Yishi Zuo is Head of Go-to-Market Strategy at Tavus, the conversational video AI company. He began his career as an investment banking analyst at Goldman Sachs before spending three years at a hedge fund, then took an MBA at MIT Sloan where he co-founded DeepBench, an expert network that reached seven figures in revenue and was later acquired. He ran a startup studio for about four years and led finance at a YC-backed healthcare AI company before moving into go-to-market. A serious poker player, he treats the game's disciplines — expected value, process over outcome, and mastery of fundamentals before tells — as an operating system for placing go-to-market bets.
“You have to separate the process from the outcome.”
“Let's say you think you're following the right process and you get bad outcomes every single time, and maybe you need to reevaluate your process.”
“I think that's probably the most applicable like framework in from poker to a lot of like business logic.”
“I try to be rational about like how I place my bets.”
“I'd argue it's worth losing a few hundred bucks to build relationships that could lead to a few hundred thousand.”
“If you work on the first layers of fundamentals, like you'll be better than like ninety five percent of beginners. Like don't even worry about like tells and reading people.”
“There's a lot of factors that go into play. There's like the opportunity cost of like what you spend your money on.”
“It was the right bet to make. But sometimes they don't pan out and that's OK.”