My San Francisco Adventure
How I left my consulting job to become a third person at a tech startup
Last Friday, I dropped off my McKinsey laptop, waved goodbye to Prague, and flew from the Czech Republic to California on Saturday morning. There I was picked up by two guys at the airport, one of which I saw for the second time in my life, the other one I have never seen before. As I am writing this, we are sitting together in our San Francisco hacker house, ordering chicken and bananas and talking about product.
How it all started
One random day in May 2023, my friend from VC told me to meet for coffee with people from “a cool startup” that they just funded.
I had trouble to find a spare hour in my McKinsey schedule. But since the founders were supposed to be programmers from the same university I studied — I said why not.
I met Vašek — one half of the founders’ team — for a coffee at Miners. Vašek and his co-founder Tom were building e2b in a team of two, being at the whole beginning. However, I was immediately impressed by Vašek´s great vision for creating something big. He wasn´t just another crazy genius with an ambiguous idea that nobody understands. It turns out they have been coding things together with Tom since high school, starting from mobile apps, and later creating dev tools used by thousands of developers.
Joining e2b
Few days later, I announced at my corporate job that I was quitting. When people asked me why, I told them passionately about two crazy programmers who were building tools for “AI agents”, the OpenAI president just shared their product on his twitter and they get four thousand stars on GitHub.
Looking back, I am not sure whether people knew what any of that meant, but given that e2b was also backed up by decent funding, they assumed it a fantastic opportunity for me.
From small town to Sillicon Valley
When I got to SF, Vašek and Tom were waiting for me, waving with an “e2b” poster. We immediately went to our “hacker house” — a place where a tech startup team can hustle together.
Without even realizing, we immediately started working. Maybe you are expected to go party on a Saturday night in a big city, but what can three Czechs from small towns know about that? Sunday was devoted to working as well, so I started to feel like a good fit.
Of course, it was all risky, 90% of startups fail and the average age of a founder is 40. But in the end, everyone has silly dreams, and becoming a third person in a startup where I can learn more about language models, neural networks and technology world has been mine.
In conculsion, hello from the hacker house, and be ready to hear more from us.
