2025 EES HYBRD: I’m A Startup Founder: AMA

Hi everybody. Everybody, how we doing? Hope everybody is doing great.

We are coming to the end of the 2025 emerging engineer summit, but it is not over yet. We are super excited for our session today on being a startup founder with two fantastic speakers from hybrid joining us, co-founders, and we are really excited for the conversation. Before we dive in, just a couple reminders.

Please utilize the chat. We will be asking you to submit your questions. Please do that in the Q&A tab.

Keep your topics relevant to the session in the chat. Build a community, talk to each other, ask us questions. And at the end of the session, as always, we ask you to fill out the session survey.

It is pinned right over there for you. We really appreciate your feedback. With the reminders out of the way, I am excited to introduce this session.

Some of you may know one of our speakers who’s joined us before, Matt Reuters. He is co-founder and CTO of Hybrid. Previously, he was a senior engineer at AWS and president of Bentech, which is Amazon’s black employee network tech chapter focused on recruiting, retaining, and developing diverse talent.

A lifeline athlete, Ruters transition from rugby to triathlons after his shoulders gave out and recently picked up surfing. I am jealous of all those skills. I would die if I did a triathlon.

Our next speaker is Mottz. He previously led core product teams at Whoop and AICS, a mobile app rollup company. In parallel, he was a member of the US national rowing team.

Incredible. Before entering the tech industry, Mottz was a research associate publishing on AI and health at Harvard. Those are some credentials.

So, let’s welcome our speakers. As we do that, I would love for you to put in the chat, are you interested in creating a product or starting a company? If you’re interested or you’ve done so, would love for you to drop that in the chat as they come up to stage.

Ah, welcome. Hey everyone. Hey Geneva.

We’re excited. So please drop your welcome in the chat. I’m going to start with a couple framing questions to just get our convo started and then we are going to open it up to the audience.

So again, drop your Q&A questions in the chat. But would love to start you know really to talk a little bit about your journey read both your buyers incredible journeys and so how did you know it was the right time to like leave more established companies and build something of your own and Matt I’ll start with you. Yeah.

No and also just want to say thanks so much for for having us love CodePath and and the emerging engineering summit. So I had worked at at Amazon for my whole career out out of college and was fortunate enough to have some mentors who had taken sabbaticals during their tenure and and they encouraged me and they said hey look like if you’re able to do it and your manager is is cool with it like you should you should absolutely do that. And so it was I felt like it was at the right time for me to just take some time do nothing get bored.

And so I took four months off. And it was during that time that I started to think a bit more deeply about what’s next kind of for me in in my career. And in those months leading up to that, I’d been talking a lot with Mottz and Ben and Shu our our two other co-founders about hybrid about, you know, maybe building something.

And by the end of it, basically realized I don’t think I’ll get another chance to to build something with my best friends. Maybe ever again in my life and so you know I figured it was it was a good opportunity to take the job. Awesome.

How about you Mottz? Yeah, very similar to to what Ruters was describing where I was very fortunate to get to work at Whoop which was a really in my mind category defining company in the in the health tech space. And through spending time there got to meet my co-founders Shu and Ben who worked at Whoop and and Rutters as well through the Boston scene.

And I it was just like this moment of like you know when are you ever going to get this many good teammates in who are all ready to start a company at the same time. You know life like you never really know how it’s going to go and so when all the stars align you kind of I think have to go for it. We’re lucky to have you know supportive friends and family who could make that happen and like the worst case didn’t seem that bad and so we went for it.

Was anyone in your life like you guys are crazy to be leaving like established small everybody was on board. I I I I definitely got to live with that from my mom but you know it’s good. It’s you know good mom feedback you know.

Yeah. Yeah. I’m still teaching my mom how to create a reel on Instagram.

So I feel like tech stuff, you know, their above their playground. So what were like the kind of building off that, what were like the scariest unknowns for you when leaving the corporate world and how did you manage them? And Matt would maybe like to start with you there.

Yeah. No, of course. Like to your point, you know, we had just spent the start of our career kind of getting into this to these positions at these companies that of course are kind of desirable to to work at.

And to your point, like people are like, "And now you’re going to like throw it all away to like go make some app." it was scary to be like, you know, I just finally got to that like dream job that I had. Like do I really want to jump out of it quickly? And I think how I reconciled that was or at least now like one year in I look back and I say like hey hybrid’s going really well but you know if something happened and we had to stop tomorrow I think I’d be a much better so as a be a much better product manager today after just a year of of being a founder.

And so it it feels like it’s been the right decision so far. And Matt, anything you want to add? Yeah, I would I would plus one, you know, the stat the statistics on how many startups are successful are incredibly low.

And so purely I think for me one of the biggest risks was was financial including the fact that my fiance is one of our co-founders as well. And so it’s kind of both of us now have this financial potential in insecurity and kind of some ways to to to think through that and that we’ve kind of m thought about those risks are we have both been kind of saving up in our careers up to this and so we feel like there’s enough of a cushion there in that regard. The other thing that’s really helpful is, and and I shout this out every time, Amazon has a really good what they call a boomerang policy, which basically means you can leave Amazon and come back with effectively a really easy interview.

You only interview your hiring manager within one year. And so that kind of feels like a all right, I have at least one year to go try the thing. We are coming up on the one-year anniversary of of hybrid So my and I’m very happy to say I’m like heads down on hybrid and and yeah excited for what the future has for us.

