How 1,000+ customer calls shaped a breakout enterprise AI startup

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

On the surface, Narada has everything that would likely get investors coming through the door: a dream founding team of experienced researchers and operators from Stanford and Berkeley, large enterprise customers, and a product that works. So when Narada signed up for Startup Battlefield in 2024, the team was surprised at how little fundraising they had done. That choice was by design.

“We didn’t want to waste too much money,” Park said when asked why they waited to fundraise. “Because I believe that when, again, if you have too much money in the bank and you don’t have anywhere near product market fit, you’re tempted to just spend money on things that don’t actually help you evolve the business in the right way. It takes away the friction of doing a lot of the wrong things.”

Park previously established and abandoned by Coverity. That founding experience taught him one crucial lesson that he has taken with him to Narada: take the time to talk to your customers before you do anything else. Park said he and his co-founders didn’t focus on reaching out to venture capital firms in the beginning, but instead the three of them conducted more than 1,000 customer conversations to really understand what the pain points were. Once the problem was very clear, the solution came into view. These teams needed an AI product that they could talk to as a person and take multiple steps simultaneously.

“If you want to build a real business, ask the hard questions, right? Spend time with customers, not just selling, because once you have that contract and that purchase order, that’s just the beginning, right?” Park recommends looking at those early conversations as more than just sales calls: “And some of those clients we started working with ended up turning into million-dollar deals, right? And it’s always easier to sell more to a company that has already chosen you and has some level of trust in you.”

As an experienced founder, Park has the fundamental belief that to build a business the right way, the customer must be at the center of every decision. Because at the end of the day, no matter how trendy, interesting or well-received your product is by the industry, if people aren’t willing to pay for it, it won’t be a winner.

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Isabelle Johannessen is our host. Construction mode is produced and edited by Maggie Nye. Audience Development is led by Morgan Little. And a special thanks to the video teams at Foundry and Cheddar.