Building a lean team before raising big with David Park, Narada

About this episode

David Park discusses building a lean team and the importance of customer engagement before raising capital.

This week on Build Mode, we’re joined by David Park, co-founder and CEO of Narada, an enterprise AI agent platform spun out of UC Berkeley AI Lab research. Narada uses large action models to automate complex, multi-step workflows across enterprise systems. After previously co-founding and exiting Coverity, Park is now building his second company with a different playbook: Stay lean, talk to customers, and don’t raise before you’re ready. In this episode, he shares why Narada spent a year making nearly 1,000 customer calls before raising institutional capital, how the company reached 99.99% reliability in production environments, and why he believes too much funding too early can derail even the strongest teams. Park also reflects on his experience as a Startup Battlefield Top 20 company and the lessons he’s carried from his first exit into building Narada. He breaks down: Why customers won’t tell you your “baby is ugly” — but their wallets will How Narada achieves enterprise-grade AI reliability Why raising money before product-market fit can be dangerous The discipline of building a lean, “mean building machine” When to scale your go-to-market team (and when not to) Why founders…

People in this episode

Host: TechCrunch

Guest: David Park

Topics covered

• lean startup
• customer engagement
• enterprise AI
• funding strategy
• product-market fit
• startup lessons

Keywords

• lean team
• customer calls
• enterprise AI
• funding
• product-market fit
• reliability
• startup lessons

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Narada, UC Berkeley AI Lab, Coverity, Startup Battlefield

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