From Uber to AI-powered ecommerce

A week in AI is like a year in other industries. I hope these issues become your weekly source of AI information, inspiration, and ideas. If we haven’t met before, I’m Amanda Smith. I write about AI, the current zeitgeist, and the fascinating folks who are building in this brave new world. 

Good morning. Some of my favorite founders have cut their teeth in Silicon Valley, but got a bad taste for big tech. Even in the most ambitious companies like Uber, some founders get the itch to start their own thing. 

What’s special about this week’s story is how this founder focuses on using AI to support the backbone of the American economy: small businesses. 

Enjoy the read.

Trending in AI right now:

Ronak Trivedi got his first taste of big tech right out of school, in his time at Microsoft. While it was a privilege to see what a trillion-dollar company looks like behind closed doors, big tech wasn’t for him. 

In 2015, in the early days of Uber, Trivedi landed a role to work alongside co-founder, Travis Kalanick, to build UberPOOL, which was only in a handful of cities at the time. 

Kalanick took Trivedi under his wing, and it was here that he cut his teeth in the world of start-ups and Silicon Valley. It was a career-defining time, but not for the reasons you might expect. Trivedi had an epiphany: Uber reinvented infrastructure for transportation… and many other industries were ripe for disruption. 

Trivedi followed the Uber co-founder to his next venture, Cloud Kitchens (which was reinventing infrastructure for food and restaurants), but soon enough got the itch to incubate his own company. 

Trivedi had a friend who wanted to start a watch brand. He’d periodically check in on him, but the friend was still tinkering six months later. In that time, Trivedi, who was used to the speed of execution in the tech world, had a realization: That MVP mentality didn’t exist in the physical world, which is most of the American economy. What if we could reinvent small business ecommerce? 

“If you have a business idea, you should be able to very quickly bring that business to market. You should be able to find factories and designers, get it into a warehouse, and ship it around the world,” Trivedi said. 

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Enter Pietra. Think of all the steps required to create, ship and market a product – that’s what Pietra does. Mom-and-pop businesses through to celebrity brands use it. 

This was pre-AI. Pietra had a big break during the pandemic, by putting software inside factories in China and India. 

Then AI came on the scene. 

“We went from ‘thanks Pietra, we now have the software and infrastructure we need to operate a business’, to now, can I just deploy these agents to run my business for me?”

“Let’s say you want to launch your own line of onesies for babies. You probably would’ve had to wait 12 months and invest $100,000 before someone took you seriously. Now, with Pietra, you can design 200 concepts, turn them into technical specifications, deploy an AI agent to find the factories and negotiate with them, and send you an email when you have a quote for a custom sample… all in 30 minutes.”

A user can literally ask Pietra to find a factory that works with Nike. They have their vetted factories, but the AI will still give the user factories that aren’t in Pietra’s verified network that they should know about. There’s no gatekeeping. Pietra gives every factory in the network their own AI agent to help facilitate international business. Auto translation features help facilitate international business, especially for those who aren’t native English speakers. “We help business owners around the world get access to things they previously wouldn’t have.” 

“We aggregate all the models. What we found out is different models have different strengths and weaknesses. It’s not right out of the box GPT5, Claude or Gemini. It’s actually all the models and a lot of these sub models underneath that do very specific things really well. We integrate all of them as a company and fine-tune them for e-commerce,” Trivedi said. 

This is an important lesson for other founders, not to ignore the potential of the smaller models or get too dogmatic about one particular tool. 

Because Pietra is reinventing the infrastructure of ecommerce, leaning into one model likely wasn’t going to cut it. Beyond speeding up sourcing and fulfillment, it can also do cool things like helping find influencers and affiliates. “It can read all of TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and ping all these data sources to analyze their videos, comments, and communities. Within 45 seconds, it can find 25 awesome beauty influencers in New York City at this engagement rate, with their emails and outreach messages ready to go.” 

Trivedi predicts we’ll see more factories going direct to customers. This will continue to upend vehicles like drop shipping, as the AI-empowered factory operators realize they don’t need the middlemen. 

He believes AI isn’t making the rich richer and the poor poorer. Rather, the floor is being raised. Pietra’s growth strategy is more philosophical than practical, connecting to the universal desire of wanting to own our own futures. “The ultimate hack is tapping into this latent distaste for corporate America. It doesn’t take a lot to meaningfully change someone’s life with a second type of income. The middle school teacher who launches their own candle line that is by objective standards not a huge business but could double her yearly salary.” 

That’s what he reminds the folks at the OpenAI offices, where he frequents. “The true value of AI is much more wholesome” than the headlines. 

Now, a mother-daughter duo with a store in a small town can have the equivalent firepower as a team of 30 – they’re just digital workers that exist through AI. 

However, Trivedi says AI will never replace creativity. “I remind everyone that you can’t go to AI and say, ‘make me a million-dollar business’ and it just spits something out. It’s derivative and execution focused.” 

AI is not going to have novel thoughts anytime soon.

If something here speaks to you, I’d love to hear it.

Until next week,
Amanda

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