Going from a Founder to an Employee

Going back to being an employee — not in finance

I recently stepped down from building my startup to join the founding team at Unriddle, focused on growth and social media strategy. Unriddle is an AI platform that helps us read, write, and find research papers faster. We’re at 2.1M users and have passed $1M in ARR. My role as founding growth is to 10x the company, and I’ll be doing that primarily through social media.

Why did you step down from your startup?

I don’t really like the term “never give up.” At a certain point, we need to be bluntly honest to ourselves and ask ourselves if this will go anywhere. I still believe that the problem we’re attempting to solve is a real problem, but to succeed in the home services space is painfully difficult. If hundreds of startups, CEOs, and McKinseys consultants can’t solve something, what makes a 20-year-old think that he can? That said, I’ve learned to be realistic, drop the ego, and learn to step down when we’ve lost.

Why go back to being an employee and why social media?

Being a great founder comes first from being in love with the problem (it’s not the solution, it’s not the perks of being YC backed, it’s not being your own boss). For me, I haven’t found that problem that keeps me up at night, so naturally, I don’t have the inclination to build.

In term of how I ended up at Unriddle: the company’s first growth hire reached out to me a while back, and we finally found time to connect a couple weeks back. We talked, I found myself able to apply my skills, and then I decided to take a shot with this startup.

Social media is not a glamorous role. Going to Wharton, social media is constantly looked down upon while investment banking and private equity roles are looked up to. And the truth is — I get it. I’ve lined my resume up with a list of internships in high finance, ranging from VC to PE to IB. But outside of finance, I’ve always loved social media.

To start off, I was always a consumer of media and created digital media companies while I was in high school. Social media has always been a fun passion project of mine, but more recently, I’ve learned how important social media can be for your business. I learned first hand while creating my own content to over 10K followers — seeing these brand deals roll in my inbox told me enough.

Secondly, having also worked startup and finance jobs, I will always argue that social media / startups / growing a company is always a harder task than any investment banking role. The lack of structure, precedents, and clarity makes a startup job 10x harder than being an Excel monkey. As a competitive kid, this excites me.

How will you 10x Unriddle?

This is a question that I hope to figure out. As of now, my role mainly revolves around managing our brand accounts. Similar to any startup, my role and title can evolve to something completely different tomorrow or next week. However, my strategy is to 1) don’t change what already works, but instead optimize and 2) try new stuff.

Firstly, I know that social media / influencer / UGC marketing works wonders for my company. With that said, my goal is to optimize this funnel which I’ve already been working on and hope to see positive benefits.

Secondly, I want to try new growth initiatives. Without releasing too much information, I’m considering strategic partnerships to change our business to more than just a consumer platform.

That’s it for my life update. I’ve been following ServiceTitan’s S1 recently. More on that coming hopefully in the coming weeks :)