Find a workload-shaped wedge

Before building a platform, switch from execution mode to search mode. Steve Blank describes a startup as a search for a repeatable business model, and Y Combinator compresses the work into launching, talking to users, and iterating. For an inference company, your first launch may be a benchmark, a manual deployment, or a capacity rescue. The point is not self-service polish. The point is to expose a claim to a real operator and learn whether the failure matters enough to change behavior.

Ask for the last concrete event. Walk me through the last model you shipped. Where did the schedule slip? What did the failure consume? What workaround did you try? A hypothetical question such as, would you pay for lower latency, invites politeness. A historical question reveals budgets, systems, decision makers, and urgency. End with a commitment test: if we remove this failure in four weeks, will you provide traffic, an owner, and a paid pilot?

Score candidate workloads, not broad industries. A useful wedge has a frequent painful event, visible existing spend, reachable buyers, representative data, and a natural expansion path. Real-time voice, private multimodal inference, long-context coding agents, and fleets of fine-tuned adapters are examples of workload shapes, not recommendations. Your founder access matters as much as technical elegance. A smaller problem with ten reachable operators is more valuable than a giant category you can only describe from the outside.

Imagine twelve teams tell you that faster inference sounds interesting. That is not twelve signals. Now imagine five coding-agent teams independently report the same event: long shared repository context is reprocessed after routing moves a session, time to first token misses the interactive budget, and engineers manually pin traffic to instances. Two teams share sanitized traces showing the repeated prefixes. One agrees to a four-week paid pilot if you improve p95 time to first token without changing answer quality. That is a real wedge candidate. The incident identifies a user, a workload shape, a broken control decision, a reproducible input, and a commercial gate. Your interview ledger should preserve the difference. Record compliments in a separate column and never count them toward validation. Count observed incidents, access to artifacts, named owners, and commitments. If the five incidents differ, do not average them into an artificial platform. Pick the cluster with the clearest consequence and strongest access, or keep searching.

Use a hard gate before building the control plane. Five independent buyers should describe the same painful event. At least two should share a representative workload or traffic trace. One should commit to a paid or tightly time-bounded design partnership. This gate does not prove a company exists, but it turns architecture from imagination into response. Your assignment is a two-week, twenty-interview sprint and a ranked wedge memo based only on observed behavior.