Why I'm building Compound

I've spent the last fifteen years working in professional services. I've run enterprise accounts, worked with founders and marketing leaders, built teams and been responsible for the commercial side of the work. It's a business where you sell expertise and judgement, but a lot of the economics still come down to people, time and how much work a team can physically get done.

AI changes that equation.

A growing amount of the work within professional services — research, analysis, drafting, synthesis, iteration — can now be done in a fundamentally different way. That doesn't just make existing services firms more efficient. It creates the possibility of building the services business itself differently.

That's what interests me.

I think there is an opportunity to build a professional-services company where the valuable part is still human — understanding the problem, making the judgement, knowing what good looks like and taking responsibility for the result — while much more of the production is handled by machines. And professional services is where I want to explore that because it's the world I know. I understand how the work gets bought, how relationships are built, how delivery actually happens and where things tend to break.

Compound is my attempt to see what happens if you rebuild that kind of business around what AI can do now. I'm starting with one very specific problem for B2B companies: helping them figure out what they should be saying on LinkedIn, and building the system to keep doing it.

—Tushar