Maya Mikhailov and cofounder Alex Muller were regularly walking a trail in San Francisco.
They had walked this same trail every day, and it was getting a little boring. So they decided to walk the trail backwards—start at the end of the path—and, as Mikhailov notes, “all of a sudden you see a whole new view. It was in that moment that Alex asked, ‘What if people are doing A.I. wrong?’”
That one question led them to explore another possibility: “What if we could flip the whole problem on its head and start with business goals?” And that’s the moment that led Muller and Mikhailov to begin their next venture, Savvi AI, a platform that enables product teams to build, launch, and manage A.I. apps.
What was your “aha moment” for founding Savvi?
We had been building A.I. products for Synchrony for three years, and decided that we wanted to take a little bit of a break and figure out what to do next. We knew we wanted to build something, but didn’t know what it was.
So when Alex asked me that question and I saw that crazy twinkle in his eye, I knew that we were going to go on this journey again. I didn’t know if I was prepared to, because I had wanted to really decompress from building a company for a decade, selling that company to a Fortune 50 bank, and becoming an executive.
Even though I wanted to take more of a break, in my heart of hearts, I was like, “Damn, you’re right. This needs to be built. This needs to be out in the world.”
What is your biggest challenge?
It’s not a technology challenge, it’s a mind-shift challenge. If everyone has told you that things need to be done in a certain way, with a certain process, with certain specialists, and then someone comes along and says, “It doesn’t have to be that way,” it requires a shift in mindset.
The people I admire the most looked at an industry that looked very well established and they asked, “What if it didn’t have to be that way?”
I think the investment community is such that it’s made up of pattern recognition and quick conviction. So when a pattern becomes ingrained, it’s harder to shift and say, “What if that pattern is wrong? Why is this the only pattern?”
What is one fun fact about you that people may not know?
I was once in a movie called Sorry, Haters as an extra, and I have an IMDb credit as “Socialite #3.”
The Fortune Founders Forum is a community of entrepreneurs chosen by Fortune’s editorial team to participate at the annual Brainstorm Tech conference, which took place in Deer Valley, Utah, in July. Our inaugural cohort was selected based on a variety of factors, including the potential impact of their companies, and reflected a diversity of geographies, sectors, and demographics.
