Welcome to In Depth, a new podcast from First Round Review that’s dedicated to surfacing the tactical advice founders and startup leaders need to grow their teams, their companies and themselves. Hosted by Brett Berson, a partner at First Round, In Depth will cover a lot of ground and a wide range of topics, from hiring executives and becoming a better manager, to the importance of storytelling inside of your organization. But every interview will hit the level of tactical depth where the very best advice is found. We hope you’ll join us. Subscribe to “In Depth” now and learn more at firstround.com
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Welcome to In Depth, a new podcast from First Round Review that’s dedicated to surfacing the tactical advice founders and startup leaders need to grow their teams, their companies and themselves. Hosted by Brett Berson, a partner at First Round, In Depth will cover a lot of ground and a wide range of topics, from hiring executives and becoming a better manager, to the importance of storytelling inside of your organization. But every interview will hit the level of tactical depth where the very best advice is found. We hope you’ll join us. Subscribe to “In Depth” now and learn more at firstround.com
How a weekend hack became a multimillion-dollar AI startup | Adit Abraham (Co-founder & CEO at Reducto)
In Depth
1 hour
6 months ago
How a weekend hack became a multimillion-dollar AI startup | Adit Abraham (Co-founder & CEO at Reducto)
Adit Abraham is the co-founder and CEO of Reducto, which helps leading AI teams extract and structure data from complex documents and spreadsheets in their pipeline. Within 6 months of launching, Reducto went from 0→7 figures in ARR. Reducto has grown to process tens of millions of pages monthly for companies ranging from startups to Fortune 10 enterprises. They just announced a $24M Series A. Before Reducto, Adit was a Product Manager at Google, working on Ads and Search, and conducted machine learning research at MIT's Media Lab.
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In today’s episode, we discuss:
How listening to customers revealed an opportunity to pivot
The weekend project that became Reducto's breakthrough
Landing a Fortune 10 customer
A technical founder's guide to sales
Key insights from Reducto's fundraising journey
Advice for founders: “You’re going to fail”
Much more
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Referenced:
Anthropic: https://www.anthropic.com/
Chetan Puttagunta: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chetanputtagunta/
Diana Hu: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sdianahu/
Liz Wessel: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elizabethwessel/
Raunak Chowdhuri: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sauhaarda/
Reducto: https://reducto.ai/
Scale AI: https://scale.com/
Stripe: https://stripe.com/
Textract: https://aws.amazon.com/textract/
Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/
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Where to find Adit:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aditabraham/
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Where to find Brett:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-berson-9986094/
Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/brettberson
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Where to find First Round Capital:
Website: https://firstround.com/
First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/
Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/firstround
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstRoundCapital
This podcast on all platforms: https://review.firstround.com/podcast
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Timestamps:
(00:00) Hackathons, YC, and an unexpected pivot
(05:23) The weekend project that became Reducto's breakthrough
(09:11) How customer signal led to PDF processing
(14:46) Landing a Fortune 10 customer
(22:42) Building “transferable features”
(25:58) How caring beats sales skills in startup growth
(30:28) The strategy behind Reducto's horizontal expansion
(36:18) Hire slow, go-to-market fast
(41:45) A technical founder's guide to sales
(43:45) “You’re going to fail”
(46:27) Why startups win
(48:30) Key insights from Reducto's fundraising journey
(51:43) Less structure, more impact
(55:00) How frustrations shaped Reducto’s culture
(57:35) The question you should always ask in meetings
In Depth
Welcome to In Depth, a new podcast from First Round Review that’s dedicated to surfacing the tactical advice founders and startup leaders need to grow their teams, their companies and themselves. Hosted by Brett Berson, a partner at First Round, In Depth will cover a lot of ground and a wide range of topics, from hiring executives and becoming a better manager, to the importance of storytelling inside of your organization. But every interview will hit the level of tactical depth where the very best advice is found. We hope you’ll join us. Subscribe to “In Depth” now and learn more at firstround.com
