Life is a series of experiments.

After 14 years of working for others, building my own company was a long-awaited experiment that had always piqued my interest.

This is a brief summary of what I’ve learned trying this idea.

It’s mostly intended as a capsule for my future self to read. But it could also serve as a source of information for others who might also be thinking about starting a company.

It is of course a sample of one and “your mileage may vary”.

Some important context

There are a million ways to do a startup.

Different variables, such as whether you raise funding or not, are a solo founder or team up with others, or work on a consumer product or enterprise, would have a significant impact on how things might pan out. The experiment I ran had the following specific characteristics:

• I built a venture-backed startup in Silicon Valley in 2024
• I chose a rather complex domain: the Health AI industry
• I tried to team up with multiple co-founders, but for a wide range of reasons -- usually timing or misaligned values/expectations -- I ended up being a solo founder
• Before the startup, I was in big tech (Google)

Why I started a company

The most important lesson that I discovered through building the company was how much of an exercise in self-discovery and reflection it was.

Working as an employee, one inherits a well-marked path to walk on. But as a CEO and especially a solo founder, one needs to intentionally and frequently choose/define the foundational aspects of the business.

It starts with high-level and shiny things like the company’s mission & vision and goes all the way to the decision-making process, choice of investors, commercial strategy, and even boring details such as which service to use for payroll, email, or the marketing website.

Every decision has a major impact on your work life. And you, no longer your employer, are responsible for the outcome of these decisions.

Over and over, one is forced to define who one actually is.

For me, some of the reasons for starting the company were:

• I wanted to create my own culture: one that was aligned with my values.
• I wanted to work on something that genuinely made the world a better place.¹
• I wanted to leverage my generalist nature (engineering, research, product), which was rather under-utilized when I was working in a specialized role at a big tech company.
• I wanted to experiment with building an entire company with the help of AI. There were a lot of wild claims about this being a possibility. I had cautiously assumed that everything was a lot easier with AI and that there was a non-zero chance that AI would exponentially improve through the course of my experiment. If that was true, then having a blank slate to draw on was going to be a massive advantage.
• I was curious to experience being a founder. If you talk to people who know me well, they would very likely tell you that trying a bit of everything -- and being a master of none -- is very much a part of my character 🙂
• It felt like an opportunity loss not to try doing a VC-backed startup in San Francisco, the mecca of startups, while I was relatively young and able.

What I learned about myself

I don’t think I’ve gained more insight about myself in any other experiment of similar length. And the majority of my experience was not by any means the exhilarating and fun ride that is portrayed by most. It was painful and confusing at times. But it was also incredibly satisfying at other times.

It was worth it.

My learning journey started right before I even embarked on the path. Given the weight of this decision to start a company, I decided that I needed to clear my head before committing to such a major decision. To do this, I did a 10-day Vipassana. A year later, I still feel the magnitude of that experience. 10 days of watching my “monkey brain” going from one thought to another. From one emotion to another. There are a lot of lectures about Buddhism in Vipassana sessions. Over and over you are reminded that cravings and aversions are the source of human suffering. And the point of life is to escape this cycle of suffering.

I came out of the Vipassana a different person. I was in fact seriously considering that I should not start a venture-backed company 🙂 The whole exercise felt like an ego-centric pursuit that I would easily cling to and cause immense suffering. It felt like a distraction from my -- unexpectedly started -- spiritual journey.

For better or worse, my enlightenment episode wasn’t able to stop me from pursuing this journey.

In retrospect, I was pretty disoriented after this intense meditation course and should have given myself much more time to reintegrate into society. I think Vipassana was a very potent, though incredibly helpful, shock to my system.²

At times, AI gave me an illusion of progress

It’s hard to make something out of thin air. Especially when you are alone in thinking about it.

At first, AI was a major band-aid for me in these situations. Every time I’d feel stuck on something or was daunted by a major decision, I’d turn to my three trusted friends: Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini 🤖 These interactions were honestly helpful on many occasions. But I do think there was a lack of durability in some of what came out of this experience. At first glance, the slides, wireframes, apps, and business ideas seemed very promising and professional. But like the actual taste of a McDonald’s sandwich that looks incredible on a billboard, the reality did not match my illusions.

In addition, the fact that it was so easy to spend days, weeks, months mindlessly “building” prevented me from doing some important reality checks. There is something really addictive about the AI coding process.³ Others have written about this.

Towards the end, I intentionally switched to doing a lot of thinking by writing on paper and talking to real users. But the low barrier of using AI as a crutch was always hard to avoid.

I didn’t find something that would work for me

The harsh reality is that I failed at my startup (it’s totally ok though! 🙂).

Aside from the well-known challenges of building complex and high-stakes solutions with GenAI, I couldn’t find a path that simultaneously:

• was a venture-scale business
• was something that I was deeply interested to work on for a long time
• had high enough traction to justify continuing with

I wrote about some of the things I tried in the past. I tried a few other options after the pivot as well. But at some point I decided that I had enough data to make the decision to stop the experiment.

In case it is useful for you, I’ve also open sourced the iOS app that I ended up shipping which got modest traction.

I miss working with other smart people

If you’re a strong technical person in the Bay Area working in big tech, it’s pretty hard to justify quitting your job for a startup whose entire bank account is less than your yearly income. One might say that I did this, so there must be others. But I was not able to convince others to quit their job to join me. Some of this was probably a timing issue. Another reason was, however, that I wasn’t able to prove to these folks that they would have remotely similar expected value of gains by working in the domain that I had picked.

Unsurprisingly, I couldn’t prove this to myself either.

What I do miss now is deep collaboration with some of the folks that I worked with in the past. Not just engineers but also researchers, designers, clinicians, and product managers.

I of course do not miss the many levels of middle management, hours of unnecessary meetings, and the strange politics of big tech 😉

I found out about my hidden values

When I was contemplating getting off the VC-backed startup train, I benefited from the help of a wonderful friend and mentor.

One of the exercises that I went through was to re-read one of my favorite books, Designing Your Life and go through the exercise of Odyssey Planning. I tried to do this without thinking about what happens to the company. What I realized going through the exercise was that no future came up that pointed to an aspiration to be a CEO, a founder, or a sole decision maker for others. Instead what did come up were aspirations for balance, authenticity, health, presence, and to have a rich life. Nothing came up that required massive amounts of money or control.

This exercise was a major catalyst for making my mind up about ending the startup experiment. ⁴

I feel so incredibly lucky (and spoiled)

On one hand, I am -- yet another -- failed startup founder 🙃

I didn’t go all in to make my company successful. I didn’t make a dent in the universe. I earned a fraction of what I would have earned had I simply stayed in my past job. I didn’t even spend most of the funding that I raised…

On the other hand, I feel incredibly lucky to have spent the last year:

• Intentionally building an entire company from scratch
• Testing many assumptions
• Getting experience in fundraising and interacting with investors -- from micro-VCs to the largest investors in Silicon Valley
• Learning a lot more about hiring and people management
• Learning more about the healthcare and AI space
• Getting back to my roots as a researcher and software engineer by doing months of focused development work
• Reading tens of books
• Meditating for hundreds of hours
• Running tons of miles
• Eating healthy homemade food for most days and being close to my wife and dog

And I got paid doing all that.

I genuinely don’t regret this failure and have a pretty good idea of the next life experiments that I want to run!

Lastly, and most importantly, I am so grateful for fellow friends, family, employees, advisors, and investors who helped me spend this year in the startup land.