Startup Strategies How I built a $100M startup after losing EVERYTHING | Aydin Mirzaee
Aydin is the co-founder of Fellow and he's today's guest on Startup Strategies with Juliana Hahn. From losing everything in the dot-com crash at age 13 to building a $30+ million SaaS platform, Aydin has navigated multiple pivots and a strategic exit that shaped his approach to AI-first product development. In this episode, he reveals how he and his 20-year co-founding team bootstrapped their way to a multi-million dollar SurveyMonkey acquisition, then leveraged that experience to identify the manager productivity gap that became Fellow.
Aydin shares how he:
- started with childhood ventures building websites and attempting to compete with Yahoo before losing his father's money in the dot-com crash
- bootstrapped Fluidware to nearly 100 employees before executing a strategic acquisition to SurveyMonkey
- identified the manager productivity gap during his SurveyMonkey experience and used it as the foundation for Fellow
- navigated COVID as their 'Instagram moment' - pivoting from manager co-pilot to meeting productivity platform, then again to AI-first meeting assistant
- scaled Fellow to over $30 million raised with 10x revenue growth since 2021 by understanding that every pre-AI company must disrupt itself or risk being displaced by AI-native startups
Let's break down his Startup Strategies.
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