How over 1,000 customer calls shaped a leading AI startup

This isn’t David Park’s first rodeo. The veteran founder and TechCrunch Startup Battlefield alumnus has certainly been tested in the enterprise arena. In this episode of Build Mode, Park joins Isabelle Johannessen to discuss how he and his team intentionally iterate, fundraise, and scale Narada. An enterprise AI solution uses large business models to automate complex, multi-step workflows across enterprise systems.

On the face of it, Narada has everything that would attract investors to its door: a dream founding team of experienced researchers and operators from Stanford and Berkeley, big-name institutional clients, and a successful product. So in 2024, when Narada applied for Startup Battlefield, the team was surprised by how little fundraising it had. This choice was by design.

“We wanted to not waste a lot of money,” Park said when asked why they waited to collect donations. “Because I think when you have a lot of money in the bank and you’re not close to the product market, you tend to spend money on things that don’t actually help you grow the company in the right way. It removes the friction of doing a lot of the wrong things.”

Park previously founded and exited Coverity. That foundational experience taught him an important lesson that he took with him to Narada: Take the time to talk to your customers before doing anything else. Park said that in the early days, he and his co-founders did not focus on reaching out to venture capitalists, but instead, the three of them made more than 1,000 phone calls with clients to deeply understand pain points. Once the problem became very clear, the solution came into focus. These teams needed an AI product that they could talk to as 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, not just selling, because when you have that contract and purchase order, that’s just the beginning, right?” Park advises looking at those early conversations as more than just sales calls: “And some of these clients we’ve worked with end up turning into multi-million dollar deals, right? And it’s always easier to sell more to a company that has already chosen you and has a level of trust in you.”

As a veteran founder, Park has a core belief that to build a company the right way, every decision must be customer-focused. Because at the end of the day, no matter how new, interesting, or well-received by the industry your product is, if people aren’t paying for it, it’s not a winner.

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Isabel Johansson is our host. Build mode Produced and edited by Maggie Nye. Audience development is led by Morgan Little. And special thanks to the Foundry and Cheddar video teams.