14.ai Dispatch #19
SF Tech Week meets startup therapy: competitions, conversations, and customer feedback that finally gets acted on.
There are two wolves inside everybody: typing tournaments and sound baths.
And a third wolf (or gastrointestinal issue) being e-commerce support that actually scales.
🥇 The Great Founder Type-Off
Every founder says they move fast. Few can prove it at 120 words per minute.
We hosted a typing competition where caffeine met hubris, and discovered that engineers are just athletes with lower vitamin D.
Highlights included:
Two near-fights over autocorrect.
One keyboard so loud it was legally a percussion instrument.
Several instances of “teh”
Speed impresses investors. Accuracy keeps the lights on.
Thanks to everyone who showed up and made it fun.
❤️ Customer love: Bolna (YC F25)
Tired of “please hold”? Bolna isn’t.
They just launched a multilingual, lightning-fast support experience powered by 14.ai, delivering context-aware answers in multiple Indian languages and drawing real insights straight from their docs and product.
Huge shoutout to Prateek Sachan, co-founder at Bolna (YC F25), and Pavan Kapoor, for the kind words and for moving at record speed.
Proud to help power customer conversations that actually work.
👉 Try it live at bolna.ai.
🌙 YC women founders sound bath
We called it a sound bath. It turned into a customer support séance.
What started with a simple ticket escalated dramatically.
It was really a live demonstration of customer support in 4D.
Ten minutes later, half the room was humming “please hold.” Somewhere in there, someone achieved spiritual alignment.
Thank you to everyone who joined!
🧠 Workshop recap: Turning conversations into growth
Dan Melnick, founder & CEO of Zing, joined us live from Austin to explain how 100+ brands turn customer rage into retention - and why 3 a.m. DMs matter.
Takeaways:
Fast replies make money. Slow ones make Reddit threads.
Founders should do their own support early (for humility).
Automation is good until it calls your VIP customer “bro.”
Thank you, Dan!
👀The new Mr.Beast video looks INSANE
🧭 Next week: Feedback fatigue anonymous
Everyone “values feedback” until it shows up in a 600-row spreadsheet.
Join us and Nimesh Chakravarthi, co-founder of Edgedive (YC F24), for a group therapy session on turning feedback into advantage instead of trauma.
We’ll cover:
Why connecting support, sales, and product isn’t a crime.
How tagging helps you realize 80% of tickets are vibes.
Making sure insights cause change instead of another dashboard
📆 Thursday, Oct 16, 9 am PT
📸 In case you scrolled past it
Build, run, repeat: The 14.ai unofficial dress code, featuring code commits and cardio sessions.
Customer support trends 2025: 14.ai was featured in a new industry report on how AI-native platforms are redefining modern support.
Newsletter chaos: Marie explained why ours works best when it’s messy, human, and occasionally in all caps.
Bold swings: Michael explained why he left France to build in the U.S.
SF reality check: Brains, money, and broken sidewalks in the same city.
💬 Book a chat bot chat
If your current bot can’t handle “hi,” let’s talk.
🧳 Cool jobs at 14.ai (and friends)
🛠️ Founding Engineer @ 14.ai (San Francisco)
💻DevOps Support Engineer @ Porter
⚙️ Customer Success Manager @ Finley (San Francisco, New York, Remote)
DM us if you have a job to put here...
📚 What we’re reading (so you don’t have to)
Marie: Tobi Lütke is still captivated by internet commerce, 20 years later, Stripe
Matthew: From Virtual Threads to Distributed ETL with Effect & Cluster, Hugo Mufraggi
Maya: An Empirical Study of the Anchoring Effect in LLMs: Existence, Mechanism, and Potential Mitigations, Huang et al.
Michael: Interacting with Thoughtful AI, Liu et al., 2025
Ugo: A Conversation with Sam and Jony, OpenAI
🫡 Until next week: keep your keyboards fast, your conversions faster, and your customers happily clicking “add to cart.”
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