Amir Barsoum and the business of starting again

Four driverless cars were moving outside a San Francisco restaurant, and Amir Barsoum was watching them. It was eight in the evening. One car was parking. Another was working its way around it. A Waymo was dropping him off; a fourth was collecting somebody else. In his account of the encounter, published in January 2025, the striking detail was the ordinariness of the activity. Cars were doing the small, fussy things that make a street function. They had somewhere to be.

Barsoum took the scene as a prompt to think about other kinds of work. Every industry, he argued, would eventually expect a comparable moment. He wanted AI products to progress toward autonomy, even if their first versions needed considerable help. A restaurant arrival had become a business question. Entrepreneurs are sometimes inconvenient dinner companions.

By then, he had already begun another chapter of his own. After founding Vezeeta, he was building InVitro Capital in California. The new venture put a question around the usual question of entrepreneurship: how do you arrange the conditions in which several companies can begin?

The detour through big business

Barsoum’s career has moved between starting businesses and learning how larger ones operate. After graduation, he built a distribution company in Egypt. It reached about 120 employees within three years, and he sold his stake to a partner. He then pursued a corporate career, eventually joining McKinsey and later AstraZeneca. His consulting work took him through markets including Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Britain, Switzerland, and Belgium.

The sequence gives his later decisions a useful context. He had experienced the responsibilities of employing people before taking on the responsibilities of advising established companies. He returned to entrepreneurship with both kinds of work behind him. That combination is visible in his current concern with the idea and the machinery around it: the people, financing, and operating decisions that give an idea somewhere to go.

Vezeeta followed in 2012. In 2020, Fortune included Barsoum in its 40 Under 40 list. Recognition offered a public marker of the distance traveled, although a list tells you rather less about a founder’s working day than a hiring decision does.

His California chapter brought a family office and then InVitro Capital. Today, its team biography describes operations across California, Boston, Mexico City, Cairo, and Panama City. His working geography has expanded considerably from the first Egyptian business. The recurring occupation remains company building.

Before the deck comes the customer

Barsoum prefers to get involved before an entrepreneur has a finished presentation. He describes wanting to meet a capable person while the idea is still open. The two can work through possibilities together, abandoning one and trying another until they find something they both want to build.

He initially considered creating a venture capital firm. His own explanation for the different outcome is practical: he preferred operating, joining the work, and making things with his own hands. In that arrangement, a network has a job. Advisors should introduce customers. Investors should help reach them too. Existing portfolio relationships can open conversations about another problem.

That approach changes what the first meeting is for. A polished deck presents a conclusion. An early customer conversation can disturb it. The studio creates room for that disturbance before an entrepreneur has spent months defending a particular answer.

“If you have a pitch deck, you’re too late for us.”

Amir Barsoum

There is a human consideration here, too. Experienced people can have useful skills and still hesitate to begin a business. Brendan le Grange’s description of the studio emphasizes an environment that brings potential founders into company creation with support already around them. It asks whether some of the uncertainty that keeps a capable person on the sidelines can be handled collectively.

The attraction is understandable. An empty calendar can be frightening; so can a calendar filled with tasks you have never done. A studio offers colleagues and resources at that vulnerable beginning. It still leaves plenty of difficult decisions. Customers retain their customary right to be unimpressed.

The appeal of an unglamorous market

InVitro Capital announced its official launch on January 14, 2025. Barsoum described its interest in established, fragmented markets where manual processes remained common. The proposal was to bring AI into businesses that already had demand and work to do. The market would come with customers and existing habits, rather than needing to be invented along with the product.

That is an interesting place to look for a new company. Familiarity can make an industry disappear from view. A service gets delivered, an invoice gets sent, and everybody carries on. The inconvenience between those two events becomes part of the furniture.

Barsoum’s account of the opportunity makes that middle stretch worth examining. In a service business, technology can affect what the customer receives and what it costs to deliver. The business question reaches beyond whether somebody will buy a new tool. It asks how the work itself can change.

