I've been building popular tech products like Tome since I became my family's breadwinner at 15 years old. I've learned you never know how people are going to use your creation.

• Keith Peiris is the co-founder of Tome, a storytelling tool that uses generative AI models like GPT-4 and Dall-E-2.
• The platform hit 1 million users less than 5 months after launching, eclipsing tools like Dropbox and Slack.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Keith Peiris, cofounder of Tome. It has been edited for length and clarity.

You could say I've been in the business of communication and storytelling my whole life.

When I was nine years old, my dad gave me a giant book on Photoshop. He worked at an IT company selling computers, and he eventually got a hold of a bootlegged copy of Photoshop for me to experiment with.

This was the early 2000s, so if you wanted to build animations on the web, you were using Macromedia Flash.

I started playing around with all these tools and posting my creations on forums. Soon, people started messaging me. Then they started commissioning me to build websites for them. I was charging $250 for a website, and I quickly realized that with all the money flowing into my account via PayPal, I would have no problem affording an Xbox.

I had a bit of a flywheel going by the time my dad caught wind of my web-building venture.

He suggested that we turn the operation into a full-fledged company, and that I take the helm as CEO. We named our company Cyberteks Design.

Eventually, my dad quit his job and jumped on board with me full-time. At our peak, we had around 100 clients and were charging $5,000 a website.

We weren't valued like a tech company, of course. At the age of 15, though, I had become the accidental breadwinner of our household.

That gave me the confidence that I could make it as an entrepreneur in the long run.

'You're just building products for people'

I went off to college first, studying nanotechnology engineering at the University of Waterloo.

My first job out of college was at Facebook. I spent more than six years there, including a couple of years at Instagram and a brief stint at Oculus, before becoming an entrepreneur-in-residence at the venture firm Greylock.

My biggest takeaway from those years in big tech was that even at a company with a global reach like Facebook you're still just building products for people.

At the same time, I also learned that no one uses your tools the way you envisioned.

When I was working on direct messages, now known as "DMs" at Instagram, my team and I thought we were building a tool for people to share memes with close friends. Instead, we noticed that people were using the feature for everything from selling their personal apparel to tracking celebrities to striking up new friendships with people who shared their interests.

The truth is that everyone uses tools differently, so you need to build them in a permissive way.

The same has been true with Tome

Tome is a multimodal storytelling tool that utilizes generative AI. It's the first of its kind to allows creators to generate narratives ranging from presentations to outlines to stories along with visuals within seconds.

Type a command like "Make a fundraising pitch for a company that makes telescopes," and Tome will roll out eight slides with a table of contents and pictures to match.

When we started building Tome in the early days of the pandemic, my cofounder, Henri Liriani, and I thought we were building for someone we knew. Our archetype was a technical software designer, or a product manager, who had ideas to present.

But since we launched in September, we've seen Tome being used by parents to create stories for their children. Doctors are making pre-surgery explanations and post-operation guides. Greylock partner and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman made a visual podcast with Tome. One user created a guide for smoking a Texas brisket.

My mom used to have a WhatsApp group with her Sri Lankan "auntie" friends that sort of functioned like a giant photo gallery. Now, they're using Tome, which is a use case I had never even thought about.

In February, we became the fastest productivity tool to hit 1 million users, outpacing platforms like Slack and Dropbox, according to news reports. As of March, we've accrued 3 million users. After our Series B round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, we were valued at $300 million.

We didn't take any shortcuts to get here. And honestly, I don't know if there are any shortcuts to building a valuable product that people love.

I think you have to be committed to doing things the hard way — the earnest way. If you do, though, I tend to believe that things work out.