Ambitious & Driven

Currently: Co-founder @ Bloom (YC 25) Studies: MSc Robotics (ESOP) @ ETH Zurich ‘23, BSc Aerospace @ TU Delft ‘19 (top 1% graduate w/ honors) Previous start-ups: Fireview, Giftit Experiences: Software Engineer @ Verity, Co-founder & Chief Engineer @ Talaria, Autonomous Software Lead @ MIT Driverless Origin: Spain, NetherlandsLinks: LinkedIn, TwitterBloom is hiring!They’re an incredible team based in Zurich, building the future of the creator economy.Supported by Founderful Campus! They run the VC Academy program, selecting top students from Swiss universities that invest in the hottest university startups.Growing up and early educationWhere did you grow up?I grew up in Barcelona, Spain until the start of high school. Then I moved to a tiny village along the coast of Barcelona that had about 2,000 people. That's where I did high school. During that time, I also did an exchange year in Canada in Kamloops and participated in three back-to-back summer programs in STEM, including a summer at MIT as part of the RSI program.Why did you decide to study Aerospace engineering?I liked so many different things in STEM – math, physics, chemistry, engineering, computer science – basically everything. So I decided to do aerospace for my undergrad because I could do all of those things in one degree. I did that in Delft in the Netherlands.Then I fell in love with robotics through a minor, so I came to ETH Zurich to do my master's. At the end of my master's, I fell in love with app development and software engineering, and that's how I ended up doing startups.Studying at Delft University and side projectsWhat projects did you work on at Delft?I followed the standard curriculum there, but the main highlight was that we set up Talaria, a "dream team." We were trying to build an electric vertical takeoff and landing jet. We basically went from nothing to a 40-person team, all students. We actually built a working prototype over a couple of years, and it was really cool.Why did you decide to do a minor at ETH Zurich?There were a couple universities you could pick from for your minor. My top two choices were Princeton and ETH Zurich. At that point, I was mostly just looking at rankings and how good these universities were.I wasn't someone that looked at their minor as a way to take a six-month vacation and go to Asia and chill. I was looking at what minor would allow me to grind the most and learn the most from.ETH was cool because I was in my undergrad and could basically take entirely master's courses in robotics. I could get a really good taste of what a master's would look like and what robotics would be like.I loved the challenge. I had never done machine learning, robotics, or much software engineering before. I remember going to the advanced machine learning lecture, and the professor asked, "How many of you are doing your PhD?" 30% of the room raised their hands, and I was like, "Holy s**t, okay."But I loved that challenge. I had to learn the entire Introduction to Machine Learning course in about two weeks so I could catch up with the content in the advanced lectures. It was super theoretical and mathematical.I also took a course called Duckie Town, which was very applied robotics. I met really cool people there and got super inspired by the technical excellence and rigor of these lectures and professors. I fell in love with that and knew I wanted to potentially come back for my master's.What did you do during your gap year after undergrad?After my bachelor's, I did a gap year. The main reason was that I knew about this student team - I knew Delft was working with MIT Driverless, and there was an opportunity for me to be the autonomous software lead at this team and work with really cool people on both sides, in Delft and at MIT.I really liked the applied part of robotics where you would work on software, deploy it on hardware, and see it run - but on a larger scale, on an actual full-scale electric driverless car.That year I was going to be going to MIT to lead the team halfway through, but then COVID hit. So we completely shifted gears and started working on a simulator to do the competitions online instead of in real life.It was also an experience of learning C++ on the go. I hadn’t written a single line of C++ before I started with Driverless, and everything was in C++.Studying at ETH Zurich and starting BloomWhat made you decide to do so many side projects (like Before They Change the World and YouTube) at ETH that most students don't normally do?Honestly, it's hard to explain where this comes from, but I think I take a lot of inspiration from others. When I see someone being excellent at a certain craft—and it can be literally anything like Carlos Alcaraz destroying Djokovic at Roland Garros, or Magnus Carlsen playing blindfold chess against 10 people simultaneously, or Charlie Puth coming up with a melody with his perfect pitch—I can get very easily inspired.I realize these people are human, and I'm human too. There's no law of physics limiting me from doing something like that or being able to do something like that. So I just love to take on challenges and see how plastic my brain and body are—how quickly can I learn something and change my abilities.How was your experience at Verity?I interned at Verity during my master's, which was a cool experience. Although it was during COVID, so I didn't get a lot of face time with the people I was working with, I did work on an important part of the pipeline. I deployed code to actual drones and watched these drones fly around at night in an IKEA warehouse, which gave me a kind of "Night at the Museum" feeling.What made you transition from robotics to app development?The transition to app development happened later in my master's, especially when I was doing my thesis. I was starting to work with my current