Ep 1.7 • From Big Tech @ Meta to Co-Founders | Interview with LastMile AI

In our first live recording in New York City, guests Andrew Hoh and Sarmad Qadri, co-founders of LastMile AI, share their experiences transitioning from working at Meta to launching their own AI developer platform. They discuss the importance of trust and communication, comparing the co-founder relationship to marriage, emphasizing accountability, mutual support, and the ability to navigate conflict.

In our conversation, we discuss:

• Difference between working for Meta and startup life
• Addressing conflicts (lessons from marriage)
• How to know if they’re the right co-founder
• Finding value in different working styles
• The all-encompassing nature of founding

Favorite Quotes:

1. Differences between large corporation (Meta) and startup (LastMile): "It feels just a lot more emotionally tied to your identity in a way that I never felt in any other company or any other place that I've at least worked at."- Sarmad

2. In addressing conflicts, lessons from marriage: “When you're married, you think of how do we solve a problem? It's not like, ‘Sarmad let me down’. It's like, ‘No, we need to fix this’. We don’t point fingers... we're on the same team and we're gonna have to fix this.” - Andrew

3. In finding the right co-founder for you:
“It's not finding someone you don't disagree with, but it's finding someone who makes you the best version of yourself that you can be.” - Sarmad
"The way that we work together… I genuinely believe we can fix any issue.” - Andrew (Healthy Founding Relationship Principles)

4. Emotional stability is key! “You need to be an emotionally stable person. There's so much that [starting a company] throws at you, and being able to just be very rational and analytical and not lash out when things go wrong. All of that requires a degree of emotional stability and maturity that you have to come in with or learn it very quickly.” - Andrew

5. Finding value in different working styles — do you prefer bungee jumping versus hiking? Do you add a new ingredient to a focaccia recipe on a whim or not?: “I do think it's helped for me to partner with Andrew because we see things in slightly different ways. I can be a lot more aggressive at times and Andrew's like, ‘hold up let's take a step back’. I think the inverse is true to where I feel like I jumped off a cliff because I'd already made up my mind that I wanted to do this much sooner, but walking through those steps with Andrew, where it felt like we were going for a walk, was really important to our success.” (Working Styles Quiz)

6. Founding takes a tolls on others in your life as well: “Andrew once asked me how my wife is doing through all this. And I thought that was a very empathetic question. You can ask, ‘how are you doing’, but to ask how someone else is doing, that requires you to understand like the toll of building a company extends beyond just yourself as a founder.” (Life Priorities Exercise)

7. Do not allow frustrations to build up, share small and often: “We have a rule that we'll