Most people will read this page and feel a kind of friction. That's intentional—but not for the reasons you might think.
We're not another company claiming to "work hard and move fast" for intensity's sake. We've built this culture deliberately, because we're trying to solve problems that haven't been solved before. That kind of work requires a specific operating environment: high autonomy, rapid adaptation, and a bias for deriving answers rather than retrieving them.
For the right person, this is energizing. The ambiguity feels like possibility. The pace feels like momentum. The lack of playbooks feels like freedom.
For others, it feels like chaos—or worse, like rhetoric every startup claims. If that's your read, we're probably not the right fit for each other. No hard feelings.
This page exists as a courtesy: an honest picture of what every day actually looks like here. We want you to take it seriously, because we do.
Demand.io is a profitable, founder-led AI commerce company driving $1B+ in annual GMV. We're the team behind SimplyCodes (the #1 AI-powered savings tool) and Product.ai (our shopping intelligence assistant that verifies claims instead of summarizing noise).
The internet is broken. You can feel it before you can name it.
You ask an AI for product advice. The response is fluent, confident, comprehensive—and says nothing. You search for a review. The top results are SEO-optimized listicles from content farms that never touched the product. You try a forum. Half the posts are astroturfed. You can't tell which half.
This is the noise floor of the modern web: SEO arbitrage, marketing hallucination, and affiliate corruption have polluted information so thoroughly that signal is nearly undetectable. LLMs made it worse—they trained on the noise and now reproduce it fluently.
Product.ai is not a search engine. It's an intelligence layer for commerce—a system that adjudicates reality rather than averaging opinions. We don't predict the next token. We litigate truth across four vectors—marketing claims, physics measurements, user consensus, and proprietary transactional signal—then serve verified answers with receipts.
The core insight: We have something no one else has. Through SimplyCodes, we see what people actually buy, return, and complain about—millions of transactions that never hit the public web. When the marketing says "5-star product" and our data shows a 40% return rate, we know the truth. We see the cart abandonment, the support tickets, the re-orders. That's data the review sites never touch. This proprietary signal is what makes our verification engine defensible.
When you ask Product.ai "which camera should I buy," we don't give you ten blue links. We give you a verdict: "Buy the Sony A7IV. Here's why. Here are the tradeoffs. Here's the one reason you might not. Buy it now with the best price we've verified." Done.
The endgame: We become the "Intel Inside" for the agent economy. As AI agents proliferate—in phones, cars, enterprise systems—they need sources of verified truth they can trust. They can't afford to hallucinate in domains with economic consequences. We intend to be the API they call.
We don't make decisions by consensus, seniority, or loudest voice. We make decisions by reasoning quality.
If you're an intern and you have the clearest analysis of why we should do X instead of Y, your argument wins. If you're a VP and your reasoning has holes, you lose the argument. This sounds obvious. In practice, it's disorienting for people who've spent careers accumulating positional authority.
Every decision traces back to: What do we actually know? What are we assuming? What's the causal chain between this action and the outcome we want? If you can't articulate that chain, you don't have a decision—you have a guess dressed up as conviction.
Process is a tool, not a religion.
Most organizations calcify around processes that made sense once. Someone solved a problem, turned it into a procedure, and now everyone follows the procedure without understanding the original problem. When reality changes, the procedure becomes a liability—but no one questions it because "that's how we do things."
We treat process as temporary scaffolding. Useful when it compresses decision-making. Discarded when it doesn't. If you find yourself saying "but the process says..." you've already lost the plot. The question is always: what does reality say?
This is uncomfortable for people who like structure. There's no manual to follow. No one will tell you the "right" way to do your job. You have to figure out what needs to be true, work backward to what actions would make it true, then do those things.
Everyone claims to want "high agency" people. Here's what we actually mean:
When you hit a wall, your first instinct is to find a way around, over, or through—not to report that there's a wall. You don't wait for permission, clarification, or resources. You figure out what you can do right now with what you have.
When something goes wrong in your domain, you trace the failure back to your decisions—not circumstances, not other teams, not insufficient resources. Even when external factors contributed, you ask: What could I have built that would have been robust to those factors?
You operate on reality, not on narratives about reality. You don't confuse the map with the territory. If the data says one thing and the story says another, you trust the data and update the story.