That’s awesome. So could you tell us a little bit about like how you developed hybrid its intent and like how you you kind of shared how you decided to start the business but what did it actually look like to launch your product and whoever feels like they want to chime in there. Well, do you want to start with it?

You were in early brainstorms. Sure, I’ll take it away. So as you guys might have gotten from our our bios, you know, all of us working on hybrid are pretty serious athletes ourselves.

And so in terms of how we got to the initial idea, we were just building something that we wanted to see in the world ourselves. And I think like at first it was like, oh, maybe this could be a cool side project. And then it was like, oh, maybe this is something that like, you know, we can just make a like a small business out of it.

And then now it’s like oh like we should really like we can make this a big company if we if we do this right. And we can go into lots of detail in the session on like what the earliest weeks of launching this looked like. But you know what it looked like for us once we were all fully heads down working on hybrid.

We really pushed ourselves to get paying customers really really early on. I think within you know, a couple weeks we had and and and no offense to to Matt here, but like we had we had a very bare bones product that was that was ready, but we did get, you know, our first paying what we call founding members on that and then we just kept iterating with them from there and just every week adding adding more and more people. And I think that was the right way to do it.

Yeah, a a common a common phrase that is used is that if your customer’s problem is is like painful enough, if your product solves their problem, your customers will will pay for it and we’ll put up with it. So, you know, our design was like super janky. It didn’t feel really slick, but we allowed users to accurately track both their strength and cardio.

And and that was something that they really wanted to do. And so, you know, they put up with maybe the the sharp edges on our UI, but and that early feedback was really invaluable to to getting us off the ground. Yeah, that’s awesome.

So, I know you’re part of a Y Combinator cohort and we have a lot of, you know, attendees who are interested maybe in in doing something like that in the future. Could you walk through like what that process looked like to get accepted and kind of how your experience has been? Yeah, sure.

I I can jump on it. So what’s cool about Y Cominator among many things is the application process is super standardized. It’s not like you know sometimes VC in my mind is like very like the venture capital world can be kind of like nebulous and like smoking mirrors but Y cominator is very standardized.

There’s four batches every year. The application as far as I can tell hasn’t changed very much from from batch to batch. So on the Y cominator website you can find the the application.

The questions I think are very helpful in terms of fleshing out what is it that you actually want to build and and how do you actually want to build a business around this. And I really encourage everyone to apply well before you feel ready. For one, going through the application will challenge your thinking and you’ll have a better thought process afterwards.

For two, even if you don’t get in, showing repeated attempts, I think actually YC likes to see that. And I’ll be super candid like we the first time we applied, we got rejected with like no no interview, no nothing. And then the second time was when we got in.

That was a common theme. I think 50% of the companies in our batch had gotten in not on their first application. And we even had a story from one of the YC partners who said he applied to YC times and I think the first five times he was rejected.

That was when there was still like only one or two batches a year. And then on his sixth time he got in and he founded Pager Duty which was the first license company to go public. So definitely apply early and often.

Yeah. And Matt, I would love to ask maybe like a bit of a follow-up which is like what is your relationship within the cohort like? Like is it a supportive environment where you guys are bouncing ideas off each other?

Is it doggy dog of like which product, you know, which is going to rise to the top? Like how has that experience been? Yeah, I I often say one of the most underrated and perhaps underspoken about benefits and aspects of YC is is the community of it.

Both within the batch and just throughout all YC companies. If you’re in YC, you can just email any other YC company. It doesn’t matter if they’re unicorn or or if they’re early like you.

And you can hop on a call with them. Like everyone’s always willing to to chat and take time. But the other part of YC is during during the batch every two weeks you you meet with a kind of a small cohort about 10 companies within your within your batch and you make bi-weekly goals.

And part of this is to kind of state your goal out loud. You have a bit more, you know, pressure, you know, healthy pressure to to meet those goals after you state them. And and so you do that over time.

Our batch ended, you know, a year ago now, and we are still doing those bi-weekly office hours, we call them, with our 10 companies. And, you know, we often say they’re they’re kind of like therapy sessions because everyone’s, you know, you’re everyone’s like working through stuff. There’s ups, there’s downs, there’s ups, there’s downs.

And you get a lot of really good outside feedback from perspectives that, you know, you might not normally have around you. And so, yeah, the the YC community is is really strong and, I really love it. That’s awesome.

So I’d love to chat a little bit about like the traits you’ve developed, that make you a successful founder and the things that people may be interested in developing if they’re interested in like leading a company. So, what traits do you think are most important for you all that you’ve developed across your time working on hybrid that like are important for startup founders to have? And Mottz, maybe I’ll start with you.

Sure. I’ll let Matt be the judge of if I’m good at this or not, but I I think you need to you know, like Matt said, there’s so many ups and downs in in a startup, and you need to know how to kind of ride that wave. It’s much more unpredictable than being in at a larger company.

You can’t let the lows get too low. You can’t let the highs get too high. I think you need to at least I think you need to have this kind of like irrational optimism without going crazy with it.

Like the lows you’re just like ah whatever like we’ll we’ll get over it and then the highs are like we’re going to the moon. So you just need to I think learn how to ride that wave. And I do think that you know while there’s many founders who can do that when they’re like 19 years old or whatever like that probably wasn’t me when when I was that age like it’s been very helpful to have a couple of years of both work experience and then I think through like things like athletics and those sort of things you just learn how to be in a team and kind of like control your your own head space a little bit and make sure you’re not like dragging other people down or being being super negative all the time, those sorts of things.

Yeah. Yeah. I I do think you’re you’re great at those.

