Work-Bench Masterclass: Using AI for Startup Market Discovery
Before committing to the startup journey, the most valuable work a founder can do is understanding a market - how it works, who the stakeholders are, and where real problems exist.
Historically, mapping a market, understanding its stakeholders, and identifying real pain could take weeks of manual research. Today, AI can dramatically accelerate the process - if you know how to use them properly.
Join us for a Work-Bench Masterclass with our Venture Partner, Diego Oppenheimer, where he’ll walk through a practical framework for using AI to research markets and evaluate startup ideas. Diego will also share the exact AI prompts that he uses for market research.
In this session, Diego will cover:
How to choose the right industry “haystack” to explore
How to use AI to map a market and identify stakeholders
How to uncover real problems worth solving
How to test early solution hypotheses before writing code
This session is designed for:
Operators exploring startup ideas
Builders researching potential companies
Founders validating a new market
Anyone curious about structured startup discovery
About the Hosts:
Diego Oppenheimer: Previously founded Algorithmia, an AI infrastructure company acquired by DataRobot. He is now a Venture Partner at Work-Bench and an executive fellow at Stanford GSB, where he assists in teaching AI for Research-Driven Inspiration, a course focused on systematic startup discovery.
Work-Bench: We are an early stage enterprise software VC fund based in New York City. We lead Seed rounds in SaaS and infrastructure startups with checks from $2.5 - $4.5M, focus on supporting companies’ 0 to 1 go-to-market journeys, and have built a dynamic enterprise tech community here in NYC. We’re investing out of our $160M Fund IV, and notable portfolio companies include Cockroach Labs, Socure, Spring Health, and Dialpad.