We Left Meta to Start a Company 🎙️ New Episode Recorded Live in NYC

Two colleagues at Meta left their corporate jobs to start an AI company together. Considering leaving your stable job to start a company with a coworker? This episode is for you!

It’s only fitting that our first live recording in New York City is with a founding team whose journey takes them all around the city. Andrew and Sarmad reminisce on how they went from Meta coworkers to co-founders of an AI developer platform that has raised $10M in seed funding. Spoiler-alert, it includes lunches at Flatiron’s Eataly, whispered co-founder agreements in Stavros Library, and miles of walking around Madison Square Garden talking about what makes a good partner, how co-founding is akin to a marriage, and learning each other’s working styles.

Throughout the conversation, we kept coming back to one analogy: When you make a big life decision, does it feel like bungee jumping or a meandering hike? For Sarmad (self-identified as “more reckless”), he remembers their decision to start a company as taking one big leap, while Andrew (more risk averse) remembers it as a long walk with small twists and turns along the way (listen at 11:12). They credit this difference in mindset and style as one of the great strengths of their partnership (see also the “focaccia moment” at 17:40 for more).

Listen (Spotify, Apple), watch, or read about their story, and take our quiz on Working Styles to learn more about yours and your teammates’!

Know someone starting a company with a former coworker? Forward along!

🎧 Listen on Spotify / Apple / YouTube / Google

Favorite Quotes from LastMile AI (Ep. 1.7)

Full blog post can be found here.

In our conversation, we discuss:

• Difference between Meta and startup life
• Addressing conflicts (lessons from marriage)
• How to know if they’re the right co-founder
• Finding value in different working styles
• The all-encompassing nature of founding

Favorite Quotes:

1. Differences between large corporation (Meta) and startup (LastMile): "It feels more emotionally tied to your identity in a way that I never felt in any other company or any other place that I've worked at."- Sarmad

2. In addressing conflicts, lessons from marriage: “When you're married, you think of how do we solve a problem? It's not like, ‘Sarmad let me down’. It's like, ‘No, we need to fix this’. We don’t point fingers... we're on the same team and we're gonna have to fix this.” - Andrew (Tenets of a Healthy Founding Team)

3. In finding the right co-founder for you: (Risks When Finding a Co-Founder)
   “It's not finding someone you don't disagree with, but it's finding someone who makes you the best version of yourself that you can be.” - Sarmad
   "The way that we work together… I genuinely believe we can fix any issue.” - Andrew

4. Emotional stability is key! “You need to be an emotionally stable person. There's so much that [starting a company] throws at you, and being able to just be very rational and analytical and not lash out when things go wrong. All of that requires a degree of emotional stability and maturity that you have to come in with or learn it very quickly.” - Andrew

5. Finding value in different working styles — do you prefer bungee jumping or hiking? Do you add a new ingredient to a focaccia recipe on a whim or not?: “I do think it's helped for me to partner with Andrew because we see things in slightly different ways. I can be a lot more aggressive at times and Andrew's like, ‘hold up let's take a step back’. I feel like I jumped off a cliff because I'd already made up my mind that I wanted to do this much sooner, but walking through those steps with Andrew, where it felt like we were going for a walk, was really important too.” (Working Styles Quiz)

6. Founding takes a tolls on others in your life as well: “Andrew once asked me how my wife is doing through all this. And I thought that was a very empathetic question. You can ask, ‘how are you doing’, but to ask how someone else is doing, that requires you to understand like the toll of building a company extends beyond just yourself as a founder.” (Life Priorities Exercise)

7. Do not allow frustrations to build up, share small and often: “We have a rule that we'll never have pent up anger or resentment. The rule is to bring it up early, because hate festers and you never want to leave a startup hating your co-founder.”

Are you a founder, investor, or ecosystem partner curious about founding team dynamics?