You got the co- one one thing that I think is really important, especially if you have multiple co co-founders or if if you have co-founders and and you’re not a solo founder is trust. I’ve seen and spoken to a lot of people who end up You know, there’s this stat that’s basically like the majority of companies don’t die because they run out of money. They die because of founder breakups.

And I think the easiest way to prevent founder breakups is if you know and you create like real trust across your founding team. So, and I I I really appreciate that we have that in hybrid. So like Mottz is the king of product and I know that like I can’t do product better than Mottz and and like that’s actually a really good thing because because it it helps us kind of create this environment where you know everyone knows what they’re doing and isn’t going to kind of second guessess maybe you know the decisions that someone else makes.

Similarly, I write better code than Moths. And so if I have some like technical suggestions like you know MZ is be like, "Oh man, like I can’t believe Matt decided to do that." so I I I think that’s a super important thing from like a team dynamic perspective. Yeah.

Awesome. I’d love to ask like one followup on kind of like traits. What traits do you think you carried over from like big tech that serve you well in this environment?

And was there anything you had to unlearn about like working in a larger company to adjust? And Matt, maybe I’ll start with you. Yeah, one thing that I’ve been really surprised that has carried over is so I was a senior engineer, basically like a tech lead at Amazon.

And so my role was often probably like 50 like 40 to 50% of my time was coding. The rest of my time was more kind of strategy design docs and actually unblocking less tenur less senior engineers to to go deliver some some larger product and with the advent of AI my role is actually quite similar you know we have Mottz Ben and Shu all writing code and my time is actually much best leveraged unblocking them sometimes so that our total output is actually higher than if it was just me hands down coding, you know, 100% of my time. So, that’s one thing that I was I’ve been very surprised that has carried over from from my experience.

That’s awesome, Matt. Yeah, I can say that you know, I think Matt being at Amazon, Amazon was was and is at a way larger scale than where Whoop wasn’t and is today. So, Whoop when I joined was in that like you know I think there was maybe like a hundred or so employees and then when I left it was about a thousand.

So really got to see that that like big on-ramp that’s not quite the earliest days but also like definitely wasn’t in the clear yet. And so I think what I really felt at Whoop was a sense of urgency. And I think we feel the same at at hybrid.

Where every day really matters because you know we need to be on a certain trajectory. Something that’s actually been nice about founding our own company is that there’s that sense of urgency, but we have full control over all those levers. And so there’s not as much like thrash.

I think, you know, I absolutely loved my time working at Whoop, but as companies get bigger, there’s just naturally a few more stakeholders where it’s like go as fast as you can, but in like a bunch of different directions. And so, one thing that’s been nice about founding is that, you know, you’re going as fast as you can, but you also get to decide what direction to go. Yeah, that’s got to be really freeing to just be able to like execute.

You know, when things get bloated and organizations like committee for everything and a propos, you know, it’s like you get kind of tied up in the weeds. Yeah, that’s those are great insights. Just a reminder because we’re going to transition to Q&A in a minute.

Please upvote any questions you want to make sure we get to and if you’ve dropped questions, put them in the chat. So I’d love to you mentioned AI, Matt, so I would love to drill in a little bit there. You know, obviously AI has kind of changed the game for startups.

You can do a lot more with a lot less. And so how have you utilized AI with hybrid, especially as like a small team starting up and and in a crowded space? How do you guys utilize it dayto-day?

Yeah, there’s there’s three main places that that we use AI on a day-to-day basis. I think the first is at a high level having something to to brainstorm with both about like architectural and and and at the design level. Since I am the only one on our team who’s technical by trade, it’s been super valuable having AI to kind of poke holes in in kind of my design docs and and make sure we’re we’re covering all the edge cases.

The second place is probably the most popular one everyone’s hearing about is is writing code. We’re all using AI to write code. And one thing we’ve actually seen, you know, if anyone is using AI to write code themselves, is the AI has actually been a lot more effective to to do its job right the first time.

If you actually your first prompt is to create an implementation plan and then you go review the plan and then you start a new thread to go implement just that that markdown file that you create. We’ve seen that to like really increase the accuracy and the number of kind of iterations you need to do when you’re actually writing the code. So that’d be my my little side tip that I’d drop in there.

And then the last one is reviewing code. Especially since there’s now four people writing code. We have AI code review tools.

Our favorite one right now is called Greile. Really good at finding bugs. And it also helps delever my time because I don’t have to look at the other rest of the team’s code reviews until they’ve already addressed all the AI comments.

And so, you know, it’s a whole round, maybe multiple rounds of iteration that that of time that that saved for me. That’s awesome. And MZ, how do you utilize AI and like your workflows?

Yeah, I think that’s where it’s been super interesting this last year. For everyone’s context, I was not a very or like and still I’m not like a very technical founder. You know, my focus at Whoop was on on product design and that was kind of the intention for my focus to be at at hybrid as well.

But what tools like I found replet really useful. I’ve been using AI to do essentially like rapid prototyping of the features that we want to build and like we would never ship into production like something that I at least at current levels like we would never ship anything into production that I’ve built so to say on Replet but it’s been a very useful way to try out ideas talk directly to our users and be like hey like you know imagine this was a little bit prettier would you like to use this give me your feedback on this and internally like hey are all talking about the same thing here. Like this this is kind of what I’m imagining as this feature.

