founder @tomaauto (yc, a16z), just keep going..
San Francisco, CA
Joined October 2008
- Tweets 10,488
- Following 172
- Followers 11,101
- Likes 84
Monik Pamecha retweeted
For early-stage startups, viral marketing is often a mistake. The same goes for heavy paid marketing. You might get a lot of views, but not the right ones.
What usually happens is that you miss the true early adopters, the people who would actually love your still-in-progress product. Instead, you attract people who discovered you through hype, try the product out of curiosity, don’t find it ready yet, and leave. Your retention tanks, you get demoralized, and you might even pivot for the wrong reasons.
I think chasing “fastest to X ARR” or similar milestones is the wrong goal. Your aim isn’t to hit the biggest number this quarter, it’s to build something enduring and exceptional over the next decade.
There are no shortcuts. Hype, huge launches often end up in failure. You can’t skip straight from zero to mass late adopters.
You have to learn from your early users, iterate, and grow with them. Keep launching, many times. Expand the ICP, go up market, do whatever, but keep the focus and keep refining the "right" customer.
Congrats @zmzlois!
finally got my O1-A approved and tell the world that i am an extraordinary alien!
after working in @TomaAuto for three months I can finally say it in public that i love this place and the people.
me: i can probably make bundlers work
@blandthony: hired
me: ???
turned out real time context engineering at runtime it's not far off from micro frontend if we strip off the masquerade fluff (less DNS, less CDN)
want to drop a couple reasons of why i really love this place here:
tldr - chaotic good
- things i found extremely attractive: things you see in devtool corps to manipulate node.js, streaming (we just spent the weekend reading , strings, network, I/O -- weird, hacky things to make things work -- you can see them here
- this is not just another voice AI company which wraps voice AI dev tools, we self-host and manage everything if we can, hand-written audio mixing from scratch, onnx runtime, deepgram, temporal server, cluster...you name it. eval? it's just an endpoint.
- crafted function calling ( # the function guy from @scale_AI ;) before it even existed and now it sits in the nice middle ground between the standards of OpenAI function tool calls and MCP
- we listen to each other and super open to constructive feedback
- you have a lot of freedom to explore and to push your limit
- we love sports!!!
- slack never went off at peak hours
- fun, young, diverse
who would have thought? the girl from a no-name town in China - i thought they have a bundler + runtime issue need to solve (we do indeed), now solving some of the hardest problems in the voice AI industry as difficult as companies like Vapi
If you are extremely good at some sports, served in the army, loves low level primitives (office bible: THE LINUX PROGRAMMING INTERFACE) - I'D LOVE TO SEE YOU JOIN US
1. Turn on memories for chatgpt
2. Ask for constructive criticism on yourself with reasoning + evidence
3. Get your mind blown
Monik Pamecha retweeted
Look, say what you will about it, but right click editing a PHP file in an FTP client with upload-on-save is still the tightest and fastest feedback loop I've ever had in my life. We actually don't know how to do this anymore as an industry.
Monik Pamecha retweeted
Some vendors are pitching AI as a “set it and forget it” solution in auto retail.
Early use cases are showing that dealer input and context remain critical for performance.
@monikkinom, CEO of @TomaAuto, and Brian Hoang, CEO of @mialabsinc, break down how AI is being shaped by real-world dealership adoption.
"One of the things that they mention is like: you just set it and forget it, you will never have to touch it, and it will just print money for you. That does not work, you have to put effort into the tool."
" You understand your business more than anyone else. The tool needs that information and context to perform well. If you give it, you'll see crazy results."
"The potential for these roles to evolve is coming, but it's not quite there yet. So if somebody comes in and they kind of feed off of your hunger to just eliminate all the staff, and save up on this SG&A, I would be very careful with how you evaluate the product."
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Thank you to our partner @DealerPay! Check them out by visiting dealer-pay.com/
On a @TomaAuto eng interview
Q: Vim or Emacs?
A: You an unk bro?
@TomaAuto is transforming the $200B car dealership industry, but the path @monikkinom and @blandthony took to get there was nothing BUT easy.
Here's the untold story of how they:
🔹 Spent a year and half in pivot hell, grinding through 16 different ideas
🔹 Refused to quit and eventually got into @ycombinator
🔹 Started with a horizontal platform but couldn't find any hair on fire problems
🔹 Did the "Collison install" by flying to dealerships, answering phones, fixing workflows, and ended up at backyard barbecues with their customers
Check it out now 👇
Monik Pamecha retweeted
We built in an unfamiliar, uncomfortable domain inside car dealerships because we saw what was broken and how we could fix it.
Since YC, we’ve been heads-down in the lab building out our AI agents to perform for dealerships when it matters most.
Now, with 100+ dealerships using @TomaAuto and the beginnings of a go-to-market engine brewing, I couldn’t be more elated for the future.
As we march forward, I’ll always hold a fond memory of our deep dive into the dealership domain. We wrote, shipped, and debugged code live in the field while advisors answered calls next to us. Most importantly, we sat and listened before ever touching a coding terminal.
As always, I would like to extend my sincere thanks to the team at @ycombinator and @a16z for their belief in us, and to our customers for entrusting us to speak on their behalf.
We’re hiring experienced engineers who want to build on top of our in-house voice and agent orchestration layers to solve tangible problems for a critical industry.
If that’s you, check out our open roles 👇
And delight to watch @blandthony destroy folks on Smash. If you think you are good, reconsider
Monik Pamecha retweeted
The Hunt For Auto Tech's Next Unicorn: Why Silicon Valley Is Betting On Toma—And What It Means For Dealers
My conversation with Monik Pamecha, CEO of @TomaAuto :
Grateful for our investors @a16z (@seema_amble , @omooretweets) with @ycombinator (@t_blom , @mwseibel ), @flexcapital (@auren), @jonsidd , @krishnanvijay from @turingcom , @yossijlevi (@GuyDealership ), @gokulr, #11 @LarryFitzgerald and others.
We’ve raised $17M from @a16z and @ycombinator at @TomaAuto to build the absolute best AI agents for auto dealerships.
45% of dealership calls go unanswered. We built AI agents that don’t miss a beat and provide an exceptional customer experience while getting more intelligent by the day.
We immersed ourselves in dealerships for months across the country — from Oklahoma and Mississippi, to Kentucky and California to learn and earn the right to build and we are now bringing our vision to life.
