00:17:19 · S1, Brendan Foody
[00:17:19] S1: So what can you share about your fundraising history? [00:17:23] S0: Let's see. So we, started the business January 2023. We bootstrapped it to a million dollar revenue run rate before we dropped out of college. And then, and our seed round was with General Catalyst. And then we were really focused just on, like, product and not scaling up as much for the subsequent, call it, six months or so. And then we saw this huge transition underway in the human data market, where it used to be this crowdsourcing problem of how do you find a bunch of low and medium skilled people that are writing barely grammatically correct sentences for the early versions of ChatGPT that everyone is familiar with Scale AI solving. But we realized that it was transitioning away from crowdsourcing towards this sourcing and vetting problem of how do you find some of the most exceptional people in the world that can work directly with AI researchers to help push the frontier of model capabilities? And the platform that we've been building for the prior year and a half was perfectly positioned for it. And so we went [00:18:24] S1: place. To Right time. Right products.
00:18:24 · S1, Brendan Foody
[00:18:24] S1: place. To Right time. Right products. [00:18:26] S0: Yeah. There... There's a lot there's a lot of fortune and find... And luck in finding the right market. And so we went to, OpenAI and we shared our vision of how the world was gonna change. And they, along with all of the other top AI labs, correspondingly brought us in. And, I remember Benchmark invested at a $250,000,000 valuation for 10% dilution when the business was at 1,500,000 in revenue. And we were like, no, this is such a discount because we know that the business is about to inflect. They thought we were absolutely crazy at the time. And then our series b was four months later, at $4,000,000,000 valuation, but a lower revenue multiple, at a $20,000,000 revenue run rate, because the business was growing so quickly, and have obviously grown another order of magnitude since then. And so it's been certainly beyond our wildest expectations. [00:19:28] S1: Yeah. I can imagine. So everything has been butterflies and rainbows? [00:19:32] S0: Well, not exactly. Right? Like, there's... [00:19:34] S1: Let's talk about some of the hard stuff.
00:19:34 · S1, Brendan Foody
[00:19:34] S1: Let's talk about some of the hard stuff. [00:19:35] S0: Yeah. I mean, I remember before we... It really started working, it felt like this roller coaster where it oscillated between the best day in the world when we'd sign a big customer contract. We worked with a lot of seed stage customers, so the customer had go out of business the next month, and it felt like the worst day in the world. And it was just very, very tumultuous. And I think it was... Once it started really working and we saw the inflection, it was a little bit more consistent. But there's still there's still this very strong hedonic treadmill where within three months, you get acclimated to the new thing, and then it, you know, raises your expectations. And, every day, there's, you know, a new thing that's popping up that I have to worry about. And so I think it's always less glamorous, than than people think on the outside because running a startup that's growing quickly, is always bound to come with, you know, a million problems. [00:20:38] S1: Good problems to have. [00:20:39] S0: Good problems to have, but problems nonetheless. [00:20:42] S1: Yeah. How do you keep that perspective? You know, the highs are never as high as they feel and the lows are never as low as they feel. [00:20:48] S0: Yeah. I think it's about being very long term oriented. [00:20:51] S1: I like that.
00:20:51 · S1, Brendan Foody
[00:20:51] S1: I like that. [00:20:52] S0: I find that it's easy to reflect on something that happened this week and think, didn't have to deal with that thing last week, so this week is horrible. Right? But if I zoom out to where were we last year or the year before that, it gives a lot of perspective around broadly things are going pretty well, and where will we be next year and in ten years because ultimately that's what matters. And it... It's hard to say that in the moment everyone gets sucked into the day to day of all the problems that they have. But trying to always ground ourselves in that is what's most helpful, I found. [00:21:30] S1: Yeah. I like that quite a bit. Something that I've been thinking about and reflecting on as your journey between becoming, you know, a leader of people to a leader of managers, to a leader of function, to a leader of company is how do you kind of be that mirror to provide the study perspective about let's keep our eye on the long term. Let's keep our eye on the prize. Absolutely. Do you find yourself doing that for your org?
00:21:30 · S1, Brendan Foody
[00:21:30] S1: Yeah. I like that quite a bit. Something that I've been thinking about and reflecting on as your journey between becoming, you know, a leader of people to a leader of managers, to a leader of function, to a leader of company is how do you kind of be that mirror to provide the study perspective about let's keep our eye on the long term. Let's keep our eye on the prize. Absolutely. Do you find yourself doing that for your org? [00:21:53] S0: I do. And I I find that how you do that changes over time as well. Like, think early on, it's about great storytelling of what will the world look like in ten years. And and that remains important. But I think one of the changes is grounding that storytelling in metrics of what is the North Star metric that matters? What are all the things that feed into that? These numbers that you can compound over a decade because you know that those will drive immense customer value. And that's something that I've certainly gained more of an appreciation for over the last year or so. [00:22:29] S1: Let's talk about some of your favorite habits and tools. [00:22:32] S0: Of course. Other than Notion or... Well [00:22:35] S1: Well, we can we can definitely talk about Notion. But I'm curious to know, like, what have you leaned on as a CEO founder? What tools have helped you?
00:22:35 · S1, Brendan Foody
[00:22:35] S1: Well, we can we can definitely talk about Notion. But I'm curious to know, like, what have you leaned on as a CEO founder? What tools have helped you? [00:22:42] S0: Well, I I am serious in saying I use Notion a ton. In fact, even so much is, like, UI inspiration because Notion's obviously beautiful. And so I... One of our front end engineers always jokes that I'll never be annoyed with the front end if they just make it look more like Notion. [00:22:58] S1: And I will be very happy. [00:23:00] S0: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I use it most to track relationships, whether it's customers or candidates. I find it very helpful, less so a template from the community, more so that I love that it's very flexible and being able to configure all of the different dimensions and have charts that spin up to show me the analytics on our pipeline and how we're doing. And so, yeah, those those sort of analysis where... Because an issue with spreadsheets is you can't, like, click and have the page Yeah. That you're editing. And so that's the reason that I love it so much that you can have a document embedded within each of the cells and and units that, are stored in the database. [00:23:47] S1: Yeah. The databases are incredibly helpful. And having that context on our platform. [00:23:51] S0: Absolutely. Well, this is one thing, we were talking about a lot on our team is that Notion AI can now connect with all of our different knowledge bases. I think my coveted said a message, like, ignorance is now, unacceptable, because people should just ask questions to the knowledge base.