The founder who raised from Sequoia & then fired his customers
Tavus CEO Hassaan Raza on 10 Minutes or Less
After raising from Sequoia, Tavus had paying customers and a clear path to building AI for sales. CEO Hassaan Raza walked away anyway.
I interviewed Hassaan on the latest 10 Minutes or Less. He doesn’t call it a pivot, but a return to the original vision.
The company started with AI video personalization: take 1 video, turn it into thousands, because in 2021 that was the best the models could support.
Sales and marketing teams loved it, revenue was growing, and the obvious roadmap was better sales software.
But model capabilities kept climbing.
He looked at the team: “None of us give a crap about building sales tools. We built that model as a stepping stone and we got too deep into it.”
So after the Series A the fork was clear: stay at the app layer and become an AI sales company, or drop to the model layer and go back to their research roots.
The second path was orders of magnitude more capital intensive, slower, harder.
Tavus fired its customers and took it.
That’s also why Hassaan hates the word avatar: “Putting a face on some shitty LLM audio pipeline isn’t enough. It is actually more harmful than helpful. We believe in building this AI human interface, entities that can actually see you, hear you, understand your expressions and your emotions.”
Telling his investors was one of the scariest conversations he’d ever had.
Their response: “OK, but you better freaking be right.”
Weekly podcast where Outset Capital GP Ali Rohde interviews founders and figures out what’s top of mind in 10 Minutes or Less. You can also listen on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts.