Should you join: Viktor

Viktor wants to be every company’s next (and most important) hire

✨ Hey there - this is a free edition of next play’s newsletter. This is part of our series Should You Join, where we go behind the scenes on interesting companies. Our hope is that documenting these sorts of details, which never really make it to big publication press releases, can help you a) discover more interesting opportunities and b) inspire you to think creatively (for any of your own endeavors). You can join our private Slack community here and access $1000s of dollars of product discounts here.

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When AI tools went mainstream in late 2022, there was a flood of sci-fi excitement. People talked about how AI was going to take over all of knowledge work. How every company would have many AI employees for each one human. Founders pitched grand visions of billion-dollar companies run by a single person. There was talk of company-wide AI generalist agents.

Much of the hype has described the average person’s vision for AI a decade or two ago: a movie-esque future where companies have armies of hyperintelligent, hypercompetent AI beings (wizards, almost) that can do anything you ask them to.

But… If you look at the suite of AI products available today, you’ll realize that the industry has mostly not gone in that direction. The vast majority of AI products today are basically AI-enhanced tools; software products that now use AI so they can be more effective. On Next Play, we have written about AI insurance tools and AI sales tools and AI finance tools and more. But we haven’t written as much about that sci-fi pitch for AI: the hypercompetent generalist employee that can do whatever you want, whenever you want, with just one message.

Today we are writing about one of those companies. We are writing about viktor.com.

The company, which builds a generalist AI employee (“not a tool”), launched publicly in February of this year and recently crossed $30M in ARR; they raised a $75M Series A from Accel (and angels incl. the founders of Lovable, ElevenLabs, Vercel, Deel, Framer, and many more) just three months later. Companies and investors are clearly on board so far.

I sat down with the viktor.com team to learn more. What does the product do? Is this the right fit for someone looking to join an AI startup? What kinds of people thrive? What is the culture like? What is the strategy; how will Viktor win?

Those answers, and more, below.

The product

Imagine your company hires a new employee. You are this person’s manager. On their first week, you ask them to build a dashboard to track certain revenue metrics. But, instead of building the dashboard in a useful way, they respond with 1,000+ words and a prototype. What you wanted was for them to build a real dashboard from start-to-finish and deploy it live; what they did was build a context-less preview and accompany it with a wall of text.

(You’ve probably had a coworker or two who worked something like this.)

That approach wouldn’t be very effective, would it? And yet, at many companies, it’s the primary way people interact with AI: they open a context-less chat window and describe what they want. Maybe the AI helps, sort of. Maybe it’s just a distraction. But what I think we all can agree would be more useful is if there was one AI employee that had both context and access. And if you could, I don’t know, tag it directly in Slack (like a normal teammate!) and then watch it come back in a few minutes with completed work, live, ready to use. Wouldn’t that be nice?

That is, more or less, how Viktor works.

Viktor installs into your workspace (like Slack or Teams), and from then on you treat it like a colleague with infinite time and resources. You tag it in a channel and give it a task, like:

• Create a useful dashboard so the content team knows what’s performing

• Summarize yesterday’s #sales thread

• Build an internal app where reps submit discount requests and managers approve

• Audit our Meta ad spend over the past 30 days

And virtually anything else!

Viktor connects to over 3,200 tools, and it can custom-write integrations to the ones it hasn’t connected to yet. When it’s done working, it posts the deliverable back in the thread like a normal coworker would. If it needs approval for something, it’ll ask.

You can also have Viktor do recurring work, like pulling data before a meeting. At viktor.com (the company), Viktor (the employee) pulls data on revenue, signups, and ad performance before the weekly growth meeting. “The data is straight from Stripe, Posthog, and the ad platforms. So we don’t spend the first fifteen minutes of the meeting assembling a picture or arguing about whose spreadsheet is right,” Matt Swulinski, Head of Growth, told me.

Sensitive actions like moving money or emailing customers wait behind approvals in Slack, and admins control permissions per person and per integration. viktor.com charges for usage rather than per seat; this is a learning from a previous product, Jace, where flat pricing killed margins.

