How Grain Intelligence Inc. CEO Mike Adams grew Grain Intelligence Inc. to $10.3M revenue and 300 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is mike adams he's the ceo and co-founder of grain a tool that empowers remote teams to record transcribe annotate and share the most important moments from virtual meetings in a highlight reel he previously co-founded degreed and mission view which is required by wework mike leaves that recorded conversations and spoken knowledge they generate fundamentally expand our ability to listen empathize and connect with each other mike ready to take to the top i'm very excited too all right so you get an exit at wework by the way was that sort of a life-changing event that allows you to take bigger risks now or is that sort of just a nice sort of flat exit for everybody it's a flat exit for everybody and uh the big win i got was discovering the need and ultimately the product for grain that i'm building now over solving my own you know my own need for two years building an online school and so uh um our students were able to actually get absolved their income share agreements and still you know for the most part get jobs and so it ended up being kind of a win-win for everybody so so what happened to that that sounds very interesting is that the one we were bought yeah so um weworkbot mission u uh fully remote on the back of zune started in 2016 so we were one of the first like fully embracing the remote you know learning environment and cohort based model and uh we ran into a lot of regulatory challenges at the state of california that has since made it extremely clear that their position is that income share agreements where you pay a portion of your income in the future once you get a job and only if you get a job that's aligned with the students that those were not actually legal in the state of california they took up kind of an anomalistic stance on that so that that created a lot of challenges for our business we looked forward to um you know the event our ability to return venture um to make a venture outcome and ultimately made a determination that an acquisition was uh the best situation for us how much you raised that company we raised 11 and a half million got it cool so i imagine a lot with this just sort of going to we work stock yeah so it went into wework stock our investors got you know we still had it eight and a half million dollars in the bank so we made a call it's not like we ran out of the money we were like we looked at the future and we said you know this uh this ability for us to actually like deliver on the projections that we made up front given the change in climate given you know a lot of the you know kind of unit economics that we were learning over the next couple of years uh we we looked at it and we said i think it's actually you know best for our investors to uh you know get their as much of the money back as they can and then the rest was made up for and we work stock and uh i have the opportunity to start a new company i would say kudos to you for doing that i mean right there are so many founders i know that they see the writing on the wall but they feel stuck because they don't raise vc money they don't want the negative headline right if they shut the company down but ultimately the biggest opportunity cost for anybody is your time right so you don't want to waste you don't want to even though you have eight and a half million you can pay yourself you can pay your team you don't want to do that for years kudos to you for doing the right thing there and getting that out grain is born what year did you start coding grain so we the acquisition from wework was in 2019 and so i started full time on grain september 1st so my obligation through the wework acquisition was uh expired august the 31st of 2019 and i started training september 1st so um we raised some venture capital right out the gate from a lot of the people who backed me in the past they still were big believers in me and they really loved the division that we had because i was building grain just to solve the same problem for future people that i had sold to myself building a school in the back of zoom what i the insight i discovered was that spoken information it's unstructured it's largely ephemeral it's usually not even captured but it is the key to being able to bridge the gap in the future of work between seamless um between remote uh synchronous and asynchronous communication so asynchronous communications tend to be text based and the medium is usually the documentation i wrote the message it's in it's they go and search the slack logs the same is not true of the synchronous spoken world but it is true if you record it if you transcribe it if you make that content searchable but you need a new kind of uh wave of tools or software that can make it as easy to work with the content of spoken knowledge as it is to work with the content of written knowledge and so that's kind of how how grain was born i started it with my brother who was the first employee at branch metrics and so he had a four year you know unicorn run uh as the first employee there or do you have more uh we split slightly less uh slightly different very close to 50. like 51.49 sort of situation that's uh very close no you want to have good thanksgivings moving forward so yeah you can't tie yeah we'll say uh i have been a co-founder twice and uh jake and i are dramatically closer to 5050 than i ever was as a as a first-time co-founder even a second time co-founder fair fair okay how much did you raise in that first round uh we raised uh so what we did on our financing is we did about a million right out the gate which is us and a pitch deck um and a vision and a belief uh uh and that was on like a safe and then we did a priced round uh about nine months later so this is uh uh fall of oh i'm sorry this all started in 2018 not 2019. okay so that million was 2018. it was 2018. it it's fall 2018 mission you got acquired in 2018 so it's about almost three years ago mission got acquired and then we did a seat round nine months later in 2019 so this is a year before the pandemic and um we were onto this kind of trend we knew it was inevitable and then the pandemic has just really accelerated it and then we did a follow-on round um that hasn't been announced yet but uh it's with freestyle capital and so we did an initial three million on a safe there after the press round so it's been about seven million dollars total we've raised and um our team is about 15 people yeah so just be clear so there's seven total four it's unannounced but with with freestyle one was at the beginning i'm sorry three was with three free freestyle so one at the beginning and three and then three in a price round that four was announced and we raised an additional three that has not yet been announced got it okay so so let me ask about that right when you do make that announcement people will go wait a second it's very rare you see a price round and then going back to unpriced they'll go wait was there a down on there trying to manage through here what's the story there yeah the story was an up round on with amazing investor on amazing terms and we wanted to work together very very you know on quickly so what happened is we launched on techcrunch a year after that price round um this is about a month after the pandemic and we made a positioning bet to say we're on the back of zoom we're the we are the zoo map when you think about zoom apps think of grain so we had a techcrunch launch and then one of the investors that i really had a great experience with her name's jenny leftcourt at freestyle vc a year before um it timing-wise didn't work out for her to lead the priced round but she really wanted to get involved a year later and so uh this was a really easy way we had a huge amount of like in insider interest and so the rest of it was just bought up by insiders um so that's where we did the three million and they took like a much bigger check than they would normally do um just because she was so eager and excited to work with um drain and we got really nice you know up terms on it as well so when you look at a simple easy way to get more capital yeah it was a cap higher than your last priced round is that exactly like yeah yeah substantially higher interesting okay very cool let's take more to the product because i think this is interesting right you know when i had sid from git lab on he said the reason he has all his companies all of his team members post meetings even private meetings on youtube if you go to their youtube channel you'll see you can open the transcript that google automatically does and search the meetings quickly you're sort of doing that but in a much shorter more formal way and you're building business around it you're using it right now actually on this call so what is great work yeah so grain taps into this recognition that the the tools for the spoken world that we live in um are primarily designed to facilitate the conversation not to facilitate the transfer of information across the bounds of of synchronous and asynchronous work that's where grain comes in is that we recognize that well like what gitlab does where you can upload videos and these artifacts if you record it all the...