View from the Office.

Met Brett Fischler for lattes at the Copper Mug off Bedford Ave in Brooklyn. We sat in the backyard under a canopy of trees until a deluge forced us to seek refuge inside. 

Brett is the co-founder of startup Catalist AI, a project management software tool that seeks to use generative AI to collect and organize information scattered across apps in order to generate meeting notes, status reports and operational insights. 

Brett, an engineer, met his co-founder, Samantha Stevens, a product manager, at Google. Before that, Brett had worked at Bloomberg; Samantha spent time at Tinder, and American Express.

At Google, Brett was assigned a project with Sam during his first week. She seemed to know everything. Later, he found out she had joined the week before. 

They spent half their time trying to keep track of conversations everyone was having. The notes and communications were spread across a variety of apps. They bemoaned that there had to be a better way.

It’s an experience common to product managers, most of whom use a planning tool built by Atlassian called Jira. I used Jira when I was a product manager at Bloomberg and can testify that it can be clunky.

Brett and Samantha realized that they could leverage OpenAI’s GPT models to collect and process information from a variety of sources and decided to pursue the opportunity. 

The big opportunity for project management software is to leverage AI to pull together disparate threads and anticipate what steps need to be taken next.

Brett and Sam are focusing initially on use cases for tech development. The system could, however, help manage all kinds of tasks. 

They raised money from friends and family to build a version and started to reach out to others in the ecosystem. Samantha recently gave a talk to more than 15,000 product managers about how to leverage AI in their daily roles. 

Catalist AI has several paying customers, and the company is looking to convert more trials. 

If you want to know more, Brett can be reached via LinkedIn or DM me for a warm intro.