When you’re building at breakneck speed, hiring a trusted 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 ten months. Their team has expanded to 75 people, and Granet shares tactical advice on how the company managed to find hidden talent in unlikely places.
With a founding team fresh out of college, Bland’s early hires were selected for their passion rather than their pedigrees. Granet explained that they searched for a long time for their founding engineer. The person they hired had only worked a few months at an insurance company in Iowa. Before that, he was a manager at a Taco Bell and had worked on a factory floor. The team discovered him through his GitHub account.
Granet noted that what impressed them was not his technical portfolio. When they asked him what he did for fun, he broke into a huge grin and said, “I like to ship code.” After that hire, Bland began prioritizing people who were obsessive about their passions and who were as young and scrappy as the company itself. The team has been built with people from outside the typical tech ecosystem, including philosophy majors and beekeepers.
Granet said there are people with experiences that aren’t valuable on a résumé but are incredibly cool. What that shows is a level of obsession, which can be applied to anything. 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 details how Bland developed a fair pay structure and ensured all early hires understood their equity.
There are downsides to this hiring philosophy, he admitted. Scrappy talent can be inexperienced, so the company often has to adjust for employees who need time to grow into a role. Bland expects that if it invests in an employee, the employee will also invest in the company and work to improve. Granet stated that if you’re not delivering outcomes, the expectation is that you’ll be in the office six days a week, twelve hours a day.
This way of hiring can also be difficult to scale, especially at Bland’s rapid growth rate. The co-founders are extremely hands-on with the team to ensure everyone performs at the required high level. The founding team can make or break an early-stage startup, and Bland’s unique hiring methods and lightning-fast growth point to the benefit of finding the right formula for acquiring talent. Granet believes that, for the most part, early-stage startup founders should go with their gut, as everybody finds their own pattern of hiring that works.