Isaiah Granet discusses Bland AI's journey from pre-seed to Series B in 10 months, highlighting the founder's background, a viral campaign, and overcoming.
Isaiah Granet discusses Bland AI's journey from pre-seed to Series B in 10 months, highlighting the founder's background, a viral campaign, and overcoming 180 investor rejections for their AI-powered voice agent platform.
So many people fail at their startup, their early stage, late stage [music] growth companies because they forget that their job is not to figure out the entirety of the future. Their job is just to solve the level they're playing right now. Alrighty, hello everyone and welcome to the Deal Maker Show. So today we have a a founder, I mean the story is pretty unbelievable and I think that you guys are all going to really enjoy it. We're going to be talking about how to hire non-traditional people, how they went about raising money when things were not coming, you know, the right way, you know, especially after graduating from a program like YC where you think that money is going to be thrown at you. And they and again, you know, going viral too. You know, in their case, you know, they fired like 50% of their customers after their series A, which is a kind of remarkable, but really good
stuff. The building, the scaling, the financing, you name it. Quite an inspiring conversation that we have in front of us. And without further ado, let's welcome our guest today, Isaiah Grant. Welcome to the show. Thank you, Alejandro. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me. So originally born and raised in San Diego, give us a walk through memory lane. How was life growing up for you? Yes. Uh well, I have two loving parents um and I have an older and a younger brother. And so the reason I like to say I started a company was I didn't get enough attention as a kid. Uh so I had to do something that would let me get more. But um I had a a really great childhood. I played ice hockey, which is non-traditional for growing up in San Diego, but I got a chance to um experience some unique things including starting and running a non-profit for kids with special needs when I was
growing up. So that was a 501c3 that I ran for about 10 years and still goes today. And um had a a really positive childhood oriented around education, around uh community, basic values that I think every kid should get. And and in that regard too, when it comes to education, quite interesting the way that you blended as part of your degree computer science and economics. And then obviously you you shifted a little bit more on the marketing side, but but tell us how did those interests develop for you to pursue them? Yeah, when I went to college, so I um attended Washington University in St. Louis. And when I first came to school, I was a marketing and economics major. And I I loved marketing. I still love marketing. And I distinctly remember, this is well pre-Chat GPT, I was in a sophomore year marketing class and an engineer from Google came. And he pulled up this demo. He said, "Hey,
we have this thing called AI that can now generate ads for you." And he showed live how for a fake dog food company, they could generate an image, copy, and all the things that they needed. And I saw this like live in front of me as a demo, again, well before Chat GPT, and I said, "Oh, no. Uh the world is going to change really, really fast." And I actually switched my major from marketing to computer science right then and there. Um and completing an additional degree in 2 years is pretty tough, but I just fell in love with being able to build. And what I would do is challenge myself to build a project every weekend. And so uh every single weekend I tried to ship something new. And it, you know, it really taught me that in everything you do, practice makes perfect. And I fell in love with computer science. I fell in love with building. So for you, COVID, you know, was a quite
disruptive. You know, you were you're here in university, I'm sure having a good time. And then all of a sudden you see yourself back in in San Diego doing everything remote. I mean, I'm sure that that was quite disruptive for everyone, you know, that was in in your year. Yeah, you know, um it was obviously a world-changing event, but I think for me and for a lot of people in my age group, it gave us this interesting opportunity where we had for the first time in our lives very little pressure to do anything. And generally growing up um in a high school that pushes you to be academically competitive and an academically competitive university, um or even a tough job market, you don't have a whole lot of free time. And now I don't I don't do great with boredom or free time, so don't get me wrong. But what was so special about this time with COVID was I had the chance to really step back
and be able to build and focus on things other than school, other than career progression in a way that I think I literally never would have had the chance otherwise. Um I I can credit a fair amount of Bland's founding and the fact that I worked at a startup after university to the fact that there was this moment in time where it went from full speed to full stop. And that was just so incredibly valuable for me as a person. So how do you find yourself from then going back, getting the degree to all of a sudden sleeping on a floor in San Francisco? I mean, that sounds quite quite crazy. You know, it sounds crazy to everyone outside of San Francisco. I think uh a lot of your listeners and people inside San Francisco have heard this kind of story before. But coming out of college, I decided I didn't want a real job, so to speak. And so I joined a startup that had just raised like $50,000 of
angel money, was still pre-seed, very early. And I was supposed to move to New York. And at the very last second, I said, "I can't move to New York and be serious about being in tech." And so I packed my bags up, pulled out of a lease. Um they my roommates were very unhappy with me. And moved to San Francisco. And uh I actually found myself sleeping on the floor of this hacker house with 21 other guys. Uh there were seven bathrooms. Everyone likes to ask that. And so it was 21 other uh pre-seed founders or seed founders. And I literally didn't have a room. I was like in a closet on the floor with no bed. And um I just fell in love with the energy of San Francisco because it was the first time in my life that everybody else was just as excited to create as I was. So how do you go from working on that startup to then being like, you know what, I'm just going to throw my my own my own
fortune here. I'm going to go for it on my own. Um I think I just had a constant burning desire to build. And the startup was really great and and they've gone on to do good things, but it wasn't for me. And I had met my co-founder while living in this hacker house, and we decided to quit our jobs with really no plan, no funding, nothing. And we started a healthcare company. So it it was totally unrelated from AI voice, which is what we do now. And we tried to raise a angel money. Uh I think it took us 41st meetings before we got our first yes. Uh we were able to eke out like uh sub $300,000 of money. And and basically we were like 3 weeks away from more or less being homeless, like being totally out of cash and having to move in uh to my co-founder's mom's garage. Uh which is very motivating, by the way. When you when you are uh faced with that, it's it it really pushes you to work
harder. And we we ended up just really pursuing this healthcare idea. We got into YC with it. And you know, you you think that that is the beginning of the end, meaning from there it's all downhill and you'll be able to to really build a great business. But that was the the the beginning of the end, meaning our company was failing. And we really didn't have PMF or any traction in any way. And so about three-quarters of the way through YC, we actually decided to completely shut down that idea. Wow. I mean, what was that realization where you were like, let's pull the plug? This is a really brutal story. So we were 10 meetings deep with a multi-chain um clinic. So this was a group that had 10 locations throughout California. We thought this was going to be like a $110,000 contract, which for a pre-seed company is is pretty nice. Um that that gets you to the next stage of your company
development. And we have had maybe, like I said, 10 meetings with them. We've gone back and forth. And we show up to what we think is the final buying meeting. And throughout the course of it, it becomes increasingly clear that the CTO and CEO of this group think they are buying a totally different software than what we are selling them. And we basically realized that they had zero interest in what we were actually selling. And they wanted this entirely different product and had just misunderstood completely what we were selling. And that's when we realized, "Okay, this thing is not working." So then what happened after that? Uh what followed was really tough. Um for somebody who had been so used to moving, moving, moving uh post-college, we basically hit a wall where there was 2 weeks where we had no idea what we wanted to do. And we were just exploring any kind of idea. And I was
really not in a mood to talk to any…