Co-founder of Light Anchor (YC P26). Former forward deployed @sendbird
San Francisco
Joined November 2022
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Random thought of the day
“The world may be too young”
(In the context of: understanding today’s technologies)
Your brand. Now an autonomous company.
We've been running AI ads + AI marketing agents for a few Korean beauty brands. Some have already 9x'd sales.
For Q4: @lightanchor_ai is looking for 3 consumer brands (beauty/wellness ideally) that:
1. sell physical products on Amazon US
2. are down to test AI ads on Meta/TikTok
3. are AI-pilled on agents running marketing
Agency or distributor deal, we're open to chat!
DM or email to [email protected]
Post YC update: me and my wife had our second kid! 👶
For most people, working in a startup means 996 / founder mode, but I think Sangha Park and I realized earlier on that building a generational company needs.. family (literally a new generation) and fun to continue on through all the dust and dirt.
The truth is, the week after we found out my wife was pregnant with Theo (TBD), we decided to start Light Anchor (YC P26). Fast forward 10 months and we have: graduated YC, pivoted multiple times, got our O1-A visas...
Now we operate three AI-native consumer brands: everything from fulfillment to marketing.
It's not always an either / or. There is ALWAYS a third choice.
PS: to Millie, my wife, and team - thank you for going through this ride with me. 😌
We're building autonomous companies.
"Autonomous" companies...
This is me and my co-founder's dad and packing hundreds of skincare boxes.
A few things we've learned:
1. the physical world is hard. really really really really hard.
2. anyone in the last mile will survive and continue to thrive
3. consumers are much better customers than software customers (they actually respond to emails)
The world of AI is coming, but boxes don't pack themselves (yet).
Rebuilt from scratch! That is the only way.
Some of the biggest companies of the next decade won't be software businesses. They'll be services companies like insurance carriers, law firms, and tax practices rebuilt from scratch with AI doing most of the work.
In this episode of Startup School, YC Visiting Partner @CharlieWarren walks through the playbook for building AI native services companies, covering how to pick a market with the right traits, why variance kills these businesses faster than anything else, and the P&L math that’ll transform your business model.
00:00 — Intro to AI Services Companies
01:01 — Picking the Right Market
02:55 — Markets YC Likes Right Now
03:43 — The Sam Altman Test
04:35 — The Right Founding Team
05:28 — Building the Product
06:19 — Variance Is the Existential Problem
07:08 — The Early Demand Trap
07:53 — How to Price AI Services
08:41 — The P&L Walkthrough
09:33 — AI Operating Leverage
10:27 — Don't Buy Your Way In
9/ Companies like OpenStore and Thrasio attempted this but their attempt was: 1) acquiring existing brands (we don't think this works) and 2) pre-AI (that worked)