Ethan LockshinSales at NVIDIA focused on AI adoption

George Cheng, 19, ditched MIT after YC to build Code Four; a moment spurred him toward risk ahead

Name: George Cheng, 19, ditched MIT after YC to build Code Four; a moment spurred him toward risk ahead
Uploaded: 2025-12-12T14:55:50+00:00
Duration: 2 min 41 s
Channel: Ethan Lockshin
Description: In this interview, George Cheng explains why he left MIT to join Y Combinator and build Code Four, an AI copilot for police officers. Raised by school…

12 Dec 2025 · 3 min

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2:41

In this interview, George Cheng explains why he left MIT to join Y Combinator and build Code Four, an AI copilot for police officers. Raised by school resource officers, Cheng has long been interested in public safety. He observed that new regulations and technology are causing police paperwork to grow exponentially, creating a paradox where tools meant to help officers add administrative burden. Seeing this as a critical problem, Cheng and his co‑founder conducted extensive field research—ride‑alongs, interviews with detectives, sergeants, chiefs, and patrol officers—to validate the need before dropping out. The decision was strategic, supported by a strong team, YC mentorship, and a clear product roadmap: start with automating paperwork as the quickest path to value, then expand to a broader AI copilot. The company recently raised $2.7 million, positioning itself at the current inflection point where AI and policing intersect.

Chapters

George, you and your co founder recently raised $2.7 million in funding and you dropped out of MIT and joined the Y Combinator startup accelerator. You're building Code 4, an AI co pilot for police. When was the moment or insight that made you think, hey, this is important enough for me to walk away from a more conventional career? And do you ever question that decision?
I think everything I do, I never question, question. I think I think about my decisions a lot before I execute them beforehand. Some context about me is that when I was little I was raised by two SROs. They took me home every Tuesday and Thursday. So SROs are school resource officers because my parents were immigrants. And so I've always thought to kind of like build in the public sector, the public safety sector. I just don't know what. Right. And so when I discovered that police paperwork is compounding every single year because of new regulations and actually the introduction of technology makes it so that, you know, the auditing logs and everything like that for compliance is more and more that means more paperwork for police officers. And when I'm thinking about it, it's kind of very contradictory. Right? You want to introduce this technology to help them save time, but this technology comes with more burden of documentation and it actually drags along the current shift. The paperwork documentation has increased year upon year, compoundedly. So when I was thinking about this kind of problem, I was, um, I thought that, you know, paperwork is an important enough problem to solve for policing in general. Wanted to build something in this space. And so it wasn't a hard decision for me to drop out of mit. I have a great team backing me as well. Of course Y Combinator taught me a lot about how to build a great company. And then also my co founder and I have, you know, discovered, invented, found what works, what doesn't. Talked to all of our customers, from detectives to sergeants to chiefs to patrol, Done so many ride alongs to know what product we're building even before we dropped out. And so this decision wasn't just off the whim. Hey, like I have an idea. This one day I'm going to make it into Y Combinator. And I just got it miraculously. No, it was very careful. It was thought out. The current administration, right, the current budgets for police, kind of like the inflection point, I think right now is the inflection point for AI products to get into policing as well. Everybody's talking about policing and everybody's talking about AI. So I think this company, the vision for this company isn't necessarily to solve paperwork, but rather create the AI copilot for police officers. And paperwork is our first product to solve because it takes the most amount of time and it's the easiest time to value.