When you’re building at high speed, hiring a reliable team is critical for an early-stage startup. In this episode of Build Mode, Isabelle Johannessen sits down with Isaiah Granet, CEO and co-founder of Bland, a voice AI company that went from seed to Series B in just 10 months. Their team has grown to 75 people, and Granet has tactical advice on how the company manages to find hidden talent in unexpected places.
With a founding team fresh out of college, Bland’s first hires were chosen for passion, not pedigree.
“We’ve been looking for our founding engineer for a long time. The guy we hired had a few months of work experience at an insurance company in Iowa. Before that, he was a manager at Taco Bell, and before that he was a manager on the factory floor,” Granet told Build Mode, adding that the team found him through his GitHub account.
“It wasn’t his technology that got me,” Granet said. “We asked him, ‘What do you do for fun? And I’ve never seen a bigger smile on his face. He said, ‘I like to send code.'”
After this hiring, Bland began to favor people who were obsessive about their passions and as young and skinny as the company. From philosophy majors to beekeepers, Bland’s team is built on people outside the typical tech ecosystem.
“There are people out there who don’t have valuable resumes but have incredibly cool things. It just shows the level of obsession, because it 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 how to keep the team motivated and happy. In the episode, Granet details how Bland developed a fair salary structure and made sure all early hires understood their equity.
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There are downsides to this hiring philosophy, he said. Abnormal talent can be inexperienced, so a company often has to accommodate employees who need time to transition into a role.
Bland expects that if he invests in the employee, the employee will invest in the company and work to improve his job. “If you’re not delivering results, our expectation is that you’re in the office 12 hours a day, six days a week,” Granet said.
This method of recruiting can be difficult to scale, especially as Bland grows. Granet said the co-founders are extremely hands-on with the team to ensure they perform at the high level required.
A founding team can make or break an early-stage startup, and Bland’s unique recruiting methods and lightning-fast growth point to the benefit of finding the secret sauce to acquiring talent. “I think for the most part, to be honest, early-stage startup founders have to go on their own accord and everyone finds their own hiring model that works,” Granet said.
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Isabelle Johannessen is our host. Installation mode Produced and edited by Maggie Nye. Audience Development is led by Morgan Little. Special thanks to the Foundry and Cheddar video teams.
