Oluwasesan Kayode Yackson on building ProtonLabs, shipping AI products, and what he looks for in SaaS startups

# Who he is

Oluwasesan Kayode Yackson is co-founder and Chief Operating Officer at ProtonLabs Technology Inc. Ltd. He trained first in pharmacy, then moved into software engineering and cloud infrastructure. Today he combines scientific discipline with cloud and DevOps expertise to run ProtonLabs' global cloud infrastructure, DevOps strategy, business operations, growth, and strategic partnerships.

# What ProtonLabs builds

ProtonLabs is a UK-based company that builds practical AI tools meant to slot into existing user workflows. Their product portfolio listed in the interview includes:

• AskYourPDF: a document intelligence platform for extracting insights, summarizing papers, and interacting with documents via text, browser extensions, mobile apps, and ChatGPT integrations.
• Cowriter.ai: an AI-assisted writing and deep research platform for producing higher-quality content and accelerating literature discovery.
• Detect.ai: an AI-content detection tool for verifying authenticity and maintaining editorial integrity.
• Simplicity.AI: an AI form-filler that converts static or scanned PDFs into interactive digital documents and auto-fills complex paperwork for tax, legal, healthcare, employment, and immigration.

ProtonLabs' products serve more than 5 million users worldwide, according to the interview.

# How ProtonLabs grew

Yackson attributes growth to three concrete practices:

• Solve real user pain: prioritize features that materially reduce friction or deliver clear value rather than surface-level metrics.
• Extreme execution speed: iterate quickly on product and infrastructure to respond to user feedback.
• Distribution as engineering: build integrations across the places users already work—web, ChatGPT plugins, Chrome extensions, Zotero, mobile, and APIs—so users don't have to change habits.

He emphasizes operational discipline as a bootstrapped company, focusing on retention, willingness to pay, and word-of-mouth rather than top-of-funnel vanity metrics.

# What he looks for in SaaS startups (SaaS66 judging criteria)

Yackson says he will evaluate startups on four operational and technical axes:

• Clear value proposition: Can founders plainly describe the customer, the painful problem, and why their solution is meaningfully better?
• Technical rigor and reliability: Is the cloud architecture built to scale securely, reliably, and cost-effectively as demand grows?
• Distribution clarity: Is there a repeatable, non-paid path to acquire and retain users?

These criteria show a blend of product-market clarity, engineering maturity, and go-to-market realism.

According to Yackson, a good SaaS product solves a visible problem, finds initial customers, and grows revenue. A great SaaS business goes further: it builds a resilient, highly scalable system that becomes embedded in customers' daily operations while maintaining strict discipline around unit economics. The emphasis is both technical (resilient architecture) and commercial (deep embedment and efficient economics).

# Practical implications for founders

# Bottom line

Yackson's perspective links product utility, technical infrastructure, and distribution execution. For early-stage SaaS teams, the path to standing out is clear: deliver real user value, ensure the system can scale, and make adoption effortless by integrating into existing workflows.