Pasha Rayan has spent much of his career thinking about the gap between being able to do something and being able to see yourself doing it. His first company gave students a rehearsal for the office before the interview. His second asks them to make a game, a chatbot or a tiny social tool and pass it around campus. The products look different. The invitation is much the same: come in, try it, see what becomes possible.
The first invitation became Forage. Founded in 2017 with Tom Brunskill and originally called InsideSherpa, it turned recognizable jobs into free, self-paced simulations. A student could spend a few hours attempting the sort of task performed at a bank, consultancy or technology company. The experience made a career less abstract. It also made talent legible beyond the usual filters of connections, polish and proximity.
By the time EAB agreed to acquire Forage in 2024, the platform had worked with companies including BCG, JPMorgan, Google, Pfizer and Commonwealth Bank. Rayan later described a reach of 10 million users and more than 5,000 university partnerships. In some cities, he said, Forage participants accounted for a substantial share of graduate intake at individual firms. A small act of career guidance had become part of the machinery connecting study to work.
The useful zigzag
Rayan’s route into startups was not a straight line, although it has a pleasing retrospective logic. At UNSW Sydney, he studied commerce across accounting, philosophy and computer science, graduating in 2012. One discipline counts what exists, another worries over what it means, and the third turns rules into working systems. It is an eccentric undergraduate bundle and a tidy toolkit for a product founder.
He joined KPMG after university, then discovered that the consultant’s view from the side of the room did not suit him. His explanation is admirably compact: “I didn’t want to be a consultant - I wanted to build things.” A $25,000 hackathon win helped carry him toward a product role at Freelancer.com, where he worked on growth initiatives.
Outside work, he kept finding himself in conversations with students who wanted career advice. A future co-founder noticed the pattern. Instead of treating the questions as a recurring favor, they treated them as evidence. The result was a mentoring idea that evolved into virtual work experience, then moved through UNSW Founders’ 10x Accelerator and Y Combinator’s Winter 2019 batch.
“Talk to an excessive and unreasonable amount of your potential users.”Pasha Rayan on the early work of building
His operating recipe from those years has five ingredients and very little theatre: speak to users, ship quickly, watch what happens, remain capital-efficient and focus on results rather than awards. It reads like common sense until one counts how many products are constructed chiefly from internal meetings and confident adjectives.
Forage also made the founder’s own origin visible. Rayan was raised by a single parent and understood limited access firsthand. Brunskill came from a rural background. Their product did not promise to erase inequality with a dashboard. It offered a specific intervention: let more students understand the work, practice it and demonstrate intent before a hiring decision.
The intermission was the point
An acquisition usually supplies a neat full stop. Rayan used a semicolon. After Forage, he spent less than a year at art school and travelling. It was a deliberate break from the familiar velocity of product road maps, fundraising and growth. Then the AI boom became, in his phrase, “too fun and too exciting” to observe from a distance.
Art school did not send him back with a decorative fondness for mood boards. It gave him a method. Start with the outline. Step away far enough to see the overall shape. Only then fill in the detail. If the outline is wrong, exquisite shading merely makes the wrong picture more expensive.
The outline for the new company began as A1Base, built with fellow UNSW graduate Pennie Li, an early engineering and product hire at Forage. The pair entered Y Combinator’s Winter 2025 batch with infrastructure that allowed AI agents to communicate through channels such as SMS, Slack, iMessage and Teams. While building the pipes, they arrived at a larger product question. Messaging apps were designed for people sending messages to people. What should the room look like when AI becomes another participant?
Graduates from UNSW after studying accounting, philosophy and computer science.
A hackathon win helps open the door to product and growth work at Freelancer.com.
Co-founds Forage, joins YC W19, scales virtual job simulations and exits to EAB.
Returns to YC with A1Base, then develops A1Zap as the social layer for AI apps.
From content to things
A1Zap is the consumer expression of that question. Its pitch begins with a complaint about the feed. Social networks were built for content, which means their fundamental object is something to look at. Rayan and Li are betting that AI changes the object. Instead of posting a picture or sentence, someone can make a quiz, a campus map, a matchmaker, a chatbot, a mini-game or a tool that does something to and with other people.
The company is beginning on campuses, territory Rayan knows from Forage. Early examples have included rent-transparency projects at UT Austin, group matchmakers at Harvard and tools for local events. A creation moves through friendships rather than waiting for a separate distribution plan. The feed becomes a shelf of small experiences made by people who understand the room.
There is a second idea nested inside the social one: personal agency. Rayan argues that people should have AI acting in their interests, not only agents optimized for the platform or a company. “You should have an AI that’s on your side, not just the company’s side,” he has said. In a group containing humans and several agents, allegiance becomes a product feature.
He is equally interested in taste. When a machine can generate millions of possibilities, the shortage moves from production to selection. Human value lies in choosing what resonates, what matters and what feels appropriate in context. A student who knows a campus joke may make the right tiny app for 200 friends. Scale arrives through relevance, not through sanding every edge into universality.
“The future isn’t about AI replacing humans. It’s about expanding the space of what can be done.”Pasha Rayan
Long horizons, small rooms
For all the novelty of social AI, Rayan’s view of company building is stubbornly slow. A worthwhile business, project or institution takes at least four years, he says, and probably ten. He considers the early stage a privilege: a small group of people can spend time with users, understand their lives and make something considered before scale adds distance.
This is where his optimism acquires some grit. Rayan describes the founder’s posture as “unashamed existential confidence,” paired with a radical acceptance that nobody knows whether the thing will work. The uncertainty remains. The choice is to hold ambition and amusement at once.
There is a geographic edge to that ambition. Rayan speaks warmly about Australian technical talent while arguing that its builders can set their sights higher. The useful provocation is not to imitate Silicon Valley’s volume. It is to expose oneself to a global standard and ask what the work could become without an inherited ceiling. His own career kept a foot in both worlds: foundations at UNSW in Sydney, company-building experience in San Francisco and products intended to travel far beyond either city.
He has kept returning to the UNSW founder community that helped Forage at the beginning. The gestures are practical. HEO Robotics co-founder Will Crowe publicly thanked Rayan for helping his team recognize the Y Combinator opportunity. Rayan is also listed among the founder backers of Scout, a company building back-office software for school districts. These connections make his stated interest in other people’s potential feel less like a branding motif. The same founder who wants communities to celebrate one another’s wins has behaved as if useful networks are made by passing the ladder back down.
He applies similar patience to co-founder selection. His advice is to build projects together before making a grand commitment. Tinker, exchange feedback, observe how the other person responds when the work gets difficult. Pennie Li had already worked beside him at Forage, giving the second company a history before it had a new name.
Community, too, can be designed. Rayan has spoken about creating rooms where the default response to another member’s success is happiness rather than threat. It is a deceptively demanding standard for a social product. Many networks learned to convert envy into engagement. A network of things friends build for one another will need a different emotional economy.
His two companies now resemble opposite wings of the same campus building. Forage handled resumes, interviews and the sober anxiety of entering working life. A1Zap is aimed at the part that makes a campus feel alive: jokes, experiments, games, friendships and small acts of invention. One helped students rehearse the institution. The other invites them to rearrange the furniture.
The pleasant surprise is that art school fits between them. First, learn to see the opportunity. Then, step back and find the outline. Finally, hand other people enough material to draw something you would never have thought of yourself.