Lessons Learned During the Founder's Journey

Many apply to join each class of a16z speedrun, but what's it like for those who get in? Nine speedrun alumni share their behind-the-scenes stories and perspective.

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This is part 2/2 of “Five Stages of the Founder Journey.” Read part one here.

The world of early-stage startup programs can feel mysterious for anyone who hasn’t been through one. What do you actually do in these programs? Maybe more bluntly: what’s the point, beyond access to capital?

For the ~50 or so startups accepted into each class of speedrun, what follows is a 12-week journey that culminates on Demo Day. To try to lift the curtain a bit on what happens in the 84 days in between, this week we spoke with nine founders—each of them a16z speedrun alumni.

If you’ve considered applying to join the upcoming class of SR005, this is what you’re in for.

Community, Advice, and Inspiration

One of the most important aspects of a16z speedrun is that it’s held in-person. Founders are expected to show up in the office, week after week, throughout the duration of the 12-week program.

It’s a big ask, and can be a hassle for founders who have to temporarily move from around the world to participate. But for those who make the move, the value is clear—in part because of how motivating it is to be surrounded by smart, talented peers tackling some of the same challenges you are.

“What we realized as soon as we started is that even if you are a standout performer in your regular life, when you start speedrun you suddenly revert to ‘average’ status,” says Ioana Hreninciuc, cofounder at Runware (class of SR001). “Everyone in the room is a standout performer. You know the bar will be high but it is so much higher than you think.”

Hreninciuc says that the pedigree of others in the class—”industry legends”—inspired her and her cofounders to level up their game. “You have to push yourself to be a 10x version of yourself in every aspect,” she says. “Refining your idea, preparing your pitch, building relationships. Everything has to be 12/10. You realize this on the first day but you hone it through the entire program, like a bootcamp, and you emerge much more target-oriented and sharper—ready to go into your launch, your fundraise, or whatever’s next.”

Nishi Kaza, cofounder of Marlo (class of SR004) recalls an early in-person session that unlocked a problem for him. The theme of the session was “King for a Day.” The idea was that each set of cofounders would take turns talking about the most critical problems facing their company—then would have to listen while others in the room discuss the problem as if they were the CEO. “It was crazy because there were folks who had clearly dealt with this problem before, months beforehand,” Kaza says. “We had so much tunnel vision that we weren’t thinking about it in the right way.”

But even more valuable than the suggestions, Kaza says, was the realization that he and his cofounder weren’t alone with the challenges they were facing. As a founder, Kaza points out, “There are probably not many people in the world who can actually empathize directly with what you're going through on a personal level. It’s not just that you need to talk to people who understand professionally, but also that they understand what's important to you—it helps you maintain mental clarity.”

Sidebar: Going All In on Community

Vinay Chandrasekaran is the Founder and CEO of Layerpath (class of SR004). Initially, he was a bit skeptical of whether speedrun would be a good fit for him, because the initial three classes of the speedrun had a heavier emphasis on gaming.¹

But once convinced that the program was a fit for Layerpath, he decided to go all in. “Because I had to find someplace to stay for three months, I didn't want to stay in a hotel or an AirBnB,” he says. So instead, he chose to stay in a founder house with 16 other founders, many on wildly different journeys (Chandrasekaran was the only a16z speedrun founder in the house).

“That house became one of the best things that happened to me,” he says, “because beyond the 40+ founders I was spending time with weekly at speedrun events, there were another dozen founders at home.” He’d also go out of his way to strike up conversations with other founders at coffee shops. The result was a massive network of new friends and a newfound community of founders so strong that he has since decided to move to San Francisco full time.

“I think some people might hate it,” Chandrasekaran says, “but right now this is the thing that I need for the next three or four years. If you want to accelerate and succeed, you've got to be in the best place, right place at the right time. And my future is in SF.”

Hreninciuc adds a note here that echoes something we hear a lot from founders: there are limits to the value of the advice you can get from others. “Everyone has advice and guidance but no one has the specific answers for your business,” she says. “You meet incredible luminaries but they don’t fish for you, they teach you how to fish. The answers are not in the talks and calls, they are in the work you do after with your cofounder and your customers.”

Sami Ramly, Founder of Echo Chunk AI (class of SR003), compares this stage of building a startup to watching an actual videogame speedrunner. “You quickly learn to appreciate that the most impressive speedruns are these fresh playthroughs of games where rote memorization or repetition of learned moves is definitionally impossible,” he says, “because there are so many unique combinations, things get procedurally generated on the fly, and every single playthrough is unique.”

Put it this way: “No two startups are ever the same, and no two problems you face will ever be exactly the same,” Ramly says. “But you still have to git gud.”

Refining the Vision, Product, and Team

Once the first few weeks of speedrun have passed, founders find themselves facing diverging challenges as they build toward the ultimate goal of presenting a killer product during Demo Day.

When Michael Lingelbach, Founder and CEO of Hedra (class of SR002) first entered into speedrun, he was “only a few months” into his founder journey. “We were pre-product and I had only made a few hires,” he says.

Some of the other cofounders were much further along with their product, and a conversation with one of them permanently changed how he thinks about his product vision.

In Lingelbach’s words:

“One memory that sticks out to me was our first cohort dinner at the Cavalier in downtown SF. We were standing by the bar, and one of the other speedrun founders whose product was already in the market asked me about what I was working on.

I immediately went into a deep technical dive about the limitations in current video diffusion models, my desire for steerability and longform consistency, and the various things we were working on. After a couple minutes, the founder asked me who my ICP [ideal customer profile] was and what were the core use cases—basic questions. I remember afterward going outside and sitting on the curb, thinking about how I had focused on describing the what and not the why.

