If you are building at high speed, hiring a trusted team is essential to get started early. In this episode of Build Mode, Isabelle Johannessen sits down with Isaiah Granet, CEO and founder of Bland, a voice AI company that grew from pre-seed to Series B in just 10 months. Their team has grown to 75 people and Granet has some smart advice on how the company can find hidden talent in the most unlikely places.
With a group of founders fresh out of college, Bland’s early hires were chosen for passion, rather than pedigree.
“We were looking for a really long time for our founding engineer. The person we finally hired, his work experience was a few months at an insurance company in Iowa. And before that, he was a manager at Taco Bell, and before that at a factory,” Granet told Build Mode, adding that the team found him through his GitHub account.
“What I found was not his expertise,” said Granet. “We asked him, like, what do you do for fun? And I’ve never seen a bigger smile than his face. He said, ‘I like to send code.’
After that hire, Bland began prioritizing people who were more focused on their interests and smaller and less focused as a company. From philosophy majors to beekeepers, the Bland team is built for people outside the mainstream tech ecosystem.
“There are people out there with things that don’t matter on their CVs, but are incredibly cool. It just shows you that level of passion, because that can be put into anything,” Granet said.
As the company has grown over the past year, the leadership team has had to learn not only how to hire, but also how to keep the team motivated and happy. In the episode, Granet elaborates on how Bland developed a fair wage structure and made sure all early hires understood their equity.
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There are downsides to this hiring philosophy, he said. Scrappy talent is inexperienced, so the company often has to accommodate employees who may need time to grow into the role.
Bland expects that if he is going to invest in an employee, the employee will invest in the company and do the work of development. “If you don’t deliver results, we expect you to be in the office six days a week, 12 hours a day,” said Granet.
This recruiting method can also be difficult to scale, especially with Bland’s growing rate. The co-founders work closely with the team to ensure they are working at the required high level, Granet said.
The founding team can make or break an early-stage startup, and Bland’s unique hiring practices and rapid growth point to capitalizing on the secret sauce of talent acquisition. “I think for the most part, honestly, early-stage founders have to go with their gut and everybody finds their own hiring pattern that works,” Granet said.
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Isabelle Johannessen is a great host. Build Mode produced and edited by Maggie Nye. Audience Development is led by Morgan Little. And a special thanks to the Foundry and Cheddar video teams.
