Foo spent four years on an email app few would pay for, then made Paragon customers pay before any code existed, and Paragon now runs the integrations behind AI products such as You.com and Copy.ai.
Brandon Foo is co-founder and CEO of Paragon, a Los Angeles company founded in 2019 that lets software and AI companies build integrations with apps such as Salesforce, Slack and Google Drive into their own products.
Growing Up as an Only Child
He was born in Minnesota, lived there until he was 16 and grew up an only child, he told Founder Chats. He studied violin, played competitive golf in high school and thought about starting a band, which he later compared to starting a company.
Studying Math at UCLA
He spent two years at UC Santa Barbara, where he met future co-founder Brandon Shin, then transferred to UCLA and studied math and economics. He was on track for finance, with internships in private equity and wealth management, but started side projects and a student group called Bruin Entrepreneurs.
Building Polymail After College
His first company, Polymail, was an email app that became one of the most upvoted launches on Product Hunt. He spent four years on it and drew tens of thousands of users, but at $5 to $10 a month it never solved a problem urgent enough for businesses to pay much, he told The SaaS Podcast. Building integration after integration for Polymail gave him the idea for Paragon.
Selling Paragon Before Writing Code
He started Paragon with Ishmael Samuel, a former Uber engineer, according to TechCrunch. This time they ran more than 100 customer interviews and had prospects pay $30 through a Stripe form before writing code, then increased the price to test demand. The first idea, a backend service like Firebase, gave way to an embedded integration tool after customers kept raising the same problem.
