From the day the first employee arrived to the present, Applied Intuition has actively and intentionally recruited former founders. Dozens of founders have joined the company and contributed to its success over the years, and we interviewed 10 of them for this five-part series.
They shared their experiences, what is involved in starting companies, and what it means to be a founder.
“They're going to run through walls.”
Six words that speak volumes. That is how Peter Ludwig, Applied Intuition’s Chief Technology Officer and one of the company’s co-founders, explained a key part of the company’s strategy: Enlist people who founded companies. He elaborated on the value of attracting ex-founders—“maybe there's a nicer phrase for that” he acknowledged of the “ex-founders” label—and commented on their typical personality type.
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We naturally attract and retain lots of people who started their own companies.
“You have to be incredibly optimistic and just have this attitude of ‘no matter what happens we're going to get through it and we're not going to quit no matter what.’”
The rationale is straightforward. Creating anything new—a product, a team—can present the same challenges as launching a new company. Handing the reins for such a launch to somebody who exhibits a founder’s mindset should raise the likelihood of success. They accept the challenge knowing what lies ahead. That they will need to run through walls.
“One of the reasons Applied Intuition has been successful is we naturally attract and retain lots of people who started their own companies,” said Qasar Younis, Applied Intuition’s Chief Executive Officer, and the company’s other co-founder. He attributes part of that success to the fact founders tend to be skilled in many domains. “Founding a company requires you to be more well-rounded. You have to dabble in recruiting, marketing, and design—even if you're in engineering. If you’re a non-technical person you have to dabble in product engineering and hiring engineers, even if you’ve never done it before. So they're almost more like general managers.”
Hiring employees with entrepreneurial backgrounds is no accident. “I would say we've definitely sought them out in recruiting,” Ludwig said. “Seeing on the resume that somebody started something, we consider that a very positive signal.”
It is also not a secret. “There's an internal joke that we collect former founders,” said Joe Moster, an engineering manager at Applied Intuition, himself an ex-founder.
Prioritizing the founder’s experience when seeking someone to launch a new initiative has proven advantageous. “They're going to figure it out,” Ludwig said. “They're going to work so irrationally hard to solve whatever problems come up.”
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One of the appeals to folks who want to do entrepreneurship is you come here. You get to do it with a lot less risk, and ideally you're learning more because you're learning from other people.
The benefits flow both ways. Alan ElSheshai is a senior software engineer at Applied Intuition and was the first engineering hire, joining after founding multiple startups himself. His post-education path was a mix of big-company employers and boot-strapped ventures. After one startup attempt went awry he joined a major management consulting firm, advising clients on cybersecurity.
“Hated that, went back to startups,” was his succinct assessment.
“So one of the appeals to folks who want to do entrepreneurship, and want to do a startup, is you come here. You get to do it with a lot less risk than you do if you're just going out on your own and doing it,” ElSheshai said. “And ideally you're learning more because you're learning from other people, you're learning from people like Qasar, other product people, you're learning engineering skills that you wouldn't get.”
Ex-founders can be found by the dozens among Applied Intuition employees and alumni, and ten of these individuals shared their founding experience for this five-part series. We begin with Origin Stories, to be followed by Brick by Brick, Waking Up, The Beginning of the Beginning, and Lessons Learned.
Part 1: Origin Stories
How does one start a company?
Starting a company looks different from founder to founder. The notion to start a company can come from a range of places. The tried and true find-a-need-and-fill-it is motivation for some. That is how one of the Applied Intuition founders-turned-employees got started.
“I was actually shocked that a solution like this did not exist in the market,” Yaser Khalighi, an Applied Intuition engineering manager, said of why he launched his startup, SceneBox. It was while working at another company—building data solutions as that employer’s first data hire—that Khalighi started to get an idea. After a while he realized a lot of other companies likely had the same need.
“What we built at SceneBox was a data management platform for computer vision workflows. Our customers were primarily ADAS and AV companies,” Khalighi said. In the course of customer engagements, it became apparent SceneBox and Applied Intuition were solving complementary problems.
What came next? “We got acquired by Applied Intuition.”
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We like you guys. But we're just going to TELL you a problem to work on. And you're going to work on it.
Sometimes the startup path comes with a pivot. “It was the classic, ‘Pitch something that you have a problem with,’” said Ryan Brigden, an engineering manager at Applied Intuition. Brigden had been studying computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon, and planning to pursue his PhD, when the startup opportunity appeared before him. “At the last second, I decided to go start a company with several of my friends who I had worked with through my undergrad at CMU.”
