#ai-startup

#ai-startup

He took a few stabs at starting new AI businesses, but nothing really stuck until he got a call from a friend who wanted help filling out customs paperwork. Basu got "very curious" and started cold-calling customs brokers in the Los Angeles area. He learned that many are mom-and-pop affairs still deeply reliant on fax machines and paper. When his first customer showed him stacks of manila folders during a FaceTime tour of her office, everything clicked, Basu told TechCrunch.

I resigned from Microsoft in September 2025. Less than a month later, I lost almost everything I owned. During my move from New York City to my hometown of Toronto, the trailer transporting my belongings was stolen in the middle of the night. The trailer was eventually recovered, but none of my belongings were. While resigning from Microsoft set me down this unfortunate path, I believe leaving Big Tech was the right move for me.

The new AI platform, founded by Crypto.com CEO and co-founder Kris Marszalek, reportedly spent a whopping $85 million on the Super Bowl spot, only to garner so much traffic that he had to post on X: "Insane traffic levels. We prepared for scale, but not for THIS," followed by three fire emojis.

My clearest memory from middle school is pacing in my bedroom, phone in hand, repeating the word 'wake' again and again. I was testing a voice app I had written. If I said the phrase just right, the app would respond. If not, I would tweak the code and try again. I had just learned to code from YouTube. My apps were getting downloads, and I was addicted. I would run home from school, drop my backpack, and open the reviews before starting my homework. It was the first time I saw that code written alone in my bedroom could reach people I would never meet.

"The day the company collapses is the day we drink that beer," Ondracek said.

We will neither fail, nor will we be an average outcome, and that's what we want and that's all I care about every day and all you should care about every day, and nothing else should matter,

My entrepreneurial ambitions led me to major in computer science, which opened the door to internships at companies like Meta, Slack, and Robinhood. My desire for more agency and autonomy over my work drove me to intern at progressively smaller companies. My first internship was with Facebook, which at that time had about 12,000 employees. When I joined Slack, it was a 1,200-person company. And finally, when I got to Robinhood, it was a 300-person company.

I got rejected from every single internship I applied to last summer - consulting, finance, tech, and entertainment. At the very end, I settled for a role at a startup called RecruitU as a social media intern. I grew their Instagram from 0 to 100,000 and my own account from 0 to 50,000. I also grew the company's user base by 400%. I was pretty much their only distributor.

You get to brush up on your soft skills while picking up technical skills like financial modeling. The biggest lesson I learned from my time in investment banking was how to perform a wide variety of tasks efficiently. It also taught me how to ask the right questions when evaluating businesses. Working on deals honed my intellectual curiosity and sharpened my judgment when making investment decisions.

Context windows of AI models, which indicate the ability of a model to "remember" information, have increased over time. However, researchers have suggested new ways to increase long-term memory of AI models, as they often can't hold context over several sessions. 19-year-old founder Dhravya Shah is attempting to solve problems in this area by building a memory solution, called Supermemory, for AI apps.

I never thought I'd be 37, unemployed, and living with my parents in Ohio again. A year ago, I was working at an AI startup in Los Angeles. I was making good money and had a one-bedroom apartment and a pretty stable routine. My salary was just enough to pay the bills, rent, and take care of my dog. Then, almost overnight, it all fell apart.

Khosla criticized the founders' decision to leave their team behind, stating, "Windsurf and others are really bad examples of founders leaving their teams behind and not even sharing the proceeds with their team."