self-taught-engineer
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Jason VandeBoom Built a $250 Million Company $35 at a Time
He arrived in Chicago to study fine art, sold his first piece of software for $35, and spent 13 years declining the usual startup script. The patience became his advantage - and then his hardest thing to preserve.
Ray Caamano's Long Bet: Make the Grid Optional
A high-school dropout taught himself electromagnetics, helped rethink the electric drivetrain, and spent decades learning one stubborn lesson: reliable power is a systems problem.
João de Paula Took the Long Way to an AI Company That Watches Work Move
A law graduate taught himself to code, applied to Y Combinator until the answer changed, built two companies, took a sabbatical and came back for a third. Mesmer is his attempt to turn fifteen years of engineering-management scar tissue into software.
Jeri Ellsworth Keeps Bringing the Future Back to the Table
She built race cars, taught herself chip design, survived one startup’s collapse, and returned with a stranger, more sociable idea for augmented reality: keep the people, the pizza, and the table in view.
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.