In this episode of The First Podcast, Ben and Alex sit down with Tom Hamer, co-founder and CEO of Marqo, the company redefining how businesses unlock value from unstructured data through vector search.

Tom's story starts early — a self-taught coder at ten, building top-charting educational apps by fourteen, and eventually landing at Amazon Web Services, where he met his co-founder Jesse Clark, a lead applied scientist for Amazon Retail Search.

It was there they uncovered a striking market gap: Amazon’s search converted at 18%, while the rest of e-commerce languished at 3%. That disparity became Marqo's founding thesis — giving every company access to the same calibre of search technology powering the world's most successful retailer.

The conversation gets into the tactical realities of early product development,including why "action produces information" and how Hamer learned to stop marketing Marqo as a developer tool and start anchoring it to measurable business outcomes — revenue uplifts, conversion gains, and bottom-line impact.

Tom also breaks down why traditional chatbots fall short in e-commerce, and how Marqo’s AI-native architecture enables websites to self-optimise around user intent in real-time — a fundamental shift from keyword matching to genuine human-like understanding.

Beyond the product, Tom reflects on the strategic moves that shaped Marqo’s trajectory: relocating to the Bay Area to unlock global scale, building culture into every hire, and the hard leadership lessons behind the company's $12.5M Series A led by Lightspeed.

For founders and operators building at the intersection of AI and commerce, this episode is a masterclass in turning deep technical insight into durable business value.