You hire Viktor. You ask him to do work. And he does it. That’s a rather exciting, and simple, pitch. So how big do its founders think this can get?

The strategy

According to Fryd Wiatrowski, viktor.com co-founder and CEO, every company standup opens the same way. From a recent meeting: “Today is day 1,064 of our mission to automate all knowledge work for humanity. We are 0.014% there.” The counter goes up every week.

I don’t think the long-term vision could be any clearer. But, if you are considering joining viktor.com, you may also be interested in the company’s priorities over the shorter term. Like the next few years. “Most digital work performed today will be done by AI within roughly five years,” Fryd said. “[And] not just individual tasks. Entire companies will become increasingly automated.”

That sci-fi pitch, that world where one person could run a billion-dollar company and teams are increasingly filled with AI employees… It’s approaching soon, according to viktor.com’s founders. And, if viktor.com succeeds, it will sit at the center of that revolution for millions of companies.

“We are building for AGI, not for what’s possible today,” said Peter Albert, co-founder and CTO of viktor.com. “We are directly taking on the big AI labs on their core goals, and believe we can win.”

The big AI labs, by the way, are probably one of the main reasons why you might be skeptical of Viktor. Just a couple of months ago, in fact, Anthropic announced Claude Tag: a version of Claude that acts as a team member in Slack and can accomplish a lot of the same work that Viktor can. So why put your faith in Viktor? Why won’t the big dogs win this one?

I can think of a few reasons you might bet on viktor.com. For one, it’s not immediately obvious that because AI labs produce the ‘engine’, so to speak, that they will produce the ‘car’. “Engine producers are rarely the best car producers,” Antoni Olendzki, whose role at Viktor is to ‘make the number go up,’ told me. I am a bit skeptical of the claim (which I hear often!) that because the big AI companies can make something, that they will be the best at making it.

Another reason is the models themselves; Viktor is model-agnostic. When you ask Viktor to do some work, your request is routed to the model that is most efficient and effective for that particular task. But when you tag Claude, well, you’re using Claude. So you could reasonably argue that Viktor’s incentives are more closely aligned with their customers’: they simply want to produce the most effective work outcome with any combination of models.

“We sit inside the customer’s actual context, their Slack, their tools, their memory of past work,” Fryd said. “A lab can copy the product. It can’t copy three years of your company’s context.”

The growth

If you look at Viktor’s public launch timeline and numbers… You might walk away confused. Wait, they launched in February of this year and raised a $75M Series A just three months later? They just crossed $30M in ARR? How?!

Fryd and Peter left Meta, where they met, in 2023, and spent two years on AI products that (mostly) didn’t succeed. The product they built right before Viktor, Jace, was an email agent which worked but whose flat monthly pricing broke against real-world compute costs. When Viktor launched in February, it looked like an overnight success; it was really the first truly successful attempt of a company and a team that had been shipping since 2023.

The launch itself was mostly a video. “We tried walking around offices in-person and telling them to install our agent,” Fryd said, “but no one wanted it. Then we launched a demo video on X, which did 2.5M views in the first week, and growth since then has been mostly self-serve.” At the time of their Series A, Viktor was only about 15 people. The company has now grown to 35.

The ARR is nice, but I think Viktor’s net dollar retention (350% in the first 30 days) is more impressive. A customer who starts at $1 is paying $3.50 a month later, which means that a lot of Viktor’s growth is coming from existing customers delegating more as they realize just how useful Viktor can be. Most of that revenue is coming from the U.S. (Viktor is based mostly in Warsaw and Munich), and they’re opening a New York office soon to operate as a commercial sales/success hub run by Robbie, Viktor’s new CRO.

These are good metrics. But, if you were going to underwrite Viktor as a company to consider joining, I think you’d also want to look at their team and culture. Would you be a fit here?

Team and culture

The resumes at viktor.com are impressive. Fryd studied math at Oxford and worked in high-frequency trading before he joined Meta. Peter was a self-taught engineer who ended up on the core team behind Llama 2. Robbie O’Connor, the new CRO, built Notion’s EMEA business from ~$13M to ~$230M ARR - about 38% of Notion’s global revenue - after doing the same job at Asana. Matt Swulinski led growth at Wispr Flow from 0 to $2B valuation. And the investors include both founders of Slack, which is an especially nice signal considering Viktor lives inside of Slack.

