Starting something new

Today is Day 26 of something new. TK, Kevin, and I are participating in the inaugural Sequoia Arc Americas program.

It's a bit insane to have those words on paper – starting a company has felt infinitely far from reach but something we've always wanted to do in our lifetimes.

Why Now?

I don't think there's ever a great time to take the leap.

Most founders are outliers even prior to starting a company, and their career trajectories far outpace their peers. Therefore, they're already successful in their current role, making it irrational to justify taking such a large risk.

Ramp has a dense concentration of entrepreneurial talent, and my older coworkers remarked that past a certain age (28-30), it became far more difficult to start a company. Unless you were already well-off in life to begin with, getting married and having finanical dependents made the risk near-impossible to justify. Something else I heard at Ramp was that (1) it was hard to find the right co-founders, and (2) even once you knew who your co-founders would be, the timing rarely worked out between all the co-founders.

Given that information, here was my thought process: I'm almost 24 (at the time of writing), giving me a 4 year window to make the leap. There would likely never be a good time for me to start a company, but it was also unrealistic to expect that the timing would work out between Kevin/TK/myself in the future.

Why Us?

It's a bit curious that we were accepted into Sequoia Arc, given that we got in with nothing more than an idea. The majority of pre-seed and seed investments are a bet on the team more than the idea (companies are expected to pivot while searching for PMF), and I think the same applies to us.

TK, Kevin, and I have known each other for over 10 years. We attended Stuyvesant High School before we were roommates at Cornell Engineering. We were finalists at YC's 2020 Hackathon, co-founded a company while in college (Pixelcode), and have worked on countless other side projects together (IDK, Hub, Crypto Wrapped). I also strongly believe that TK/Kevin were outliers before becoming founders: Kevin went from IC3 → IC5 in 3 halves in Facebook, while TK was Employee #20 and PM of the core product at Ramp. More impressively, they've displayed consistent grit and tenacity despite difficult times and failures.

This heavy emphasis on founding team makes sense. Companies are largely a reflection of the founders' beliefs and personalities, and the #1 cause of company failure stems from co-founder breakups. Someone told us that co-founder relationships are like "marriage without the sex", which I think is both funny and accurate.

Why Arc?

When we sought out advice on starting a company, many people warned us that it would be impossible to do while having another full-time job.

We agreed that the ideal/unrealistic option would be having a blank check while we worked through the idea maze, but the second-best option would be to join an accelerator like YC as a catalyst to leave our full-time jobs.

We looked at a few – we considered YC, a16z Start, South Park Commons, the Neo accelerator. For reasons I'd like to avoid elaborating on here, we didn't apply to any of these (happy to explain over email for those curious). While we were looking at these, someone in our network told us about Sequoia Arc, a program that Sequoia was running for outlier founders at the pre-seed/seed stage for the first time. We put together the application over the next few weeks, eventually submitting on the day it was due.

We had a few interviews with a few folks on the Sequoia Early team, and were accepted into the program a few weeks before it started.

Participating in Arc was ideal for many different reasons, but I'd like to mention a few here:

1. Sequoia is arguably the most legendary VC firm
2. The 7-week Arc curriculum sounded invaluable as first-time founders
3. We wanted to meet other founders at the pre-seed / seed stage
4. Participating in the first Arc Americas cohort had asymmetric upside (similar to participating in the first YC batch)
5. We were excited to partner with Josephine/Alfred.

Why?

I've saved the most interesting question for last – why desire to start a company in the first place?

I think everyone's motivations for starting something are rather different. For me, there's a few factors:

Team

I was part of a project team at Cornell called Cornell AppDev, full of truly incredible people. We used to lament that after graduation, it seemed inevitable that you would work with people you didn't like, at a company you didn't care much about.

TK and Kevin are genuinely my version of a dream team. I'm also incredibly excited to create a team of world-class group of people that I'm excited to work with every day.

Purpose

In my 2021 In Review, I wrote:

I felt disillusioned working at Facebook. It was hard for me to believe that my work made a positive impact on society or that working at Facebook was the best use of my talent. The compensation, perks, and brilliant coworkers all sugarcoated the truth that no one at Facebook fully believed that they were achieving the vision of "making the world more open and connected".

Since graduation, I've leaned further and further into this ideology. Starting a company comes with innumerable burdens, but it's incredibly rare to have the opportunity to leave any imprint on the world we live in. I want to continue to search for meaningful purpose in my life, and starting a company is another step in that direction.

Family

My parents have had an outsized influence on what I believe today. They've sacrificed tremendously to ensure that my sister and I would have access to the opportunities that they did not, and it's a responsibility that I do not take lightly.

I've spent a long time thinking about what it would mean to best repay them for their sacrifices, and I've realized over the years that access to opportunity is so critical because it affords you the luxury of choice. Whereas my parents had many paths in their lives closed off to them, I've consistently had the freedom to choose.

I've been successful in my career thus far, and I don't think I've hit the limits of what I can do yet. Ironically, I don't think I'm searching for success – I'm searching for failure on the largest stage possible. Until that point, I don't plan to reduce the scale of my ambition.