Meet the Baby Boomer whose life changed when 2 Gen Z AI founders walked into her plumbing business. She became their first COO
Source: Fortune ·
Marcelle Flowers was trying to sell her Sacramento business when Broccoli AI knocked on her door. Now they've raised $52 million led by Khosla Ventures.
From the source
When Marcelle Flowers’ staff told her that two students were waiting at the counter of her Sacramento plumbing shop, she grabbed her wallet. She assumed they were selling chocolate bars for a soccer team. “I literally said, you have five minutes,” recalled Flowers, now 62 years old. It was June 2024 and a deal to sell her business, Armstrong Plumbing, had fallen through months earlier. She was also “really opposed to AI,” she told Fortune. She feared it would take her people and “take all the jobs.” The visitors were AJ Jain and Aditya Ketkar, two engineers in their mid-20s whose energy startup had just fizzled. They had spent that spring walking into about 140 contractors’ shops across Northern California, carrying a diary instead of laptops and offering no sales pitch. “People were not treating us like salesmen,” Jain said. “Curious kids was, like, our persona,” They had built exactly one thing worth showing: an automated appointment-reminder call for a San Francisco electrician.…