FOUNDER: NATHAN BELAYE
Nathan Belaye grew up in motion.
He was born in Ethiopia and moved roughly every four years: Tanzania, Paris, then high school in Qatar. Each new country meant re‑learning how people lived and worked, and seeing how similar problems surfaced in very different systems.
In Qatar, that curiosity met software.
There was a Carnegie Mellon summer college program there. Nathan discovered Information Systems - a mix of computer science and business - and realized he didn’t just want to write code; he wanted to understand how technology rewires real‑world workflows.
Nathan then attended Carnegie Mellon for his undergraduate studies at the main campus in Pittsburgh.
Sampling the “default paths”
Software engineering internship (freshman year)
He tried pure engineering and learned quickly that being behind a computer all day wasn’t for him. He wanted to be closer to the humans on the other side of the screen.Consulting (PwC and Kearney, New York)
Two summers in consulting gave him structure and pattern recognition: large organizations, messy processes, and a constant push to make them legible.Product management at Intuit (4 years)
After school, he joined Intuit’s APM/RPM track and stayed for four years as a PM. He rotated across teams, eventually leading:The QuickBooks Online homepage
Then the Payroll app
Intuit gave him something most early‑career PMs never get:
A CEO who still talked to customers regularly
A culture that took “customer obsession” literally
A budget (about $200/day) to talk to business owners
Nathan used that customer budget every single day. Most people didn’t touch it. He did, until his director started calling him “the customer guy.”
It didn’t feel like extra work. It felt like play.
THE PROBLEM HE COULDN’T UNSEE
The more he spoke with small business owners, the clearer the pattern became - especially for “deskless” teams in:
Cleaning
Landscaping
Security
These businesses looked similar under the hood:
No real handle on their workforce
Ask, “How many employees do you have?” and many struggled to answer confidently.Time tracking that barely worked
Around 36% of timesheets were edited—usually clock‑out times employees had forgotten.
Roughly 70% were still using pen and paper.
Payroll as a bi‑weekly emergency
Every two weeks, owners or admins would scramble through a mix of memory, paper, and corrections to get people paid. Around 40 employees, most felt forced to hire a full‑time payroll specialist, often around $70K/year, just to keep chaos at bay.
For most people, this is just “how SMB operations work.”
For Nathan, it started to look like one of the most under‑automated, high‑leverage workflows in the economy.
THE AI SPARK
Nathan attended the Founders You Should Know program in San Francisco.
At FYSK, he watched a founder from 11x, an outbound sales tool that had raised tens of millions, demo something memorable:
AI agents making cold calls
A voice that sounded like a real human, selling on the phone
Nathan’s reaction wasn’t, “We should build AI sales.” It was:
“There’s no way people buy from AI.
But people will absolutely let AI run their back office.”
He already had a co‑founder in mind: a second‑time founder and the best engineer he knew: Antonio Chan.
He didn’t wait for a perfect inflection point or external permission. He started pushing:
Let’s quit our jobs.
Let’s go after this problem.
Three months later, they both left.
By February, they had:
No product
No revenue
Conviction built on thousands of conversations and real operational pain
COMPANY: SIRA
If you strip away the buzzwords, Sira is very simple:
Sira uses AI to guarantee accurate hours for employees.
The core of the product:
Automatic, geofenced time tracking
Employees arrive at a job site → they’re automatically clocked in.
They leave → they’re automatically clocked out.
No manual punching, no “I forgot” edits days later.
AI‑driven attendance and coverage
If someone doesn’t show up, Sira’s AI calls them.
If a replacement is needed, Sira’s AI calls everyone available on the roster until the shift is filled.
One‑click payroll
Because hours are accurate, clean, and reconciled, all of it flows straight into payroll.
The owner or manager just approves - often literally via a text.
Nathan doesn’t sell “AI.” He sells outcomes:
Stop overpaying for bad time data.
Replace a $70K admin with software.
Get back hours of your own time every pay period.
On their website and in their sales motion, “AI” is almost a secondary detail. His ICP cares about results.
ICP
Sira is deliberately narrow.
Type: Deskless, shift‑based businesses
Verticals: Security, cleaning, landscaping
Size: Roughly 20–250 employees
At this scale:
Labor is the biggest cost.
Time theft, no‑shows, and errors compound into real margin.
