self-taught-engineer
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Darrell Jobe Built a Cooler Around Two Second Chances
A cardboard-box career became a study in replacement: plant fiber for foam, paid work for closed doors, and persistence for the future his past seemed to dictate.
Ravin Thambapillai
Ravin Thambapillai is the co-founder and CEO of Credal.ai, a New York security-first platform that lets large, regulated enterprises deploy AI agents without leaking the data those agents touch. A philosophy-politics-economics graduate from Oxford who taught himself to code into a job at Google, he spent seven years at Palantir building AI systems for banks, life-sciences firms, and public-health institutions before starting Credal in 2022, months ahead of the ChatGPT wave. Backed by Y Combinator and a $4.8M seed led by Spark Capital, Credal serves customers like MongoDB, Wise, Checkr, and the US government, processing over a million LLM queries a month.
Danielle Cohen-Shohet
Danielle Cohen-Shohet is the CEO and co-founder of GlossGenius, the all-in-one booking, payments and point-of-sale platform built for salons, spas and independent beauty professionals. A summa cum laude Princeton graduate and former Goldman Sachs analyst, she taught herself to code and wrote the first version of the product after running a freelance makeup business out of her dorm room. Founded with co-founder Karim Butt and run alongside her twin sister Leah, GlossGenius now serves tens of thousands of beauty and wellness businesses, crossed roughly $100M in revenue, and reached a $510M valuation on its 2023 Series C.