20 Oct 2026 09:00
205 - Everyone Says They’re the Missing Layer in Enterprise AI, So I Asked Solid’s CEO How He Proves That in a POC
Yoni Leitersdorf's company, Solid, sells a semantic layer: the plumbing that helps AI agents understand an enterprise's data well enough to do effective, valuable work that passes a customer's evals. As platform software, this is about as invisible as a product gets, and by Yoni's count there are probably 100 semantic layers a buyer can choose from right now, including the ones Snowflake and Databricks already ship. So I wanted to know how a startup like Solid can get market share in a crowded category, and how it decides which deals are worth chasing. One of his answers: the prospect who shows up saying "we know we need a semantic layer" is not the deal he's hoping for.
We also got into:- What a POC has to prove before a data leader can take it through the finance/procurement gauntlet
- Why Yoni thinks startup speed stopped being a moat against Snowflake and Databricks given how fast bigger companies are now shipping features
- What he'd change about his customer discovery process if he started a third company
If your product is a horizontal platform or infrastructure your buyer can't see, I hope this episode sheds some light on the overlap between product, UX, and GTM for enterprise AI.
LinksFull transcript and show notes: designingforanalytics.com/resources/episodes/205
