The D1 Athlete Who Built a $100M Voice AI Company

you were an ultra endurance cyclist

the shortest race that you've ever finished is 300 miles

ridden without sleep which is actually pretty nuts

and before that you competed in cross country skiing

at the highest level of US college sports

and even qualified for the national championship

so that's an incredible accomplishment

but then the race got cancelled

what was that week like before the cross country skiing cancellation

I had my

basically my entire life had been training for to make it to the Ncaas

and you know I didn't make it freshman year

didn't make it sophomore year

didn't make it junior year

senior year was my last chance to make it

and so I had finally got everything figured out

was able to finally make that um

that ski race and I was very excited

about it and then yeah at that point it was just like all the work

yeah I mean at the time it was it was weird

there was like parts of you felt like relieved

because it was like a very stressful moment

you know you're like oh

you know like I have a right off um

I think you feel a little bit like that in the moment

because you're like oh wow

this big stresser is over

but as I kind of looked back on

I think I was I ended up being pretty bummed because it was you know

it felt like unfinished business

and there was no way like that was just completely taken from me

and there was no way that I could go back and do anything about it

it was just it was gone like I couldn't

there was nothing that I could have done because at this point

there was nothing that I could have done because at this point

you know

it was too late to do like a fifth year or something like that

nor was I interested in that

so I think of that that was one of those things where

it was just like it put like

I think it put a chip on my shoulder

I was like oh

like I still still gotta make it still got something to prove

and that chip is carried into what we're doing today

I do think that there is a very strong correlation between kind of

professional athlete and founders

because a lot of the traits you do bring with you right

like ultra endurance

dealing with situations that you might not be able to control

and working almost delusively focus on something um

your entire life um

so you were in the US you did school in the US and you were

you spent your whole life in the US

but then you landed in Melbourne to do a PhD in machine learning

and that's where you met your co founder Nissan

and that's where the idea for felony started

so before we get too ahead of ourselves

um in two sentences

could you describe what felony is

very simply put we allow you to answer your phone with AI

that talks exactly like a person

so if you have a receptionist or use a call center

we can automate right now about 80 or 90% of those workflows

using artificial intelligence

and save you about 70% of what you would be paying um

for that now I can go into the details of what makes this

you know better and exciting

but I think we'll just stop for there

no please

like please go into all the details of why you guys are fun exciting

I think that we see so we've been in the market in space a long time

so we started working on this

but like started doing research on this about two and a half

three years ago back before voice AI was even a term

like it wasn't even a term that existed

and so we started doing just research on this because we're like

well this feels like a problem um

and you know

that was kind of the earliest days of like putting things together um

and so when we say we answer the phones with the ad

there's a lot of companies out there that like claim that they do that

I think that like what makes us different is No. 1

we've got two and a half years of battle scars

of just obsessing over one problem

number two we have like a PhD background

which has helped us like build and train or optimize our own models

and but like really number three

what our customers use us for

is they want to optimize and understand the calls at scale

and so they need some one platform where they can build a voice agent

and then they can say well

how do I actually make my AI agent better

if you're booking appointments

you really care if that that per

you know that AI or that person whatever

how well of the job that they do at booking that like

did they book the appointment

did they not and what we see on the market today is

there's a lot of people that promise AI

they can kind of do everything

but it's really hard to get reliability at scale

and so we're really

really good at getting reliability of voice agents when you have 10 15

20 30,000 calls a day

and you want to make sure that every single call gets handled

perfectly that's when businesses choose phone

I think voice AI is super big right now

but we sometimes forget that this is um

it only kind of start rising up towards the end of 2023

even 2024 actually

so it's only been around for maybe one or two years um

but the space has rapidly moved since

so you mentioned how

your product is completely more robust than others in the market

how do you think about like achieving this on a technical level

a lot of what

technical challenges come down to is doing a lot of small things right

and so it's every detail that that is involved in formally

we've paid attention to whether that is

how do we handle interruptions

how do we handle when somebody's done talking

how do we make sure that our latency is low at scale

how do we handle situations where the AI

agent gets the email address wrong

because the transcription is wrong

like all those little details

like all those little details

and so really what it is

is a combination of a lot of really small details put together

and then

the ability to be able to optimize and run that at extreme scale

and so a lot of what our customers rely on us for is they

they can't have their phones be down

and so we make sure that they're up 100% of the time um

and so that's a

that's a lot of stuff and a lot of the reasons why people pay for us

what were the main things

that you

