Own Pain Startups

Good Inside is a parenting education platform founded by Dr. Becky Kennedy, a clinical psychologist, that teaches evidence-based principles for raising resilient children. The core philosophy—that children are inherently good inside and that behavior issues stem from missing skills rather than bad character—extends to leadership and workplace dynamics. Dr. Kennedy demonstrates how parenting frameworks like repair, boundaries, and sturdy leadership translate directly to managing adults in corporate environments.

Mollye Graham is an operating executive and leadership coach who built Glue Club, a community for scaling leaders. Drawing from 18+ years at Google, Facebook, Quip (sold to Salesforce), and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, she developed frameworks like 'Give Away Your Legos' and the Waterline Model to help leaders manage rapid growth, navigate emotional challenges, and build high-performing teams.

Saster is a B2B founder community generating eight figures in annual revenue through sponsorships and event tickets. Jason Lemkin has transformed the go-to-market team from 10 humans to 1.2 humans and 20 AI agents while maintaining equivalent business performance, demonstrating how AI can dramatically improve sales efficiency and scalability.

LinkedIn, under CPO Tomer Cohen, is piloting the Full Stack Builder model—a radical reimagining of how product gets built at scale. The program empowers builders across any function to own the entire product development lifecycle (idea to launch) by automating everything except vision, empathy, communication, creativity, and judgment. With custom-built AI agents (trust, growth, research, analyst) and re-architected platforms to work with AI, early adopters are saving hours per week while maintaining or improving quality, with top performers showing the most enthusiasm.

World Labs, founded by renowned AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li, launched Marble, the world's first generative model that creates navigable and interactable 3D worlds from text and image prompts. Building on decades of foundational AI research (ImageNet, computer vision), the company positions spatial intelligence and world modeling as essential complements to language models for robotics, embodied AI, and creative applications. Early adoption shows 40x production speedup in virtual production for VFX/movies, with expanding use cases in game development, robotic simulation, and psychology research.

Gamma is an AI-powered presentation and website design tool that achieved 100 million ARR in just over two years with a small 30-person team. Starting with a controversial Product Hunt launch and a viral tweet that caught Paul Graham's attention, Grant Lee led founder-driven marketing and manual influencer onboarding to drive organic word-of-mouth growth. The key breakthrough came after rethinking the entire onboarding experience post-launch to focus on delivering magical value in the first 30 seconds, which transformed signups from hundreds per day to 20,000+ daily.

Block, a financial services and fintech company led by CEO Jack Dorsey, has become one of the most AI-native large companies by building Goose, an open-source AI agent that saves engineering teams 8-10 hours per week. Under CTO Donjie Prasanna's leadership, Block reorganized from a GM structure to a functional structure, enabling deeper technical focus and AI integration across all teams, from engineers to non-technical roles. The company is pushing the boundaries of autonomous AI agents that can work 24/7, anticipate user needs, and orchestrate complex workflows across enterprise tools.

Scale AI pioneered the data labeling category for AI model training, evolving from autonomous vehicle labeling to expert-driven data collection for frontier AI models. The company has grown to approximately 1,100 employees with two major business units, each generating hundreds of millions in revenue. Following a $14B+ investment from Meta for 49% non-voting stock in 2024, Scale remains independent under new CEO Jason Droge and continues to work with leading AI labs and enterprises to improve model capabilities through expert annotation and evaluation data.

Sundial is an AI-powered data analyst tool founded by Julie Zhuo, former head of design at Meta and author of 'The Making of a Manager.' The company helps organizations like OpenAI, Gamma, and Character AI automate data analysis and make better product decisions by diagnosing problems with data and treating solutions with design. Julie's unique trajectory from design leadership to data-obsessed founder reflects a broader trend where AI empowers individual contributors to do more with smaller, more nimble teams.

Airtable is a no-code platform that democratizes business app creation. Founded 13 years ago by Howie Liu, it achieved early product-led growth success and became a SaaS darling. Recently, Airtable has undergone a major transformation to become AI-native, restructuring into 'fast thinking' and 'slow thinking' teams to ship AI capabilities weekly while maintaining infrastructure stability. Howie personally uses Airtable's AI agent Omni extensively and spends significant compute resources testing AI capabilities daily.

