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Aaron Cannon
Co-founder and CEO · Outset
AI-moderated research Product leader
Cannon is giving research teams interview depth at survey scale, so big decisions rest on hundreds of conversations instead of a handful.
Aaron Cannon is co-founder and CEO of Outset, an AI-moderated research platform he started in 2023 with Michael Hess. He began his career in research and strategy consulting for Fortune 500 companies, then led product and design teams at technology companies for about a decade.
The frustration behind Outset
“I was always deeply frustrated with how slow that process was and how we were forced to make critical business decisions based on data from only a small group of participants/users,” he told Pulse 2.0. He met Hess at a startup where Cannon was head of product and Hess was technical lead. Hess now leads product and engineering, and Cannon leads sales, marketing, and customer success.
The moment he knew it worked came in early 2023, after a test with WeightWatchers returned 100 AI-led interviews in under a day. He recalled the call that followed: “The researcher working on the project reviewed the data for the first time, called me, and said, ‘Wow – that really worked.’”