It really changed how I spoke about the company going forward and how I thought about our product as we brought it to market. Ultimately people, both investors and customers, care about the value proposition of the company, what problem you are solving and for whom, this applies regardless if you are a deeply technical research company or a purely application layer play.”

—Michael Lingelbach, Founder and CEO at Hedra

As Lingelbach and his team progressed through the program, he became even more convinced of the importance of deep empathy for the user and “deeply understanding your ICP and market before you start building.”

More on Product Vision, with Runware’s Ioana Hreninciuc

“You need to keep things as simple as possible. It shouldn’t take two minutes to explain your product; It should take 15 seconds. You have to say it in 1-2 sentences max. If you can’t do that, then you don’t have enough clarity on the problem your product actually fixes. Thankfully the speedrun team will provide excellent mentorship on this, but it still takes a while especially for first time founders to grok.”

—Ioana Hreninciuc, cofounder of Runware

Asked for other top lessons learned during this time, Lingelbach says that two stand out most to him. First, hiring the right team:

“The team is unequivocally the most important part of an early stage startup,” Lingelbach says. “You'll pivot multiple times before finding PMF and you need a team of strikers who will build with you through the tough times before PMF (and the inevitable chaos as you hyperscale).” Lingelbach says that he specifically seeks out people with at least five years of experience, preferably with some time spent at a high quality seed or Series A startup.

More on Team, with Altera’s Nico Christie

“Bringing on your first hires is a special challenge. You need people who are exceptionally strong (smart and have the right experience), but they also need to be completely bought into the vision. I think of these first hires as your most important investors. One thing we are learning is you also need a balance between artists and soldiers. You need independent thought, healthy pushback, but also the ability to carry out hard orders. Getting that balance right is probably the most important challenge—companies will live and die by their early team.”

—Nico Christie, Cofounder and Chief Business Officer of Altera

The second lesson Lingelbach stresses for founders is the importance of product:

“Regarding product, I think the worst thing you can do is build in a vacuum, only to release a product without pull,” he says. “Whatever you can do to short circuit the feedback cycle and validate pull with minimal engineering resources is key to building efficiently, although sometimes there are those magical second order effects that can only be felt in users once you build a great product.”

More on Product, with Soundmap’s Zibo Gao

“It's all in the product. How much you care ultimately reflects in the product, which then translates to all your business metrics. Demo Day was an important BD/networking opportunity. But for a consumer business, my end-users don't know and don't care what presentation I gave. Delivering better product experiences is our lifeline and that is the only timetable we have.”

—Zibo Gao, cofounder of Soundmap

Demo Day and the Fundraising Playbook

The class of SR004 on Demo Day, March 18, 2025 in San Francisco

The 12-week a16z speedrun program culminates in Demo Day, an opportunity for each founder to pitch their vision in front of a live audience of hundreds.

Founders spend weeks refining their pitch in the leadup to Demo Day, and the process of pitching itself can feel harrowing—a process we covered last month in the speedrun newsletter. But what comes after can be even more stressful, as founders drown in the demands of heavy inbound from potential investors, customers, strategic partners, and other founders.

Kieran Donovan, CEO and cofounder of K-ID, says that after presenting at Demo Day, he and another cofounder effectively went full-time on handling inbound—while the others handled customers, he tackled investors.

“I kept a spreadsheet of all investor-inbound and everyone in the company forwarded that inbound to me,” he says. “I kept track of a suite of data for each investor: check sizes, sector focus, preferred stage, but also learning about who the individual was that was reaching out in each case, and what might matter most to them.”

K-ID is Donovan’s first startup, and he took a particularly humble and curious approach to each of these interactions. “I wanted to get in as many reps of my pitch, my story, my vision, as I could,” he says. “I actually defied a lot of the advice that surrounded me at the time, which was ‘don't say yes to every meeting.’ If I were to found a company again, I would heed that advice—but only because I wouldn't be a first time founder. Those meetings were exactly what I needed to get sufficient reps in on the pitch, the story.”

Crucially, Donovan treated each interaction—even those with people he assumed wouldn’t invest—as an opportunity to learn something. He asked each investor what he was missing, or what he should be thinking about.

“After 25 investor meetings I was able to see patterns,” he says. “After 50 meetings I felt pretty confident that I had seen enough variations that no matter which way the meeting went I could maintain confidence and humility. By the time I hit 100 meetings the unique investors really stood out: who really knew the market, who genuinely got the vision, who could be the real differentiator for us in growing the company.”

Post-Demo Day involves two key aspects: presentation confidence and investor dynamics. Pitching in front of hundreds dramatically boosts your confidence, making subsequent longer pitches much easier. While deal mechanics are relatively straightforward, selecting the right investor is quite similar to hiring a team member—both parties need to build mutual understanding while maintaining momentum across multiple conversations.

—Mustafa Özdemir, Cofounder at Circle Games

Ultimately, Donovan was able to find great investors to partner with and power the next stage of K-ID’s growth. But in the meantime, he also developed serious insight into how investors think—something that will be useful for the next stage of fundraising.

But what about all that advice that investors gave him? Was any of it actually useful?

Donovan says yes, but with a catch: “The great advice wasn't framed as advice,” he says. “It was demonstrated through real stories. As a result, one thing I repeat a lot today when I talk to other founders looking for help on the journey: I can't give advice. I'm not going to pretend I have all the answers. But I will share my stories.”

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That’s it for this week. For more exclusive peeks behind the curtain of speedrun and weekly deep-dives into the cutting edge of tech and entertainment, subscribe below:

And if you’re a founder or potential founder interested in securing up to $1 million in funding for your startup, you can apply to join the fifth cohort of speedrun today.

We’ll see you next week.

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1. Read more on how speedrun has evolved to include companies from across tech and entertainment—inclusive of gaming!—in this blog post.