think that you guys solve a lot better than the current market

and so most of our competitors out there are saying like hey

plug this model in you plug your own model in

you just you know GPT 4.1

5.2 whatever um

you you start with a blank canvas

and then you kind of go and figure it out

and with funny

what we've done is we've been very opinionated and we've said hey

this is how voice agents should behave um

and we've tried to solve a lot of the downstream problems

were solving themselves through our other platforms

so it's like our customers don't have to prompt engineer

with phone me in other platforms

they have to prompt engineer and

and so what we do really well is like we we say hey

this is how you should interact with voice AI um

and and it's our job to figure out like

this is how to make an AI talk like a person

and you don't need to know the model

you don't need to know the infrastructure

you don't need to adjust the VAT parameters

like it just is gonna work out of the box and

and that's kind of what we believe that the market really cares about

like this when their phones answer

they don't care about the latest model and adjusting the

these little parameters and so we've really focused in on

on how do we make things as simple as possible but no simpler

um that's definitely very true

I'm actually setting up a voice agent right now

um and there is a ton of prompt engineering involved

more than people actually think

um and how you actually engineer the prompt

really affect the output of the agent itself

okay so we really got a bit of ahead of ourselves

but okay going all the way back to the origin of Phonely

so the origin behind Phonely

um how did you land on that problem

to obsess about for the next two years

it just felt like a really important one to solve

and it felt like a hard problem to get right

so I think part of you know

you end up a little bit lucky with it where you say hey

this is gonna be a problem with AI

and this is gonna be something that is going to be solved

it isn't solved now so let's work on it

and I think we got lucky at how challenging of a problem

it was to solve and

and it's always good when you find a hard problem

because that means that people will pay a lot of money to get it right

you and your co founder both came from a research background

into start up business world

um when you first did the transition

were there any mindset shift that you had to make

in order to turn from research mode into CEO founder mode

I had previous startup experience

so I had that kind of mindset out of the gate

I think that there was a little bit of transition period of like

understanding how to build products for like

the minimum thing that you needed to get things work

like it's changed over time right

cause when you first start

it's like

the minimum thing that you need to get a customer validation

that they actually want the thing that you solve right

um and I think so many people waste time on like

pretty UI and convenient interfaces and stuff

it's like

really the minimum stuff that you need to get a paying customer on

and I think that we spent a lot of time like

you know the

the most successful things that we did

and it's very clear shape was like

listen to your customers and build the features that they ask

and every time that we were like

this is gonna be a great feature that we're gonna add to this

you know whatever those features didn't get end up using

but the ones that our customers ask for

had one customer ask for it and then like 10 or 15 would use

yeah for sure

make something people love right

a incredible segue because will you did have a startup before Phonely

so you built a hardware startup called Spoke Sound

turning flat surfaces and artwork into high fidelity speakers

it even attracted chance the rapper had a genuine patent

but then you closed it down

so what was the moment that you knew it wasn't going to work out

in the long run for you

yeah

I think it's one of these things where like it could have worked out

and I realized that after I had shut down the startup

but the real big motivation for me to like

move on was I was right out of college

I wanted to start something

I didn't know what to start

this is a cool idea something I've been playing around with

and so I kind of went for it

and I Learned a couple really valuable lessons

the first thing is I didn't feel like I was solving a problem

and with my next startup I said

I want to solve a real problem that like

I want to solve a real problem that like

businesses or people have in the world

and so I had I was creating a nice to have

and I really didn't like that I was creating a nice to have

cause it didn't feel like a sustainable business model that like

I wanted to tap going forward right um

and then that was one really valuable lesson

and the second valuable lesson that I that I took on that was like

it's important to pick the idea that you

the idea that you work on is actually really important

and it doesn't like everyone's like oh

I have this genius idea but I think that the learning from that is

you're gonna be working on an idea for a really

really long time so make sure that you either like the problem

like the customers or like the solution a lot

because if you don't those do those things

then it's just not gonna work out

cause best case scenario

you're gonna start to see success in like three to five years

obviously you love the founder mode

you're still doing it today

you've done it right after college um

so I'm curious

like most people usually after an idea doesn't really work out

they pivot to another idea and build another startup right away

but then you did the whole

kind of spent some time building spoke sound

and then did your PhD before jumping into Phonely

was there kind of a strategic reasoning behind that or

and I was watching AI become bigger and bigger and

and better and better and I was like well

I want to get some really concrete experience on this

cause I feel like there's gonna be something in this space

and so I switched into that

and that research opportunity was a great way for me to

it was a full ride scholarship

