#StartupsEverywhere: New York, n.y.
#StartupsEverywhere: Ben Hills, Founder & CEO, Iris
This profile is part of #StartupsEverywhere, an ongoing series highlighting startup leaders in ecosystems across the country. This interview has been edited for length, content, and clarity.
Speeding up procurement without sacrificing regulations
Ben Hills is a lifelong entrepreneur seeking to improve the procurement process without compromising the bedrock of standards and regulations that make public works projects reliable and trustworthy. His startup, Iris, provides an AI agent that converts the days and months of request for proposals (RFPs) applications and reviews of those applications into hours of work. We sat down with Ben to talk about his experience hiring talent in the startup ecosystem, the future of the human workforce, and more.
Tell us about your background. What led you to Iris?
I got my entrepreneurial start early, and at 14, I started a t-shirt printing company that I sold for six figures before leaving for college. I got into the tech scene after college as an intern for Full Measure Education, an EdTech startup that turned what used to be day-long, in-person tasks for students in higher education into 30-minute phone applications. For example, we provided students in Louisiana state universities with their first-ever digital application portals for financial aid. I spent a few years with that company, going from an intern to their COO. I learned a lot about how higher education supports the American economy and the finer details of technical education policy. After Full Measure got acquired, I took what I learned there and started my own company, Iris, here in New York. I started Iris because I, in selling software to colleges and universities, did a few thousand RFPs manually and had a vision for speeding up the application and review processes. Iris is named after my grandma, whose late husband spent his career responding to RFPs at Lockheed Martin. We started selling our product over a year ago, and we now have over one hundred clients.
What is the work you all are doing at Iris? Who are your users?
Iris uses AI to help sales teams draft responses to Requests For Proposals (RFPs), like grant applications. It takes most teams 30 hours across nine people just to get to the first draft of an RFP response. Our platform contextualizes all of a company’s institutional knowledge—such as their latest proposals, marketing, and press releases—through AI to generate high-quality responses. We also provide software on the reverse end of the process, allowing vendors to effectively read through submitted RFP applications. Iris helps those clients, like large government agencies, turn months of human labor analyzing vendor responses into an AI-assisted process that takes a couple of hours.
What has your experience been finding talent to help you build and scale Iris?
Bottom line, it’s very difficult to hire strong talent. Filling all our roles at Iris was a challenge for two main reasons; one, the massive layoffs in tech during and following the pandemic made many people hesitant to take the risk of working at a startup; and two, a small startup like mine cannot possibly offer competitive salaries against the positions at larger companies.Even if there are only five programmers on Earth that get multi-million dollar salaries, it greatly inflates the salary expectations for the rest of the industry. On top of that, AI is such a new and burgeoning field that there aren’t many people who have worked with it for long from a practical standpoint. It’s one thing to get people in a room for a hackathon and another to reliably provide enterprise-grade software to real customers. We’re lucky to have a full team and we’re always welcoming new talent to join the ever-evolving RFP space, but I know it’s not the same for many founders.
What is your perspective on the future of the human workforce and AI?
AI is going to undoubtedly change the labor market, but it’s not going to replace people. Every technological revolution has changed how and where people work—we don’t have full-time switchboard operators anymore—advancements in infrastructure have enabled people to have more impactful roles. There’s a lot of noise in this discussion right now and it can be hard to separate fact from fiction, but I know for a fact that AI can help make more jobs than it “takes.”
Live translators, for example, are a noble position and are in high demand, but no organization that needs translation services is having their needs fully met right now because there are simply not enough human translators. The Fire Department of New York recently adopted an AI translator and went from only being able to provide multilingual support for some languages at certain times on certain days to being able to provide 24/7, year-round, emergency support in every language because of AI. That’s a really powerful transformation. Closer to home for Iris, the City of New York has 647 open positions for procurement specialists—people whose full-time job is to issue RFPs and read responses. Without those procurement specialists, many municipal projects—like building more affordable housing apartments—are stalled, and the demand for work cannot be met.
What are your goals for Iris moving forward?
From a commercial standpoint, I want to scale up our client base by a factor of ten–in a year, I would like Iris to have at least one thousand clients. Our competitors are focused on automation. Iris stands out because we focus on saving time and increasing quality. We believe in the strength of RFPs, which means that buyers know what they want and they have standards and expectations. I want our perspective to be more mainstream, and help people understand how Iris can improve the quality of government and constituent services by improving the application process for public projects.
All of the information in this profile was accurate at the date and time of publication.
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