The Five Stages of the a16z speedrun Founder Journey

Part One: Deciding to build a startup, finding a cofounder, and hitting the apply button.

Welcome to the 55,478 people reading this. With many new friends joining us each week, now’s probably a good time for a reminder of what we’re up to with the a16z speedrun newsletter.

Each week we publish stories about people pushing the limits of tech, entertainment, and AI. We’ve featured an Oscar-winning VFX lead who uses game engines to build worlds, renegade hackers modding AI companions into Skyrim, and geniuses at Google DeepMind using GenAI tech to improve global weather forecasting systems.

We believe the future belongs to people like these—ones who defy categories and invent new possibilities. That’s why we publish a wide mix of stories that celebrate builders of all stripes, whether they’re established industry titans, independent creatives, or startup founders participating in the a16z speedrun program.

Ultimately, we share these stories because we want forward-thinking founders to apply to speedrun. And we know many potential founders are probably wondering what it’s like to go through a startup program like ours successfully.

So today we’re sharing the first article in a two-part series about what it’s like to go through the speedrun program, featuring three founder teams who completed successful fundraises after pitching at last month’s Demo Day. Your own startup journey is unlikely to go exactly like theirs, but we hope these founders can serve as a model for anyone on the fence about applying to the program.

This is how their journeys began.

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This is part one of a two-part series. Be sure to subscribe to a16z speedrun to get the followup in your inbox.

What leads a person to do something as crazy as quitting a secure job to become a startup founder? And if you do manage to get into a startup program like a16z speedrun, how do you make the most of it?

To find out, we asked three recent successful graduates from the class of SR003 and SR004 to tell us about their journey through the program.

The first question: What made you want to do this in the first place?

Stage 1: Deciding to Take the Leap

Above: Marlo’s Austin Chen pitches at SR004 Demo Day

Before he became a two-time founder and head of creator monetization at TikTok, Austin Chen was a high school dropout.

As a kid growing up in the Bay Area, Chen was always competitive with his older brother. And when the brother got into Berkeley, he says, the pressure to become “the high-performing one in the family” only increased. “He would dig at me all the time,” Chen says, “and I was like, dude, I could get into Berkeley too.”

The 16-year-old Chen bet his brother he could get in before graduating high school. But when he applied, it looked like the older brother would win the bet: “I got rejected,” Chen says, “And he was like, yeah, see, there's no way.”

But Chen wasn’t eager to give up on the bet so easily. He wrote an appeal, arguing that Berkeley would be a better learning environment for him than high school. And to the surprise of both brothers, it worked. Chen got accepted.

“That actually taught me a lot,” Chen says. “It was the first time that my eyes were opened up to the fact that rules and systems are built by people, and you can slip past some rules and systems if it makes sense—you just have to sort of feel out where the edge is.”

Chen phrases this lesson in another, more familiar way for followers of Bay Area startup culture. The first step toward forming a startup is to take a mental leap by accepting that “You can just do things.”

Chen continued to apply this lesson when he cofounded his first company, and later at Apple, which acquired his company and brought Chen and his fellow cofounders on board to develop music discovery features and build out Apple's in-house record label. It was at Apple that Chen met Nishi Kaza, who is now his co-founder for SR004 portco Marlo.

The two bonded over experience working with creators, and both agreed that there was a serious market opportunity in helping creators streamline brand collaborations and manage deals.

The idea for startup #2 was in sight, and they’d already made it to stage 2 of any great founder journey: finding a cofounder.

Stage 2: Finding a Cofounder

Intangible cofounder Charles Migos steps onto the stage at SR004 Demo Day

Few decisions in a startup’s life matter more than cofounder selection.¹ When Intangible cofounders Bharat Vasan and Charles Migos first met about Intangible, they knew how important it was to share a common vision for what could be a decade-long (or more) experience.

Migos had been cultivating the idea behind Intangible over the course of his career, from Apple to Unity. He saw the potential for AI to finally make 3D creative tooling easy to use, and build a “Canva for 3D” that tens of millions might use.

As a repeat founder with exits and a former VC, Vasan understood how rare it was to build an enduring company with venture-scale returns. He was looking for a cofounder who was equally ambitious and aligned: “Charles had a vision of what the future could look like that was not doable in a large company, and we had very similar values around what we wanted the culture to be.”

