Labelbox's Path to PMF: Why Founders Must Be Contrarian and Right Through Customer Discovery

Labelbox co-founder and CEO Manu Sharma shares how prioritizing deep customer discovery and idea validation over rapid MVP building enabled the company to achieve product-market fit and hockey-stick growth. Despite being highly technical founders, Sharma and his co-founders spent early days on customer research rather than building, which led to identifying the critical problem of collaborative cloud-based data labeling. Now a Series D company with $188M in funding, Labelbox emerged as a leader in the data labeling industry by solving a problem that became increasingly important as AI capabilities scaled.