I found a really useful way to think about edge cases that I wasn’t initially perceiving. Like if I just saw a design on a Figma, sometimes I can be like, "Yeah, it looks like it looks good to me." But by going and then actually trying it into Replet, it’s like, "Oh, you know what happens if there’s no data there? Like what’s the empty state or like what does the back button functionality look like?" It’s really been a good forcing function to think about those things.

And I’ll just say it’s been very empowering where I’m like, hey, I can get a lot further than I ever could before. And then I can work with the rest of a really good team to actually get like the productionalized version of that vision out out into the world. And so I’m having a blast right now.

Yeah. Making like it’s just way more efficient with your time it sounds like in both both areas, which is great. We’re about to get to 10 questions.

Probably have like one more I’d love to ask you. You know, a lot of our students and attendees who are here are juggling a ton of stuff, right? Like they’re doing school, part-time jobs, work, internships, full-time jobs.

So, how do you guys navigate burnout when like you are the main like you know what your future depends on what you’re producing right now and like how do you manage that and particularly like maybe from an athletes mindset like how have you built either like habits or something to help you you know manage burnout and managing your time and and Mottz maybe I’ll start with you. Sure. Yeah.

No, I I totally get it. Like I’ve I’ve been in the exact same position like you know, you might maybe it’s school or like you have this like day job and then you might have this other it’s a dream of a side business or like in my case it was my athletic career. Like at peak I’d basically wake up just before 5 a.m.

Train, walk to the office after work, go to the boat house, do another session. Like it was a it was a busy time and I’m like I’m already out. Yeah.

I think there’s like there’s all the kind of best practices around like you know sleep hygiene and nutrition that I I think go a long way. The one thing that I I’ll kind of throw into the discussion is I do think one way to that gets you through those times is that if you’re if what you’re working on is actually aligned to what you really want to do it. I’m not saying you’ll never feel burned out.

You’ll never feel tired or exhausted or anything, but like I found that’s I’m much more excited or I’ve never been happier to like work on hybrid related tasks because 95% of the tasks are like this is like what I can’t stop thinking about like I just want to get excited. Yeah. And then I you know on the 5% of tasks I’m like today I’m really tired like I have my teammates who are also doing that.

And so like I’m not saying that burnout isn’t isn’t a problem or a topic for us, but I do think that that makes a big difference. I’ve been in situations not at hybrid or at Whoop where I was like, man, I really don’t care about like the thing that we’re building today. And yeah, like it’s way easier to to check out in that world.

Awesome. Yeah. I think one thing that helps me and it’s it’s always easier said than done but is is you just have to be like ruthless with prioritization because you’re always going to have you know 10 times the amount of things to to do than like you have time in the day and and so you really have to be like brutally honest with yourself and like is this thing on my list actually the number one priority?

Is this actually going to bring the business money? Is this actually going to help the business grow? Can this wait till next week?

I think asking yourself questions like that really help kind of narrow down the list and and it kind of ties back into our our you know chat earlier about like when you launch you’re going to launch really early and and you’re always kind of launching whether it’s your first launch or new features or new products. And to launch as early as possible and get that feedback as early as possible, you have to like cut cut the stuff that you think is going to be good, but like it’s actually not critical. Yeah.

On the more dayto-day, I find that just like blocking off chunks of time for what I’m going to work on helps a lot with like the the decision fatigue of like what should I work on now? So, I really like just having the first thing I do for the day is like chunk off kind of what I need to do. Yeah, that’s great.

Yeah. You know, Michael Seel, who obviously part of the Y Combinator founding group, he did a session at San Francisco where you were there, Matt, and he was talking about like a student asked like, "When do you know it’s time to do a V2?" And and he was like, "What do you like?" He was like, "Don’t ask." You guys already know. He’s like, "You should always like the V2 is always happening, right?" Like it’s never it’s never done.

And so that constant development and like thinking, it does take prioritization to figure out like what’s the best place for me to focus my time right now? And understanding some things are going to have to be pushed. Okay.

I said it was the last one, but this is actually the last one. So, you know, you guys are your own bosses now, which is way different than reporting to someone. I would imagine like your athletic background helped you develop some like traits that serve you well in this space, but for folks that maybe don’t have that experience or interested in like I want to do something on my own, how do you maintain like discipline and structure in your work knowing like you could just sit on the couch and watch TV all day because you don’t have a boss?

How do you manage that piece of it? From Oh, no. You go. So, you go.

You go. You go. You go.

Okay. It’s a lot of that basically like so no, you’re exactly right. Like there’s no there’s no like taskmaster who’s going to tell you like this is what you have to do today.

I’d say that one thing that keeps me you know aside from the fact that like our entire financial future is dependent on this work like the the thing that keeps me really motivated is that every day we we meet just like 15 minutes we call it pulse check kind of like a standup a little bit less formal and we’re not like grading each other on what everyone did but we’re checking in on you know, what’s the progress that we’ve made on the things that we set out to do? And I’m really motivated to be like, you know, I have really good teammates and they’re always crushing it. And so I don’t want to be the guy who’s like lagging behind and like has just been playing video games.

And so I think there’s like this like healthy dynamic of, you know, you don’t want to let let the team down. And I think that that’s kind of a a flow that pushes all of us. Shared like shared accountability being something that you guys focus on.

Yeah. And and Matt, how about you? Yeah.

I think it’s it’s similar to to the burnout question. Mottz was actually helping me with my own training plan that I’ve been making. And Mottz said, if you’re not going to enjoy it, like, don’t do it.