The two men were looking for a cofounder that complemented their talents: With Migos focused on product, and Vasan focused on the business and scaling the startups in the 0-1 phase. They also wanted to build a startup where culture aligned with their values. As Migos puts it, “Creativity is a team sport.”

Many of the greatest games and films, Migos says, “are a function of tens, hundreds, perhaps even thousands of people putting their DNA onto that final product—I don't believe in a world where we are going to be usurped for our enormous creative talents and abilities, particularly as teams of people.”

The vision for Intangible, then, was to build GenAI tech that “puts teams of people firmly in the center, amplifies their talents, and gives them more creative at-bats.”

The two found that they were aligned, both on the vision and the culture. More than that, they felt like they’d found a friend they’d like to build a business with. They shook hands and decided to go for it.

Stage 3: The Application

For many female founders it can feel “hard to imagine being able to stand in front of hundreds on Demo Day and pitch,” says Nandini Mullaji. “But since I did it, so many female founders have reached out, expressing interest in doing speedrun and asking me about my experience—It has been amazing.”

When Sitch cofounders Nandini Mullaji and Chad DePue decided to apply to speedrun, all they had on hand was a slide deck and a vision for how to make dating apps better.

Mullaji, a two-time consumer founder and Stanford MBA grad who moonlit as a matchmaker for many years, had linked up with DePue (a former Senior Director of Engineering at Snapchat) on the recommendation of a friend. The co-founders knew that they wanted to build something in the dating space.

“But the problem is that so many investors have been burned when it comes to dating apps,” Mullaji says, “and building a marketplace always requires a lot of startup capital.” Despite the solid cofounding team, the duo worried that they’d struggle to find funding.

“There are not a lot of people who will just jump out there and like believe in you,” Mullaji says. But she and DePue decided to apply to a16z speedrun anyway. They got an invitation to join a call with speedrun GP Andrew Chen. “And from our very first conversation with Andrew, it was clear that he bought into the team and the dream.”

DePue has seen the fundraising process from both sides of the aisle, and says that particularly for very early stage startups, he’s always wary about “people that are too aggressive right away about all the details of your business.” He says that investors who fret about financial projections and competitors too early “tend to lack the courage to actually invest in a pre-seed stage company.”

When Mullaji and DePue got invited to call with the speedrun team, they say, it was a different vibe. “He [Andrew Chen] just sat down and started talking to us about our vision and our story,” DePue says. Later meetings, of course, involved more digging into the details of the business plan, but both Mullaji and DePue were relieved that the first step was “more about getting to know who we are as a team and whether we can build this.”

Mullaji and DePue were originally accepted into the class of SR003, but the timing was a little tight, so they were given time to work on their product before joining the class of SR004 when it kicked off six months later.

By then, Sitch had become “a very different product,” says Mullaji, in part thanks to ongoing conversations with the speedrun team about the team’s goals and ambitions. “It's fascinating when you can have conversations with investors where—before they were even on the cap table—they're adding value to the business. And that was what was happening with Andrew.”

With their product rebuilt and launched in a first test market, the Sitch team was ready to go when SR004 launched in January of this year.

That’s when the real fun began.

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That’s it for part one of this series. We’ll be back next week to share founder stories about the final two stages of the a16z speedrun founder journey: Stage 4: Surviving the 12-Week Sprint and Stage 5: Demo Day and Time to Build.

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.

💡 More Big Ideas

🔁 Andrew Chen argues that you should “quit whatever it is you're doing” and “build the startup you've wanted to build.”

🤖 Tom Hammer calls Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke’s memo to staff about the need to adopt AI a “peek into the future.”

🔎 Colin Campbell issues his request for startups and argues that after learning to talk, AI will next learn to build reality.

💼 There are currently over 400 open jobs listings across our portfolios. Join our talent network for more opportunities. If we see a fit for you, we'll intro you to relevant founders in the portfolio.

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1. We don’t require speedrun applicants to have a cofounder, but it is encouraged. As a16z speedrun GP Andrew Chen wrote on X this week: “Convincing one smart person to join you is probably step one in validating that it's a serious effort / idea / team, so we do look to it for some signal.”