spend a bunch of time just like diving in understanding the problems

doing real research but then also just learning a lot about it

and and I think that that

that credibility and also that experience is what like

helped this propel me further

much farther than I

than I would have been just because I had faking the time

spend a year and a half just working on learning AI before it was big

you know understanding the stuff um yeah

a little bit of also just saying hey

this is feels like it's gonna be a revolution

I wanna be a part of the revolution

how am I gonna do that here's an opportunity right in front of me

let's go jump into that

yeah beautiful

I am so jealous of you I definitely chose the wrong subject to study

okay so um

Phonely initially launched to small businesses

so 30 to 100 dollars a month fast feedback loop

thousands of customers

then a single call center signed on and paid more than

all of them combined so when that first call center customer signed

did it change your perspective on the direction of the company

moving forward

it definitely did right

it was one of these things where we started small

because that's what we could get

and that's what we knew and honestly

the product wasn't good enough so having iteration cycles

like I think you mentioned there as well

but just having reps of people testing your product

finding problems was actually the most valuable thing at the time

but then as many businesses go

as many successful larger businesses go

it's like you go up market

because you realize that there's a lot more money up market

than there is in the SMB type of a space

and while businesses that get SMB right can be very

very very successful it's very hard to get right um

and because it just requires a lot of distribution and resources

and like the right um

the right product and

and as we started building out what we were doing

we realized hey this model really works well

when we have the ability to give customers a support that they need

to be able to get up and running with the platform and

and automate their workflows

and if they don't you know

we're still we're still a believer that like with AI

we can augment a lot of that stuff

for small or medium businesses

but but to

to have real success and forget the kind of growth we're looking for

we realize that like upmarket just made more sense for us

I can only imagine too um

with upmarket

there are a lot more complications and complexities that actually

a platform that's quite opinionated in terms of the model

and the abstraction becomes generally even more helpful um

because they care about the minute uh

quality of the phone calls

yeah yeah exactly

so in the same similar vein

like you've achieved a lot with Phonely

so one of your customers ran $10 million of insurance sales

through your AI voice agent in four months

when you think about like these results comparative to like

other voice um

agent startups uh

I know we've talked a bit about technical architecture and like

being very opinionated and caring about small little things

but like uh

it was it just like building good relationships with customers

I think what every every startup launches if they do the right things

they can get some buzz and some press

and some early interest and attraction

and what we really did in the early days

was really build a relationship with customers

and we would have weekly meetings

daily meetings sometimes with these customers to go through

like everything that was broken

because like there was a period there

like a year and a half ago when it was like

like 30% of our calls were just not working

like the agent wasn't responding

there were like it was yeah

caught up and and these customers

they stuck with us like all of them stuck with us through that

this initial cohort of customers

and now it's like you know

everything runs smoothly it works perfectly

whatever but it was all built on relationships and so it would be like

yeah 5 in the morning

every morning

I would get a call from one of our customers and he would be like

you know something was up right um

either he wanted to turn on his agent or whatever

so you just like try to provide really

really good support um

try to build a really good product

try to make something that people love

and then I think that like commercials and stuff

you can a little bit worry about that later

once you have a product that people love

and you know that you're solving a real problem

and so one of I think one of the big mistakes that I've made

and I've seen other people make is like

try to get quick wins um

for you know

the right the right type of customers right

like if a customer can like

if you if you believe that you have the right people in the room

and that customer can expand to be a big contract

and all you have to do is prove your value

then like prove your value with the right people and

and you will be successful

30% failure rate is quite high

so going through those periods where the agent wasn't working properly

what were you saying to your champions

to let them continue working with you over time

it was just like just

it was like hey we're

you know we're working on it

like here's what we've done

here's what we think the issue is

we're rolling it back we're trying to figure it out

um just like as much communication as you possibly can like

I don't remember specifics of exactly what I said to them

but a lot of it is just

trying to be as communicative with them as you can um

try to make them realize the reason that they signed on um

and then we were just like

we would just be like hey look

we're not gonna charge you for it like

you know like we're we're investing in the long run

we're not gonna make you pay for stuff that's not working

so I think that that went a long way with them um

and it kept these customers on cause like

you know one of the customers now pays us like yeah

like $78,000 a month and if they would have left at that early time

because we weren't like so supportive and so caring of them

we'd have lost a big chunk of our revenue so just being a good

