Beginning a startup
what I spent the last 10% of my life on (part 1)
To folks who don’t know me, I recently wound down a venture-capital-backed tech startup I started with my co-founder two years ago. It was an invaluably educative experience.
I’m writing this series of blog posts to capture our journey from a deeply personal and opinionated perspective - why we started, how it felt navigating this as two first-time founders, and why we eventually shut down.
I hope it offers some takeaways for anyone also thinking about entrepreneurship.
Since starting my career, I have been immersed in the tech startup world. I was fortunate to be an early participant in two fast-paced, mission-driven startups - one brought me into the world of AI and self-driving cars at Lyft, and the other melded AI with efforts to cure diseases.
Experiencing their spirit and success, fueled by my naivety and sense of adventure, I felt inspired to try to build something of my own.
I was passionate about tackling a problem with global impact, and the climate crisis was particularly close to my heart.
Fast-forward to a brief stint at Entrepreneur First1 and another with OnDeck2, I found myself again a solo founder, actively searching for the right co-founder.
After many networking events and some serendipity, I met Jonathan on YCombinator’s co-founder matching platform. While initially looking at different ideas, we connected well and stayed in touch. Over time, our areas of investigation converged, and we enjoyed our video call sessions immensely.
We hit it off in our co-founder dating ritual, which included an entrepreneurs’ analog of The 36 Questions That Lead to Love. We quickly realized we shared similar values, and Third Polaris was born!3
Fully-remote, cross-continental duo
We were both technical, with areas of overlap and complements. He brought a keen pragmatic, analytical, and slow-and-steady methodical style, which balanced my tendencies to rely more on an emotional and fast-paced action approach. Often, his counterpoints made me rethink my approach, and this was a stimulating bouncing board.
Jonathan and I enjoyed our working styles. We both valued the flexibility of remote work — having experienced it during the pandemic, we saw how well it enabled productivity and travel. So from the start, we decided to make our company remote-first.
a snapshot from our first newsletter post
But what should we build?
Guided by The Mom Test and supported by the incredible networks from EF, OnDeck, and various climate events, we broadly narrowed it down to batteries.
Lessons:
A business problem is one customers are willing to pay you to solve. Finding this is hard.
Constraints create clarity. The more we narrowed our focus, the more precise our hypotheses became, making it easier to identify people to speak with and validate our ideas.
Why batteries?
The world needs a lot more batteries to transition away from fossil-fuel-powered vehicles and support the broader energy shift.
Along the way, we were fortunate to receive guidance from three incredible advisors — Joachim, Lina, and Winson — each with deep expertise in the battery industry.
As complete outsiders, their insights helped us understand the landscape and sound less clueless during customer discovery calls. Still, we hadn’t yet identified the right pain points to solve. Our next goal was to validate our hypotheses.
Lessons:
Desk research can only take you so far. There are only so many McKinsey reports and market analyses — you need to talk to people at the end of the day.
The best problems are those you’ve experienced firsthand. The next best ones come from peers in a domain you know. We had neither here, which made discovery harder.
Getting into a factory
Battery manufacturers are notoriously secretive about their production practices. Everyone has their “secret recipe,” and many are wary of adopting “esoteric” technologies like AI. Breaking into this space and getting meaningful conversations was a considerable challenge.
We eventually visited a couple of battery production factories. One breakthrough came through a third-party consultant—we paid for their help with our idea and secured an introduction to a battery company as part of the deal.
Lessons:
As Winson once put it, sometimes you must spend money to make money.
Be unashamedly transparent and willing to ask for help — even from potential customers. We never pretended to be battery experts. Instead, we openly acknowledged our learning curve and asked for their support.
Having someone on your team (even an advisor) who can open doors to your target market is invaluable. As outsiders, this lack of connections made our journey more difficult.
First traction
We hypothesized that improving battery production quality could be valuable since manufacturing often results in many scrap cells and involves lengthy, complex quality testing.
During our first meeting with a battery company, we pitched the idea of predicting manufacturing outcomes from early-stage production parameters.
We quickly built a scrappy demo over a weekend on a small test dataset and showed where our skills are. They liked what they saw, and eventually, we secured a contract for a larger project.
Lessons:
Early wins create momentum — maintaining that is critical when building a startup4.
Identify the minimum viable test and execute it quickly. Speed matters.
We decided to incorporate Third Polaris officially and kicked off our adventure!
Tools and resources that we found useful
Setting up a US Delaware C-corp
Incorporating a Del-C corp is surprisingly easy, and the founders don’t need to be in the US. Here’s the stack we used to move fast. (shameless plug of our referral code as well)
Clerky (incorporation);
Mercury (banking + also does SAFE)
Puzzle (accounting);
Anytime Mailbox (email referral)
Books
Gratitude
Hundreds of wonderful people supported us professionally and personally along this journey, and I’m forever grateful to them. While I can’t name everyone here, I’d like to thank a few who played pivotal roles in our early days:
Charles Cushing, Tom Kirk, Raimund Karver, Anant Kapoor, Arkadiy Serezh, Ruben Fiszel, Eddie Forson, Tom Kotecki, Sarah Montgomery, Bruis van Vlijmen, Martin van der Heijden, Jan Figala, Brett Cotten, and Lukas Platinsky along with our excellent advisors Joachim Schaeffer, Winson Ng, and Lina Emilsson.
To everyone who offered their time, insight, and encouragement, Thank You. You made this journey possible.
A studio for early-stage solo founders to meet co-founders and build a venture capital-backed company
Back then, they had a part-time remote-only program and network that I joined.
First lesson: Finding a suitable co-founder is incredibly hard. Second lesson: Naming a startup is probably harder.
We were still bootstrapped and self-funded with no revenue. This was an incredibly privileged position, not something most people could afford.