co-founder, and I basically listened to my gut. I saw how excited I was to work on my thesis versus how excited I was to work on this app we were building, and there was a big difference.I think the main factor was probably iteration speed. I was doing reinforcement learning in robotics, which sounds really cool at a high level. But the day-to-day reality is different—it's a lot of tweaking parameters, waiting two days for a training run, looking at graphs, and hypothesizing what needs to be changed.With app development, it's more immediate: I want to build this feature, I crank out some code, and I instantly see if it works and how it looks. I can quickly add new features and talk to customers. I love that aspect of it, plus the freedom of controlling your own destiny.I also found that the output of a startup—a product that people can actually use and get value from—was a lot more fulfilling for me than a research paper. So that's how I can rationalize it, but in the end, just listening to my gut would have been enough. I was way more excited about app development, so I knew I would put in more hours and get much better at that craft because of how motivated I was.Building Giftit, Fireview & BloomHow did you know when to move on from an idea and what lessons did you learn about validating startup ideas?This is a very tricky balance and nobody has really figured it out. I do think you get better at it over time.There's what YC calls the "good kind of crazy" versus the "bad kind of crazy" when thinking about ideas. Some people will call your idea stupid, and sometimes they can be right, sometimes they can be really wrong. The Airbnb founders are an example of the "good kind of crazy"—people thought they were insane, but they had seen a few data points and experienced something magical themselves, so they had conviction.My main advice is: don't care what others say except if they're your users. Anyone can say "this is a stupid idea," but ignore them unless they're your target users. Ground yourself in user feedback and don't be afraid to uncover the truth by forcing someone to tell you "No, I don't want to pay for this."First-time founders often postpone talking to users and asking the hard, awkward questions like "Is this a problem for you right now?" or "Would you pay for this?" because they're afraid of someone saying no and killing their fantasy. At some point, you stop marrying yourself to your ideas and actively try to invalidate them until someone proves you wrong.More experienced founders actually validate an idea before they even start building, which is the opposite of what first-time founders do.With our first startup Giftit, I had so much energy and excitement that I could just keep going even when things weren't really working. But my co-founder was losing conviction, so it became clear we needed to think about something else.We had a few ideas in the back of our minds, one of them was a vague idea of what became Fireview, which would solve a problem we had with Giftit and that we had seen other startups and agencies have.This time, we didn't just build the product. We started with a landing page and waitlist, saying "we're not going to build this product only to realize nobody wants it." We got some decent traction on the waitlist, built the product in a few months, launched it, and started making revenue pretty quickly.We even got an acquisition offer from a company that wanted to integrate our product into their tool, though we didn't take it because it wasn't a "hell yes" offer.Around that time, the idea for Bloom had been floating around in our heads, but it was very abstract—like, what about a meta-app where you could draw something on screen and it would come to life, or where you could talk to your phone and it would build an app?But we weren't thinking far enough and weren't anticipating how good AI coding models would get. We were limiting our vision to super simple apps and wondering who would want this—hobbyists? Designers for prototyping?During the holidays in 2024, I went to Barcelona for a couple weeks and spent that time experimenting to see if this was a pipe dream or if there was a feasible way to make it happen. I came back with something promising, and in mid-January convinced my co-founder that this could be extremely big and change the world.The YC deadline was coming up in three weeks, so we built a prototype, submitted the application, and got an interview. I got a bunch of help from people in the SPH mafia who had gone to YC before, which really helped with our prep.Building Bloom and lessons from Y CombinatorWhat is Bloom and what is the long-term vision?Bloom is the fastest way to build and share native mobile apps. What Bloom allows you to do is literally talk into your phone, describe an app—it could be anything: an AI-powered app, a personal app that persists your data, a social app with authentication or payments—and Bloom builds both the front end and the backend for this app, deploys everything for you.You don't have to do anything else than just describe what you want, and then you instantly can use that app natively on your phone with haptics, gyroscope, camera API, contact sync, calendar, even HealthKit. It's cross-platform for Android and iOS, and you can share this app with a single link.We're basically taking the convenient web sharing experience of links and bringing it to native mobile apps, which is notoriously difficult even for developers. Normally you'd have to build in Xcode, have an Apple developer account costing $100/year, submit for review, use TestFlight for sharing, etc.With Bloom, you build the app in seconds, get a link, drop it in any chat, and people can just tap that link to open the app on their phone. It's the most frictionless way to build and share native apps.Short term, we're empowering people