and trying to communicate as much as you can and working super hard

it really comes around a long way um

going to SMB to these gigantic accounts

and obviously at one point the agent wasn't working super perfectly

how did you make the transition of sales from going like SMB to like

large um

large contracts like did do you change your approach at all

like how do you think about those

it's just learning the sales process learning the sales cycle

I mean this is all net new to me so I'd never

never been a salesperson never done enterprise sales

you know never done any of this stuff and I think that what

what I kind of committed to was just learning and saying like

I've always I've always kind of just jumped in with both feet

even if I didn't know the right information and said

well I'll figure it out as I go along

and that was really the case with sales

what we found out what was working is just going to conferences

a specific type of LinkedIn outreach and then inbound as well

so we just try to get in the press

try to generate attract

you know hype

um we knew that we were solving a problem

and then once we kind of got those things together

then it was pretty easy from there

cool beautiful

so okay

so you guys went through y Combinator

the San Francisco start of school

home to iconic companies such as Airbnb

Coinbase

Dropbox in the summer of 2024 and the Series a didn't come until 2026

so in between the AI funding market went into a frenzy

companies raising mega rounds every few months

valuations completely exploding

you guys kept your head down and kept building

what was it like internally during those two year gap

yeah for sure

so I think probably some clarification on that

so we got into YC summer of 24

we raised a seed round out of that

we didn't announce it just cause we were too busy working

um so right out of that

so that would have been October

no dis October

December of 24

and then we did close our seed round in like December of 25

we just didn't announce it until recently

looking back in those two years

like as someone that is obviously very high achieving and impatient

um all throughout kind of your professional athlete career

and then did startups right out of college

do you ever feel like things were moving too slowly

how do you balance those like internal and external pressures

I mean it obviously like I'm very competitive right

like I wanna be that person that is

you know exceeding it every possible way right

um

and then that was that was hard

there was a lot of times for me

where that personal thing of like

we should be better we should be bigger

we should be blah blah

blah was was a really like hard question for me um

to the point in which like

but then like towards the end of it

I was just I kind of realized that there's a

there's a lot of hype out there and then there's like reality

and so when we realistically look set

step back and said like okay

let's look at where we're at

like when we raise our Series A

we're still top 5% of YC companies

our valuation is is top 5% of YC companies ever created

you know like we

we like

we are objectively moving faster than most um

and I think that where were

where I kind of landed was the idea that like

comparison is the thief of joy right

you can always like you can always come out there

there's always somebody doing better

somebody bigger somebody that you knew

like it's just always gonna be the case and

but realistically like when I started the company

I had this little sticky note that I wrote down and put on my desk

and it said

there are no shortcuts for you um

Bo Davis and what that meant to me was it meant to me that like

like that that's not gonna be your story right

your story is not gonna be the one that like

goes from this to a million like you're gonna have to earn it

and that's that's what you wanted anyways

it was not about being the lucky one that you know

got the easy route to the top

it was about putting in the work and learning and growing and

and building um

along the way because that's that's like

that's the story that I've always think it

nothing in life has ever really been handed to me

I've always had to work for everything and um

I think that that was the right mindset to how you create something

like it goes explosive but just work on it

try to solve the problem try to do your best you can and

and don't expect that you're the exception

yeah hundred percent I

I can see the athlete um

mentality coming through um

do you see all the sticky note

I have it somewhere I don't have it on my desk right now but yeah

I still do

you have to make you have to make a sign of the model you know

yeah exactly no shortcuts

so your series a story was actually really funny as well

so you it came from a LinkedIn post about cycling

so Base Ten's Caroline saw it reach out and months later

Phonely had 16 million

and 100 mil valuation without running a formal race

well first off

congratulations that is a huge achievement

and kind of your two worlds marry each other into one um

what are you excited for that the money will unlock

for me it's just all about growth right

like we're we're scaling our sales team pretty hard right now

like we you know we'll probably have three guys this week um

and so it's it's a big push for us to be able to do that to say hey

like we built like we spent so much time building the product

and now it's time to push on the sales

and really take this thing to the next level

and I think for us it was figuring out like we

we've Learned a lot along the way

and we figured out like

through all that pain and that suffering of like okay

this is what actually works in the market

this is how you do it and then now it's just hey

let's like push the money button and

and try to grow as fast as we can and we couldn't get there

we couldn't get the kind of growth that we wanted to get

if we didn't take on external capital

and so we realized that like hey

money is gonna be really important for us yeah

we can we can be successful and you know

we can

I can have good exit and retire and all that stuff like if I wanted to

um but it for us it was like hey

