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.

My dad and I built this at a kitchen table. He's a financial advisor. I was in college. We just thought — why is this so hard for normal people?

We named the company Adyen. It means "start over again" in Surinamese. We wanted to rebuild payments from scratch, not patch the old system.

I sold my first company at 24. I could have coasted. But I kept seeing teams duct-taping spreadsheets together and thinking — this is insane.

Alipay was born because nobody trusted anybody. Buyers didn't trust sellers. Sellers didn't trust buyers. We just sat in the middle and said: trust us.

I built an internal task tracker at Facebook that people loved. Then I thought — why does only Facebook get to have this?

We started in France because the French are cheap. I say that with love — they care about value. That was the perfect test market.

I studied behavioral economics at Columbia and realized: people aren't bad with money because they're dumb. The system is designed to confuse them.

We launched at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2010 with $400,000 and a product that managed money for free. People thought we were either lying or about to go broke.

My wife and I are both scientists. We started BioNTech because we believed mRNA could cure cancer. COVID was not the plan. But the science was ready.

Pedro and I started our first company in Brazil at 14. We were too young to sign the incorporation papers. Our parents had to do it.

I spent 20 years at BTG Pactual. I knew exactly how banks worked, how they priced, and where they overcharged. That knowledge became C6's blueprint.

My first company was the Million Dollar Homepage. I sold pixels on a webpage for a dollar each. It worked. Calm is slightly more sophisticated.

We're a British guy who sold pixels and a British guy who made video games, running America's biggest mental health app. Nobody saw that coming, least of all us.

My dad built DriveTime. I grew up in the used car business. I saw everything that was broken. Carvana was my answer to all of it.

I was 20 years old when I co-authored Attention Is All You Need. I didn't fully understand what we'd built. Nobody did. It took five years for the world to catch up.

I sold FreeCharge to Axis Bank for $60 million. I could have retired. But I had a thesis about trust and high-net-worth users that I needed to test. CRED is that test.

I'm Spanish. I moved to Brazil because I saw the biggest gap between what banks charge and what lending should cost. That gap is a $500 billion opportunity.

I moved from Italy to New York with five co-founders and no revenue. Five Italians sharing a two-bedroom apartment, building a mattress company. Our families thought we'd lost our minds.

I was a carpenter. I made furniture and couldn't find anywhere to sell it online. eBay was for used junk. Amazon was for mass-produced stuff. So I built Etsy.

I worked at PayPal and realized they had zero interest in Africa. 1.4 billion people and nobody was building for them. So I went home and built it myself.

I spent 15 years at Google building search. Then I realized every company needs Google — but for their own internal data. That's Glean.

I bought fake Jordans on eBay. Paid $300 for counterfeits. That experience made me so angry that I built an entire company to make sure it never happened to anyone else.

I invented the TPU at Google. The Tensor Processing Unit. Then I left because I knew I could build something faster. That chip is the LPU.

All four of us came from Flipkart. We saw what happened when you made e-commerce simple for India. We thought: what if we did the same thing for investing?

I was a corporate lawyer at O'Melveny. I spent 80% of my time on work that didn't require being a lawyer. Research, document review, drafting boilerplate. Harvey does that 80%.

I was a Buddhist monk for ten years. I shaved my head, lived in monasteries, and meditated for 16 hours a day. Then I thought: how do I explain this to someone on their lunch break?

The name Hugging Face comes from the emoji. We were a chatbot startup, remember? The name stuck even when the product completely changed. Sometimes the silliest names age the best.

I co-founded DeepMind. We sold it to Google for $500 million. Then I watched Google bureaucracy slowly suffocate everything we built. Inflection was my escape.

I wanted to build the Keurig of juice. A pod system where you get fresh, cold-pressed juice at home with the push of a button. That was the vision. The execution got complicated.

Construction hasn't changed in 100 years. We build houses the same way we did in 1920. I thought: what if we built them in a factory instead? Like cars. Like iPhones.

I ran Flextronics, one of the largest manufacturers in the world. I knew how to build things at scale. Construction seemed like the obvious next frontier. It wasn't obvious at all.

