Planetary Health Lab

I just added another $10M to my run rate in 6 weeks. Here's every idea I tried before hitting $20M ARR: 1. Moved to New York at 21. I studied financial engineering at Columbia and I wanted to be a founder, but didn’t have the guts. 2. Joined a startup hedge fund on Wall Street. I wanted to learn how things get built from scratch, it died in a year. 3. Joined Barclays Capital. I worked on the trading floor for 2 years. I had a lot of friends building software back then and I started to feel inspired. 4. Learned how to code. My best friend told me that once I learned, I could build anything. So I did. Nights and weekends. For 6 months straight. 5. Shipped my first app. Did it under alias Ben Cera so my finance boss wouldn’t find out. People loved it. I quit my job, bootstrapped the company for a year… it failed. 6. Built a photo messaging app. Josh Kushner from Thrive Capital loved it and invested $1 million from his brand new fund. 7. Pivoted into a people discovery app. It had massive traction, but then I realized I was building a dating app and decided to walk away. 8. Moved to LA. I became the CTO of a tech enabled interior design startup. We raised $20M from Founders Fund and Zillow Group. 9. Worked with Uber’s founder. Travis Kalanick bought CloudKitchens and I got a meeting. I decided to join as a product manager. 2 years later, I was leading a new division I had built from scratch. 10. Decided to come back to the arena. I moved to Paris to start a new company called GiftShop with my good friend and raised $8M. After 2 years of co-founder tension, I finally walked away to go solo. 11. Started Polsia Inc. Decided that i wanted to start working with AI right away, but also take a break and see the world. So I starting traveling the world and touring most of Asia. 12. Built Blanks. An iPhone app that builds iPhone apps using AI. Failed. 13. Built Decision AI. An AI that helps you make decisions with AI. Zero customers. 14. Started Polsia. I went all in on the idea of building a company that builds and runs companies with AI. I built the first version and moved to San Francisco. 15. Polsia worked. 5 months later, I had 10,000+ customers, a $10M run rate, and raised $30M on a $250M valuation. Now, I have 25,000+ customers, a $20M run rate, and we're about to hit $25M very soon. This is 20 years of failing and starting over. Until it finally clicked... Every lesson is tuition, nothing is ever wasted.