“Why is the sky blue?”
“Because the sun’s light has lots of colors hiding in it! When it comes down to us, the blue color bounces around the most and fills up the whole sky. So when you look up, you see blue everywhere!”
“But why does the blue bounce around the most?”
“You see, sunlight is like a bunch of beach balls bouncing down from the sky. The blue beach balls are the tiny ones; they bump into everything in the air and go bouncing all over the place. The big beach balls, like red and yellow light, are too big to bump around much, so they just go straight down.”
“Yeah, but why is blue tiny? Why are red and yellow bigger?”
The father sighed, half-smiling. They had a curious toddler, and they liked answering him, encouraging him to think.
Now, he would do that all day long, nonstop.
He was tired and had a headache, and he longed for some quiet time. But the curious and excited big blue eyes of his 4-year-old were there, expectant, anxious… So, he took a deep breath and answered.
Next came another round of questions, and soon he was running out of analogies to explain modern physics to the child.
I hope this is a phase, he thought.
It wasn’t.
From why to why, this young child would become the co-founder and CEO of Gradial, a company creating the agentic content infrastructure to let marketers automate the boring parts of their jobs and focus on what they do best: tell stories and connect to their audience.
This company is now valued at $675 million, with more than $110 million raised in just 16 months.
This is Gradial.
Yup, asking bold questions wasn’t a phase for the founder of Gradial. Nor is it a phase for many of the unicorn founders out there.
Welcome back to Zero to Unicorn: Unicorner’s bi-weekly deep dive into life stories and lessons of the founders behind billion-dollar companies.
Let’s begin our deep dive into our fifth founder story.
Most startup conferences optimize for headcount. Ambition is doing the opposite.
It's a one-day, application-based summit limited to 150 founders, operators, and investors, hosted at a private venue in Santa Monica on September 24th.
Every application is personally reviewed by the organizer, Justin Gordon of The LA Grind and The SF Grind.
On stage: Shivani Siroya (Tala), Mehul Nariyawala (Matic Robots), Dee Murthy (Ghost), Dara Ladjevardian (Delphi), Jessica Chang (Upwards), Jo Phillips (Payabli), and Shamin Walsh (BAM Ventures), more announced soon.
No boring panels and (as Justin puts it) no casuals.
Quick note from us: Use code UNICORNER for 15% off your ticket.
This is sponsored content.
Doug Tallmadge, co-founder and CEO of Gradial, describes himself as having been a curious child. He asked the kind of "why" questions most kids ask, but he kept going, and his parents never shut that down.
He credits that simple habit of curiosity and learning as one of the main drivers that led to Gradial, his company that is “allowing marketers to be marketers again.”
What does that mean?
Gradial automates the complex but still necessary (and boring) parts of running marketing campaigns. It means connecting tools and systems like CRMs, ERPs, CMSs, and "the three-letter-acronym soup of enterprise tools" that make up part of a marketer's daily life.
“We had written out, “What is the list of all of the enterprise software that is the most painful to use?” and then we looked at that list, we said, well, which of these systems do we want to go, you know, build around?”
In a normal workday, a marketer does a lot of different tasks. They upload information about a contact in software to send an email, refresh the content of a landing page so it reflects new features of a product, then send a new SEO article to the specialist for approval, and check the integration between the website's current form and the email automation inside the CRM, check if the pixel is well configured to count the conversions correctly…
In Doug’s opinion, the chaos of these tools shouldn’t, and doesn’t have to be, a daily reality for every marketer.
Faraway is this marketer from “storytelling” and “connecting with the customer,” which is what they thought they were signing up for.
We’ll soon see how this physics-inclined child would create one of the leading startups in agentic AI marketing.
But before founding a company, you need co-founders. And Doug met his at Dartmouth during his college years.
As an astute “why-asker,” Doug was drawn to technology, and he liked to learn about everything related to it. He often thought about broad engineering questions. He's a self-described generalist by design, interested in space, AI, energy, and biotech.
Not wanting to over-specialize with his degree, too, he majored in physics (and later graduated with honors).
There, in his freshman year during physics lab, Doug met Deip Kumar, his future co-founder and CTO of Gradial. Soon, he met Anup Chamrajnagar and Anish Chadalavada, who would also become co-founders and COO and CGO, respectively.
From left to right, the Gradial founders: Anish Chadalavada, Deip Kumar, Doug Tallmadge, and Anup Chamrajnagar. (GeekWire)
So how does a guy with this background end up building a solution for marketers?
Unfortunately, the following lines will perhaps bring more questions than answers, but we promise it will make sense.
Because Doug, before helping marketers launch campaigns, would launch satellites.
Guess he's always liked things that take off.
After graduating, Doug would spend close to five years at SpaceX.
He started as an avionics intern in 2017 before moving into a full-time role in 2018, where he went on to hold several different positions.
Each was related to Starlink.
Doug was responsible for scaling the network from zero to 500 thousand customers, in addition to leading a team of 10+ software engineers and data scientists optimizing the network.
He witnessed firsthand the company getting bigger each year, all while keeping a startup mindset:
"At SpaceX, we would think about every dollar we were spending. We were very frugal in how we operated, even though it was already on a multi-billion-dollar scale."
He didn’t know yet, but this SpaceX mindset of working like a startup even though it would end up being a company with more than 14 thousand people would inspire him daily years after.