who already think of software as a creative medium—designers, entrepreneurs, developers. They already come up with app ideas but building them takes a lot of time or money, especially for non-technical entrepreneurs who have to hire someone.But what's really exciting is expanding the range of people who think about software as a creative outlet. The best analogy is what YouTube and phone cameras did to media, where initially making videos was limited to videographers or journalists or filmmakers, and now literally everyone makes videos.I think the same thing will happen with software. We're unlocking the creator economy, but for software. Right now the creator economy is mostly photos, videos, and music, but software is a superset of all those. The creator economy can become so much larger when everyone can build software for themselves, their communities, and their fan bases.Getting into Y CombinatorWhat was the Y Combinator experience like?We spent most of the batch building, which isn't the best use of time. Ideally, you start the batch, launch immediately, and then use the batch to grow, sell to your batchmates, get growth advice from partners, use the YC brand as much as possible.For us, we weren't ready to launch. We launched on Bookface (the internal YC platform) about halfway through the batch, saw issues we needed to fix, then launched properly a few days before fundraising week, which is one week before demo day.The batches are shorter than they used to be, and demo day comes at you so fast. It's crazy.SF was great, and YC especially was great because they organized events that brought people together—alumni reunions, talks, alumni demo day, demo day itself. These events brought together really awesome people. But most of the batch, we were literally just in our apartment coding.The main value was that the three of us were in the same apartment, living and working together, which created a very good atmosphere that I'm going to miss.What were the biggest lessons and value-adds from Y Combinator?I haven't actually thought about ranking the main lessons, but there are tons of them. At the start of the batch, there's an event where all the partners in your group tell their founder stories in great detail, and you learn so much from their experiences and mistakes.All the talks about fundraising, how to approach it, and the famous Dalton talk about how not to die as a company are incredibly valuable. He shares statistics from thousands of YC companies and what happens to them after the batch.But the main value-add from YC was the brand and how that helps you, especially in fundraising. That's where you have the biggest unfair advantage.It creates an artificial deadline that usually doesn't exist in fundraising, and it gives you confidence because you have high leverage—you have $500K in the bank so you don't need to raise money. You're in a position of very high leverage where you can say, "I want to raise at a 20 to 30 million valuation or higher," and investors will say, "Yeah, okay, YC standard practice." If you tried to do that outside of YC given the stage most companies are at, people would laugh at you.One of the things I loved about the experience was seeing people I previously thought of as "gods" in person. I had listened to so many podcasts of Brian Chesky, Sam Altman, Jessica Livingston, and Paul Graham. Then I saw them in real life, and the world felt so small in that moment.You realize these people are just humans like you—they make stupid mistakes, they have dumb questions. When they tell their stories from the beginning of their journey, they're very human and relatable. So there's pretty much no excuse for you not to go for something yourself.How did Bloom raise $3.4M and what advice do you have about fundraising decks?That round was raised in five days, more or less, before demo day. I have to say, it was raised without a single pitch deck. I want to tell this to people who are first-time founders because I remember how much I obsessed about pitch decks when I was getting started with Giftit, spending so much time on them.For this round, I just jumped on calls the week before demo day, told the story of me and my co-founder working together on different things and landing on Bloom. Then I shared my screen, gave them a demo of the product, and told them the vision and how big it could become.The people who understood the product, the technical problem it was solving, or the pain point it addressed—and had a bit of imagination—understood its potential easily. They didn't need a pitch deck with a TAM slide or anything.We had launched a few days before, so we had limited traction. YC definitely helped because investors knew demo day was coming and other investors would be looking at our startup. Investors needed to move fast.What's funny is that you still get some people, mostly European investors or those who haven't dealt with YC companies before, who book a meeting, have a call, and then tell you, "We have our investment committee next Monday and can follow up after that." They don't realize the round might close before then.It was a super exhausting week with so many back-to-back meetings. I was basically talking the whole day, telling the story, and doing demos. But the product really sold itself in the fundraise.What advice do you have for people considering starting a company or taking risks?Especially at this age, I think the biggest risk is not taking risk. You should be making bets when you're in your 20s.Honestly, at this time when AI is taking off and industries are being completely shaken by new technology, there's no advantage to being in this field for seven years versus one year. Nobody knows how things are supposed to be done—there are no rules.Young people have a crazy advantage now more than ever. You're taking a huge risk if you're not taking a risk right now.Bloom is hiring!They’re an incredible team based in Zurich, building the future of the creator economy.Hey Arnie here - hope you enjoyed this blog!Always happy to hear feedback, who should I bring next & what questions should I ask? This is a public episode. 