from comfy job to founder: my default mission

9 Oct 2026 · 1 min

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A former big-tech employee explains why founding felt inevitable. At 13 they sketched an idea like Perplexity using basic machine learning. At 16 they launched Sub, a personalized news feed. These early projects made them a builder first, so leaving their job to start a company was just following the path they'd always been on.

Chapters

Why did you go from comfortable job to being a founder? What happened in your brain?
For me, having a big tech job was always a means to an end. I've always wanted to just be a founder. For me, it's not, why do you want to start a startup? For me, like, that's the default. Like, I built— when I was 13, I wanted to build what is now Perplexity, but I didn't know GenAI back then, so I used more standard ML techniques. That's what got me into CS and software engineering. When I was 16, I built this app called Sub, which was an aggregation feed of news, all the content that you care about. That's my default. That's all I know.