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

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