Four Failed Startups and a Cancer Diagnosis: David Park on Building Jenni AI
EO Korea
David Park, 27, is the CEO of Jenni AI, an academic AI assistant that helps with research, writing, and "everything in between." In this interview, Park recounts eight years of startup failure before Jenni began to grow, and then a thyroid cancer diagnosis shortly after. The question running through the conversation is why a founder keeps going through years of little visible progress. Park's answer is partly practical, centered on talking to users relentlessly and taking responsibility seriously. It is also partly personal: "You can always fail. You can fail at something you don't love. So, you might as well fail at doing what you love."
Where Jenni AI Stands Now
Park opens with the company's current numbers. According to Park, Jenni has raised money from Jason Calacanis and from the AI Grant, run by Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross. Park says the company has grown about 15 to 20% per month for the last 10 months, is at roughly $2.5 million in annual recurring revenue, and has over 2 million users globally. Park believes there are now Jenni users in every country in the world.
Park grew up in a family that "wasn't rich." Park credits their parents with giving them a lot of love and confidence, which let them "believe in myself and do crazy things like start a company."
The First Business: A High School Clothing Brand
Park's first venture, at 16, was a clothing brand sold to students at their high school and neighboring schools. It failed "pretty spectacularly," and Park lost all their money. Looking back, Park says they didn't know the basics of business and naively believed that building something cool was the most important thing. It's not enough, in Park's words, "to just make a t-shirt" and assume you'll become a millionaire.
Still, that brand gave Park what they call the coolest moment of their life. At a mall, Park saw a tall, athletic "jock kind of guy," someone who would never have been their friend, wearing one of the sweaters they had made. The thought that something they built was valuable enough for that person to choose to wear it stuck with Park. Park traces their lasting interest in making products that provide value to people back to that moment.
Dropping Out After a Pitch on a Plane
Park attended UC San Diego. On a flight from Seattle to San Diego, Park noticed that the passenger next to them had Coinbase open and guessed he was "probably pretty rich." For the next three hours, Park says, this passenger was their "captive prisoner," and Park kept pitching their startup idea. Park thinks he was annoyed, but that he also recognized how much Park cared about what they were building. Less than three days after landing, they met up, and he handed Park a cashier's check, Park's first investment ever. Park then dropped out of college and went full-time.
A Social App and an AI Dating App
The next venture came from a college observation. People Park met kept saying "add me on Snapchat," "add me on Instagram," or "here's my LinkedIn." Park's team built an app that would add someone across Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and LinkedIn with one button. It didn't do well. Park lists the reasons: they didn't know how to acquire customers, didn't understand network effects, weren't building for their users, and made "a lot of poor decisions product-wise."
Then came an AI dating app, which Park still considers "actually pretty cool." Users didn't swipe. Instead, the system used machine learning to analyze a user's face and their previous partners to predict physical attraction, and looked at their Facebook to infer interests. The company partnered with restaurants in the city and set up the first date at a restaurant both people liked, with a coupon. Park describes it as a concierge service, and says local businesses loved it because it brought them free customers.
It ended when Park tried to raise money. According to Park, a VC declined because the investor wanted users to stay on a dating app as long as possible. If users found a partner and became happy, they would delete the app and stop paying, and it would never become a billion-dollar business. Park, around 19 or 20 at the time, found this "really sobering," like crossing "the chasm into like the adult world of venture capital." Park was disillusioned, and the team stopped working on the product.
Failure Feels Different After Dropping Out
Park distinguishes between failing in college and failing afterward. The first failure "didn't feel that bad" because Park was still a student. Once they had dropped out, failure brought real pressure. Park would see friends on Instagram posing in graduation gowns while Park lived with their parents or worked on a startup that wasn't going well. A year later, those friends had high-paying jobs at companies like Microsoft, and Park was in the same place. Park says they tried not to compare themselves with others, but "you can't have full control over your mind." This is the context for the line about failing at what you love. Failure was possible either way.
