This isn’t David Park’s first rodeo. The veteran founder and TechCrunch Startup Battlefield alumnus is certainly battle-tested in the entrepreneurial arena. In this episode of Build Mode, Park joins Isabelle Johannessen to discuss how he and his team are intentionally iterating, fundraising and scaling Narada. This enterprise AI solution uses large action models to automate complex multi-step workflows in enterprise systems.
At face value, Narada has everything that would likely get investors knocking on its door: a dream founding team of experienced researchers and operators from Stanford and Berkeley, well-known enterprise customers, and a product that works. So in 2024, when Narada applied for Startup Battlefield, he surprised the team at how little fundraising he had done. This choice was by design.
“We wanted to not waste too much money,” Park said when asked why they were waiting to raise money. “Because I think when, again, when you have a lot of money in the bank and you’re not close to the product market, you’re tempted to spend money on things that don’t actually help you grow the company the right way. It removes the friction of doing a lot of the wrong things.”
Park was previously founded and spun off from Coverity. That founding experience taught him a critical lesson he took with him to Narada: Take the time to talk to your customers before you do anything else. Park said that in the early days, he and his co-founders weren’t focused on approaching VCs, but instead the three of them made over 1,000 customer calls to deeply understand what their pain points were. Once the problem was extremely clear, the solution came into focus. These teams needed an AI product they could talk to like a person and trust to take multiple steps at once.
“If you want to build a real business, ask the hard questions, right? Spend time with customers and not just in sales, because when you have that contract and that purchase order, that’s just the beginning, right?” Park advises treating those early conversations as more than just sales calls: “And some of those clients we started with eventually turned into multimillion-dollar deals, right? And it’s always easier to sell more to a company that has already selected you and has some level of trust in you.”
As a veteran founder, Park has a fundamental belief that to build a company the right way, the customer must be at the center of every decision. Because at the end of the day, no matter how trendy, interesting, or well-received your product is by the industry, if people won’t pay for it, it won’t be a winner.
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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.
