ORIGIN

We started by making yearbooks in Perth, Australia. Not exactly the typical Silicon Valley origin story. But the lesson was the same — make complex things simple and people will love you for it.

Traffic is driving me nuts. Am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging.

We named the company after Aragorn's sword because it was broken and reforged. American defense innovation was broken. We're reforging it.

Our first delivery was pad thai. I drove it myself. The customer tipped $5 and I thought we were rich.

I studied transportation in Zimbabwe and saw how ride-sharing already worked there. America needed the same thing but with an app.

We left Google because we realized the fastest path to autonomous driving wasn't the one with people in the car.

I had millions of YouTube views and couldn't pay my rent. The internet broke the connection between making something people love and getting paid for it. Patreon fixes that.

We started because buying Funko Pops on eBay was boring and full of fakes. Live selling fixes both problems — you see the item, you see the seller, and the energy is addictive.

We named the company after the seeing stones in Lord of the Rings. Tolkien nerds building surveillance technology for the CIA. Sounds about right.

Our professor gave us a B on the business plan for Cloudflare. Most expensive B in Harvard Business School history.

I spent six months taking screenshots to prove our security controls worked. Then I spent another six months doing it again the next year. There had to be a better way.

We named it ZenPayroll because running payroll should be zen — calm, simple, stress-free. Nobody believed that was possible. We proved them wrong.

I spent half my day at IBM searching for prospect phone numbers. The other half calling numbers that didn't work. I built Seamless.AI so nobody has to live like that.