Setting Aside Ego and Gut Instinct
The most valuable lesson from this period, Park says, is that gut instinct "rarely provides me much value." Park's image for it: the blueprint for a billion-dollar company is "ripped up and scattered among minds and actions of the users" you are building for. A founder needs to be egotistical enough to believe they can build a billion-dollar company, which Park calls "a wild statement," and humble enough to recognize they don't know much and must keep talking to users. Once a founder puts ego down, Park thinks, a startup can "blossom a lot better."
Jenni's Origins: GPT-2 and a Strange Sentence
Park majored in literature and loved poetry and writing. Their co-founder was a computer science engineer who later did a PhD in natural language processing. The two wanted to connect writing and AI.
They started Jenni when only GPT-2 existed. While experimenting, they got a generation Park still remembers: "Nothing is darker than a butt hole." Park found it the funniest thing they had ever read, a sentence no human had ever said to them, and at the time also somehow profound. The reaction was that an AI had written this, so they had to find a way to make a business out of it. Park adds right away: "I really don't recommend anybody do this. We just got really lucky."
The first version of Jenni aimed to make human writers about 10% faster using GPT-2. The team brought writers into the office and timed them with and without AI, targeting 10%, 15%, then 20% speed improvements. When GPT-3 arrived, they realized it could produce genuinely useful text. That's when they moved from an agency model to SaaS. They no longer needed human writers, and Jenni became a general tool that anyone could use, "like Microsoft Word, but AI first."
Getting Better by Removing Features
Park describes a counterintuitive pattern: as the team removed features, Jenni kept improving, and each round of "ripping things out" made the vision clearer about what people actually came for. The team focused on time to value. The question they asked was whether a new user could get their first autocomplete within the first five minutes.
Early customers came through direct effort. Park cold-called businesses, talked with them, became friends with them, and tried to figure out how to deliver the best product. The team talked with the few users who arrived, tweaked the tool, relaunched, and repeated. Eventually a large wave of users came in, and nearly all of them were students. The team chose to keep building for researchers and people in academia, since they were the ones getting value from the tool.
How Park Talks to Users
Park argues that money matters far less in the early stages than it seems to a struggling founder, especially one trying to build a big company. If someone will talk to you and try your product, giving them a month or two free is "no problem at all." Park criticizes founders who refuse to give anything away as "a little arrogant." In Park's view, the lifeblood of a startup is knowing what to build. Continuous user conversations make gut instincts faster and product sense better. Park's main tip is to prioritize talking to users above everything else, including money.
Park also advises asking uncomfortable questions. With only 10 users, a phone call with one of them is rare, and you don't know when the next one will come. Asking "What's your favorite thing about my product?" only makes the founder feel slightly better and yields no information. Park instead recommends asking what the user's current workflow looks like and what their biggest pain point is. When relevant, founders should ask about the product's bad points rather than its good ones. Users try to be polite, Park says. Some will lie outright, and some will lie without realizing it. So founders have to judge heavily by users' actions. Park's view is that you get more comfortable only by repeatedly putting yourself in uncomfortable situations.
A Tiny Podcast and a $100K Check
An early-stage startup "has nothing going for you," Park says, so you take any call. While struggling, Park even replied to spammy LinkedIn messages obviously sent to a thousand people. Park was invited onto a podcast with very few listeners. One of them happened to be a scout for Jason Calacanis. The scout emailed about a possible investment. Park missed that first email, but the scout sent a second one, Park replied, and they invested $100,000.
Park went to their grandfather's house and the family was "swearing in Korean" in disbelief. Park had never seen that much money, took a screenshot of it, and stared at it constantly.
Going to Malaysia to Survive
The business wasn't doing well when the check arrived. Park recalls revenue of about $2,000 in month one, then $2,200, $2,300, and $2,500, growth Park calls almost negligible. Park didn't fully trust themselves with the money as a young founder unsure of their decisions. So Park and their co-founder flew to Malaysia, where Park says everything costs about a quarter of the price.
