Rubric started with a love for building and tinkering. When GPT-3 came out the three of us started hacking together demos, and we've been building with AI pretty much every day since.
Over the past three years we've had the opportunity to build incredible projects with incredible companies, from Series A startups to Fortune 500s. For Cal.com we gave every user their own email address at cal.ai, so they could book a meeting just by writing to it, and it ended up being one of the first AI agents in production. The AI shopping assistant we built with Albertsons is now live across 22 of their grocery brands, from Safeway to Vons.
We still get really close to the teams we work with. When we built Gumloop's creator marketplace, we flew out to SF and sat with their team for a week before writing any code.
None of this would have happened without a small and mighty group of fewer than 100 people who took Rubric from zero to one. If you're one of them, thank you so much. We will NEVER forget it.
Now we want to go from one to two. Here's the vision.
Rubric is an agency, a lab, and a product studio.
The agency
At the agency, we aim to be maximally helpful. We want to help our clients achieve their mission, and we want the ROI from engaging with us to be as high as possible.
This is a forever practice for Rubric. If one day we don't rely on the agency to make revenue, we will shift it into a pro-bono model, and continue to invest in it as a first-class component of what we do.
The agency grounds us, keeps us focused and humble, and gives us the opportunity to meet incredible people, and contribute to their missions.
The lab
At the lab, we aim to be maximally curious. The lab is a divergent, artistic space where instincts get sharpened, and ideas get sparked.
There is no burden of being success-oriented, and the phrases “product-market fit,” “return on investment,” and “ideal customer profile” are BANNED.
We share what we learn at the lab with you in the form of writing on our blog, and open-source codebases on GitHub.
The product studio
At the product studio, we take on ambitious missions, and bring them to people. We start by building things for ourselves and for our friends, so that we have a really tight feedback cycle and can know quickly when things work.
We want to build things that the world needs, and be uncompromising in their values. We don't pivot the mission, only the roadmap, and we greenlight the kinds of products that investors might not fund.
The agency grounds us, the lab sharpens our instincts, and the product studio puts them to work. Together they make a flywheel, and every turn makes us better at building the best products, for our clients, for ourselves, and for the world.
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