At the time he lived in Pittsburgh, where landlords typically did not use any kind of digital payment technology. This left tenants no choice but to pay their rent the old-fashioned way, by writing checks. Brigden’s co-founder pitched a rent management solution, targeting college students. They developed an app that would write the rent check to a landlord, a model that proved not to scale. So Brigden and team approached Y Combinator for guidance. The response was not what they expected.
“They told us, ‘We like you guys, we want to fund you. But we're just going to TELL you a problem to work on. And you're going to work on it.’”
Cue the pivot: Develop a cashierless checkout system, essentially something very similar to Amazon Go, but for non-Amazon retailers. It demanded a lot of learning from the outset. How many in the team had retail experience? Zero.
“We took trips. We met executives. We built a demo store in San Francisco, in our office, that we could invite people to as they came to [Silicon] Valley,” Brigden said of the educational phase. “A lot of these large retailers have tech teams or small tech teams or business development folks out in the Bay Area, and we would learn what they're thinking about.”
One of those learnings was that the prospects cared about a different problem entirely, not what Brigden and team were charged with solving. “Actually, most of them were not thinking about replacing cashiers. The big hype phrase at the time was ‘omnichannel.’ ‘Right now, I have 10 systems to manage everything. I want one system that does it all online, merging online, pick-up in store, all together.’
“And so, the side feature was you can remove the bottleneck at the checkout. But a big part of it was that we identified that we could be the omnichannel provider. And that was really the pitch that landed hard.”
Just as Ryan Brigden started a technology venture to solve a problem in the traditionally low-tech domain of retail, so did Amir Shah, now an engineering manager at Applied Intuition. What he described as a “super interesting ride” on the way to Applied Intuition included a nearly 10-year stint with Lockheed Martin, where he worked on a wide range of assignments, including devops, systems engineering, hypersonics, and ICBMs. During this time a group of friends—“a little bit younger than me, they were still in college, graduating relatively soon”—approached Shah with a startup idea.
“The problem statement was that they live in a world where they're entering and exiting college campuses, they are moving in and out every year. There was a lot of waste, financially as well as materially,” Shah said. “And so, they're thinking about ways of solving that problem, and so a used marketplace was an area that they were really really interested in.”
It was not as if alternatives did not exist already, as Craigslist was well established. A bit of market research revealed that their target demographic—college students—weren't using any particular tool to address this problem.
“It was text groups and things like that. Very low exposure, really—friends, friends of friends, that you're finding ways to offload your stuff,” Shah described the situation. “People would go basically dumpster diving, finding an old fridge that somebody threw out at the end of the semester, taking it to their apartment. So we decided to build an app around this.”
The reaction to this idea for a better mousetrap? Chilly.
“Nobody that I talked to about it was like ‘That's super cool, tell me more,’” Shah said. “It was kind of, ‘OK, so you're making Craigslist. Nice.’”
Undeterred, Shah and his co-founders continued to pitch early-stage, seed, and angel investors. It took time—talk to people who have started companies and you will hear about the need for perseverance—but eventually they were able to explain the problem well, and get investors and a team on board.
“I joined as CTO,” Shah said of those early days. “We did some mock-ups, we pulled together a quick user story, a workflow, things like that. Built a pitch deck, did some research of the market, and we went and raised a little bit of seed funding to go do this.” And they built the app.
“It was four co-founders, which is quite a lot of co-founders for a small company,” he remembers of the early days.
“But whatever. We were young. Trying to figure it out.”
Generating New Features and Ideas
The credo, “Ideas are the lifeblood of business,” credited to Richard Branson, might apply especially to startups, for which generating high-value ideas is more necessity than advantage. Conceiving innovation, seeing untapped markets—perhaps even creating them—are all at the core of entrepreneurial victory. Successful founders recognize the need to spawn new ideas in the dynamic landscape of startups.
But how to generate them?
Poke the market
“I guess I don't have a super great process for doing it,” Greg Granito acknowledged about evaluating what's worth pursuing and what's not. Granito was involved in starting two companies before joining Applied Intuition, where he is now an engineering manager. “The first question you should ask is ‘Who is the customer and what value are you providing to them?’ And really looking at finding what the value is, how big the value is. Because if you can provide a lot of value, you can usually find ways to do the rest of it.”
“Good ideas are something that comes back from the market,” said SceneBox founder Yaser Khalighi. He cautions against the temptation to build something based only on an idea and a theory. “I think it's always good to hypothesize the pain point, but then through that you actually have to poke the market. You have to talk to customers. You have to see if people actually would pay for it.”