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Currently: Co-founder @ Upsolve AI (YC W24) Studies: Civil Engineering PhD (Drop-out) @ EPFL ‘15-’18, MSc Fluid Sciences @ Brown ‘14-’15, BSc Civil Engineering @ Brown ‘10-’14 Experiences: Product Lead @ Palantir, Swiss Women’s National Rugby Team Player Origin: Hong Kong Links: LinkedIn, TwitterUpsolve AI is hiring talented software engineers! Apply through their website or reach out to Ka Ling directly!Supported by Founderful Campus! They run the VC Academy program, selecting top students from Swiss universities that invest in the hottest university startups.Growing up in Hong Kong & interest in sportsWhat was your childhood like growing up in Hong Kong? What were your interests?I was born and raised in Hong Kong. As a kid, I was quite athletic - I fenced really well and also played table tennis at a high level. Sports has been a big part of my life, even into adulthood.Academically, I was really good at math, physics, and chemistry - basically anything that required logical and analytical thinking. From Hong Kong, I went to study at a high school called United World College, which is part of a special high school movement. There are probably around 20 schools around the world. The whole idea is to make schools like mini United Nations where you get folks from very different, diverse backgrounds and countries to all study in a boarding school together. So I was studying abroad in Hong Kong for two years, did my IB, and then I moved to the States for university. I studied at Brown University before going to Switzerland for my PhD.What got you started in sports? Was it a push from parents or your own interest?I think probably my mom played some role in it. She liked to bring me around to learn different random things. So I did kung fu, ballet as a kid, and then tennis, table tennis, fencing as I mentioned. I just got quite good at it, and because of that, the periphery of sports that I touched just kind of expanded from there.Are you a competitive person by nature?Let's say I'm competitive in the sense that I love winning, but if I lose, I hate the type of losing which is when I did not prepare enough and I go in and lose, because that essentially means I could have prepared better.But if I prepared to the best possible extent and I also perform 100%, 110%, and if I lose, then it just means someone else is better. And sometimes, you know, it's also good to lose because then you know someone else is better than you and then you can catch up on that one as well.So I'd say I'm competitive and I don't like losing if I felt like I'm under-prepared, that's kind of bumming.Studying Mechanical Engineering at Brown UniversityHow did you end up going to Brown University in the US?One of the things is that the Hong Kong education system, at least back then (I don't know now), was quite spoon-fed. So it was one of those where I wanted to find somewhere that is more interactive, let's say not as spoon-fed, not as old school.In my United World College, it's just very popular for folks to end up either going to UK or US to study. I chose Brown because it's the most liberal arts college in the world, and you get to even make up your own major or make your own concentration. So it always been a bit of a dream school for me. I applied, got in, and decided to go there.How was your experience at Brown? What did you focus on there?I studied civil engineering there and then went into mechanical engineering, specializing in fluid and thermal sciences. That's actually the reason why I ended up going to EPFL for my PhD because I was studying computational fluid dynamics.But one thing I enjoyed the most is the fact that since it's a liberal arts college, there wasn't really a major concept until maybe your third or fourth year at uni. What happened there is you ended up making friends from people who could study all these random things as well. And that was the special thing because I felt like I just learned so much even just by having conversations with my friends at a lunch or dinner table. So that was the unique special thing there.Did you find peers in high school and college who had the same "grind" mindset as you?I think so. For example, my high school typically attracts people who, at a young stage, let's say 14-15, dare to dream. Because it's modeled as a mini UN, a lot of my friends actually flew across the world to live in Hong Kong. That kind of means you just have some dream or some belief that you want to pursue. And I think that essentially extends into grittiness in a way.And I think Brown as well - it wasn't an easy school to get in, and they put focus on someone's development being well-rounded. So I think that typically also attracts driven people, people who just have aspirations, who are willing to work hard as well.How was the experience moving from Hong Kong to the US as an immigrant?It was fun, with a lot of differences there as well. I think the first month or two I was just lost. I didn't watch as much American TV growing up, so sometimes I'd sit down and all my friends would be talking about people that everyone seemed to know. I was like, "Who are these people? Why haven't I met them on campus?" Then I realized they were talking about some TV characters!So there were definitely some differences there. But difference is great - you get to learn from it as well.PhD studies in Switzerland and decision to drop outWhat brought you to EPFL for your PhD studies?The lab I was in aligned with my area of interest - it was in