It was there that he learned you must move really fast and get things done through creativity and determination rather than with big budgets.
Some lessons you don't recognize until you're the one applying them.
Leaving in February 2023 was not an easy call. He describes it as a difficult decision to walk away from SpaceX to go start something of his own.
He quit his job a couple of months after ChatGPT launched. It came with a mix of extremely high enthusiasm and uncertainty.
Doug saw the power of AI to change the course of humanity in science, art, research, and so much more, even though no one fully understood why or how, yet.
He couldn't ignore this feeling.
And he was still as curious as he always was. He started to think about how ChatGPT could be used in an enterprise.
Today, this sounds obvious. But, in late 2023 and early 2024, it wasn't.
So, the idea kept nagging at him.
Ok, enterprise. But that’s too broad, right?
So, for a few weeks, freshly unemployed, the group of founders asked a question: what part of enterprise will we focus on?
Amid the excitement was the uncertainty, of course.
What have I done? I quit my job to do this. Am I wasting my time here?
The hardest part of that early stage, these first weeks, in his telling, was having an empty calendar and no revenue, with no way to measure whether anything he was doing was working.
Without evidence one way or the other, it's easy to slip into a kind of panic mode, second-guessing the company's direction every morning.
Doug talks about needing balance there, because if you let that panic take over, you risk pivoting the company every single day instead of giving ideas the six to 12 months they sometimes need to prove out.
“There’s a tough tension there of if something's not working, you do need to pivot, and you do need to change and be open, but you also have to have some sort of compass because you have to have some beliefs about what you think the market should look like.”
But they saw early traction with marketers.
Doug affirmed that marketing and satellites have a lot more in common than you might think.
"I think there's actually more similarity between enterprise marketing and building a satellite than people would expect. There's a schedule, there's a rollout, there are people contributing from different places, and there are hard problems to solve along the way. But the thing you really see in a startup is just how many of those smaller tasks that aren't very difficult add up to something that operationally is quite challenging to scale."
They saw an opportunity to transform marketing through true autonomy, beyond chatbots and text generation, the general uses for ChatGPT back then.
The lesson? Think and build the "because" before asking the "how."
Be prepared for tomorrow, even if today is still a mystery.
Why did they find early traction with marketers?
Marketers have what Doug calls an early-adopter mentality. They are really excited about innovation and in 2023 were already pushing to bring AI into their daily work, even though they didn’t exactly know how yet.
They were testing, seeing the abilities of AI in their daily operations, pushing its limits, playing with it.
Doug describes marketing as a competitive sport that requires constant differentiation. If you're selling shampoo, you're competing against a hundred other brands for the same 100 million households.
You must be different to grab people's attention. Otherwise, you'll quickly vanish even if someone sees your name.
Marketers are also under constant pressure to do more with the same or shrinking budget while still driving revenue.
Saying plainly, it's a team that is always asked to operate miracles, producing more, with more quality and with less money, which makes the domain a natural fit for AI.
Thus, the Gradial team chose to build for marketing teams.
Their solution uses AI agents to execute campaigns and handle the manual work at scale so marketers don't have to.
The main goal is to allow marketers to spend time on the parts of marketing that they love.
That means less time configuring software and more time on storytelling and creative campaigns.
"It is our belief that in a world increasingly permeated with AI, marketing will matter more than ever as the part of the company most focused on establishing human connection with customers. But for marketing teams to succeed in this future, they need to be able to focus on storytelling, not wrestling with the tools and workflows that surround it."
We have AI for marketing enterprises. That’s hardly a company.
To answer the many more questions that came with early-stage company building, the team turned to a whiteboard, where they often spent three, four, five hours staring at it.
The best ideas Gradial came from brainstorming at this whiteboard.
One, for example, was when they listed out the software that was most painful to use inside a company's marketing department: CRMs, ERPs, CMSs, and the rest of the three-letter-acronym soup of enterprise tools.
The question they kept asking was a simple one.
What would happen if you put AI on top of all of this?
There had to be a way around logging in to so many tools, taking so many different actions, clicking so many buttons, and completing too many operational tasks before getting to what you're supposed to do, which is telling amazing stories.
At the time, all of the software enterprise tools were built in the pre-AI era. No one was thinking about their usability in an AI context.
"Too much of that process (telling stories) has been stuck in tools that just don't scale and workflows that don't allow us to actually execute on that storytelling in the way that we would like. And we have a workflow that was really built, you know, a decade ago around a series of assumptions that are no longer true in a world of AI. And we have these software tools that promised us productivity, personalization, speed at execution that really required a lot of manual clicks, required a lot of Jira tickets, required a lot of logging into systems and basically trying to be that bridge between a CMS that didn't talk to a CDP, a number of different enterprise systems that don't actually share context."
Once again, asking the right questions let the team see a couple of steps ahead of everyone else.
The team essentially conceived the idea of an AI agent way before it was a thing.
This was the seed of the agentic content infrastructure Gradial would later launch in 2026.
But how do you build something that no one has built before?
Being among the first to do something new is a mix of feelings.
You don’t have a random thread on Reddit or a 12-year-old in a YouTube video to help you out.
It’s you and what you know against the odds.
It can be amazing and the highest point of your life, but it can also be filled with some of life’s lowest lows.
For Gradial, it’s… well, we won’t get ahead of ourselves yet.
Stay tuned.
