Q&A: Scheduler AI Co-founder and CEO Maddie Bell
Scheduler AI Co-Founder and CEO Maddie Bell far right.
It could be hard to work alongside your partner, but it’s second nature for Maddie and Mike Bell.
They started dating in high school, took all the same classes their senior year, and then attended Duke University together.
After stints working for P&G and Nielsen in Cincinnati, they set out on their own as co-founders of a venture-funded startup, Scheduler AI, while raising three young children.
Fresh off of Scheduler AI’s $2 million raise from Drive Capital, bringing total fundraising to $2.8 million, Maddie Bell spoke with OhioTechNews.com about their vision to create the world's first fully autonomous meeting orchestration platform designed to instantly connect the right people at the right time for the right reasons.
OhioTechNews.com: What problem are you trying to solve?
Maddie Bell: We'd seen other solutions, and what we found was that they didn't actually solve the scheduling tension, they just pushed it onto someone else. So, for example, when someone sends you a calendar link, you get to do the work of scheduling. When you decide to coordinate the meeting and look at everybody's calendars and figure out when someone's free, the burden is still on you. And if you send a poll, then everybody's just sharing it and nobody's actually eliminating the challenge and making it a mutually good experience.
Q: What made you want to solve this problem?
A: We became entrepreneurs by accident. The true story of our lightning moment was that we had two high-power jobs, three young children, and a dog. One day on the way home from church, we had just run into friends for the seventh time and said, oh, we should totally get together soon—for the seventh time. And these weren't people we didn't like. These were people we wanted to spend time with. But the sheer madness of scheduling was consistently getting in the way to the point where, in a moment of frustration, I just looked at Mike and said, “This is ridiculous. You should just be able to add your people to a chat, describe what you want to schedule, and make it all happen.” And the true insight underneath that was that scheduling doesn't actually start with a calendar. It starts with conversation. It starts with context.
Q: It sounds like that initial focus of serving parents has broadened?
A: What we started at and what we are today are completely different—to the degree in which, if you explained to me 12 months ago what our AI is now doing, who our AI is serving, and how our AI is performing, I would not only have not expected it, but I probably wouldn't have understood the words you were using. That is how incredible it has been to unleash an idea, a truth into a market, and then have that market shape how the technology grows and matures. We really, really had to get specific and dig into where we were going to make a disproportionate AI impact, an AI impact that is going to actually change the KPIs that businesses care about most.
Q: How did you get connected with Drive Capital?
A: As part of the Ohio ecosystem, we were able to connect with them through a mutual founder. We used our AI to schedule the meeting over Slack. We had just won Slack's Global Hackathon, so we had at least some validation. Credit to Drive, this was before Open AI and GPT and AI had really hit the stage.
They like to invest in founders that have interesting, unique, and developed backgrounds. And so at the time they were like, “Yeah, we see a world where scheduling is done differently. We see the insight that conversation is where the action is happening.” I think they're a future-forward shop that wants to see ideas that will change the world. That's what they're looking for. Once we were able to start taking these agents into that autopilot state and get the results that we talked about—and start bringing on bigger and bigger businesses—that gave us the traction to come to them and say, “Hey, now it's time to really flesh out the team, expand what this AI is capable of, and start to scale it up a bit.”
Q: What has that been like being co-founders with your spouse?
A: We have a cheat code. Mike and I met when we were 15 years old and started dating when we were 16. So we have been co-founders in life for almost 20 years. Obviously, if I were going to invest in you and you told me you were married to your co-founder, I would have questions. And if you met a couple of years ago, I'd say, “Don't do it.” Right? But it's a little different when you've gone through life with this person. The investors said, “Tell us more about that.” And I think the cool part is we were able to point to a track record of success in 20 years together. Very few people get into Duke University from the same state, much less the same city, much less the same high school, and much less dating. So we showed up to freshmen orientation as a real anomaly. I get to work with my best friend on something that I find fascinating, and I get to use the skills that I was trained for 12 years to be able to use, and for him it’s the same. Imagine you are on a team with another player and you don't even have to speak the play. You just kind of run it.
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