Summary
Latent Space sits down with Yasser Elsaid, founder of Chatbase, to mark the company’s $10 million ARR milestone—reached three years after Elsaid built the first version as a CS student in Canada, launching to just 16 Twitter followers in early 2023 before ChatGPT had launched. The origin story covers how Elsaid discovered retrieval-augmented generation (then unnamed) while calling GPT-3’s API in late 2022, recognized that no product had turned the technique into a self-serve interface, and dropped out of university to ship Chatbase in roughly six weeks.
The conversation explores how Chatbase survived waves of competition from ChatGPT plugins, Sierra, and dozens of lookalike products by staying focused on a self-serve B2B distribution model and building deep customization features rather than chasing consumer virality. Elsaid shares specifics from the company’s internal “GTM manifesto,” including a shift from 50/50 experimentation versus scaling-what-works to an 80/20 ratio in favor of proven channels, and details an ongoing global customer video series with stops in Paris, Las Vegas, Toronto, New York, and San Francisco—featuring customers such as the screen-time app Opal and F45 Hong Kong.
The discussion also traces the evolution of the RAG ecosystem from 4,000-token context windows in 2022 to today’s long-context frontier models, and how early hallucination problems shaped Chatbase’s approach to guardrails. Elsaid reflects on the $1-in, more-than-$1-out growth equation that now drives the company’s reinvestment decisions.
📺 Source: Latent Space · Published May 02, 2026
🏷️ Format: Interview