And this is in the context of like, you know, should I do mobility, you know, should I schedule a yoga session on my rest days? And and I and I think that there’s an aspect there as well as like if you’re not gonna have fun building a company, it’s going to be really hard to build a company. Like you have to get a lot of motivation from that and from whatever you’re building and the benefit that you’re going to give your your customers and you know, whoever those may be.

Because it is long. It’s a it’s a long journey. It’s not easy, but if you’re like, okay, like this is actually really fun.

I think that’s that’s going to be just the biggest intrinsic motivation at the end of the day. Absolutely. Okay, we’re going to go to some questions from the audience.

Make sure you’re up voting, dropping your questions. You guys seem like you have a great vibe. You obviously get along.

We got a lot of questions about how you pick somebody to do this with. So, how do you choose a partner and learn how to trust them? Would love to maybe Mottz, I’ll start with you on this one.

Sure. I think picking a co-founder is probably the single most important decision that you can make at the genesis of your company. We’ve gotten to, you know, now we’re like a year into doing this and like to to Matt’s point around like what causes company to dies, like we I think it’s only ever really been like co-founder issues that I’ I’ve seen so far.

So, like I can’t emphasize enough how important this decision is. I you know I think it’s not too different from like picking up like a relationship partner or like marrying someone like you’re basically committing to you know in our case you should be kind of willing to commit to working to like 10 years of your life or something like that with with this person. So if you’re not being like it’s a it’s a hell yes then you shouldn’t you shouldn’t do it.

That’s great advice. Plus one. No, I think Moth hit the nail on the head.

If you can’t have like open candid conversations with someone and give them feedback and be open to feedback from them, probably not the right business partner. How did you guys like assess if that like were you like interviewing each other? Like how I know you like you knew each other.

How did you know those things if that makes sense? Like how did you know it was the right fit? I mean, you know, we were saying before this, we’ve been friends for for five years.

We stayed in like a little you know, house together during COVID. And this is actually a question on on the YC application is like what other projects have you done altogether? So for context, on a whim, Mottz Shu, she was our other co-founder and I we we DJed at Porchfest in Boston.

Love that. I’ve like put together some little like AI scripts to scrape Reddit for some of Mottz’s product launches. And so it’s it’s another reason to just just fill out the application because you start to see, oh, we actually do have a history of like working together and like working together pretty well and and it’s been fun you know, working together on those things over the way.

So yeah, that’s great. Okay, next question from Carl. From your perspective as co-founders, what’s a skill or mindset that new grads often underestimate but turns out to be critical for thriving a startup environment?

I love this question. Oh, Boston. Okay, love it.

Matt, I’ll start with you. Yeah, I think one one skill that can tend to be underestimated is like having autonomy and and finding finding solutions to problems, not just bringing problems. It’s a startup.

It’s it’s scrappy. Like we ship really fast. And and and there’s going to be some scrappy things along the way.

And so it’s always about finding that balance of this thing works. But like you know like how long will this first version of this take us before we have to you know go and fix it. And I think it can be easy to to get in a case where you just kind of sit and like okay what do I do next?

What do I do next? And so it’s really important to thrive in a in a startup to be like looking for like hey I saw this like I think this can be better and actually I think I can make this better in like five minutes. And so kind of just looking for all that improvement and being able to just say hey I fixed this without even having to to be told to do so.

Yeah. Yeah. That’s such a good call.

M anything you want to add there? Yeah. No I think that’s exactly right.

The the thing that came to mind for me was interpersonal communication in general. Probably writing as a specific example, but that’s a hard skill in the sense that I think when you’re just growing up and in school like you’re just communicating naturally. So you don’t actually necessarily know if you’re like really good at this or or really bad.

But one thing I like that became apparent like you know when I meet when I became when I joined the workforce is someone can be a brilliant brilliant engineer or whatever skill set that it is but if they are like not a joy to work with or really hard to work with because they can’t communicate their ideas like it doesn’t really work like you can be brilliant and not have a lot of impact because you can’t get the team aligned to what you want to do you’re just no one wants to work with you because like you’re not fun to be around. Not even fun, you’re just bad to be around. I think it’s one of those things where you like I would have never thought of it as a skill set, but I’ve I think seen so many examples of it’s so obvious when you don’t have this that really made me appreciate you know like on our team that it’s something that I think that everyone on the team’s boss with.

Yeah, I hope everybody heard that. Yeah, the communication is so critical. Even if you’re at the start of your career and you’re just trying to get through a technical interview, being able to like communicate how you’d approach a problem is so much more important than like just getting to the answer.

And so that’s that’s really great advice. Okay, next question from Jose. He has two questions.

We’re going to tackle one first, which is what made others like why cominator users etc. believe that hybrid could be launched in the market and grow like apart from your passion. So I think what this question is getting to like how did you pitch the value of hybrid when you were kind of just getting started. And Matt maybe I’ll start with you.

Yeah. There’s this term that that’s used a lot of people you I’m sure everyone’s heard of product market fit. Yeah.

But there’s also something that we talk about at YC called founder market fit where you have been in this space for so long like you really deeply know the problem yourself. And so the solution you’re building is for yourself. Like if you are your own best customer, that’s a really that’s really helpful because it really tightens the feedback loop on on kind of improving your product.

And so one thing that I believe and and they don’t really tell you, you know, why you got in like explicitly, but one thing one common thread I I think is that it was clear that we had founder market fit given our experiences we shared all together and and our athletic backgrounds. Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. Don’t the only thing I can think to add is that just remember you don’t need every single person in the world to think that your startup is a good idea.

