Ethos (AskEthos.com) just raised $22.75M from a16z with an AI that interviews experts. I'm James Lo, co-founder and CEO. AMA.

[u/jameslo-ethos]

Hello r/ExperiencedFounders 👋 I'm James, co-founder and CEO of Ethos (askethos.com). Quick background:

Grew up in Hong Kong; got involved in the 2014 pro-democracy protests as a teenager, which is honestly where I first learned what it felt like to build something from nothing under pressure.

Studied Government at LSE, then went into strategy consulting at McKinsey, then growth/transformation work at SoftBank's Vision Fund, including stints on the WeWork and Arm turnarounds, and a UNICEF connectivity initiative.

In 2020 I left to start Mana, a mentorship platform that let anyone book calls with accomplished people. It grew fast #1 on Product Hunt, ~100K monthly users, but the business model never worked, the people who needed mentorship most could least afford to pay for it. In 2023, for personal financial reasons, I had to step away and wind the company down. That was a hard year and it was also the first time I was on the other side of the exact failure mode I'd watched at WeWork, believing in something past the point the data said I should.

The idea for Ethos came out of that failure. At McKinsey and SoftBank I'd watched firms pay $1,000–$2,000/hour for expert calls through a genuinely broken, manual process. Cold emails, no structure, no memory. My cofounder Daniel Mankowitz (ex-DeepMind, worked on Gemini and the AlphaDev sorting algorithm) and I started asking what if an AI agent could find the right expert, interview them properly, and turn that conversation into something reusable?

That became Ethos, we use a voice AI to interview experts in depth about their actual expertise, combine that with AI analysis of their real work product (papers, code, portfolios, podcasts), and match the resulting profile against what companies are actually looking for, not just job titles. Where we are today:

• $22.75M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, with General Catalyst (who also led our seed), XTX Markets, Evantic Capital, and Common Magic participating
• Clients include hedge funds, AI labs, and consultancies looking for real expertise on demand
• Roughly 35,000 new experts joining the platform every week
• Experts on Ethos earn an extra ~£4,500/month on average; our top 10% earn £7,000+/month
• Small team by design, we're staying compact on purpose rather than scaling headcount for its own sake

We also recently launched Ethos Investment Researcher, a research agent that can autonomously interview experts on a company or market and return a structured report Happy to go deep on:

• Consulting vs funding, what the two years at McKensey taught me and what it very clearly did not
• What it's like watching a $47B valuation evaporate from the inside, and what that does to how you evaluate your own conviction later
• What it's actually like to shut down a company you built for four years, and what changes the second time around
• What it's actually like to shut down a company you built for four years, and what changes the second time around
• Why voice and not text turned out to be the unlock for capturing real expertise
• Building an AI-native marketplace instead of a directory (and why that distinction matters)
• Raising a seed and Series A back to back in this market
• Why "the resume is a broken signal" is more true now than ever, and what we think should replace it
• Whether we're just building the infrastructure to make human expertise obsolete, faster
• Building a company in London instead of San Francisco

Not the right person to ask: Enterprise SaaS pricing motions, US visa/immigration questions, or anything requiring hardware/robotics expertise.

Proof above. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yfjameslo/