Handshake, a 10-year-old career marketplace with 18M students and professionals, launched a data labeling business in January 2024 by leveraging its massive network of experts (500k PhDs, 3M master students) to create high-quality training data for frontier AI labs. In just 4 months, the new business hit $50M in revenue; by 8 months they're on pace to exceed $100M ARR—rivaling their core business in annual revenue.

Chip Conley, founder of Joie de Vivre (the second-largest boutique hotel chain in the US), was recruited by Brian Chesky at age 52 to join Airbnb as head of global hospitality and strategy. His near-death experience from an allergic reaction led him to sell his hotel company and pivot to founding the Modern Elder Academy, the world's first midlife wisdom school with campuses in Baja and Santa Fe, addressing the value of intergenerational collaboration and age diversity in tech.

Mayor Shlomo bootstrapped Base44, an AI-powered no-code/low-code app builder with batteries-included infrastructure (database, user management, integrations), from zero to acquisition in 6 months. Starting with three close friends and a focus on building in public on LinkedIn, he grew to 400,000 users and $1.5M ARR in just 4 weeks, eventually selling to Wix for $80M+ without raising any external funding or even writing code for the last 3 months of the company's existence.

Revolut is a fintech platform operating in 50 countries that challenges traditional banks by offering multi-currency accounts, P2P transfers, crypto buying, investing, savings accounts, joint accounts, loans, credit cards, and mortgages. Now valued at over $60 billion with 50+ million customers, Revolut is known for hiring and developing exceptional product leaders who go on to become CPOs and founders elsewhere. The company operates with a flat hierarchy, founder-led product reviews, small autonomous teams, and obsessive focus on building 'WoW' products with incredible UX.

Reboot is an executive and leadership development firm founded by Jerry Colonna, a former VC partner at Flatiron Partners. The company helps leaders develop radical self-inquiry, practical skills, and shared experiences to build resilience and authentic leadership without sacrificing their wellbeing. Through CEO boot camps and coaching, Reboot has become a trusted resource for entrepreneurs and executives seeking to grow without burning out.

Wes Kao co-founded Maven, a platform that makes it easy for people to host live cohort-based courses. She previously co-created the alt-MBA program with Seth Godin. She has since left Maven to launch her own course on executive communication and influence, teaching frameworks and tactics for better written and verbal communication.

Stackblitz, founded by Eric Simons, pivoted from a 7-year deep-tech play building WebContainer (a browser-based operating system) to launch Bolt, an AI-powered text-to-app builder. After launching with a single tweet in October 2023, Bolt achieved $20M ARR in two months and $40M ARR by month five with 1M monthly active users, making it one of the fastest-growing products in startup history.

Notion is a no-code productivity and database platform founded by Ivan Zhao in 2013. After 3-4 years of what Zhao calls "lost years" trying different product directions—initially as a developer tool—the company pivoted to positioning itself as a consumer-friendly productivity suite that hides powerful no-code building capabilities underneath. The company stayed lean and profitable, rebuilt its technical foundation multiple times, and achieved significant traction through word-of-mouth and organic adoption, reaching unicorn status without traditional venture funding.

WordPress powers 40% of all websites on the internet and was co-founded by Matt Mullenweg at age 19 as a fork of an abandoned blogging platform called B2. Automattic, the commercial entity behind WordPress.com and related products, has grown to 1,700+ employees across 90 countries and is valued at over $7 billion, with WooCommerce now representing over half its revenue.

Community Notes is a crowdsourced fact-checking system on X (formerly Twitter) that allows regular users to add contextual notes to potentially misleading posts. Using a proprietary 'bridging-based agreement' algorithm that rewards notes approved by people who typically disagree, the system has grown to nearly 1 million volunteer contributors and delivered 30 billion note views in 2024—more than double the prior year. The product's success demonstrates that open, decentralized approaches to information quality can outperform traditional centralized fact-checking.