You just need the people that your your customers essentially. And so, while I think at a high level, especially when we started, an app for people that do both strength and cardio seemed kind of niche, and you know, if you asked 100 people, 100 random people, I bet like 90 would have been like, ah, like, does the world need that? But for the 10 people out of those hundred that are that sort of athlete that is doing strength training and cardio and you know really cares about their performance, it was like a oh I need that right now.

And so I’ll much rather take you know the a smaller group of people that absolutely are like have their hair on fire with this problem rather than something that you know every single person when you talk to them is like oh yeah like I I checked it out but like actually doesn’t want it that badly. Yeah. Absolutely.

Okay, that’s great. All right, next question is from Ryan, which is, "Are you hiring?" And actually just heard backstage that they hired one of our students from ESF as an intern, and that’s working well. So, Matt, I know you guys are growing.

So, would love to hear about opportunities with hybrid. Yeah, we are growing. We’re looking for we’re looking for interns specifically in in engineering and and in marketing.

Yeah, for context, at the last CodePath event we had in San Francisco, we had an intern join us for two weeks full-time. He’s now on part-time and he he shipped a feature to basic yeah basically you shipped a feature to production in like a week and a half. And so like that kind of speed and kind of attitude is something that we’re definitely looking for.

If you’re interested in in that, please feel free to reach out to Mottz andor myself on LinkedIn. We can give you more more details there. Awesome.

Okay. I love it. You’re about to get bombarded on LinkedIn mod.

Okay. Next question. And this is actually semi-related, but as you start to build, you know, your organization, are there, this is a question, are there specific qualities that align with either Hybrid’s mission or culture that you’re looking for in candidates?

So, like as you grow, how are you communicating like what the values of hybrid are? And Matt, I’ll start with you. So, Hybrid is a fitness company.

And so, something, you know, especially talking about fun market fit, something we always ask, you know, people we’re hiring is, you know, what does your fitness look like? You know, are you like, do you enjoy working out? You know, talk, you know, we’ve talked a lot today about like you need the work to be fun to like get up and do it every day.

And so something we definitely do look for is you know do you enjoy working out do you relate to the product like do you would would you find the product useful yourself because that also helps then as you’re building something because all of our time is so so so scarce it basically lets people iterate and think about those edge cases on themselves without having to come to the team ask questions go back you know again like it’s this being autonomous. Like those are really things that that we look for in our in our candidates. Awesome.

I would just say like working out and enjoying working out are two very different things. So important distinction lots. Anything you want to add there?

Yeah. No, I I think Matt said exactly right. Like I think we’re looking for people that are motivated to use the pro the product themselves and then if they see something that you know they think could be better are like coming with solutions of like hey I just did this workout and it was really annoying the way like hybrid this did this or that and I think we should do this and like here’s a prototype of how that could work is like we we love to see that.

It’s kind of like how we’ve gotten to this point ourselves. We’re like we’re using hybrid every day in our own training. And it’s it’s our startup, so we get to build whatever we want.

And so like when something is not what we want, we go and and fix it. And I think that can I think anyone can have that feeling like it’s not that you need to be some you know we have athletes on the platform who are like ex-Navy Seals you know training firemen Kona Olympic medalists but we have athletes from all walk of life who just it’s just people who care about their performance at the end of the day and so if you care at all about like health and fitness and want to see something in the world that makes that better then I think we can be a good fit. The the the other thing I I would plus one on on Ma’s thing about you know you like kind of looking for these opportunities is that is also very applicable in nontechnical aspects like if you’re like hey I saw this really cool Instagram reel from this other fitness company.

I think we could do something similar for hybrid. Like we’re trying to build a brand and and something that that people kind of like empathize and like identify with. And so being on social media is so critical to our business.

And so on the the marketing intern side, like if that’s something that you’re interested in, even if you’re really, hey, I just love taking videos and pictures on the side. Those are all kind of things that tie into, you know, what you what you enjoy. And yeah, because you guys are really building a community.

Like Matt, I see your, you know, like your little run post on LinkedIn. I’m like, "Oh my god, he already worked out. I gotta go." so like you’re already like kind of building that community.

And so it’s really important to have people Yeah. That can like support that kind of community building obviously on social that’s really important related to communities I would love you know you talked about the Y cominator batch next question is like more about you know additional resources so what resources or community have helped you most as founders especially like just when starting out are there things that come to mind outside of Y cominator that have been really helpful for you and and Mottz maybe I’ll start with you sure not to say Y cominator but there’s lots of free resources about YC that I think are super helpful as well. Like there’s a great YC has a number of great podcasts.

The Light Cone podcast is a good one. There’s a podcast called Dalton and Michael which are which is run by two of YC. Dalton was our ended up being our our group partner.

So there’s like lots of great content there. The YC website has things like you know when it’s time to go fundraising like YC invented the what’s called a safe which is just a a deal structure in which you can do fundraising. So there’s lots of free Y cominator stuff that’s that’s available.

I I’ll leave it at that. Matt, can you think of Yeah. Yeah, I I think the other thing that might be counterintuitive at first, but is actually your your non founder friends, like I think just just having friends that aren’t necessarily in the thick of it all the time.

It’s really good just like unplug and those relationships are super important like over time. And so like not spending 100% of your time on your startup and like you know taking a breath one just helps for the longevity like it is a marathon. You’re running really fast but you know it’s still a marathon and having those opportunities to to kind of get a fresh you know discussion and and fresh perspective is really helpful.