I was an engineer at SpaceX, in the best shape of my life, and my blood sugar was pre-diabetic. A continuous glucose monitor showed me what my food was actually doing to my body. That experience created Levels.

We bought a GM factory for a dollar. A dollar. The factory that built the Chevy Cruze. We were going to build electric trucks there. The symbolism was perfect. The business plan was not.

We started as a social commerce platform. Housewives would share products on WhatsApp groups and earn a commission. We turned word-of-mouth into a distribution channel.

I wrote my Stanford MBA thesis on building an eBay for Latin America. My professor gave me a B. The market gave me $80 billion. I'll take the B.

I tried to open a business bank account at Chase. It took three weeks, four visits, and a fax machine. A fax machine. In 2019. That experience was the final push to build Mercury.

I left DeepMind because Google moves too slowly. Guillaume left Meta AI because Meta moves too cautiously. We started Mistral because we wanted to move at startup speed with frontier-lab talent.

We were at Wix together. Eran and I saw the same thing: teams were drowning in tools and none of them talked to each other. We built Monday to be the one tool that replaces ten.

I founded MoviePass in 2011. It was a good idea at a fair price. Then Helios and Matheson bought it, dropped the price to $9.95 a month for unlimited movies, and turned my company into a bonfire.

I'm Austrian. Max is Austrian. We built N26 in Berlin. An Austrian neobank, headquartered in Germany, with a European banking license. Europe is one market if you build it that way.

I'm Korean. I moved to New York with no connections and no money. I started Noom because I watched my father struggle with diabetes his entire life. If I could change one behavior, I could change one life.

Joel and I tried to get a loan for our previous business. We had revenue, profits, and real customers. The bank said no. That rejection created a $2.8 billion company. Thanks, Barclays.

After the financial crisis, banks stopped lending to mid-sized businesses. Just stopped. Companies with $5 million to $50 million in revenue couldn't get a loan. We built OakNorth for them.

We started this in Oulu, Finland. Population 200,000. Middle of nowhere. The coldest city in the EU. Turns out that's a great place to build a sleep company — what else are you going to do in Finnish winter?

We started in 1998 making loyalty cards for petroleum companies. Loyalty cards. Then we pivoted to payment terminals. Then to merchant commerce. Every decade, we reinvent ourselves.

William and I started by building a budgeting app. It was bad. But the bank connection layer we built for it was really good. So we killed the app and sold the plumbing. Best pivot decision we ever made.

I'm an engineer from India who somehow built the most social fashion marketplace in America. I don't know anything about fashion. I know a lot about building communities. That turned out to be the skill that mattered.

Steve and I ran a previous startup together. The hardest part wasn't the product — it was dealing with our bank. Opening an account took weeks. Getting a card took longer. We thought: we'll build the bank we wish we had.

Shashank and I were at IIT Roorkee together. Two engineering students who knew nothing about finance. We built a payments company because integrating payments into our college project was so painful that we thought — someone should fix this.

I have a heart condition. I've been a patient my entire life. I didn't build Ro because I saw a market opportunity. I built it because I know what it feels like to need healthcare and not get it fast enough.

I'm from Chile. I came to NYU for an MFA in art. Not computer science — art. Runway started as my thesis project. A Chilean art student built one of the most important AI companies in the world. I love that story.

I dropped out of MIT at 19 to start Scale AI. My parents are both physicists. They understood probability well enough to know this was a bad bet. But they let me do it.

My parents immigrated from China to work at Los Alamos National Lab. Nuclear physicists. I grew up in Los Alamos, New Mexico — population 12,000. Not exactly the startup ecosystem. But the work ethic was world-class.

We started by refinancing student loans at Stanford. Literally. Alumni lent money to current students at better rates than the government. That peer-to-peer model was the original idea. Everything else came after.

I was 54 years old when I started Starling. In tech, that makes me ancient. In banking, it means I actually know what I'm doing. I'd spent 30 years inside banks. I knew exactly what was broken.