“Just hire another admin” is both expensive and doesn’t actually fix the system.
Nathan’s framing to owners is blunt and economic:
You’re paying someone a full‑time salary just to babysit time sheets, schedules, and payroll.
Sira can automate that layer and give that money—and your time—back to the business.
It’s not aspirational tooling. It’s a new back office muscle.
GTM
Most YC‑track founders default to:
Cold email
LinkedIn sequences
Content and PLG funnels
Nathan tried all of that.
For Sira’s ICP, one channel works disproportionately well:
“Cold calls drive ~80% of our revenue.”
Why:
SMB owners in these verticals live on the phone.
When the business line rings, they don’t know if it’s a client, a bank, or a fire to put out - so they pick up.
A typical Nathan call:
Open with context and a human line
If they don’t recognize him:“We connected on LinkedIn,” or
“My dream is to be as busy as you.”
Describe the outcome, not the stack
“We use AI to automate time tracking, scheduling, and payroll.”
“Instead of a full‑time admin behind ADP clicking around, imagine AI does it, and you just approve it over text.”
Handle the ‘we already use X’ objection
When they say, “We have Homebase/ADP,” he doesn’t argue about tools. He talks about workflow:You still need a human in the loop to make it all work.
Sira’s wedge is removing that human cost.
For founders and operators, two useful takeaways:
Channel–market fit can be very different from what’s popular on Twitter (X).
For some ICPs, phones still beat everything else.
HOW NATHAN THINKS ABOUT THE NEXT YEAR
Ask him about one‑year targets and he doesn’t start with ARR or a logo count. His KPI is customer feedback.
He wants to hear:
“This has helped my life so much that I’m bringing money back to the business and focusing on growth.”
“For the first time, I actually like my payroll or time‑tracking tool.”
In a category where no one says “I love ADP,” that’s a radical goal.
Underneath that is a simple strategy:
Build a base of customers who genuinely feel Sira saves them money and time.
Turn them into a referral engine by being relentlessly useful.
Metrics will come. The non‑obvious moat is customers who would be upset if Sira disappeared.
WHY THIS MATTERS FOR FOUNDERS & VCs
Nathan’s story is a useful counterweight to a lot of current AI and SaaS narratives.
For founders
Depth beats novelty.
Sira didn’t come from a brainstorm about “AI + vertical SaaS.” It came from four years of product work, thousands of customer conversations, and an almost boring problem that turned out to be huge.Customer obsession can be a daily habit.
Most PMs at scale companies don’t use their customer call budget. Nathan used his every day. That muscle became Sira’s foundation.GTM should match your ICP, not your peer group.
If your customers live on the phone, your growth motion probably should too - even if that looks “old school” to other founders.
For VCs
Under‑automated workflows are still everywhere.
Time tracking and payroll for deskless teams is not a new category. But AI lets a product like Sira change the economics: replacing a human admin with software, not just making their life slightly easier.Founder–problem fit matters more than “AI founder” branding.
Nathan didn’t show up to AI and then look for a problem. He had the problem first. AI became the right tool later.
TL;DR
Background: Ethiopian‑born, globally raised (Tanzania, Paris, Qatar), studied Information Systems at Carnegie Mellon, sampled engineering and consulting, then spent four years as a PM at Intuit.
Discovery: While working on QuickBooks Online and Payroll, he used a daily customer budget to talk constantly with SMBs, seeing firsthand how deskless teams in security, cleaning, and landscaping still relied on pen‑and‑paper timesheets, manual edits, and $70K payroll specialists.
Company: Sira uses AI to guarantee accurate hours through geofenced automatic time tracking, AI‑driven attendance and shift coverage, and one‑click payroll - removing the need for a full‑time admin glued to legacy tools.
GTM: Focused on 20–250 employee deskless businesses, with ~80% of revenue coming from cold calls to owners who live on the phone and care about savings and time, not AI jargon.
Mindset: Nathan optimizes for trust and outcomes - aiming for customers who say Sira “gave me back time and money,” and explicitly thinks in 10- to 15‑year time horizons rather than quick exits.
Nathan’s path is a reminder that the best AI companies often look less like a “new paradigm” at first - and more like someone finally taking a painfully specific, old problem seriously enough to solve it all the way down.