Abstract: My first startup experience: 2024/07-2025/01

Last year in April, I decided to explore building a startup, and in June, I quit my job at Amazon to focus on it. From April to June, I also explored some AI startup ideas and worked on a few projects with people I met, but I didn’t incorporate a company or formally devote myself to building a startup. From July 2024 to January 2025, I incorporated a company with a cofounder and devoted myself to the 0-to-1 stage of building a startup. I transitioned to an advisory role after January 2025. The experience was bittersweet but very valuable, and I learned a lot. I will summarize my learnings and thoughts here. Please note that, per agreement, I will not disclose any details about the company, cofounders, or product, but will share my learnings and thoughts from my experience and those of other first-time founders I know.

Tech Stack

From a technical perspective, I have learned a lot about building full-stack SaaS apps with AI agents from the team and my open-source collaborators. Before this, I had limited experience with building SaaS apps and deploying AI agents into production: I had only built a few small Python fullstack projects using streamlit. Now I have a tech stack for fast prototyping and deployment: (1) Vercel for frontend, backend, and AI backend deployment; (2) Supabase for database, authentication, and subscription; (3) Next.js + shadcn + Tailwind for frontend; (4) Express.js + Node.js for backend; (5) FastAPI for AI backend. If we hit a technical limitation with Vercel, we can deploy to AWS.

Co-founder matching

I also have some takeaways regarding cofounder matching: Start with people you know well, and then expand your network. If you start with people you don’t know well, please take the time to understand their values and principles to check if they align with yours. Don’t just find a cofounder based on their resume and experience. Don’t be too quick to commit to someone (if someone pushes you to make decisions as soon as possible, that is potentially a red flag). You will need time to understand what type of people suit you well as a cofounder, and it will take time to develop your own perspective on this. As a first-time founder, you typically have these options regarding cofounder matching: (1) join a team that has already raised pre-seed funding or been accepted into an accelerator - in this case, it won’t be an equal split, but it reduces risk significantly; (2) start from scratch with another first-time founder, usually with a 50/50 or 51/49 split. Please note that unless the other person commits to putting in more money into the company on day one, you should argue for an equal split, since 51% means the other person can remove you from the board and force you out if you disagree. The other person can also change your equity since they have the voting power, which would put you in a vulnerable position. (3) Work with a cofounder who is significantly more experienced than you - for example, a successful serial entrepreneur or a director+ at big tech companies or VP+ at series A+ startups, while you are a staff software engineer or engineering manager. In this case, you would take less equity, but your chances of success would be higher. (4) Join a team that has already built a product (whether it’s just a prototype, a working product, or one with paid customers), but hasn’t raised any funding and is completely bootstrapped. In my view, if the founder already has some paid customers and is on the right track for fundraising, and you fit into the team, it might be worth taking less equity to join them. However, if the founder has only built a prototype or MVP, then as a builder, it doesn’t really make sense for you to sacrifice your equity. Please note that any cofounder relationship is at-will, meaning you can leave immediately if you want to. However, make sure to work on a separation agreement to ensure the company can continue operating without you.

Principles

After talking with many peer founders, I have found it very important to align on certain principles and values when building products with the early team members. Some of my principles: (1) For B2B ideas, speak with potential customers to verify their need for the product before building the product. (2) Build quickly and verify technical limitations before committing: Launch a minimal version to prove the concept rather than spending months building something without certainty of success. For example, if AI is a core feature, test its limitations in the problem space before investing months in full-stack and infrastructure work. (3) First build to ship, then refactor - don’t overcomplicate the tech stack before achieving product-market fit, as refactoring can always come later. (4) It’s ok to start with non-scalable solutions, focus on selling the product before scaling operations.

The current wave of startups is being empowered by AGI, which is why I want to dedicate myself to doing startup now from an AI/ML background. However, I’ve observed that not all founders share this vision—some who previously worked in Web3 have only pivoted to AI startups because of easier funding opportunities and favorable market timing. While profitability remains the number one priority for any founder, if I were to partner with someone again, I would prefer working with someone genuinely passionate about AGI—a person who proactively learns the latest techniques, regularly exchanges insights with me, and enthusiastically discusses how to apply new technologies to enhance our product. I totally understand different people have different principles and there is no right or wrong, just that people with similar principles can work together more easily than people with different principles

First-Time Founder Dynamics: Trust, Vulnerability, and Persistence

The foundation of any successful founding team lies in mutual trust and support. When your cofounder steps into the CEO role and tackles fundraising for the first time, becoming their strongest advocate is essential. If you can’t genuinely support them, it’s better to part ways than demand they prove themselves to you. Questioning a cofounder’s qualifications based solely on years of experience reveals either a lack of trust or fixed mindset thinking. Many initially inexperienced founders have developed into exceptional CTOs who later bring on specialized engineering leadership at Series A and beyond.

Second of all, in the cold-start phase, you will feel embarrassed and uncomfortable. For example, you will need to cold-call a lot of potential customers to verify the product ideas at the very early stage. And you will need to hire a team and build a product when you are simply bootstrapping. This recruiting is different from working at a big company since you don’t have a brand name and you are on your own. You also need to network with people to get early angel investors, advocates of your startup and in-network design partners. Your past achievements are not that relevant; you need to start from zero and build up your credibility. You will for sure face a lot of rejection and failure, but you need to learn to embrace embarrassment and be patient.

Community & Study Group

In addition to my former startup, I joined the South Park Commons founders community to meet more people and learn/build with them. I also organized a non-profit research organization called PathOnAI.org (https://github.com/PathOnAI) to collaborate with people online on open-source projects. I learned a lot from my peers and mentors in these communities. When there is a shared thesis bringing people together to work on something, they can learn from each other and build momentum more effectively than working alone.