how big can we make this thing

um and the money was

the fat is the only way that we could unlock the kind of growth

that we're looking for

been a long journey um

been through a lot like

what do you think have been personal cost to running this business

you know and you hear people be like

oh you know

I I work 18 hours a day right man

but I didn't and I didn't think

and I heard people say that I didn't think it was possible until I

like did it

and then I did it for years and the

the the opportunity cost and the

loss on that has definitely been something that's like

weighed on my mind of saying like yeah

like I've I've missed out on like

two years of my life that I could be hanging out with friends

I could be traveling I could be

you know doing taking life on the easy route

and yeah that that like that's

that's kind of the consequence

but at the end of the day

it's like we put ourselves in a really good position going forward

and kind of the way that I think about it

I've justified that if you will is say like

the path that I'm on

gives me a lot of optionality to do whatever I want in the rest

of my life you know

I guess a lot of work now

it's really hard my 20s are not gonna be awesome right

but for the rest of my life

I can choose the impact that I want to make

I can choose the path that I want to go on

I've Learned how to raise capital

I've Learned how to build a product

I've Learned how to engineer

you know scale a sales team like

you know all these learnings right

and so it gives me so much room to go do different things in the world

and I think that as much as it sucks to miss out on some fun years um

I think at the end of the day

life is really long and to

have the optionality to spend the rest of it

doing what you want is valuable

for me and also like at the end of the day

it's like I really just want to make an impact in the world

and make the world a better place

Phonely is is not gonna be the only

it's not gonna be the last company that I start um

but it allows me to give some impact that I can hopefully take on

on my next venture to to make the world a better place and

and do some of the things that um

I care about and while voice AI is a problem to be solved and

and I love the problem and I love the team and I love the people

I still feel like there's more out there for me to

to go and really try to make the world a better place

so I'd like to have the opportunity to do that

and for me feels like the fastest way to get that opportunity

beautiful and you can always have fun in your 30s

40s or golden 50s you know

yeah we'll see about that

um okay

so throughout this entire journey

what do you think has been the most valuable lesson you've Learned

as a founder

there's like several lessons

like first off to anybody out here's watching it

that is considering being a founder or not being a founder

I recommend that you don't be a founder um

the reason for that is like

it's so hard and there's a lot of luck involved um

but even if it works out it's

it's a very long journey to

to kind of where you wanna go

and there's like there's really no easy route um

and there's some people out there that are like

oh I might wanna start a company

like if you might wanna start a company

like your company's probably not gonna work

you know and then like if

but if you're like

I need to be a founder because I feel something like so strongly

so passionately that I have to do this or

or else then

then it's like okay

well you have no choice

like you better go do it and then you better be prepared to like

put in a lot of work um

hey I wanna

I wanna build something massive

and I'm gonna go out in the Silicon Valley and I'm gonna like

you know there's founders that are like

on different scales and different levels

um but it's probably also just like

know the game that you're playing in

like if you're gonna play in the venture capital game

which is the game that I play in

it's like you need to know that you're gonna like hit

go super hard and try to be super big

and it's like a very risky

volatile crazy kind of space

and you better be ready for that

um if you just want to like

create a business and grow that and have it be a lifestyle thing

there's like a lot of respect to that

those are the people that take it super seriously and that are saying

like you have to really want it for it to to work out

I've Learned a lot about the two year arduous journey

and I feel like after this

I need to go compete in some kind of race or competition to like

get that competition edge

there you go you definitely should

thanks so much for uh

inviting me to the the podcast really appreciate it

okay so before entering the founder path

but when you think about like those small little details

any other factors that really contributed to your success

trying your best being super genuine um

you did this whole transition from like

a lot of time working on this

like I really have pushed hard and I think

don't be a founder unless you have to be a founder

to be fair like I'm on a very extreme end of things where I said like

there are no shortcuts for you

um Bo Davis

and will wrote that note to himself from Day 1 of Building Phonely

before this conversation

I thought I knew what it took to be a really great founder

but now I'm not sure anymore

me my entire life had been training for to make it to the NCAA's

you know I didn't make it freshman year

I didn't make it sophomore year

I didn't make it junior year

senior year is my last chance

nothing in life has ever really been handed to me

that shift followed him through from elite sports to voice AI

before voice AI was even a term

5 in the morning

every morning I would get a call from one of our customers

something was up

he took every call himself and the customers that stuck through

one of the customers now pays us $78,000 a month

two years in 100 mil valuation

and I'm so excited to sit down with will

co founder and CEO of Phonely Today

my name is will

I'm the co founder and CEO of Phonely and this is founders in motion

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