrow from the 10X discipline popularized at Google and ask for step changes, not tidy tweaks, because small targets trap you in yesterday’s logic. We write goals that change customer reality, cut time to first response from minutes to seconds, collapse fulfillment from days to hours, and help partners launch services in hours instead of weeks. This approach compounds. A series of two-fold and five-fold improvements across algorithms, data quality, and compute stack into orders of magnitude, exactly what AI scaling research and budget-optimized training predict. We anchor every goal to tangible outcomes that our customers feel and rely on.
2. Decision speed and the cost of delay
We are biased to decisions that teach us fast because delay is expensive, often pricier than a wrong turn. We treat choices like Bezos’ doors: if it’s reversible, we move with a lightweight process and about 70 percent of the info, then correct quickly. If it’s a one-way door, we slow down, test assumptions harder, and involve more voices. Either way, we decide, instrument the outcome, and review what the data says, not what we wish it said. We run small, real experiments instead of science projects.
3. Culture that rewards bold work
Behavior is what you celebrate, so we celebrate the teams willing to challenge assumptions, cut deadweight processes, and ship what others might avoid because it matters. Every Friday, at our all-hands, this comes alive: people share their boldest wins, or even losses, through demos or metrics that move the needle. The whole company rallies behind those moments; this ritual fuels our momentum.
The compounding effect
Exponential progress rarely feels magical at the moment. Instead, it emerges from relentlessly stacking fundamental improvements exactly where they matter most. Each advance, whether it’s a smarter AI model trained on better data, a more insightful prompt, a faster chip optimized with superior task scheduling, or an interface redesigned to cut unnecessary clicks, may seem incremental on its own. But together, these refinements change the shape of the entire performance curve.
The real impact of first principles thinking unfolds over time, compounding through improved systems, workflows, and feedback loops. We set ambitious horizons decades ahead but break our journey into actionable steps we can deliver now. Each small innovation cuts away waste, collapses inefficient handoffs, and teaches software to shoulder more responsibility with greater intelligence.
You experience the true compounding effect when a task that once consumed an entire day happens before you’ve finished your coffee. Those efficiency gains transform behaviors and expectations so profoundly that going back becomes impossible. First principles thinking gives you the framework to rebuild from core truths, creating structural improvements that cascade across technology, teams, and culture.
This is how we run Vendasta. This is how we plan to keep building for you.