I was an IBM consultant who collected sneakers. I started a blog called Campless that tracked resale prices. That blog became the data engine behind StockX. Never underestimate a side project.

I founded Teladoc in 2002. Nobody wanted telehealth. Doctors hated it. Insurers ignored it. Patients didn't trust it. It took a global pandemic to prove what I knew 18 years earlier.

My wife was diagnosed with breast cancer. The oncologist had almost no data to personalize her treatment. In 2015. I thought: this is insane. We have more data on what movies people watch than on how to treat their cancer.

I grew up in a factory town in Zhejiang. My parents worked in manufacturing. I understand factories. I understand supply chains. Temu is not a tech company pretending to understand manufacturing. It's the other way around.

I founded Theranos at 19 because I was afraid of needles. I wanted to run hundreds of tests from a single drop of blood. The vision was real. The technology wasn't.

I grew up sharing a room with three siblings in Madeira. I never forget where I came from.

Three billion dollars for headphones. Not bad for a kid from Compton.

$600 million for a whiskey brand. Not bad for a plumber from Dublin.

I started in Brooklyn buying storefronts that national chains needed. Same logic, different zip code.

I grew up on a commune without electricity. Now I run companies that power how the world communicates.

Three MIT PhDs walked into a chip company. That's not a joke — that's our founding story.

We started on Facebook — as an app. Peer-to-peer lending as a social media feature. It actually worked.

Tom Knight wrote the foundational paper on synthetic biology at MIT. We're his commercial legacy.

I grew up in a village near Kyiv with no phone. Now 2 billion people use the communication tool I built.

I couldn't figure out shipping for my handbag business. So I built the solution myself.

Three college students who loved anime built a studio that outearns most Hollywood studios.

Tech otaku saves the world. That's literally what our name means in Chinese internet slang.

I was a modder making free battle royale mods. Krafton hired me to build the real thing.

I kept winning data science competitions by trying every algorithm. So we automated that process.

Three students at TU Munich analyzed SAP logs nobody was reading. We found billions in hidden inefficiency.

I was a hedge fund quant who fell in love with space. The best career pivots are irrational.

I quit my job making laser printers to build a fusion reactor. My wife was surprisingly supportive.

My PhD thesis in 1999 proved mRNA could trigger an immune response. That discovery launched an industry.

I was a cardiologist growing heart tissue. One day I thought: why not chicken?

A terrible cab ride in Bangalore inspired Ola. Bad service creates great companies.

All four founders are former teachers. We know what works in a classroom because we've been in one.

I quit a law firm in Africa to figure out how to make eggs without chickens. My parents thought I'd lost it.

I built Quizlet at 15 to study French vocab. Now 60 million students use it every month.

Israeli military intelligence taught me to see the whole picture. That's what Orca does for cloud security.

I named the company after my bulldog. She deserved an empire.

We started in 2000 — during the dot-com bust. Everyone else quit. We kept building.

My parents traded goods on the Grand Canal. I trade goods on the internet. The scale is different. The principle is the same.

I grew up in Aligarh speaking only Hindi. I learned English from television. In India, that background usually means you don't become a tech billionaire.

I spent 30 minutes searching for a ballet class in New York City and gave up. That frustration became ClassPass.

A Google product manager and a finance guy walk into a cornfield. That's not a joke. That's how FBN started.

I picked cotton as a kid. Now I pick oil out of the ground. Same work ethic.

I grew up with nothing. Everything I have, I built with my hands.

I started by feeding construction workers. Now I build the towers they work on.

I grew up in Soweto. Everything I have was earned. Nothing was given.

We started on a horse farm. The horses made serums. The serums made vaccines. The vaccines made everything else.

I founded Freshworks because my cable company gave me terrible customer service. Best complaint I ever filed.

I started Stitch Fix because I hated shopping. Turns out millions of other people do too.

I started a blog because I wanted to hear real women talk about beauty, not editors telling them what to think.

We got sick and needed a doctor. We could not find a trustworthy recommendation. That frustration was the original idea.