Jake Stauch
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No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups · Taking on ServiceNow: Coding Agents the Rest of Us with Serval…
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Can an AI Startup Beat ServiceNow?
Jake Stauch says a startup can take on ServiceNow if it aims at the large enterprise from the first day, and if AI lets people build automations in code. Two and a half years in, he calls the original plan delusional and says it has gone the way they drew it. Serval set out to become the largest enterprise software company. They made a list of companies, circled ServiceNow, and said they would beat it and build something bigger. That was two people in his co-founder Alex's living room. The ambition was there on day one.
The usual path is a thin layer on the incumbent, or a down-market product for smaller customers. A layer caps the company. Serving a smaller market first changes the product
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What Is Serval's ProServal Team?
Jake Stauch says ProServal is Serval's team of automation engineers who stay with a customer after the first deployment, because the list of work to automate does not end.
Enterprises have barely used what the technology can do. The gap is knowing the people, the process, and which workflows exist today versus how they should work. Serval still sends people for that. A deployment strategist and a deployed software engineer go on site, work out the implementation, and walk the customer through it. After that go-live, customers keep a long tail of requests. He says software engineering has unlimited demand for work, and internal automation does too.
ProServal, which he also calls automation
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Why Does Serval Have No Product Team?
Jake Stauch says Serval has no product function. Engineers talk with customers every day, so product development sits with the engineering team. They adapt to what customers say today versus what customers said a month ago. The product ships and changes faster than anyone can keep up, including him.
Serval hires engineers who understand customers and puts them in front of customers, because so many decisions happen at the edge and not every product decision can rise to leadership. Leadership has to push product decision-making down, move fast, undo a wrong turn, revert, and kill work the team was committed to. When engineers show how the customer sees the product now, leadership changes cou
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How Fast Is Serval Hiring?
Jake Stauch says Serval is 200 people, up from 20 in January, and hiring will get even faster. Higher output per employee is the reason the company wants more people, not fewer. Unlimited demand for work, unlimited competition, and unlimited ambition sit behind the plan. Every employee already does far more than a year ago, and the ambitions for what employees can do next are bigger still.
The product is already enterprise mature. Serval is automating essentially all kinds of work for every employee in the world, so the addressable market is as large as the ambition. Decisions follow how fast the company can grow and what it chooses to focus on, rather than a preset map of what the market l
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Should Companies Build Their Own Enterprise Systems?
Jake Stauch says companies should not build their own main enterprise systems unless the needs are very bespoke and unique. Vibe-coding the main system-of-record tools is quite expensive to build and maintain, even when a company can do it. Buying off the shelf for work outside a core competency remains the build-versus-buy choice, because enterprise software is still hard to build.
Companies that tried it are relearning that enterprise software is complex and needs people to maintain it. Use cases and edge cases break, updates keep coming, and the company has to staff a team and pay for that labor. In many cases no one wants to work on the internal tools team. A lot of companies have hundr
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Why Does Serval Price on Workflows Instead of Tokens?
Jake Stauch says Serval tries to price on workflows run, because that reflects actual work better than tokens, which track verbosity and inefficiency. CIO customers are pulling back from the initial token-maxing era. Adoption is still so early that the pullback will not become a clampdown in the aggregate. Spend is going to keep rising sharply because most companies are still at the beginning.
Each company goes through rapid early adoption and then a pullback of spend while trying to measure and calculate ROI. Long-term budget impact is not really the concern. Customers expect a short-term pullback and still plan on increasing spend. What they need is more proof of ROI, a way to show the sp
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How Can IT Teams Safely Let Coding Agents Build Automations?
Jake Stauch says IT teams can let coding agents build automations when the work goes through approval, a staging cycle, and an audit trail. Serval is the AI platform for that department, so IT can extend the tools to HR, finance, people teams, and legal.
Personal agents work well for consumers, SMB, and a lot of mid-market organizations, and they fail inside a large enterprise because each person's permissions are so limited. In a lot of cases someone is not allowed to bring an agent to work. Even if they were allowed, the agent can barely read email, so it cannot reach the systems and automations people want at work.
Engineering teams adopted enterprise AI early because code review makes
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Why Do IT Teams Hate ServiceNow?
Jake Stauch says IT teams often name ServiceNow as both a top cost and the tool they hate most. Serval is enterprise automation and enterprise service management: people ask questions, get help at work, and automate parts of the job they do not enjoy. The company competes with ServiceNow, the longtime legacy provider in the category.
He found the category at Verkada, selling enterprise physical security products to IT teams and spending years asking what they spend the most money on and what they hate the most. ServiceNow topped many of the lists, even though for most of his time there it was unclear how anyone would beat a company that had done so much so well. ServiceNow is a robust, cust