Vast Forward 2026: Co-Founder Jeff Denworth Explains Vast's Profitability

Thanks, Ashley. Good to see you again.

When we started the company, what we kind of envisioned is that as AI started to creep into the modern enterprise and into the different types of services and products that we use, that it would completely change the way that computing happened at the most fundamental level. We're moved to a world of accelerated computing on top of way more data than anybody ever expected to deal with. And terms like generative AI weren't even in existence. We didn't know that AI machines would be spitting out all this interesting content and knowledge. So in order to accommodate for how this new wave of computing would work, we realized that we had to basically take a blank sheet of paper and rebuild pretty much the entire distributed system stack starting from storage and then going to databases and then the compute environments that AI runs in and rethink everything for a level of scale and performance and cost efficiency that really legacy systems were never designed for. And so we've been at it for now about a decade and the product is quite comprehensive in terms of its capability of allowing customers to just deploy their AI applications inside of them and these applications will improve over time using AI and so we call it the AI operating system for that reason.

Sure. Turns out we were actually founded the same month that OpenAI was founded, believe it or not, which is obviously now a very popular company. So back then you could see tones of what was going to happen in the market, but nobody knew it would be commercially wildly successful and nobody knew these products would actually be able to do things like drive a car down the road or answer a question about the Revolutionary War in 3 seconds. And so what we did see was a few companies that were really working hard at it. You had Google obviously with DeepMind. That same year AlphaGo beat the greatest Go champion in the world which is computationally almost like an unsolvable problem. Just so many different scenarios you can play in Go. You had companies like Tesla and Google that were investing in self-driving car research and a few other places like for example Facebook was doing a lot with AI. And so when we looked at all of them, we got a sense, okay, there's real investments being made here and there's real thinking being applied. Nvidia started to introduce some new computers that could actually take these concepts and accelerate them and make them affordable to deploy. And so we just looked at those and said, 'Okay, let's build something that is capable of answering that challenge.' But at the same time, we needed to make money. And ChatGPT didn't exist. So nobody really knew what was going to happen. And so we built in all these enterprise capabilities into the platform so that we could just go and sell while we were hoping and waiting that something big would happen with AI. And then in 2022, 2023 that started to happen and our business just kind of went really exponential.

First of all, no. No. Me personally, my job is to kind of find product market fit. And so we're definitely not AI visionaries, but we think a lot about infrastructure and we tried to be thoughtful about what the new infrastructure requirements would be if AI were to happen. That's probably the most I would say about that.