Startup Idea Teardown
A one-hour, honest stress-test of your startup idea. We pressure-test the problem, who has it badly enough to pay, the competition, and whether you're the right founder to build it. You leave knowing the biggest risks in your idea and the fastest, cheapest way to test them before you spend months building.
What's included
- A clear read on your idea's biggest risks and blind spots
- A short validation plan to test demand before you build
Meet your expert
Saad E.
Founding Engineer at a16z & 1984 Ventures startups | Idea to MVP Coach
I'm Saad. I graduated from USC in Computer Science and Business Administration, interned at Google and at Amazon twice, and got recruited into quant. I turned quant down because optimizing someone else's system wasn't the work I wanted. Instead I went all in on startups with real money behind them: Doublespeed, backed by a16z, and Clera, backed by 1984 Ventures with a $3M pre-seed, plus a few others. Today I'm building my own startup in stealth, and it's growing quickly. Almost all of my recent work is AI. I've built with it at a level most teams haven't reached yet and led engineers doing the same: designing the systems agents plug into, deciding what a model should never be trusted with, writing the evals that catch a regression before a customer does, and knowing which calls still need a human. That's a different skill from writing code, and it's the one companies are hiring for right now. I can help you with: - Landing big tech internships and new grad offers (I've been through Google and Amazon recruiting multiple times) - Quant recruiting, and deciding whether it's actually the right path for you - Breaking into startups: finding the good ones, reaching founders, and judging whether a company is real - Building an AI engineering career and a portfolio that proves you can do the work - Technical interviews: coding, system design, and the new AI-focused rounds I'm 22, so I was in your seat very recently. You'll get advice from someone who just ran the playbook in today's market, not five years ago.