With an entrepreneur’s economy of words, he put it more simply: “I call it the wallet test.” He proceeded to describe a process of traversing the path from an idea—“Everybody is excited about every idea,” he warned—to assess whether an idea has the gravitas to run the gauntlet from concept to product to purchase. To get someone to open their wallet.
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I think it's always good to hypothesize the pain point, but then you actually have to poke the market. You have to see if people actually would pay for it.
“Very few of them would give me an LOI [letter of intent]. Very few of them introduced me to their boss to talk about the idea,” he said of potential customers he spoke with when trying to progress a concept. “Everybody is nice out there, specifically to founders and entrepreneurs. But then you have to really poke them hard to see if their nicety is actually because of their business interest. So you have to poke them hard. And then—when you generate the demand—you go back and build the product.”
Vetting customer input this way saves one of the most valuable resources a startup team has, its time. Requests from customers usually sound reasonable, plausible. But are they important? Important enough for them to commit?
“It was more a question of priorities,” Fahrzin Hemmati said of listening to customers’ wish lists. Hemmati, who was the second engineer hired and served as Head of Engineering at Applied Intuition, is now Chief Operating Officer at Reviewable. He described the process of understanding those priorities.
“What was the most important to them? What could they actually use right away? Sometimes customers go, ‘It would be nice if.’ And if you make the mistake of just implementing, then you follow up six weeks later and go ‘It's there.’ They're ‘Great, cool. We'll totally use that next quarter.’
“Okay, great,” he recalled with obvious derision. Lesson learned.
Put your ear to the ground
Listening to customers is fundamental to how Adriano Quiroga pursues ideas—but with a filter. Quiroga, now an engineering manager at Applied Intuition, founded a startup called Focal Systems, which used deep learning technology to determine out-of-stock levels for retailers and communicate that to a store’s back room. He said customers might be quick to offer suggestions for products, but he prefers to hear about what they are trying to solve.
“People are not that good sometimes at talking about solutions. They might talk about solutions that don't make sense. They might not even talk about the right solutions,” Quiroga said. “The way that I think about this is you put your ear to the ground, hear what customers are saying and then have customers talk to you about their problems.”
From there? Try different things. He illustrated an iterative approach with a story from his time at Focal. They initially attached a tablet to a shopping cart. The next step was attaching a camera to a shopping cart. In the end, they solved the problem by attaching cameras within the store.
“We didn't know that we were going to do static cameras,” he said of the iterations. “You go through that; you try it out.”
He emphasized the need to identify the success criteria and determine whether they have been met. “Is this thing actually working? You ask yourself in your heart of hearts with all the data that you need, with the right counsel, advisors that you need, and maybe some of your investors, founders, your employees, this idea, after we've been executing for a while: Is it working? Yes or no?”
Good ideas can be more humble than heroic
Cashierless checkout for retail. Monitoring out-of-stock items in stores. Helping college students dump a couch. Some of the companies these ex-founders started might seem pedestrian—not exactly SpaceX—but they were solving real problems.
“I would tell people it's the driest sounding company,” Joe Moster said of Ware, the company he founded. Ware developed a drone-based approach to counting inventory inside massive warehouses, facilities on the order of a million-plus square feet. “What we were doing was all cutting-edge AI, robotics.” Even though his company operated one of the largest fully autonomous drone fleets in the U.S., Moster acknowledged they were “literally just counting things.”
But there was value in counting those things. One of the examples Moster uses to demonstrate that value was a client with a warehouse that stored telecommunications equipment. The facility housed about 500,000 square feet. A single pallet of 5G antennas, with a value of $200,000, went missing. Was it in the next aisle? Was it a quarter mile away?
Moster ran the robot, which found where the pallet had been misplaced. “Otherwise they would have been on the hook for $200 thousand,” Moster recalled. “But the robot was just like ‘I got you, bro.’”
Amir Shah’s experience in launching an exchange for college students had a similar non-sizzling vibe, but when he and his co-founders talked with investors it eventually found reception. Still, other ventures had more sizzle. One of the co-founders went on to another startup developing new automated external defibrillator technology for people suffering sudden cardiac arrest. “Sometime during our fundraising, he got in touch with a bunch of people from MIT who said, ‘Hey, we figured out how to build a better AED,’” Shah said. “And so, he's running that company now, they're doing great.
“That's a little bit more sexy—saving people's lives—than a college marketplace.”
Continue the series with Part 2, Brick by Brick.
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