So the fancy stuff is there, if that’s what you’re looking for. But I don’t want you to come away with the impression that viktor.com has a culture that cares a lot about a pretty CV; according to one person on their team, “some of our best people never even finished high school.”

Succeeding at viktor.com, rather, is all about slope. “I don’t care about experience,” Fryd said. “I expect everyone to grow very fast, and there’s no ceiling here. I only hire people who are smarter than me, and if you’re great I’ll do my best to learn from you.”

Lots of startups say stuff like this, of course. Is it true? I don’t know, but you could ask Rafał Szlendak, who is a software engineer at viktor.com. “There was just one small problem [when I interviewed for the job] — I could barely code. I ended up passing the interview and getting the offer. But the expectation was that I learn extremely quickly, or else, I get kicked out.”

This is a company that isn’t afraid to take chances on people they think will learn fast (high slope!), even if those people do not currently possess the full skillset needed for the role. That’s encouraging if you’re young or new to the industry, and it’s also encouraging if you’ve been looking to switch roles (e.g. from PM to software engineer). Viktor might take a chance on you.

On the ground in viktor.com’s offices, the sense is that of extreme urgency. “It’s never ‘let’s schedule a call for Wednesday’,” Fryd said. “If it can be done today, do it today.”

Describing Fryd, Rafał told me that “he wants to know everything… And he wants to know it NOW — doesn’t matter what you’re doing… And his sense of urgency is contagious.”

The other thing you notice is that the company actually runs on Viktor. New hires get the product on day one. It sits in the weekly meeting. Robbie O’Connor told me he was “operational in a matter of hours” because Viktor onboarded him. Joining an AI company that does not run on its own AI, one employee told me, “is like joining a restaurant where the chefs order delivery.”

If you take away only one thing, let it be that the team is ambitious. “From my VC days,” said Kacper Zambrzycki, who runs talent, “I met hundreds of founders, and most of them say they wanna build something big, but they say it because this is how you fundraise... Fryd says he wants to build a trillion-dollar company, and the more I get to know him, the more I believe this is the case.”

Should you join Viktor?

viktor.com could be a rather unique company to join for a few reasons. One is that it’s one of the few-ish companies building a truly generalist AI employee; the founders are openly building “for AGI” and don’t intend to silo the product into a narrow tool. If you want to go build the version of AI that shows up in optimistic science fiction, then Viktor might be a company to consider.

There’s also the rapid growth and gigantic Series A, both of which point to viktor.com being a rather ‘hot’ startup right now on a positive trajectory. The company is still early and the team is still small, so you’d be getting onboard far before viktor.com exits ‘exciting early startup’ mode.

You might also make a positive impact on the world. “Some of the smartest people in the world spend their careers doing work that machines should be doing, while the hardest problems remain unsolved: hunger, diseases we still cannot cure, poverty, and children who never receive a real education,” Fryd told me. “We are building the AI worker so people can spend their time solving problems like these instead.”

The most useful advice about who should not join came from Matt Swulinski (growth): “You’re expected to build your own tools. Not adopt them. Build them… And there is no playbook. No process. If that sounds like overhead rather than leverage, this isn’t the place.”

If you do want in, the bar for applications is low (you can cold email) and the bar for effort is high (it better be good). Fryd’s Founder Associate, Filip, got hired by cold email. “He emailed me, I didn’t reply, and he kept emailing. Instead of asking for a call again, he looked at what was hurting us most at the time, which was hiring, and he sent me his solution to it, already built. We hadn’t even spoken yet. By the time we did, he’d basically started the job, so I let him keep it.”

So, if you do apply, take some of that advice (or this advice) to heart.

viktor.com is currently hiring across all departments for their offices in Warsaw, Munich, Dublin, and New York. You can browse their open roles here.

Thanks to Viktor for supporting Next Play and making this spotlight possible.