Alexandr (Alex) Wang

I remember I moved... I flew straight from Boston to San Francisco to start the company.

And basically immediately went from like... At 19 years old.

19 years old.

Yeah, I immediately left and then I started coding in San Francisco.

And I was part of this accelerator.

I was part of this program called Y Combinator.

And...

And it's kind of like the Hunger Games for startups.

So it starts out, there's 100 startups at the start of the summer, and you're all grinding away, you're all working, you're all trying to show milestones and show progress.

And then it culminates at the end of Y Combinator, at the end of it all, there's a demo day where everybody presents their companies, presents their progress, and tries to get investment.

And, uh, and it, so it literally, it quite literally is the hunger games.

It's like, you go through this whole thing at the end, if you get investment, you get money, you've won.

If you didn't, um, you've lost.

Uh, and, uh, and so that was like, that was, that was the beginning of the company.

We ended up getting good investment.

What did you do?

Uh, well at that time we were, we were, it was, it was around data for AI.

So it was all around like, uh, how do we fuel data for, for, um, what people want to build with AI.

But at that time it was like so early that like the use cases were pretty stupid.

Like we were helping one company try to detect, like, it was like a t-shirt company.