As they had predicted, they kept making "amateur decisions." Jenni stayed at roughly $2,000 MRR for another one and a half to two years. Park believes that if they hadn't gone to Malaysia, the company would have died before it started growing.
The Lost $250K in Korea
During that stretch, Park was invited to the K-Startup Grand Challenge, a competition where top-10 finishers win money. Park went to Korea with the company low on cash and secured a $250,000 investment from a VC that seemed "pretty much a done deal."
The night before the key meeting, Park stayed out very late with a girl they really liked, thinking it would be fine. Back home, Park found a document they needed to fill out, entirely in Korean. Park's Korean is "okay" but not good enough for a legal document, so Park worked through it with Google Translate until around 3 a.m., slept little, woke at 8, and arrived late to the 9 a.m. meeting. That night, the VC emailed to say they would not invest because it wasn't the right fit.
The company was two months from running out of money. Park had a team, including a software engineer whose wife was either pregnant or had just had a baby. Park says they cried hard that day and calls it one of the worst days of their life. Last-minute calls to a VC who had shown interest earlier brought in enough runway to survive.
Park draws a lesson about discipline from this. People become entrepreneurs to avoid the 9-to-5 and live on their own terms, and Park admits they had some of that attitude, thinking VCs were lucky to invest in them. Park now believes founders need to be even more disciplined than someone who shows up to every meeting at a regular job. People who join a startup bet on the founder and could have had prestigious jobs elsewhere. Park's point is that when you take on that much leverage and risk, you have to act like it.
The Viral Thread
One night around 11 p.m., while their co-founder was asleep, Park saw the site "going crazy": with every refresh, about 10 new users arrived per second. Jenni had been included in a Twitter thread that Park describes as the most viral thread in history related to AI or startups. The team had a limited pool of OpenAI credits, which Park recalls as somewhere around 1,000 to 5,000 and a lot at the time. Park says users burned through all of it within an hour.
Park called the co-founder, who didn't wake up, and ended up swearing at them on Slack that this was their big break. Meanwhile Park messaged every visitor through Intercom, asking for emails so they could be notified when service returned, unsure whether this was a one-time spike or something lasting. Park calls it the first real feeling of "some semblance of success." Raising money, in Park's view, never felt like success. It felt like the moment the real work begins.
Park expected the growth to fade and prepared for a slower pace afterward. It didn't stop. Every month, according to Park, the team found some new distribution channel or growth tactic.
The Cancer Diagnosis
About two months after the viral tweet, Park was in Korea and went to get a long-standing growth on their jaw checked. The nurse offered to examine their neck as well. Park says you know things are bad when the nurse suddenly goes quiet. She told Park there was a 50% chance of thyroid cancer because of tumors in the thyroid. Park didn't believe it at first. A life without cancer was all they had ever known. Then an email from the doctor confirmed the diagnosis.
Park recalls a quote: "a tree can't reach heaven unless its roots reach hell." After eight years of startups with nothing to show for it, Park had finally peeked "a little bit above the clouds," and then came cancer.
Before surgery, Park tried to raise money so the startup wouldn't die if they did. Park believes VCs "could smell the desperation," especially since Park needed the money wired within the month.
The Day of the Surgery
On the day of surgery, the doctor said Park had a fever and asked whether to reschedule. Park decided to proceed, reasoning that there would always be some reason to delay. Park's temperature kept rising, and nurses covered them in ice packs. Park's mother sat beside them and said that before surgery she would tell Park something that would give them all the strength they needed.
She stepped out briefly, and at that moment nurses rushed in: an operating table had opened up and surgery had to happen now. Park's mother wasn't there. Park was afraid of not understanding instructions, knew the fever raised the risk, and wanted to leave. But on the waiting room ceiling was a Bible verse about not being afraid and leaving everything up to God. The surgery went well.
