Shrink The Surface Area, Raise The Bar

Shrink the surface area, raise the bar.

Every founder knows they should do this early on, few actually do it.

Not Reducto - from Day 1, they went ultra narrow, focused hard, and implemented incredibly high standards.

The result:

$108M+ raised from First Round, Benchmark, and a16z in under 2 years while staying incredibly capital efficient (less than $1M burned to date).

Here’s how:

1/ Extreme Narrowing

Early customers will try to drag you sideways: Custom fields, one‑off workflows, vertical quirks.

Reducto went the other way: They went extremely narrow to become the absolute best.

Specifically, within document processing, they narrowed from 35 file types (what competitors offered) to just PDFs.

Within PDFs, they focused on only two things initially: layout understanding and table understanding.

This landed them Fortune 10 contracts because they were “best in class” at those specific problems.

Early on, being incredible at a small subset beats being mediocre at everything.

2/ Transferability as the Filter

Your job as a founder is to ship the most transferable solution, not the most accommodating one.

Reducto only tackled problems that would scale across customers.

For example, they said no to construction blueprints even though there was money on the table. That work wouldn’t help them land their next insurance client.

Every problem they solved had to scale across their customer base when resources were tight.

3/ Spend heavily only where quality truly matters.

For Reducto, that meant data.

If your product’s edge is model performance, labeled data is the fuel.

Reducto was never compute‑constrained, they were focus‑constrained.

Every training run had to plausibly move the product.

They rejected many training runs and experiments. Not for cost reasons; they were rejected for focus dilution.

That’s “raise the bar” in practice: fewer, sharper bets.

4/ Brutal hiring bar.

Reducto set an incredibly high bar for every hire and barely hired anyone early on.

For example, they spent months courting a PhD researcher (whose open‑source projects even competitors used), then flew to Indiana to close in person.

They could have “solved” capacity by hiring fast and broadly.

They didn’t. They hired for impact, not headcount.

That’s how you keep the culture and product crisp.

That’s why the team was just 4 people (incl. both co-founders) when they raised their $25M Series A from Benchmark.

5/ Shrink organizational surface area.

Everything was shared early on

Everyone was in one room. Public Slack channels only. The engineer who ships is the one who DMs the customer - praise and pain flow straight to the builder, unmediated.

Less ceremony, more signal. That’s how quality climbs fast without an army.

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Enjoyed reading this?

Then check out my conversation on the focal podcast with Adit Abraham, the co-founder and CEO of Reducto ($108M raised from Benchmark, a16z, and First Round)

Youtube | Apple Podcast | Spotify

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