When you’re building at breakneck speed, hiring a reliable team is crucial for an early-stage startup. In this episode of Build Mode, Isabelle Johannessen sits down with Isaiah Granet, the CEO and co-founder of Bland, a voice AI company that has grown from pre-seed to Series B in just 10 months. Their team has grown to 75 people, and Granet has regular tips on how the company managed to find hidden talent in unlikely places.
With a founding team fresh out of college, Bland’s first hires were chosen for passion rather than pedigree.
“We were looking for a long time for our founding engineer. The person we ended up hiring, his work experience was a few months at an insurance company in Iowa. And before that, he was a manager at a Taco Bell and before that at a factory,” Granet told Build Mode, adding that the team found him through his GitHub account.
“What made me was not his technology,” Granet said. “We asked him, what do you do for fun? And I’ve never seen a smile as big as that on his face. He said, ‘I like to send code.’
After this hire, Bland began prioritizing people who were obsessed with their passions and as young and weak as the company. From philosophy majors to beekeepers, the Bland team is built on people outside of the typical tech ecosystem.
“There are people out there who have things that aren’t valuable on resumes, but they’re incredibly cool. What it just shows is that level of obsession, because that can be applied to anything,” Granet said.
As the company grew over the past year, the leadership team had to learn not only how to hire, but also how to keep the team motivated and happy. In the episode, Granet details how Bland developed a fair pay structure and made sure all early hires understood their rights.
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There are downsides to this hiring philosophy, he said. Cluttered talent can be inexperienced, so the company often has to accommodate employees who may need time to grow into a role.
Bland expects that if he is going to invest in an employee, the employee will also invest in the company and work to improve it. “If you don’t deliver results, we expect you to be in the office six days a week, 12 hours a day,” Granet said.
This type of recruiting can also be difficult to scale, especially at the rate Bland is developing. The co-founders are extremely hands-on with the team to ensure they perform at the high level required, Granet said.
The founding team can make or break an early-stage startup, and Bland’s unique recruiting methods and lightning-fast growth demonstrate the benefit of finding the secret sauce for talent acquisition. “I think for the most part, frankly, early-stage startup founders should go with their gut and everybody finds their own hiring pattern that works,” Granet said.
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Isabelle Johannessen is our host. Construction mode Produced and edited by Maggie Nye. Head of Audience Development is Morgan Little. And a special thanks to the Foundry and Cheddar video teams.
