Adams believes recorded conversations are the most wasted knowledge inside a company, and he rebuilt Grain from scratch to make the useful moments easy to find and share.
Mike Adams is co-founder and chief executive of Grain, a meeting recorder that transcribes video calls and turns the most useful moments into short clips a team can share. Grain is his third company, after two education startups, Degreed and MissionU.
Starting Out in Consulting and Education
He began his career in consulting, which gave him a foundation but bored him quickly, he told the SaaS Club podcast. He met his first co-founder at a party in San Francisco, California, and his first two companies worked on the costly gap between school and a first job. Degreed focused on credentials, and MissionU offered a one-year program delivered over Zoom that aimed to teach in one year what a four-year degree teaches.
Leaving Education Technology After MissionU
WeWork acquired MissionU, and the habit Adams kept there gave him his next idea: MissionU recorded every student session, team meeting and admissions interview. He began building Grain with his brother Jake in 2018 and went full time on September 1, 2019, the day after his obligation to WeWork ended, he told Nathan Latka. He said he had to make an explicit decision to leave education behind, "because I love ed tech."
Throwing Away Grain's First Year of Code
Grain's first year went badly. The brothers had started with a technology and gone looking for a problem, and Adams joked that their ideal customer was "anyone who would talk to us and thought it was cool." They fixed it with blunter research: they brought people into the office, said someone else had built the product, and asked for honest feedback. One feature stood out, clipping a 30-second moment from a Zoom call and sharing it anywhere, and they threw away the codebase and rebuilt Grain around it.
When COVID-19 hit, an investor pushed them to launch publicly. Adams wanted to stay in beta, but he went against his instinct, and within a month seven or eight Y Combinator companies launched near-identical products, some of them from Grain's own beta. He took two lessons from it: trust his instinct as CEO over advisors with the wrong playbook, and keep interviewing customers.
Finding Grain's Buyers in Sales Teams
Interviews with Grain's 15 top accounts overturned his assumption that product teams would bring Grain into a company. Sales teams were the real entry point, and Grain grew to $1 million in annual recurring revenue and 1,300 customers, including Slack, Zapier and Webflow. It later raised a $16 million Series A led by Tiger Global.
