Building a Venture Scale Enterprise AI Company from Spain: David Villalon, CEO of Maisa (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: There’s no need to open anything to everyone. I think it’s very good to stay focused, especially because your strategy is a land-and-expand strategy. You get in through finance, do one use case, then ten, then a hundred. You want a set of large customers where you can expand and make each customer a multimillion-dollar deal. That’s really the kind of business you want to build.

Building a Venture Scale Enterprise AI Company from Spain: David Villalon, CEO of Maisa (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s stay with the journey. Let me first focus on the journey, then we’ll draw extrapolations and big conclusions. You identified a use case in invoice processing that took advantage of your product’s functionality, allowing a business user to use your product to make this happen. Did you close that deal?

Building a Venture Scale Enterprise AI Company from Spain: David Villalon, CEO of Maisa (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: So, tell me exactly what happened. What did you have in the product when customers started asking, “How much”?

David Villalon: The main problem we had was that we’d built an engine we could personally make do anything. We could customize it for any customer, but that approach didn’t scale.

Building a Venture Scale Enterprise AI Company from Spain: David Villalon, CEO of Maisa (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Double-click down on where you were — what use case you were applying this knowledge processing unit workflow to?

David Villalon: In the early days, that was one of the biggest questions we had to solve.

Sramana Mitra: For your startup, that’s always the biggest question you have to solve.

Building a Venture Scale Enterprise AI Company from Spain: David Villalon, CEO of Maisa (Part 1)

David discusses his journey building an enterprise AI venture with 15 large enterprise customers who are implementing real use cases built on the Maisa platform. These use cases are not POC experiments. They are in production. The customer base currently is mostly European enterprises. This is going to be a very valuable company.

Building an AI EdTech Company: College Guidance Network CEO Jon Carson (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Very interesting. Was there an inflection point that you experienced as you built the business?

Jon Carson: I think I’m in it right now.

Sramana Mitra: You are in it right now? Tell me more.

Building an AI EdTech Company: College Guidance Network CEO Jon Carson (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What about the financing strategy of this business? You’ve done venture-funded companies before. You’ve had exits. You were coming into this business with your own personal needs. Did you bootstrap the beginning? Did you fund it right away?

Building an AI EdTech Company: College Guidance Network CEO Jon Carson (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s double click down on pricing in all these different products. How has your pricing evolved? What was the pricing on the first version, which was just masterclass style?