The Founder Who Lit $10M On Fire, With Mutiny's Jaleh Rezaei
On The Upstarts Podcast, Mutiny CEO Jaleh Rezaei shares how AI is forcing SaaS self-disruption in SaaS; handling 'Claude spookies'; and why speed matters most.
Salespeople have a problem: they only spend 21% of their time actually selling to customers.
Founder Jaleh Rezaei set out to fix that – and business was booming.
Her startup, Mutiny, reached $10 million-plus in revenue for software that helped take some of the busywork out of the sales process. Companies like Snowflake and Uber were customers. Sequoia, Insight Partners and Tiger Global were all backers.
Which makes what happened next all the more shocking.
Mutiny’s software helped expedite the sales process for sellers by helping them manage other assets they’d need to close a deal — case studies, graphics like battle cards, custom pricing — and Rezaei saw the writing on the wall with AI tools.
Halfway measures didn’t cut it. So Mutiny’s founders made the tough decision to fire their customers and light their revenue ablaze. They reduced headcount down to 15 people. And they started scrambling to ship like a new startup, not a Series B one.
“When you start a company, the expectation is failure,” she says. “It’s really hard to accept that you’re going to burn it to the ground for the possibility of a better future.”
Just a half year later, Mutiny has won back old customers like Snowflake and Uber. Sales of its AI agent, which now handles a similar process with just a prompt, are growing 150% month over month.
“In my eyes, it’s a six-month-old company, seven-month-old company now,” Rezaei says. “I don’t think you need a lot of people to get to product market fit. Having lots of people just slows things down.”
On this episode of The Upstarts Podcast, Rezaei shares why busywork follow-ups are the sales killer; how AI is reinventing SaaS, like it or not; and how to get over ‘Claude spookies’ about the threat of big AI labs.
Plus, she shares her Upstart Moment: convincing her co-founder to start over again, on a fateful New York walk.
Our three big takeaways from the conversation are below.
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‘Benevolent dictator’ founders stand on business
Rezaei credits her co-founder and CTO, Nikhil Mathew, with turn of phrase for what it’s like to be a zero-to-one founder: “a benevolent dictatorship.”
“ Founders hold all the context in their head, and they make really fast non-linear calls. And while it may feel chaotic, if you zoom out, you just see the product, ‘Wow, it's getting better so quickly every month.’
You need to sit in the sales calls. You need to sit in the customer support calls. You need to try to grow the account and renew the accounts. You need to be in the room building the product. You need to understand every part of the company, to be able to very quickly identify where the problems are.
Otherwise, it would just take 20 years of doing customer interviews, if you weren't operating off of those gut instincts. So that's the zero-to-one journey.”
That changes as a company scales, and a CEO has to learn how to delegate, manage, set up processes, and be able to make decisions that carry more friction. One thing that doesn’t change, Rezaei says: it’s key for a CEO to focus on company-building, not optics.
“If the business isn't good, you lose all of those optics eventually anyway. And this is hard for founders, right? Because, you are on a roller coaster, and sometimes founders look for external validation, right? ‘Okay, well, if I have a lot of people, or if I have investors or whatever, it means that I'm doing well.’
But really, the only thing that matters is, are you serving a really large market of customers, and do they love your product? And those are all of the signs of whether you're building a successful business.”
Rezaei Is a loyal Y Combinator alum, and she invokes Garry Tan, the accelerator’s CEO.
“Garry had this really good example of: The chart that you don't want to show anybody, and you want to hide, is the chart you should bring as the first slide of your board meeting, and then talk about it, admit it, and, and fix it.”
You don’t need long runway, but you do need to pick a lane
The founders of Intercom, rebranded as Fin and acquired by Salesforce for $3.6 billion earlier this week, were instrumental in helping Mutiny navigate its re-founding moment.
Like other startups we’ve covered in Upstarts recently, such as Remote, Rezaei naturally considered maintaining Mutiny’s software business at first, to help fuel its AI agent development. Fin had gone through a similar process.
“They made it very clear that it was going to be really, really hard, and that these two businesses are very, very different. Because they were further ahead at implementing, right? And so, you know, they were going through it.
The way, for example, you optimize your SaaS product is A/B testing the UI [user interface] and things like that. The way you optimize an agent product is based on outcomes and evals — it's just a very different process. And so seeing how they were doing that, a couple of years ahead of us, it helped further confirm that how I see the two businesses diverging, it was only going to get more and more that way.”
Des Traynor, Fin’s co-founder, walked Rezaei through the potential process of isolating its business or deprecating it, and how Fin would’ve thought about each option.
“At the end of that conversation, I kind of concluded there's really no good reason for us to keep the other business. We have the cash, we can fund the investment, and we can be a lot more efficient with the way that we use the cash that we have, if we are really nimble and small, and don't have any of these frictions to deal with.”
That said, Mutiny’s CEO adds a self-described ‘hot take’: startups don’t need a lot of money in the bank to pull off such a transition, she says.
Mutiny has multiple years of cash to burn in the bank, but she notes that at YC, founders reach product market fit on $100,000 or $200,000 in spend.
“I don't think you need a lot of people to get to product market fit. And a lot of times, having lots of people just slows things down, and makes it so that context is now split across more people. So, I would say if you're a founder, and if you have six months of runway, I get it [not turning off your revenue source].
But if you have the money that a seed stage company can raise in the bank, you can get there.”
Speed is (mostly) all you need
When Rezaei was an early employee and growth leader at Gusto, the software business with $1 billion in revenue, she says there was a common thread across managing sales, marketing, and customer success teams.
“ When I hired good people, and then I figured out how to help them move as fast as possible, that's when we grew the fastest. So if I were to simplify everything around growth channels and all these different things, it really just comes down to speed.”
Setting aggressive goals for her employees, and then encountering the blockers they faced to keep them from achieving them, helped set her down the path to founding Mutiny.
“It was just so clear to me that speed was the growth advantage,” she says.
Years later, when Mutiny’s founders shifted the business dramatically, it was once again all about speed.
“Day one, post November 2025 pivot, we are in the office working together around the clock. You know, I personally was like, ‘This needs to work. I am pouring everything I have into this, and I know it'll work, but we're going to have to work our asses off.’
Every hour mattered. One of the things that I try to bring to the table is I do have a really good sense of urgency, and timing, and pacing, for the company. And so if things aren't fast, it just, it kills me. I can feel it.”
The obsession with speed reflected itself in Mutiny’s founders reading every error and bug their test users were encountering with the new agent, and pushing code to fix them late into the night.
”I love speed. I think speed is the only thing that matters, and if we're building something, and somebody else is building that thing ,and they're getting to the correct answer faster than us, we're going to lose.”
The lesson for other startups: if you know more about your customers than competitors, you might win. If you out-hustle your competitors and move faster than they do, you might win. If you can have both — the knowledge and the pace — it’s suddenly much harder to lose.