wind energy and numerical simulations. But I actually dropped out after three years, so I never finished my PhD.What led to your decision to drop out of the PhD program?It was multiple factors, but one of the main drivers was that academia was incredibly slow. During my time there, I wrote a paper as a first author on discovering a physical phenomenon, and it basically took two years for industry to start reading the paper and talking about it. It's good that people eventually talked about it, but I prefer somewhere where things are a lot more fast-paced and outcome-oriented - where I do something and I can instantly see it impacting someone or some part of the world.The years weren't strictly defined, so I actually don't know how many more years I would have needed. But the main thing for me back then was that I already had a first-author paper and some other second and third-author papers. It was diminishing returns for the amount of time I was putting in. I knew I did not want to be a PI or professor, so time is my most valuable capital. I didn't want to spend it pursuing the doctor title which meant almost nothing to me. There was no point in continuing.How did you come to the realization that the degree itself wasn't important? Did you get pushback from others about dropping out?I mean, it's just really thinking about what is my most precious capital. It's time. I can never buy back my time. I wasn't growing at the pace I wanted to be. What I proved I could do in a PhD - continuing would just be doing more repetitions of the same thing. So what does that really mean?That piece of paper really did not mean anything to me, because partially I also felt I didn't need it. And actually, I think in tech it's way cooler to tell people you're a PhD dropout than that you have a PhD.What's funny is my parents were like, "Why are you doing your PhD?" It's a very Chinese parents mindset - PhD is not really a thing for Hong Kong parents. The most common professions they expect are banker, lawyer, or doctor. They were like, "Do something practical! Why are you still in school?"So dropping out actually wasn't hard at all. I was quite self-independent from an early stage - I told my parents I wanted to go to school in the States and got almost a full ride to study abroad. So they trusted me. When I told them I wasn't happy and wasn't feeling the impact I wanted to have for the time I was spending, they were very open to it. It also helped that I told them I had a job lined up at Palantir - they were like, "What's that?" I tried to explain, and they said, "Well, it seems like a cool thing that you're excited about, so why not?"Competing in Swiss National Women's Rugby teamYou played rugby at a high level in Switzerland while working. How did you find time to balance that level of sport with work?As I mentioned earlier, I was always a sportive kid when I was young, so the training just kept going as I was growing up. I actually started playing rugby back in the States. I'm a sprinter so I run fast, and I just got picked by the coach and started from there.When I was younger, I fenced and played table tennis, and I was pretty high-level. It was to the point where I was going to attempt to be a professional athlete, trying to find a spot on the Hong Kong national fencing team. If that was the path, in a few years it would have been Olympics and all of that. So for me, playing for Switzerland's rugby team was kind of like a parallel universe - it wasn't shocking, it was just like, "Okay, cool."I just prioritize my time a lot. I think when people say they don't have time to train or exercise, it's often excuses. For me, even now, my calendar has exercise blocks and people know it's sacred. No one dares to schedule something during those times, and I don't compromise by moving them.At the end of the day, it's just about what's important. Again, similar to time, health is something that once it's gone, it's gone. There's no amount of money in the world you can pay to get health back. So I try to prioritize that as well as time with my family and friends.Joining PalantirHow did you find out about Palantir (it's not super well-known in Europe yet) and what made you interested in joining the company?I think I didn't realize this until maybe two years after working at Palantir, but because I studied in the States, Palantir by then was not small there - it was pretty well-known. I actually realized that in my first year of college I had applied there for an internship, though I don't think I ever heard back from them (partially because I was not American back then).I had quite a few friends from Brown that ended up working there, so I'd heard a bit about what they do. The opportunity came up because one of their recruiters reached out to me when I was thinking about quitting my PhD. I said, "Yeah, let's have a call," and the recruiter explained what they do.I realized it was actually something that would have interested me even if I had finished my PhD. The reason I did my PhD was because I always wanted to be at the intersection between business and engineering/tech. The PhD was a way for me to get extremely technical, so that when looking for more business-oriented roles, I could say, "Hey, I have this technical skillset" and then pick up the business skills.What Palantir offered was a relatively technical role but with a lot of touchpoints with users and business as well. So it was a really good fit for me - even if I had finished my PhD, I probably would have considered the same role.Palantir is known for producing many future founders. Why do you think that is?I think it's a mix of technical people getting exposure to the business side, but also because of the Forward Deployed Engineer role. Nowadays Forward Deployed Engineer as a concept is common, but back then no one thought it was