Bootstrapping First, then Raising Money to Build a $10M+ Generative AI Startup: Anthony Scodary, Co-Founder of Gridspace (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s trace this a little bit more granularly. When did you launch the company? When did you quit your jobs, or did you not quit your jobs? Did you start it before quitting your jobs?

Anthony Scodary: No, I quit my job in November 2012 and I think we started a day later. I think we decided we were going to do this in the fall of 2012. Nico had previously been at a video game streaming startup called OnLive in Palo Alto. Evan had sold his last company, which was called Zappedy.

Bootstrapping First, then Raising Money to Build a $10M+ Generative AI Startup: Anthony Scodary, Co-Founder of Gridspace (Part 1)

Gridspace is a wonderful case study of a speech technology company on the bleeding edge of Machine Learning and Generative AI. You will learn how the founders managed to bootstrap to large paying customers and then raise strategic funding. You will also learn the nuances of how they used various Open Source components and existing ML models to get to a point where they can afford to develop more original technology. You will also learn the importance of solutions versus technology platforms.

Building a Generative AI Venture from Portugal: João Aroso, CEO of Leadzai (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Now, do you also do the A/B testing on landing page optimization and things like that? Because that would be part of your lead generation process, right?

João Aroso: That’s a very clever question and a part of our roadmap because that obviously affects the end result. However, currently we rely only on the customer’s landing page.

Sramana Mitra: Where is the lead collected? Is it collected on the customer’s website?

Building a Generative AI Venture from Portugal: João Aroso, CEO of Leadzai (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: At the point at which this switch is happening, what are the dynamics of the company? Do you have customers? Are you still operating with that 1.5M in financing?

João Aroso: We’re still operating with the 1.5M in financing, but we’re starting a new fundraise. We have some early customers in Portugal and Italy. We were trying to figure out where to go in terms of differentiation when we realized that with GPT-3, we wouldn’t be scalable. So, we were trying to figure out where we wanted to go in that moment. That’s when we realized from a business standpoint that the only thing that matters to our end customer is what business the campaign is generating.

Building a Generative AI Venture from Portugal: João Aroso, CEO of Leadzai (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: So then how long did you do this business? And what kind of revenue levels or what kind of scale were you able to achieve?

João Aroso: We did that business for two years and one of my co-founders from my first startup is still there today. I left, but the company is still very healthy.

Building a Generative AI Venture from Portugal: João Aroso, CEO of Leadzai (Part 1)

João is a serial entrepreneur who has built several businesses from Portugal. His current company has found its path to scalability with the advent of Generative AI. He discusses challenges of business models and pricing in great depth.

A Serial Entrepreneur’s Journey into FinTech: Felix Rodriguez, Founder and CEO of finally (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Did you raise the seed round through your own network or through a startup network?

Felix Rodriguez: We had a process to raise funding, and they certainly made introductions. But I had taken matters into my own hands. I was inviting investors to Demo Day. I sent out a cold email to Pat Matthews, the founder of Active Capital. He ended up leading our round.

A Serial Entrepreneur’s Journey into FinTech: Felix Rodriguez, Founder and CEO of finally (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Okay. What were the other startups that you were working on at this point?

Felix Rodriguez: Immediately after that, we were thinking that for this company that has over 50 people, what could I and a couple of other engineers build that’s more automated. We were really passionate about automation. I think people call it AI now. But we were thinking about how could we automate the publishing business. We had a website business where we had a bunch of web designers. So, in order to get traffic on the web, you have to put content, right? And Google was starting to really take off.