From College Startup to AI QA Engineering: Ani's Journey Through Techstars and YC

Hi! I'm Harshil, founder of Dream Launch Studios. Today I want to share the incredible journey of Ani, a founding engineer at Spur who's building AI QA engineers. Ani's story is a perfect example of how persistence, strategic pivoting, and embracing emerging technologies can lead to success in the rapidly evolving tech landscape.

1. 🚀 The Beginning: College Startup Dreams

Ani's journey into entrepreneurship started during college with a startup called "Dorm Dash" - essentially DoorDash for college campuses. The pain point was clear: regular delivery drivers couldn't access campus buildings without proper IDs, forcing students to walk outside to collect their food.

"We thought that was a big enough pain point to where we can just get students to do this within campus restaurants and then go inside and deliver right in front of the classroom or right inside your dorm," Ani explains.

The team worked on Dorm Dash for two years, but unfortunately, COVID-19 hit and campuses shut down, forcing them to let the project dwindle. However, this experience taught Ani a crucial lesson: the satisfaction of seeing something you built being used by people is incredibly motivating.

"I loved it so much. The satisfaction of seeing something you built being used by people and seeing the potential of it - the high of it is really good to chase," Ani recalls.

2. 🎯 The High-Five Chapter: Fintech and Hospitality

After Dorm Dash, Ani joined High-Five, a fintech startup focused on digital tipping and financial services for the hospitality sector. The timing was perfect - hotels were struggling with staff retention during COVID, and High-Five provided HR software to incentivize employees to stay.

"I was the CTO and we were providing retention HR software to hotels and trying to incentivize people to stay on property more," Ani says. "We did a lot of impact there."

This role taught Ani about the challenges of regulated industries and the importance of founder-market fit. "Pick things that you don't need regulation on because a lot of things are not in your hand, even with fintech like High-Five - so many different regulation stuff."

3. 🔄 The Techstars Experience: Mentorship and Intensity

High-Five's journey led them to Techstars, where Ani experienced one of the most intense accelerators in the startup world. Unlike Y Combinator's hands-off approach, Techstars provided a structured three-month program with daily activities.

"It was very intense. We had a whole three months of structured plan every day - we're going to do this, we're going to do that," Ani describes.

The highlight was "Mentor Madness" - a two-to-three-week period where founders met with a new person every 10 minutes for eight hours a day.

"It was basically giving you the reps and experience to pitch your idea in under 10 minutes and try to find advisors. We had to talk to like 200-300 people, every 10 minutes you just pitch yourself - five minutes pitch, five minutes Q&A."

This process taught Ani the importance of high agency and moving fast. "You need to have a lot of high agency. Don't stop and question and analyze everything. Just do it and then see what happens."

4. 💡 Key Lessons from Techstars

Founder-Market Fit is Crucial:

• "Everyone looks for that - why do you think you're the person to solve this problem?"
• "It's not just you, it's also the founding team. The early team is what makes or breaks the company."

Have a Working MVP:

• "At least have a working MVP. You don't have to make revenue, but at least show that you've talked to your users, you've shipped something out."

Conviction and Clarity:

• "Have that conviction and clarity on where you want to take the idea. What's your endgame? How are you going to get there?"

Think Big Picture:

• "You really need to think about how the world view is going to change when you succeed in what you set out to do."

5. 🚀 The Spur Chapter: AI QA Engineering

After taking a backseat role at High-Five, Ani joined Spur as a founding engineer, moving from Texas to New York. Spur is building AI QA engineers - agents that can crawl web applications and test every single flow automatically.

"What we're doing is bringing AI to all these traditional QA tools. As an engineer or product manager, you no longer need to spend that many engineering hours on QA. You can just type out what you want to test like you're talking to ChatGPT and it will just go test it for you."

The AI space offers unique advantages. "You're growing with the market. You just do nothing today and you still grow just because the market is growing. There's so much momentum in this space."

6. 🤖 The Future of Software Engineering

Ani has fascinating insights on how AI is transforming software development:

AI as Leverage:

• "If you're a good software engineer with the tooling we have right now, you're easily equivalent to like five engineers."
• "We were just four or five people, we're making a lot, we're shipping a lot. I ship out like two-three features a week."

The Commoditization of Coding:

• "The leverage you used to get with learning Java or Python or JavaScript, you now have that same amount of leverage by just knowing English."
• "All you're doing right now is commoditizing the skill set that software engineers bring to the table."

The Future Landscape:

• "If you're a software engineer and you're not working with AI tooling, you might be at risk."
• "If you're an average developer, really learn how to use AI better. That could be the best use of your time today."

7. 🛠️ Tips for Vibe Coders and Semi-Technical Founders

Understand the Architecture:

• "If you're vibe coding, at least understand the basic principle building blocks of architecture and technology."
• "Have a rough idea of what your app is actually running on, what the flow is of how your app is working."

Security is Critical:

• "It's very easy to attack vibe-coded applications. It's leaking sensitive information, there's no guardrails in place."
• "Anyone can abuse it easily if you're not really explicitly asking it to solve that problem."

The 80/20 Rule:

• "It's really good at doing like 80-90% of the work, but the last 10-20% where you need to step in and fix things - that's where a lot of time-consuming stuff happens."
• "You now need to go see how it did that 80% that it did, be in that mind space, understand exactly what all the files are affected."

8. 🌟 Key Lessons from Ani's Journey

Start with Side Projects:

• Ani's first project "Dorm Dash" taught him the power of solving real problems
• College is the perfect time to experiment with minimal risk

Embrace Pivots:

• "Instead of calling it completely quits, there's a lot of merit in just pivoting to a different thing."
• "A lot of people just pivot and change the idea dramatically to where it kind of works."

Founder-Market Fit Matters:

• Choose problems where you have inherent advantages
• "The problem you're trying to solve, you need to have some kind of advantage that you believe you are the person who can solve it."

Move Fast and Break Things:

• "Really what gives startups the advantage is moving fast."
• "You can afford to be wrong and still fix it because you're so small."

Stay Technical but Adapt:

• Keep learning new technologies and tools
• "Always be on tech Twitter, always know what's happening in the industry."

🚀 Summary

Ani's journey from a college food delivery startup to building AI QA engineers demonstrates the power of:

• Starting early with side projects to learn and build experience
• Embracing pivots when market conditions change
• Leveraging accelerators like Techstars for mentorship and network
• Staying technical while adapting to new technologies
• Thinking big picture about how your product changes the world

His story shows that success in tech comes from combining technical skills with strategic thinking, persistence through failures, and the ability to adapt to rapidly changing markets. Spur is now at the forefront of AI-powered QA testing, and Ani is living proof that you can build successful products while staying ahead of technological trends.

🚀 Resources

Connect with Ani:

• LinkedIn - Follow his journey
• Spur - Check out the AI QA platform

Key Tools Mentioned:

• Cursor - AI-powered code editor
• PostHog - User analytics and screen recordings
• Supabase - Backend-as-a-Service
• Clerk - Authentication

Recommended Reading:

• Paul Graham's "Do Things That Don't Scale" essay
• Techstars application process and mentor madness

Ani's journey proves that with the right mindset, technical skills, and willingness to adapt, anyone can build successful products in the rapidly evolving tech landscape.