Here's a test: When you describe your past work, do you say "I built X" or "I was responsible for X"? The first is a statement about action. The second is a statement about org chart position. We care about the first.
This environment asks a lot. Here's what you get:
Intellectual honesty cuts both ways. When your idea is wrong, you'll know fast. When your idea is right, no one blocks it for political reasons. Your work rises or falls on merit—not on who you know or how long you've been here.
You'll work alongside people who make you better. Small team, no passengers. Everyone here chose this. That creates a specific kind of camaraderie—people who've opted into the same hard thing, solving problems together that wouldn't exist at a normal company.
We actually give a damn. About your growth, your life outside work, your trajectory. High standards and human warmth aren't opposites. We hold both.
Every culture is a set of bets. Here are ours:
We've traded stability for speed. Things change fast here. The strategy you're executing might pivot based on new information. If you need to know what you'll be doing in six months, you'll be perpetually anxious.
We've traded certainty for autonomy. No one will give you a detailed spec and check your work. You own outcomes, not tasks. This means you can move fast and make real decisions. It also means you can fail in ways that matter.
We've traded comfort for growth. You will be challenged. Your ideas will be stress-tested, sometimes aggressively. We do this because we care about getting to the right answer, not about protecting anyone's ego—including yours. If you experience intellectual friction as personal attack, you'll find it exhausting. We're not trying to win arguments—we're trying to find truth. The friction is collaborative, not adversarial.
We've traded process for judgment. There's no policy manual to consult. You'll face ambiguous situations and have to make calls. If you need rules to tell you what to do, you'll feel lost.
These aren't right for everyone. They're right for us—and for a specific kind of person.
We don't want employees. We want partners. Our compensation structure reflects this.
The Philosophy: Salary solves for your life. Equity solves for your freedom. We don't mix them.
Most companies give you a salary plus a variable cash bonus. That bonus gets taxed at ~40%, you spend it, and you're back where you started. It's a hamster wheel disguised as upside.
We eliminated the bonus entirely. Instead:
The Math: A $100K bonus after tax is ~$60K. $100K in equity gains after tax is ~$80K. Same company cost, 33% more in your pocket. Compounded over years, this is the difference between a vacation and a house.
The Filter: If you'd rather have the cash bonus, you want to be an employee. This offer is for partners. We're looking for people who want to own the outcome, not rent it.
You'll thrive here if:
You get energy from novel problems. When you encounter something you've never seen before, your reaction is curiosity, not anxiety. You actively seek out the blank page.
You build systems, not just solutions. When faced with a problem, you don't just solve it—you ask "how would I solve this class of problems?" You build the factory, not just the widget.
You hold strong opinions loosely. You form clear views based on available evidence. When new evidence contradicts your view, you update immediately without ego damage. Being wrong is data; defending a wrong position is failure.
You default to action. Given ambiguity, you move. You'd rather make a reversible mistake than wait for perfect information that never comes.
You find friction generative. When someone challenges your idea, you don't get defensive—you get curious. Maybe they're seeing something you missed. The goal is the best answer, not your answer.
You want teammates, not just colleagues. We celebrate wins together. We dig each other out when things get hard. The intensity bonds people in ways that low-stakes environments can't.
We're building the infrastructure of certainty for the age of noise.
The web was the greatest knowledge machine ever built. It's become a hostile environment for truth. We're fixing that—starting with commerce, then expanding to every domain where verified truth is more valuable than fluent noise.
This is hard. We're building systems that catch lies at scale—verifying millions of claims, scoring confidence, and knowing when to re-check. These problems don't have textbooks. We don't have all the answers. We have a framework and early results—and we need people who can push it forward.
If you've read this far and thought "finally, someone saying what I've always believed," you might be right for us.
If you've read this far and thought "this sounds like standard startup rhetoric," we haven't connected. That's fine—but we're probably not the right fit for each other.
We don't hire people who pattern-match to familiar archetypes. We hire people who engage with specifics. If you apply, be ready to talk about this document—what resonated, what you'd push back on, and why.
We'll know if you skimmed.
Product.ai is building the verification layer the entire agent economy will run on. If you want to build it—and own a piece of it—we'd like to meet you.