A few days later, once Park could speak again, they asked their mother what she had meant to say. It was a Bible verse she had found online, the same one that had been on the ceiling. Park says they are not very religious, but it prompted a reflection on how much of their life has felt miraculous: sitting next to their first investor on a plane, Jason Calacanis investing because of an obscure podcast, a viral tweet from a stranger, and getting cancer. Park says they now feel grateful for their "little miracles every day."
The Unglamorous Reality
Park closes by pushing back on how startups have been romanticized, pointing to Netflix-style dramatizations of companies like Theranos and Uber. Most startup work, Park says, "is not very sexy." It means putting in the work day after day and figuring out what matters most. Sometimes that means opening a spreadsheet, finding a relationship in the numbers, and using it the next day to make a product decision. These scenes never appear in movies.
Park restates the opening point: "The sad truth isn't that you'll fail." Park believes that anyone who builds a startup over a long enough time horizon can probably make something and earn some kind of living. The sad truth is that many days will be really boring. Park compares their present with their past. Today there is some fire every day, along with constant major decisions about spending, hiring, partnerships, and whose check to take. None of it is as painful as the old dread of sitting alone in their room, "staring into the void," doing boring tasks with no idea what to do and nothing happening. Park's closing advice is to be ready for many years of putting in the hours and the reps.
You can always fail. You can fail at something you don't love. So, you might as well fail at doing what you love. The sad truth isn't that you'll fail. I think that if you build a startup and you really work towards it on a long enough time horizon, you'll probably be able to make something and make somewhat of a living. But, the sad truth is it just won't be super eventful many days. Many days will just be really boring.
I worked my whole life, 8 years of my life startups, 8 years. 0, 0, 0, just failing, failing, failing. Finally, I'm finally able to peek a little bit above the clouds and I feel like we're finally growing. And then I get a cancer diagnosis.
Hi, my name is David. I'm 27 years old. I'm the CEO of Jenni AI. Jenni AI is an academic AI assistant. Helps you with research, writing, and everything in between. So, we've raised from Jason Calacanis. We also have the AI Grant, which is Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross. We grow about 15 to 20% per month continuously for the last 10 months. We're at about 2 and 1/2 million ARR and we're at over 2 million users globally. I think now every single country in the world there are now Jenni users, which is nice.
I don't know. I think definitely just I had a lot of growing up to do. My parents, you know, my family wasn't rich, but my parents really gave me a lot of love, a lot of confidence. In that, in a lot of ways that helped because, you know, I was able to believe in myself and do crazy things like start a company.
My first business was a clothing brand where I would just sell to people in my high school, sell to people in neighboring high schools. Obviously, it was my first business, I failed pretty spectacularly, lost all my money. I was 16 years old. I didn't know the basics of business. I was pretty naive. I thought if you build something cool, that's the most important thing. It's not enough to just make a t-shirt and then just give up and just say, "Now I'm going to be a millionaire."
I remember the coolest moment of my life was when I sold clothes. I didn't really sell that much, but I was at the mall one time and I saw this really tall athletic, just like jock kind of guy, someone who would never really be my friend. He was wearing one of the sweaters that I made. It was a really cool feeling because what I built was so valuable, what I built was so cool that he was willing to wear it. I think ever since then I've always been kind of interested in making products provide value to people.
I went to college, I actually dropped out of college. I was on a plane from Seattle to San Diego. I went to UC San Diego. I was on a plane and there's a guy sitting next to me and I saw he had Coinbase open. Coinbase is like how you trade crypto in America and I realized he was probably pretty rich. So, he was my captive prisoner for 3 hours. He couldn't leave. We were on a plane so I could just continually pitch him my startup idea. I think he was annoyed but I think he recognized that I really cared about what I was building. So, I think less than 3 days after the plane landed, we met up, he gave me a cashier's check, my first investment ever. And then I dropped out of college and then immediately went full-time.