cool. Everyone, even VCs, considered it just a consulting business.But I think what makes a lot of Palantirians unique is that we flew all over the world, side-by-side with customers, working super closely with them. That's how you develop the skill of going from something ambiguous to building something concrete - a product that helps improve someone's life or workflow.So that became a skillset that a lot of us got trained on for many years. I think that's definitely one of the reasons why there are so many founders who are former Palantirians who are doing quite well in general - we all went through the concept of Forward Deployed Engineering.Co-founding Upsolve AI (YC W24)How did you meet your co-founder and what made you want to start a company together?We worked together very serendipitously at Palantir. We built a product from 0 to 1, which was fun. We led the team together and worked almost 3 years together. We just felt like we gelled really well - he finishes my sentences, I finish his thoughts.When starting a company, the first thing for me wasn't the idea - it was the person I was going to build it with. I wanted to find someone I work really well with. Sergey is someone I built something with from 0 to 1 and then scaled it at really high speed. The way we work is just fun - like working is fun. And sometimes when things go wrong, I always tell him, "You know what? I'm glad we're in this together. It's fun even when things are bad."How did you come up with the idea for Upsolve and find product-market fit?We ended up thinking about potentially starting our company around the same time, so we started chatting together. Upsolve wasn't the original idea we explored. We actually wanted to get out of the data space because we dealt with data all these years - maybe we should try something else. We thought about a travel app, a language learning app, and other ideas.But there was a certain gravity that pulled us back into the data world. At some point we just said, "You know what, founder-market fit is okay." So we started there.The core thing was that AI is now becoming this core tool that people are really willing to adopt. We saw that many problems we'd seen at Palantir could have been automated with AI. So our exploration started from there.The other core tenant or "secret sauce" that we felt like we saw Palantir do really well is using data to enable operational decisions and actions, particularly for Fortune 500 companies. We thought, "Well, what about for the smaller guys?"The vision of the company is to be the conduit between data and decisions. From there we started talking to a lot of founders because we have many founder friends. The initial idea was using AI to automate internal analytics. As we did discovery calls, we had founders tell us it's great but they want it for their users. That's how we landed on embedded analytics.So the idea evolved into embedded gen BI (Business Intelligence). We just actually launched our embedded BI two days ago through YC.How were you able to work on an idea that wasn't originally what you planned to work on?I feel like people tend to have a "hero" perspective of how ideas work. Like one day you wake up, you have this hero concept, and then you build it, and wow, suddenly you have a unicorn company.But I think if you listen to a lot of YC stories about how companies came to be, some of the most successful companies did not start with their original idea. If you knew their alternatives, you would never guess this is the company they became.So for me it was never a problem. It's more like, let's find a starting point, and then as you get more clues, more exploration, you seek the deeper truth, and from there you go on to the next step. It's kind of like an adventure - don't have a set endpoint, but the core tendency for us is being the conduit between data and decisions. And however that evolves - maybe we pivot at some point - that's fine too. Just having enough to start, and then the journey will follow.Lessons learned and adviceYou've prioritized your time intensely for many years to achieve a lot. Do you ever feel it takes a toll? How do you figure out what needs to be reprioritized?Earlier I mentioned I prioritize health, my time, and time with family and friends. I think when I was younger I prioritized my family and friends less, but that's gotten better now as I've become older.I think the other biggest change is fully knowing it's a marathon of sprints. Sometimes it's just okay if I end the night at 8pm. You don't need to work until 2-3am every day, because you need to make sure you can run that marathon for a very long time.You went through Y Combinator - who would you NOT recommend YC to?I would not recommend YC to people who aren't actually ready to take the jump, and they do it for the sake of recognition because YC is a good brand. They actually don't want to start up - they do it because all their friends do it and it's a "cool thing," if that makes sense.I've seen people say, "I didn't get into YC so I'm not going to do my startup." And I was like, well, you should not have applied to YC to begin with. It should just be a decision, and YC is just an enabler. That's my opinion.Editor notes:Hey Arnie here - hope you enjoyed this blog!Always happy to hear feedback, who should I bring next & what questions should I ask?(Also super sorry about the my mic quality mistake (accidentally recorded with airpods mic instead of macbook mic), won’t happen again) This is a public episode. 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Elvis Nava, co-founder and CTO at Mimic Robotics, is a PhD candidate at ETH Zürich focusing on soft robotics and AI. He shares his unique journey from high school filmmaking to creating a robotics startup. Elvis discusses the challenges and innovations in automating manual labor, the evolution of video editing, and the importance of personal initiative in education. He also addresses the complexities of work-life balance in startups and the significance of teamwork in advancing robotics solutions in Europe.

