How to build an AI unicorn in 6 years
Today, Tractable is worth $1 billion. Our AI is used by millions of people across America, Asia and Europe to recover faster from road accidents. It helps recycle as many cars as Tesla put on the road in 2019. And yet 6 years ago, Tractable was just me and Raz, two college grads coding in a London basement. A year before that I knew nothing about tech. If it’s happened to me, it can happen to others, so here’s the story & learnings.
In 2013 I was finishing a college degree and starting a company was the dream. I’d tried building a fashion crowdfunding startup with friends, so independent fashion designers could get their designs funded and sold online. It had gone nowhere.
That’s when I heard about Entrepreneur First (EF). Now a world-leading talent investor, EF had then just kicked off as a company building program for ambitious college grads. Perfect. I applied, talked about fashion crowdfunding and got rejected — because I “knew nothing about tech”. EF was a tech company builder, because as Matt their CEO put it: “in the past, if you wanted to build a product for millions of people, like a car, you needed an entire factory. But now with computers and the internet, one person in their bedroom can write code to serve millions of people globally. This level of scalability is unprecedented”.
I’d seen software as dry, rigid and frustratingly intangible. Now it was company building magic. Finding that Imperial College offered a computer science conversion course, 2 months later I was enrolled for a September start. This surprised the housemates. “It says modules in ‘data structures’, ‘relational databases’ and ‘compilers’ — you don’t even understand what these words mean. Are you sure about this?”
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