Then my first business after was a social media where, when I was in college, I would meet so many people and they'd say like add me on Snapchat or add me on Instagram or here's my LinkedIn. So, we made an app that you click one button and then you get added on Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, LinkedIn all at once. It didn't do well. I didn't know how to like get customers at the time. I didn't know like network effects at the time. We also weren't building for our users. We made a lot of poor decisions product-wise.
Then I made a dating app startup which also failed. The dating app startup was actually pretty cool. It was like an AI dating app where you don't swipe at all and we use machine learning to look at your face and your previous partners to see who you might be physically attracted to and then look at your Facebook to see like your interests and then try to find people. And then we partnered with restaurants in the city and then set up your first date for you at a restaurant you both liked with the coupon. So, it was like a concierge service and the local businesses also loved it because they got free customers. They got these customers coming in from our dating app. But when I went to raise money, the VC actually, you know, "I'm not going to invest in your startup because we actually want them to stay on your dating app as long as possible. If they find a boyfriend or girlfriend and they get happy, they're going to delete the app, not renew their subscription and you're not going to have a billion-dollar business."
Honestly, that was really sobering for me. I was still what, like 19, 20 at the time, so when I heard that, I felt like I had just crossed the chasm into like the adult world of like venture capital and I was pretty disillusioned and we actually stopped working on that because that was just such a crazy sobering moment.
You know, when I failed my first startup, it didn't feel good, but it didn't feel that bad because I was still a student in college. So, I was like, this is what life's about. And it was only when I started failing after I dropped out of college, that was when I really felt a lot of pressure, felt pretty bad. You know, I would see on Instagram my friends would be graduating. They'd have those pictures with the graduation gowns and the hats and then I would be at home either living with my parents or working on some startup that wasn't really doing that well. And then fast forward a year and they'd have high-paying jobs at Microsoft and then I would still be same thing. I'd still be at home, still not doing well. And I think those failures really hurt a lot more because even though I want to say like, oh, I try not to compare myself to people, I try to like be the best version of myself, you can't have full control over your mind. So, it was a little hard to...
You can always fail. You can fail at something you don't love. So, you might as well fail at doing what you love.
The valuable lesson for me, your gut instinct, it actually rarely provides me much value. The blueprint for like a billion dollar company, it's kind of ripped up and scattered among minds and actions of the users that you're trying to build for and like you have to be both egotistical enough to believe that you can genuinely make a billion dollar company, which is like a wild statement, I think, and then also humble enough to realize that you really don't know much and you have to continually talk to users. If you have ego, it could be strange at first, but I think once you like put that down, I think your startup can blossom a lot better, I think.
I was a literature major. So, I really love poetry in college. So, I loved writing. And then my co-founder was a computer science engineer. He eventually did his PhD in natural language processing. So, writing and AI, we always wanted to kind of find some way that we could connect those two.
We started Jenni when there was only GPT-2 and I remember we were just playing with it and there was one crazy generation that we got. The AI spit back, "Nothing is darker than a butt hole." That's what the AI told me. And I thought that was so funny. I thought that was the funniest thing I've ever read, that no human has ever said to me before. And then at the time for some reason I thought it was kind of profound as well. I'd be like, "This is so crazy, the fact that an AI wrote this. We have to find some way to make a business out of this." And I really don't recommend anybody do this. We just got really lucky.
In the beginning, Jenni AI, we could just make human writers 10% faster with GPT-2. And that was the first Jenni. We'd bring in writers to our office and then we timed them with AI, without AI. And we'd be like, "Okay, we're aiming for 10% faster, 15% faster, 20% faster." And then GPT-3 came out and then we realized, "Holy guacamole, this GPT-3's actually like insane. It could actually give you text that's useful." And that's when we transitioned from an agency more to a SaaS. We said, "Okay, we don't actually need human writers because GPT-3's so good." Then we became more of a general tool. So like anybody could use it. It was just like Microsoft Word, but AI first. And then we started removing features. It's a weird thing. As we've removed features, Jenni continually got better. And then as we kept ripping things out, our vision just got more clear. This is the thing that people come for. How can we make it so our time to value... Can we make it so a user comes and gets their first autocomplete within the first 5 minutes.
