David Park built his latest enterprise AI startup, Narada, on a deliberately simple premise: talk to customers first, raise money later. A lot later.
Park, a veteran founder who previously founded and exited Coverity, sat down to discuss how Narada has grown from its earliest days into an enterprise AI product with major customers and multimillion-dollar deals. The company uses large action models to automate complex, multistep workflows across enterprise systems.
1,000 Calls Before a Single VC Meeting
In the early stages, Park and his co-founders made a pointed decision to stay away from investor outreach. Instead, the three of them conducted over 1,000 customer calls to map the actual pain points companies were experiencing. The problem that emerged was consistent: enterprise teams needed an AI product they could interact with conversationally and trust to execute multiple steps in sequence without hand-holding.
That level of customer immersion shaped the product before a line of code defined the solution.
“If you want to build a real business, ask the hard questions,” Park said. “Spend time with customers, and not just in selling, because when you have that contract and that purchase order, that’s just the beginning.”
Restraint as Strategy
When Narada applied for TechCrunch Startup Battlefield in 2024, the team’s minimal fundraising activity surprised observers. For Park, that restraint was intentional.
“We wanted to not waste too much money,” he explained. “When you have too much money in the bank and you are not near product-market fit, you’re tempted to just spend money on things that actually don’t help you evolve the company in the right way. It removes the friction to do a lot of wrong things.”
The logic runs counter to conventional startup instinct, where large early raises are often treated as validation. Park’s view is the opposite: capital abundance before clarity is a liability, not an asset.
Early Customers Became the Business
Narada’s founding team carries credentials from Stanford and Berkeley, and the company had enterprise customers and a working product. On paper, it had everything to attract investors quickly. But Park argues the customer-first approach produced something more durable than a fast fundraise.
The companies Narada worked with during its bootstrapped phase ultimately became its most valuable relationships. “Some of those customers that we bootstrapped with ultimately turned into multimillion-dollar deals,” Park said. “It’s always easier to sell more to a company that has already chosen you and has some level of trust in you.”
That trust, built through hundreds of early conversations rather than polished sales pitches, became the foundation for Narada’s growth.
The Founding Philosophy
Park’s approach reflects a broader conviction about what makes enterprise startups succeed long-term. No matter how much industry attention a product receives, market reception alone does not build a company. Customer willingness to pay does.
His framework, shaped by the exit of Coverity and refined through Narada’s early years, centers on one discipline: stay close to the customer at every stage, treat early contracts as starting points rather than finish lines, and resist the temptation that excess capital can paper over unclear product direction.
Photo by tommao wang on Unsplash
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