Currently: Co-founder @ Browser Use (YC W25) Studies: MSc CS @ ETH Zürich ‘23 - ‘25 (paused), Exchange @ NUS ‘22, BSc Cognitive Science @ Osnabrück ‘20-’22 Experiences: Co-founder GreenWAI, AI Research @ Aucos AG, Research @ Cambridge CARES, Intern @ ŠKODA Origin: Germany Links: LinkedIn, TwitterBrowser-Use just raised $17M and are hiring cracked engineers to work on the tools for AGI! 👇Supported by Founderful Campus! They run the VC Academy program, selecting top students from Swiss universities that invest in the hottest university startups.They’re organizing a Fireside chat with Julian the co-founder and CEO of EthonAI. March 26, 17:30 at ETH SPH - sign up now!".Growing up in Germany & early startup experiencesWhere did you grow up and what were you doing?I grew up in a very small town in Germany with 500 people, 5000 cows, a cheese factory and a bakery. I played a lot of football and loved exploring places. From age 16, I worked in the cheese factory making 80kg blocks of cheese and got my forklift license.I helped a friend upload 5000 T-shirt designs online to sell, but I hated doing the repetitive clicking tasks. So I started creating Python and Selenium scripts to automate it. It became really addictive seeing the mouse click automatically on my computer.Over time, I moved more into ML research and studied cognitive science. When Covid hit, I left Germany to hitchhike around the world as a digital nomad. I went to Singapore to do research for Cambridge, where I got to know many researchers from ETH. I thought they were amazing people and wanted to go there, so I applied for a master's in data science and got in.What made you decide to continue studying instead of finding a job after Singapore?It was quite obvious because during my bachelor's I didn't study that much due to Covid. From the first semester though, I got really addicted to coding and ML research. I wanted to learn more about the mathematical foundations of ML, and I heard how much ETH pushes people to learn that, so I thought it was perfect.You had a startup called Greenway while at ETH. What was that about?We won a hackathon with a traffic light optimization idea. An accelerator asked if we wanted to continue it, so 4 people from the team did. We had really sick reinforcement learning algorithms that could reduce traffic light waiting times by 25% and CO2 emissions by 50%. It worked awesome in simulation.But we had many internal fights in the team because we didn't choose each other specifically in the beginning. We also didn't have much traction. I was responsible for fundraising but in Germany I couldn't raise a single euro for half a year, even though we had awesome tech and I created great pitch decks.How were you able to manage building a startup, doing research, studying and traveling all at the same time?I really like to go fully into things. For example, one day I asked a friend "let's hitchhike from Germany to Iran." We just met up in Munich and hit the road, got hammocks to sleep in the forest, and hitchhiked for six weeks across the Middle East. If you think about how much time you have in a year, it's crazy - you can do so many things.At the same time, I have to say, at ETH I really wasn't the best student. Some courses I failed, some I barely passed. There were for sure many others who were much better than me in math and other subjects.Meeting co-founder & starting Browseruse at ETHHow did you meet your co-founder Gregor and what led to starting Browseruse?SPH is paradise. It's a student project house next to the main building of ETH where it's forbidden to study and you have to work on your side projects. When Gregor left his previous startup, he made a LinkedIn post saying he wanted to build something more ambitious. So I reached out to him.Last summer I was feeling really low. My previous startup had lawyers involved and wasn't going anywhere. I was thinking "should I just push through or pivot and quit this team?" I decided to quit after a long time. Then I started building small side projects week by week.I was always annoyed that in software like Photoshop, you have a million buttons. You know exactly what you want to do but have no clue which buttons to click to reach your goal. I thought "why can't I just tell my computer what to do and it figures out itself how to do the tasks?"GPT-3.5 was now good enough at reasoning, we just needed to give it access to the web. So with Gregor, we just built a prototype in 5 days combining web scraping with LLMs to enable taking action. We pushed it to Hacker News thinking it was really shitty, but people were fascinated by AI clicking the browser. Early adopters came in and since then, over the last three months, we've become the biggest open source repository for browser agents.Going through Y CombinatorHow did you get into YC and decide to do it?We pushed to Hacker News and I think one week later was already the YC deadline. We applied to YC and got an interview with Jared but he didn't respond for three weeks. Every week we pushed him new updates. After three weeks, while I was taking a week off with my girlfriend in the Oman desert, he wanted a second interview. I needed to get out of the desert to find WiFi somewhere. Then he said we're in.What are the main differences you noticed between US and Europe?Actually, in terms of people it's quite similar. Especially around ETH, there are super many ambitious people in SPH. They're not smarter here. Maybe compared to Europe, to my hometown, you get more pushed to build awesome stuff. If I tell someone here "I want to build my startup tonight", they say "awesome, let's do coworking." In my hometown they would say "hey, what are you doing?"But for example, in my home village they're all farmers. They work harder than I do - they get up at 6am to milk the cows, take two days holiday per year because they need to feed the cows daily. They work 14 hours per day standard, no one talks about it.How do you feel you changed going to SF?For me, it's interesting - I feel I'm the same. All those things in my mind, all those ideas and stories, were always important to me. But maybe two years ago people didn't listen to me that much. Now if I'm the hot company in YC, people say "wow" and look up to me. But my ideas are still exactly the same as two years ago.It's interesting how just because you created something awesome, people now look up to you. This is a little bit strange. I want to be on eye level with all people.Raising $17 million and future visionHow were you able to raise $17 million and what do you foresee?Around demo day we had like $4 million already on uncapped SAFEs before even taking investor meetings. I had 140 investor meetings scheduled. Investors who knew they were in the later part of the week emailed me saying "hey I want to be part of your round, just take my uncapped SAFE." So they didn't care about valuation at all. This went crazier and crazier and gave us a lot of leverage.I did all the pitching and I think over the meetings my vision for the company got crazier and crazier. We want to build at least the tools for AGI so that AGI can take action on the web.What does your work schedule look like now?Last week I was waking up at 6:30am for interviews with people from Europe who I'm hiring. Normally lunch around 12 or 1, most often we order Uber Eats. In the afternoon I'm definitely less productive. Then dinner and most often in the evening there are some events or friends come over. Yesterday we did barbecue here.How are your relationships and friends given the intense focus?I definitely talk now and then with my family. Right now my best friend from bachelor's university is visiting me and sleeping on my couch. This definitely feels crazy because if they would have told me six months ago that I'd meet all these crazy people and suddenly get $17 million... For me day-to-day it feels normal - I still go out, go for walks, go to the gym. But for people outside like family, this is completely absurd.Hiring & advice for studentsWhat kind of people are you looking for while hiring?We want to have an awesome community. We want to get a hacker house where people can hack together, have fun building together and just work really hard. If they have understanding of LLMs or browser side scraping, it's definitely useful. But they don't need to have a PhD in math or LLMs - I did traffic lights 5 months ago!For founding engineer roles, it's mainly important that you can ship extremely fast. Ship so much, see if it works, otherwise build something else. Just ship all the time. That's the most important thing - don't overthink, just ship.What tips do you have for someone without much experience who wants to follow in your footsteps?I think for the startup route, the most useful thing is to build MVPs in 5 days. Build awesome things which you think "wow that's insane." Launch it somewhere, send it to your friends or upload it to Hacker News and see what people say.For example, my last project was this goal setting app. I went to ETH in front of the main building and showed it to people. I asked them "tell me about the last time you had problems achieving your goals" and then "what do you think of this app?" Then they tell you if it's good or bad.All those people from ETH and SPH, they are smarter than I am and many are more hardworking than I am. But it's just iterating, a little bit of luck, a little bit of craziness.Do you plan to stay in SF and would you recommend others from SPH to move there?Yes, we want to stay here. Every week we meet someone from LangChain, Anthropic, OpenAI who are just one or two steps ahead of us where we can learn a lot. I think it's just easier to build the company because you have this community of amazing people and it just feels normal to build that stuff. If I go back to my home village, it would be normal to get sheep or cows in my garden. Here it's normal to build AI agents.I think what I see many people doing here is just coming for one month instead of doing an internship in summer. Fly here for six weeks, go to events, get to know people. Just message people on X "hey should we hang out?" Meet people to get a feeling how it feels here.But SPH is amazing - you can build amazing things there. You have this small community. Fundraising and stuff is just easier here but you can do the same in SPH, just at lower valuations. It's just harder. If you have a shitty product, you don't come to SF and suddenly become amazing. You still need to build something amazing that people love.Arnie here - hope you enjoyed this new episode! Been super busy as usual haha. Going forwards the blog will be more of a spontaneous rhythm where I interview amazing EPFL & ETHZ students/alumni and post directly (rather some fixed weekly/monthly schedule).I’m also expanding the podcasts moving forwards, with ai-generated blogs from the interviews. This one was generated - if you didn’t notice then it means it’s working great!(Don’t be worried though - I spent an absurd amount of time building an automated pipeline to convert podcasts into blogs. The quality is super high + I personally review/edit everything (& so do the guests)! Check it out here: https://github.com/AnirudhhRamesh/BlogEditor)Anyhows - first podcast episode, please give me lots of feedback! Also any future guests you’d like me to feature or questions you might have :)) This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.ambitiousxdriven.com