The way we got our first few customers, I would literally just cold call businesses. I would literally just talk to them, become their friends, and try to like figure out how could I deliver the best product for them. And then the few users that came to us, we would talk to them and then we would tweak our tool a little bit and then we'd launch again, we'd tweak it, launch again. And then eventually we realized we had a huge wave of users and they were all students. And we just made the decision then, like, "This seems like these researchers, these people in the academic field, like they like Jenni. We might as well keep building for these people that actually like get value from our tool."
In the beginning, you care a lot about money because obviously you're a struggling founder. But really in the early stages, money doesn't matter at all, especially if you're trying to build like a big company. So, you know, if you can convince someone to talk to you about your product and try your product, and you can give them like a month for free or 2 months free, that's no problem at all. You know, I see some founders, they're a little arrogant and they say, "I'm not going to give anyone my product for free." But the lifeblood of any startup, I think, is just knowing what to build. If you continually talk to users, you start to kind of understand where you need to go. And your like gut instincts get a lot faster. Your product sense gets a lot better.
Some tips I would have is prioritize talking to users more than anything else, more than money. Sometimes you have to ask uncomfortable questions, too. When you have a user on the phone with you, it can be really rare. Like, in the early stages when you only have 10 users and one of them gets on the phone with you, you don't know when the next one's going to get on the phone with you. So, you want to really ask, you don't want to just fluff yourself up and be like, "What's your favorite thing about my product?" You know? And like that doesn't really give you any information. It's just going to make you feel slightly better. If you have the end goal in sight, you need to ask, "What does your current workflow look like? What's the biggest pain point that you currently have?" And then when it's actually applicable, don't ask about the good things about your startup, ask about the bad things. Cuz users, they'll always try to be polite. Some of them will straight-up lie to you and some of them will just be polite and not even realize they're lying to you. So, you have to ask, you have to judge a lot based upon their actions. I think you just have to go and you just have to talk to users. And then you have to put yourself in uncomfortable situations, and slowly you'll start to feel a pocket a little bit and just become more comfortable over time.
When you're an early-stage startup, you have nothing going for you. You will take any call. I remember when I was really struggling, I would even respond to those spammy LinkedIn messages I would get where they're clearly just messaging a thousand people, but I would even respond to them because I just needed anything, anything, because we were struggling so much. And I remember one time I got invited to a podcast. Very, very few people listened to this podcast. And I think out of the listeners, one out of the very small pool of listeners happened to be a scout for Jason Calacanis. And then the even crazier luck was they sent me an email saying, "Hey, we want to meet with you. Possible investment." I didn't see the first email. I ignored the first email. So that was really unlucky. And then they actually decided to send another email. I responded to the second email. They decided to put 100k.
I remember when I first got it, I went to my grandpa's house. And then, you know, we were like, "Holy... you know." I mean, we were just swearing in Korean just like, "100k." I remember I took a screenshot. I've never seen that much money in my life. I took a screenshot of it and I just stared at it all the time. And it was so crazy.
Immediately after the 100k, when he invested in me, my startup was not doing super well. We kind of had a little bit of growth, but it was like we made $2,000 month one, 2,200 month two, 2,300, 2,500, like very small growth. Like it was almost negligible. I almost didn't trust myself with the money because I was a young founder. I was kind of unsure of my own decisions. So immediately my co-founder and I, we booked a flight to Malaysia, Southeast Asia, because everything in Malaysia is 1/4 of the price. And just like we predicted, we were still young founders. We were making amateur decisions. It took us another year and a half to two years to finally grow. Like we were stuck at 2,000-ish MRR for 1 and 1/2 to 2 years. If I didn't go to Malaysia, we would have died before. And then it was 1 and 1/2 to 2 years of just continual failure.
