Posted on 03/31/2026 9:11:57 PM PDT by nickcarraway
When you’re building at breakneck speed, hiring a trusted team is crucial for an early-stage startup. In this episode of Build Mode, Isabelle Johannessen sits down with Isaiah Granet, the CEO and co-founder of Bland, a voice AI company that has grown from pre-seed to Series B in just 10 months. Their team has ballooned to 75 people and Granet has tactical advice on how the company managed to find hidden talent in unlikely places.
With a founding team fresh out of college, Bland’s early hires were selected for their passion, rather than pedigrees.
“We were searching for a really long time for our founding engineer. The person that we ended up hiring, his work experience was a few months at an insurance company in Iowa. And before that, he had been a manager at a Taco Bell, and before that on a factory floor,” Granet told Build Mode, adding that the team found him through his GitHub account.
“The thing that got me was not his tech,” Granet said. “We asked him, like, what do you do for fun? And I have never seen a grin as big as on his face. He said, ‘I like to ship code.’”
After that hire, Bland began prioritizing people who were obsessive about their passions and as young and scrappy as the company. From philosophy majors to beekeepers, the Bland team has been built on people outside of the typical tech ecosystem.
“There’s people out there that have things that are not valuable on résumés, but are incredibly cool. What it just shows is that level of obsession, because that can be put onto anything,” Granet said.
As the company has grown in the past year, the leadership team has had to learn not only how to hire, but also how to keep the team motivated and happy. In the episode, Granet goes into detail about how Bland developed a fair pay structure and ensured that all early hires understood their equity.
There are downsides to this hiring philosophy, he said. Scrappy talent can be inexperienced, so the company often has to adjust for employees who may need time to grow into a role.
Bland expects that if it’s going to invest in an employee, the employee will also invest in the company and put in the work to improve. “If you’re not delivering outcomes, our expectation is that you’re going to be in the office six days a week, 12 hours a day,” Granet said.
This way of hiring can also be difficult to scale, especially at the rate Bland is growing. The co-founders are extremely hands-on with the team to ensure they’re performing at the high-level required, Granet said.
The founding team can make or break an early-stage startup, and Bland’s unique hiring methods and lightning-fast growth point to the benefit of finding the secret sauce to acquiring talent. “I think for the most part, honestly, early-stage startup founders should go with their gut and everybody finds their own pattern of hiring that works,” Granet said.
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WAIT UNTIL THEIR PAYCHECKS ARE ARTIFICIAL, ALSO
>>”our expectation is that you’re going to be in the office six days a week, 12 hours a day,” Granet said.
paying for 40 hours, expecting 72 hours. Hiring people for being weird rather than being competent. Why does this feel like the dot-com boom all over again?
Because it is like the dot-com boom, in that respect anyway.
I've always worked a lot more hours than my salary was for; it's who I am, and maybe that's weird, but when I'm doing something I enjoy I go whole hog and the effective hourly rate is secondary.
Between the mid-90's and about 2002 I worked those 72-80 hour weeks, getting paid for 40, at a small software company. When we had dot-com VC money it was great. But when we no longer did, and the paychecks started slipping, I was laid off with no notice, and there wasn't anything left for severance. Didn't even get the un-taken PTO/vacation time. Sucked.
Not again.
I worked for a design company right out of college that designed and built fast food restaurants. Main client was McDonalds. They also manufactured fiberglass elements and signage used in their projects. I interviewed for the decr side, but my portfolio was strong in producing drafted construction documents, so that is the position I was hired for. They paid flat salary and expected minimum of 50 hours and up to 60+ hours a week.
It was pretty grueling work. Nothing like drafting (old school hand drafting- nocomputers) for 10 hours while inhaling fumes from the fiberglass being molded in the room next door. I lasted 4 months. Quit when they started adding an extra weekend shift to our load at no additional,pay.
As a former volunteer (13 years) at our local air museum, I could talk about some of the weirdos who quit after a month or two but it didn’t have anything to do with money. It was more like they came in gunning for the best jobs, which had already been taken years before.
That’ll be interesting to see.
I was looking for a coder for a program I was running. I was handed an impressive resume and told to hire the guy. He was a contractor. Interview was a little off but I hired the guy, bought all the computer equipment he said he needed and put him to work. He was weird to say the least, fat, not very clean, walked around in his socks, desk was a mess. After a month and not seeing anything productive out of the guy I came in and said grab your shxt, hand over your CAC badge and follow me and yes that’s exactly what I said. He said what’s up I said your fired and I’m escorting you off base and did. Management said I couldn’t do that. I said I did and it’s your problem now.
I won the battle..the rest of the team thanked me. Hiring weirdos doesn’t work. You hire competent people based on merit.
Your story reminds me of the fat computer geek on the first Jurassic Park movie that got his just due from Dilophosaurs.
Back when the movie came out the software industry had a discussion about Nedry. Basically the opinion was that with 2 million lines of code and 1 engineer who felt underpaid (in the book he wasn’t paid at all) and under appreciated that was a management problem.
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