In this episode, @reductoai co-founder and CEO @aditabrm joins @allenpark to make steak sandwiches with burrata, torched peaches, and chimichurri and talk about why PDFs still break AI: how frontier models silently drop rows, why 99% accuracy can still fall short in production, what Reducto learned processing a billion pages a month, and what it would take for office work to have its Claude Code moment.
00:00 Cold Open
00:13 Meet Adit Abraham and the Viral Steak Tweet
00:57 From Remembrall to Reducto: YC and the Pivot
01:57 Why PDFs Are Still Hard for AI
03:35 What AI Agents Need to Do With Documents
04:19 Model Routing for Tricky Pages and Tables
05:29 Build vs. Buy: When to Train Your Own Models
07:00 Deep Extract, Frontier Models, and Missing Rows
08:20 Why Everyone Wins Their Own Benchmark
09:29 Reducto R1: Accuracy, Cost, and a Billion Pages a Month
10:57 When 99% Accuracy Isn’t Enough
13:05 Continuous Evals and Production Failures
16:49 How Reducto Uses AI Agents Internally
18:28 Hiring With AI and the Eight-Hour Onsite
20:17 Early Hires and What Obsession Looks Like
23:17 Blowtorching Peaches
24:24 Scaling From a Small Team to Series B
27:34 Competition and the Data Flywheel
30:52 What Better Parsing Unlocks for Customers
32:11 Finding a Cofounder at MIT
34:34 The Anthropic Hackathon, Long-Term Memory, and RAG
38:49 From Reading PDFs to Redlining Contracts
43:19 A Claude Code Moment for Office Work
46:13 What’s Next for Reducto: Extraction, Citations, and Cost
47:51 Assembling the Steak Sandwich
49:55 The Steak Allegations and Taste Test