And I remember the craziest story ever. I got invited to something called K-Startup Grand Challenge. And if you get top 10, you win some money as well as competition. So I went to Korea. We were really low on money. And I was able to get a VC to invest $250,000. It was pretty much a done deal. But then there was this girl I really liked. I really like this girl and I had a meeting the next day with this VC that was going to invest in us. And then just because I was dumb, I was like, "It's okay, I can just, you know, stay up late." I stayed up really late with her. I came back. I realized there was some document I needed to fill out. I opened it. I realized it was fully in Korean. And my Korean's like, it's okay, but I can't like do a legal document in Korean. So then I'm doing like the most ugliest Google Translate trying to fill this document before my meeting at 9:00 a.m. I finish it like 3:00 a.m. I barely sleep. I wake up at 8:00. I get there. I'm late to the meeting. That night he sends me an email saying, "Actually, we're not going to invest. We don't think that this is a right fit." That night, because we were two months away from dying. We're two months away from dying. And I had a team. I had one software engineer. Either his wife was pregnant at the time or they just had a baby. I realized I had a lot of responsibility and I really messed it up. I cried pretty hard that day. That was like one of the worst days of my life. But luckily I was able to make some last-minute calls. There was a VC that was interested before that was able to come in, give us a little bit of runway, which gave us just enough time.
But the moral of that story is, why do entrepreneurs be entrepreneurs? Right? We want to avoid the 9:00 to 5:00. We want to feel free. We want to live life on our own terms. And I had a lot of that. You know, I thought, "These VCs are lucky to invest in my startup. I'm doing very well. It doesn't matter." But to be honest, being a founder is probably, you have to be probably even more so disciplined. You have to be even more disciplined than the person, you
know, waking up every day, showing up at every meeting because there's an insane amount of responsibility. The people who join your startup, they bet on you. All of the people that joined my startup, they could get prestigious jobs anywhere. There's a lot of people relying on you. And I really messed it up. It's just important to like you take on all this leverage, you take on all this risk, so it's important that you act like it, I think.
I remember I was sitting at home. It was late. I'm kind of a night owl, so my co-founder was asleep. It was around 11:00 p.m. Suddenly our site starts going crazy. I see like every time I refresh the page, every second 10 users would come to Jenni, every second. Jenni's actually included in one of the most viral Twitter threads in history. I think it's actually the most viral Twitter thread in history that has to do with AI or has to do with startups. It is the most viral Twitter thread.
And we had OpenAI credits at the time. And we had a limit of I think like 1,000, 5,000 OpenAI credits, which at the time was a lot. I think within 1 hour we lost all the credits. The users used all the credits because we had such a crazy influx. And then I'm calling my co-founder, he's not waking up. I remember I was just swearing at him on Slack. I was like, "Wake the— This is our big break. We have to capitalize on this."
I was just handling Intercom, messaging every single person, trying to save every single person. "Hey, we're not available right now, but can you give me your email? We'll let you know when we're available." Because I didn't know if this was a one-time thing or this was going to be a sustained thing. That was the first time we ever had the feeling of some semblance of success. Because raising money doesn't feel like success. It feels like, "Okay, now the job really starts. Now we can really get our hands dirty."
After that first initial growth, I was preparing my heart. I was like, "Okay, there's no way that we can continue growing like this. That was the most viral Twitter thread ever. There's no way we can continue this growth. But, you know, we'll continue our best and we'll continue slowly." But it didn't stop. Every month we were able to figure out some new distribution or growth tactic. And the growth has been super awesome.