Yeah that’s yeah like just having somewhere you can go and be like I don’t have to focus on this right now and like I can just get that support. Yeah, that’s awesome. Okay, next question.

I would love for you guys to put on your hats and pretend like you’re back in time and and decide Yes, thank you. And decide that this is something you want to do. So, next question is, let’s say you have an idea you really believe in, maybe earlier than you guys took it on.

So, how would you start out in college, maybe like if you went back in time to either scale a business as a younger founder, like what kind of advice would you have for somebody who maybe has an idea right now, but isn’t quite sure yet how to approach the development of it? And whoever feels Matt is ready. I feel super passionate about this one.

And I’ll go back in in in my time, but I’ll assume the year is still 2025. My biggest piece of advice is just build it. You don’t have to be technical.

You know, Amoth can maybe speak about this more, but like the AI tools are so good. Like you can set up a working product that writes to a database and does all of these things purely with just prompting. Like the products are really good.

And so build the thing. You could probably build it in a weekend and just start getting user feedback and honestly start charging people money for it. You know, like a really big trap that is really hard not to fall into is giving your product away for free.

Like it won’t because if people won’t pay for it, it’s not a strong enough problem. So you’re either not solving it the right way or or maybe it’s not the right problem. So, I think just get just get out there and and and do the thing.

Yeah, I I couldn’t agree more. I think like when I think back to what I was like when I was like 20 212 on the one hand I also just like I wasn’t quite I don’t think I was ready like I wanted to mostly like row boats and and ride my bike. So like I don’t know what I was doing at 21.

So and there’s plenty of other good things to do. It’s like that’s okay too. Like it doesn’t you don’t need to be like not everyone is going to be that like 19-year-old dropout founder or whatever.

Like there’s no rush. I’m really thankful to have had a couple years like alluded to before of like getting work experience, getting athletic experience, whatever is relevant to you. But if you are like no, I need to found right now, then Matt is exactly right.

Like go out and get a customer for something really scrappy. When I think back to how how I would have thought about it is like I was I was very like academic like not super scrappy. I would have been like oh like you know what’s the like business plan or like how does this get to be a billion dollar company and like you can spend all you could spend forever just like tinkering around with slideshows and and like like business plans or whatever and it’s all like essentially garbage.

You’re way better off if you can it doesn’t need to be like the next billion dollar company. Like it it would just be cool to have a project that makes some money as like an experiment. And you’ll learn a ton doing that and maybe that is the idea that goes all the way and maybe that’s just practice for like the idea that comes after that.

So I would say go and just do it. So just do the thing. Yeah, I love that.

Yeah, because you can ideulate for forever but just see what’s happening and and test it. Yeah, that’s great. A follow-up, Matt, that we actually got as a question.

What’s the best AI coding tool in your opinion? The age-old question. My answer is it depends.

Which I’m sure you’ll be frustrated with. So, I kind of think about it as as like tiers or or levels almost. And it depends both on your technical ability and also kind of your goal.

So at the you know at at the bottom level is basically these these higher level tools things like v0ero replet lovable bolt bault new that’s actually a good one for for if you want to build a mobile app. These are platforms that that don’t actually you’re not really interacting with the code you’re really just interacting with the prompt. Mottz is like a a power user of of these tools.

Replet is is Mottz’s favorite. And so if you’re looking for like that first prototype, just get something out the door. I would go for for something in that base tier.

Like, and to be clear, like I still use those all the time. Like I made over the weekend a a tool to basically analyze a high rocks race analysis. Basically take your data and present it in in a cool way.

And I wanted something quick. I’m really bad at design and these tools are pretty good at making web apps that look pretty slick. And so you you know you can you can get really far with that.

However, that kind of brings us to the second tier of these are tools that you’re using the AI to write code, not necessarily build the product. And so these are things like cursor and wind surf. And so what my workflow looks like is I’ll start in v 0ero, get the UI looking pretty, and then export that code, and then work in either cursor or wind surf.

This is then, now this is another like it depends where I find that wind surf tends to be better for more front-end you know, whether it’s a web app or something like that products. Or where cursor tends to be maybe a little better for for backend. And so there’s really this whole suite and you just have to try them all because Shu my co-founder like we tended to prompt differently like my prompts are a bit more technical hers are a bit less technical and you know she likes wind surf better and and I like cursor better and so you really have to try them all.

They all have really generous free tiers if not they’re like $20 a month. And so yeah I think you know just just go go try them out. A lot of them give you a few prompts for free, too.

Okay, that’s great. Hope people took notes. And you can Sorry, I can rant on that for days.

So, no, no, no. Great. And I love like hearing the specific ways you’re using it, too. That’s super helpful.

I thought this was a great question from Luis. As hybrid grows, how do you guys handle scaling? So, do you do you first prioritize building features at work or design a scalable architecture or a mix of both?

And so whoever wants to chime in there. Yeah, maybe I I have some thoughts on the on like the technical side like like infrastructure scaling, but Mottz, you want to maybe start with like how we think about building products for for growth or not? Yeah.

Yeah. I I think it’s good to kind of parse those things out a little bit. From a from a like product perspective, we want to stay really focused on the hybrid athlete.

So, someone that does both strength and cardio. We’ve even gone like more specific than that. Like our core user right now is someone who does these races called Hierrocks.

That’s becoming much more popular. Like probably has several wearables like like like I am right now. Probably like a couple years out of college up to like 45.

And so like we’ve been really focused on that niche and we intend to stay focused on that person for probably longer than you might expect. In the long run, we think like the engine that we’re building can essentially work for like any athlete that does any amount of strength andor cardio. But, we want to stay focused on that that core user.

