Building It Back for His Family

Dara Ladjevardian grew up hearing about a life that no longer existed.

His grandfather had been one of the largest business owners in Iran before the revolution. “He had 30,000 employees before he was put on the hit list by the Ayatollah and had to leave the country with nothing.” Everything was taken. They came to the United States and started over.

That story was not abstract in his household. It was personal. It was repeated. It was unfinished.

“I would always hear about this crazy life that they had in Iran before it was all taken away from them. And so I think I would just hear that and be like, wait, I want to do that. I want to get that back for my family.”

Entrepreneurship was not presented as a lifestyle trend. It was legacy. It was loss. It was rebuilding.

His father was also an entrepreneur. Dara started working in his dad’s warehouse at eleven years old. “I just started pretty young and was interested in entrepreneurship.” Work was not theoretical. It was physical. It was routine. It was normal.

There was another influence as well.

“I was also a huge comic book nerd, and Tony Stark was my favorite person in the comics before it became cool in the Marvel universe.”

Entrepreneurship and technology were never separate in his imagination. Business and invention felt intertwined.

Delphi is not his first company. His first venture-backed company was called Friday. The idea came from frustration.

“I was using Uber Eats one day and I was like, ‘This UX sucks. I wish I could just text a phone number and it would order things for me.’ And that was my first company, Friday.”

At the time, he had early access to the GPT-3 developer list. He was experimenting before most people understood what large language models were capable of. Friday eventually sold.

But the more important shift happened during that period.

He was building mostly alone. “I was kind of a solo founder, didn't really have any mentors. It's a lonely journey. Even with a co-founder, it can be lonely. Without a co-founder, it absolutely sucks.”

During that time, he was reading a book about his grandfather. He wanted advice. He wanted perspective. He wanted to know what his grandfather would do in his situation. But his grandfather had suffered a stroke. Direct conversations were no longer possible.

“So I ended up training a model on his book that I could talk to and learn from.”

That experiment changed the direction of his thinking.

The first company sold, but the experience lingered. “That experience just got me really interested in how we access other people.”

When you want to understand someone’s worldview, you can read a LinkedIn profile. You can read a blog. You can watch a YouTube video. But none of those formats let you actually interact.

“There’s no way to really understand someone’s essence and how they think about things.”

That became the seed of Delphi.

He describes the vision simply. “We started Delphi to allow people to make their mind available as a source that people can talk to or learn from even when they’re not in the room.”

Three years in, the company is venture-backed. They raised a Series A with Sequoia.But the journey has not been linear.

“It has been the journey of every founder. It's a roller coaster. You come in, you start the company, you think it's going to be a breeze or things are going to happen a lot faster than they do.”

They launched Delphi one month before ChatGPT.

In retrospect, the timing was both brutal and perfect.

“It was just really early to be starting this kind of company. People did not even understand LLMs. It wasn’t mainstream.”

For a while, the product did not land.

“The product didn't really work for the first year.”

The broader market needed to shift first. “ChatGPT had to happen in order for Delphi to work.” Conversation became a new way of ingesting information. People had to get comfortable learning through dialogue with AI before they could understand learning from a person’s digital representation.

“It’s kind of like how the internet needed to work before the creator economy was a thing.”

Most of Delphi’s energy today is focused on product innovation. “Most of our business is really product innovation, building a good product and getting the right people on board.” The team is twenty-two people.

Bringing a new category to market is not simple.

“No one really understands your product, especially when you're creating a new category like Delphi. They don’t really understand what it is, how to talk about it.”

He compares it to Airbnb and Uber. At first, the questions feel absurd. Why would I stay in a stranger’s house? Why would I get in a stranger’s car? Why would I post photos online?

Building something new requires convincing. It requires clarity. It requires repetition.

The product also requires trust.

“Our product involves people’s identity. It requires a lot of trust. People are trusting us with their data and trusting us to represent them.”

That makes iteration slower. You cannot simply ship something broken and hope it works when the core of your business is someone’s identity.

“You will interview 50 people to hire a chief of staff who is going to represent you in the world. And we are representing you.”

Scrappiness still exists, but it looks different.

“You build a real MVP that barely works and you hope people like it, and then you iterate and iterate and iterate.”

At the same time, the company has had to be intentional. Trust compounds slowly.

When asked what is hardest about being a founder today, he does not mention fundraising or hiring.

“I think it is harder to be a founder now more than ever.”

The reason surprises people.

“There’s so many opportunities. There’s so much noise, especially in the AI space. It’s an entirely new thing, and people are going to try to pull you in a million different directions.”

There are endless AI tools. Endless distribution channels. Twitter. TikTok. YouTube. Every week brings a new platform or tactic.

“The hardest thing is focus.”

In 2005, building required deep technical skill. Today, building is more accessible. But distraction is constant.

“If you try to do everything, you're going to do nothing.”

His advice is specific. “You have to choose three things and then focus on those things for three months to let them compound and say no to everything else.”

That discipline showed up early at Delphi.

There were suggestions to use the technology for customer support. Suggestions to build chatbots for entirely different markets. Suggestions to chase faster revenue.

“We’ve stuck with this idea for three years.”

He has watched companies scale quickly in months. He knows the stories. But he also sees the edge case clearly.

“That is the edge case.”

Airbnb, Amazon, Nike, Figma: they took time. Especially when you are building something new.

“In year three, people are like, ‘Oh, it’s Delphi.’ There’s a mental model now. Before it, there’s no mental model. It’s like being shown a color you’ve never seen before.”

The long-term vision is expansive.

“We want Delphi to be the front-facing profile for everyone on the internet.”

A place where you can not only learn from someone, but discover the right person for your situation. Not based on superficial markers like schools or companies, but alignment.

When asked what advice he would give someone starting a company, he didn’t talk about strategy, GTM, or really anything business oriented.

“I would first start with why.”

That why needs to carry you through the darkest moments.

Then comes simplification. “What are the one or two things you can do in a month to create momentum?”

Momentum matters more than perfection.

“I think something that I probably did wrong in the first year is wait for this perfect launch moment where we have to get everything right.”

Now he compresses timelines. Ships earlier. Creates movement.

Some of his most rewarding moments as a founder are not purely financial.

Because of the nature of Delphi, he has met people he once admired from a distance. “Jay Shetty, Tony Robbins, the founder of HubSpot.” He spoke at a conference in front of four thousand people while his parents were in the audience. And then there was Halloween of 2024, when the Series A term sheet from Sequoia arrived. “I was very happy.”

And the best piece of advice he received came from Keith Rabois. He had tried to start Delphi in 2021 after selling his first company. Many people told him the idea was stupid. Some called it immoral.

Keith said two things.

“He only invests in companies where the majority of people think it’s stupid because that’s where there’s alpha.”

And second, he compared founders to filmmakers.

“Christopher Nolan doesn’t wait for people’s approval on how he should shoot his movie. He just shoots the movie and people come because he has good taste.”

That gave Dara confidence.

“This is what I think is good, and this is what I want to bring to the world. Either I’m right or I’m wrong. But I’m not going to change based on the approval of people who are only seeing things based on what already exists.”

Delphi is still early in its story.

Three years in, there is finally a mental model forming. There is focus and there is product depth.

He grew up hearing about a business empire that disappeared overnight. He grew up watching his family rebuild. He started working at eleven. He built alone. He built again. He built something people told him was stupid.

Now he is building something that requires trust, patience, and taste. But one thing we know for sure: he will keep shooting the movie.

And we will keep watching.

If you have any questions for Dara, you can talk to his delphi here: https://www.delphi.ai/dara

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