That month was 2 months after the most viral tweet. Yeah, so I was in Korea. I always had this growth on my jaw. I get it checked out every once in a while. I was like, "Okay, it's been a few years. I'll check it again." So, I went to go get checked. And then she was like, "Since you're here, do you want to check your neck, too, since you're here?" I was like, "Okay, sure." You know things are not good when the nurse is suddenly quiet. And then she says, "50% chance that you have thyroid cancer," because they see some tumors in my thyroid.
I didn't know what to say. At that point I still didn't think I had cancer because my entire life all I've known is a life without cancer, so it's hard to imagine. And then I remember I got an email from the doctor saying that I had thyroid cancer. And I remember this quote: a tree can't reach heaven unless its roots reach hell. And that's how I really felt. I worked my whole life, 8 years of my life on startups, 8 years, just failing, failing, failing. Finally, I'm able to peek a little bit above the clouds and I feel like we're finally growing, and then I get a cancer diagnosis.
Before my surgery I was like, I don't want my startup to die if I die, so I wanted to raise a little bit of money. But unfortunately, I think that the VCs could smell the desperation. I was like, not only am I raising money, I need the money within— you need to wire it within this month. It was a weird situation, so.
I remember the day of the surgery was really crazy. I was really nervous for the surgery and then the doctor comes in and says, "You have a fever. We don't know if we can do the surgery today. Would you like to reschedule it?" And I said, there'll always probably be some reason, so I said, "You know, let's just do it." And then my body temperature kept going up before the surgery. So they start bringing ice packs. I'm just laying in bed, ice packs all over my body.
And I remember my mom, she saw that I was really stressed. She sat next to me and she said, "You know, don't worry, things will be okay. Before your surgery, I'll tell you something and it's going to give you all the strength you need and everything will be okay." My mom leaves for a bit, I think to the bathroom or something, and then suddenly all the nurses run in and they're like, "We just had the operation table open up, someone pulled out, we need to do surgery now."
I'm about to go into surgery, my mom wasn't there. I was afraid I wouldn't understand the instructions. I had a fever, the risk of my surgery was higher, all these things, so I wanted to leave. But for some reason in the waiting room, there was a Bible verse on the ceiling and it said something like, don't be afraid, leave it all up to, you know, God. And then they took me to the surgery room, they did the surgery, I woke up. Surgery went well.
After a few days, I was able to speak and I remember I asked my mom, "Hey, what was that thing you wanted to tell me before the surgery?" And she was like, "Oh, I wish I could have told you. It was this Bible verse that I found online." And it was the same Bible verse that was on the ceiling. I'm not a very religious person, but for some reason I was like, "Okay, you know what? So much of my life has been these miraculous things."
Just sitting next to my first investor on a plane, having Jason Calacanis invest in me from a random podcast, having a crazy viral tweet from someone I've never met, getting cancer. I guess to sum it up, I've just been so grateful for my little miracles every day. I'm just grateful all the time.
Lately, I don't know why, but startups have been romanticized with all these Netflix series about Theranos or Uber. And a lot of startups really is just— it's not very sexy. It's just putting in the work day after day, finding out what's the most important thing to do. And sometimes the most important thing to do is just get out a spreadsheet, look at these numbers, find out some relationship. And then the next day, through that relationship, how can you make a product decision based on that? These things are never shown in these Netflix series or these movies, because they've been kind of fetishized.
The sad truth isn't that you'll fail. I think that if you build a startup and you really work toward it on a long enough time horizon, you'll probably be able to make something and make somewhat of a living. But the sad truth is it just won't be super eventful many days. Many days will just be really boring.
The dread of staring into the void, not knowing what's going to happen, is so much more painful than now. Every day there's probably some fire. I probably have to make huge decisions every single day in terms of how to spend money, who to hire, who to partner with, whether to take a check from this person. And it's not nearly as painful as when I was in my room alone and it was just super boring and I had to do these boring things. I had no idea what to do and it was not even eventful.
So I guess my advice is just be ready. Just be ready for the many years of putting in the hours, putting in the reps. I wish you the best of luck, I guess. Yeah.
Woo!
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