His June 2025 conversation with Mike Sirius on Mastering Tech Growth returned to starting with a problem and finding the experts who could solve it. It also emphasized referrals: customers telling other people that something worked. A referral is a modest-looking event with considerable significance. The customer has volunteered a little of their own reputation.

A business that earns that recommendation has done more than explain itself persuasively. It has given somebody a reason to bring a friend. For an operator, that is a useful kind of evidence.

Giving the spreadsheet a vote

Barsoum’s argument for InVitro sits between familiar investment approaches. In his January 2025 writing, he described combining the appetite to create new businesses with the financial and operational discipline associated with private equity. The emphasis was on early attention to unit economics, embedded help with product, marketing, and finance, and possible exits below the scale of a billion-dollar company.

It is an argument about what counts as a worthwhile outcome. If every plan depends on an enormous exit, the ordinary prospect of a profitable business can look disappointingly small. Barsoum’s proposal gives that prospect more room. A company can be useful, grow, and reward its owners without becoming the largest thing anyone has ever seen.

That does not make the work easy. It changes the questions that deserve attention early. How much capital does delivery consume? How quickly can revenue support the operation? What ownership remains after financing? An exciting product still has to pay for the people and systems that make it available.

The studio’s published process makes the financial intention concrete. It describes shared AI infrastructure, an internal seed round followed by a milestone-based growth round, and a plan to preserve majority ownership for the studio and its investors. Its stated break-even target is 36 to 48 months, with spending of no more than $5 million to reach that point.

These are operating targets. They give the ambition dimensions that can be measured. They also put a limit on improvisation: a team working within a capital budget has to choose which experiments deserve the next check.

Hiring the gaps

Barsoum’s concern with capital predates InVitro. At RiseUp Summit in Cairo in 2017, he was asked what he would do differently if he could begin again. His answer was to take the first financing round later. The reflection is useful because it complicates the celebratory version of fundraising. Timing deserves judgment as well as applause.

A financing round gives a company resources. It also commits the company to a relationship and a set of expectations. Barsoum’s retrospective suggests that he regarded the date of that commitment as a meaningful decision. The amount raised never quite tells the whole story.

People present another timing problem. In a 2020 interview, he put his recruiting principle succinctly: “I believe in hiring our weaknesses.” The phrase has the advantage of admitting that weaknesses exist. A founder cannot be the answer to every job vacancy, however economical that might initially appear.

In the same conversation, he pointed to the challenge of keeping regional talent and attracting international capital as companies grew. He also named CloudKitchens as a business he wished he had started. Even then, his interests extended to the operating model behind a service. The company was a way to rearrange how familiar work got done.

His later discussion with Tina Greenbaum explored family influence, the freedom to create, mentorship, conflict, and asking for help. Those subjects bring the founder back into the picture as a person working among other people. Shared resources are useful; so is the willingness to use them.

Several beginnings, one operator

Barsoum has said he wanted to continue investing and building after scaling and exiting his first technology company. He also wanted several ventures rather than concentrating everything in one. His brief explanation of the attraction is personal: “I love the grind.” It is a revealing choice of noun. Building appears in his account as work he wants to keep doing.

His AI ambitions reach well beyond today’s companies. In May 2025, he outlined a progression from more capable agents to physical automation and, eventually, more broadly capable systems in everyday life. These were forecasts. They reveal the horizon he is looking toward, rather than achievements already booked.

At the level of a particular company, his questions are closer to the ground. He has emphasized distribution and access to useful data, and discussed pricing tied to consumption or outcomes. That attention brings a large technological possibility down to a transaction: a customer, a useful service, a reason to pay.

The four cars outside the restaurant offered a glimpse of work happening differently. InVitro is Barsoum’s attempt to organize the people and capital around such possibilities. A first business, a corporate detour, a company built across borders, and another beginning in Irvine have led him back to the same practical occupation. There are customers to meet. There is work to do.