And so then it’s just like kind of following like what does that user need to become stronger and faster. We’ve started with just helping them aggregate all of their training data in one spot. So that was like integrating with a bunch of different wearables.

Now we’re moving towards now that we have all that training data and we can do a cool analysis of it like what is the actual training plan from a world-class coach personalized to them that they should follow. Getting more prescriptive and the like, but it’s still focused on that core user. And so I think like to sum up, it’s we’ll keep adding more value to that person, but it’s it’s still on that value and we’re not going to chase like every single potential user for for a long long time.

So you have two watches. Is that what I saw? I have like a Garmin that has a watch face to track like running and then the Whoop band has no wearable has no watch face.

Okay. You’re like two chains but two watches. I love it.

Okay. Exactly. And there are many like me.

Buy new niche. Yeah. Right.

So, okay. So, sadly, we are coming to the end of this session. I think everybody has so many questions and we could be here all day.

You guys have been incredible. I would love to ask maybe one quick question then one final question. First is a lot of folks are interested in connecting with you.

I’m assuming it’s okay for them to hit you up on LinkedIn. Please fire away. Okay.

So, you can find both of them on LinkedIn. I would love to really wrap up by asking, you know, we ask this question in most of our sessions for folks particularly, let’s take the people interested in a startup. What’s like your top piece of advice for knowing that a lot of our folks here are early in their career.

So, what would be your top piece of advice for folks that are interested in starting their own company? And Matz, I feel like you’re ready. I’ll go to you first.

I’m always ready. I would say, and we’ve alluded to this a little bit, like if you’re going to do it, do it for something that you really really care about. Like if you’re, you know, I also would like to make a bunch of money with with hybrid.

But like if revenue or like income maximization is like the only framework that you’re looking at it, there’s like probably way less stressful high probability ways that you can you know make make good money. I would but like what’s beautiful about working on something that you care about like you might not care about fitness at all but there’s something that you that you care about is that you get to see the see the thing that you want to see in the world happen. And like it’s actually worth it to you know you have to take a pay cut for a while if you want to if you want to go build that or like you have you know maybe it doesn’t become that really big thing but you’re really proud of of bringing it into the world and so if you’re going to do a startup I would go find that thing like I couldn’t do this for more than like a couple weeks if I had to go build like I don’t want to pick on anyone but like some sort of like AI B2B SAS AI tech software or whatever but like we have other people in our batch who do are doing exactly that and like they love it.

Yeah, so I’d say find that thing. That’s great advice. Yeah, I feel like I feel like that’s definitely priority one.

I think at the tactical level if you’re interested in it. Yeah, I think again like like like start just start building something. You don’t have to quit your job immediately as soon as you decide like I want to start something, you know?

So start on the side, see what gets traction, see what doesn’t. And and then eventually, you know, as you see, and if you feel like, hey, yeah, like this is the this is this this is pretty solid, then you can kind of cross that road of, you know, I want to do this full-time, but there’s really not a lot preventing you from from getting started. So yeah, that’s great advice.

I think the passion is so important to emphasize because I mean you all know like if you don’t like your work it’s it’s the bulk of your life. You know, it’s where you spend the most time and so if you’re not passionate about it, it’s going to be a real drag. And way harder to like, you know, be in the space where you guys are, which is like doing something you love with people you like.

I mean, that’s really the dream. And so I really appreciate your guys’ time today. Let’s drop our gratitude for Mottz and Matt in the chat.

You heard them say to connect with you, so really good luck on on the LinkedIn request. You’re going to see a popup right now for the resume book and event survey. Please complete that.

That will get you in the resume book that we will share with Matt and team as well. And so take a few minutes to complete that. I hope you see all the gratitude in the chat.

You guys were incredible. Thank you so much for your time. And look forward to hopefully having you back soon.

And next year maybe we’ll be talking about how much you guys have scaled in the massive product and it’s always part two. So, yeah, thanks so much, guys. We really appreciate it.

Thanks everybody for joining. We’re gonna close out with a quick video from Bobby D and we’ll see you in something soon. Thanks so much everybody.

I know, I know. We’re getting to the end of the summit. Ah, emoji to your eye face.

I feel it. But guess what? I’m more than excited and happy that you all have gotten to the end of our event here because let me tell you one thing, it’s one for the books and I hope you have a chance to see everything.

But if not, I got some information that’ll help you. So, this brings us to the end of the 2025 CodePath Emerging Engineer Summit. We want to say thank you for attending, for learning, connecting, and engaging with us across these past three days.

We hoped you enjoyed it. We’d like to extend a special thank you to our EES sponsors which includes B 10, Bill, GitHub, Microsoft, Pluralsight, PWC, ServiceNow, Snowflake, and ZS. Also, a big thank you to all the companies who joined us across the week sharing their knowledge, expert advice, and opportunities with our attendees.

We hope you got a chance to connect with them and learn about the opportunities. Now, don’t forget all sessions have been recorded and will be shared via YouTube and I hope you all look out for that link. We’d also like to share a link with you to complete our feedback survey.

Remember how important feedback is, right? And your resume will also be added to the EES 2025 official resume book, which we’ll share with all companies who took part. Watch out for the link, upload your resume, and let us know your experience here at the summit.

We hope you enjoy and leave feeling inspired with new connections and access the opportunities that will help you achieve your goals. Until next year, I’ll see you soon. Holl at your boy is Bobby B.