Benedikts

Cursor emailed me saying I'm top 1% of users in Riga over the last 6 months. I stopped using Cursor in November/December. Switched to Claude Code. Shipped enough in ~6 weeks to outrank people using it daily since. This is what a real CTO does.

Our demo could be a YC startup on its own.

First Latvian to get into @joinef . In Latvia, "funded dropout" isn't really a thing. The expected path runs through university and into a stable job - not through failed companies and second attempts. I've been building things for a while. Competitive coding as a kid, fine-tuning GPT-2 before many knew what that meant, a few companies since. The last one was Lindra - a browser agent that ranked top 3 on WebVoyager. We couldn't crack distribution and shut it down. The Bridge (by @joinef ) is two months in SF with founders from across Europe. <1.5% acceptance. The people in this room turned down offers from Palantir, left PhD tracks, walked away from the most promising startups in their home countries. Being around that kind of commitment changes what you think is reasonable. I met my co-founder @vfsenkevich here. BJJ world champion, very ambitious, great at sales. Working with him feels like being pulled by a Formula 1 car. We started working before the program officially began. We're building @tryharlow - AI agents for hotels. A $1.5T industry still running on software from the 90s. That shouldn't be happening in 2026.

One of those nights when I need to be sleeping, but my body wants to ship stuff instead

Worked my entire flight. It's amazing when an airline has starlink.

One quote about building startups that really stuck with me: "Nobody told you it will be easy"

Working alone in the office at 9 pm on a Saturday so my future kids can also work alone in an office at 9 pm on a Saturday. The dream is real.

Somewhat decent day of work, but felt like quite some more tokens should have passed through (probably due to coding with Sonnet)

Day 48–58 of building a VC-funded startup as a 20yo student. We are officially generating revenue. Updates: Hit Top-3 on WebVoyager benchmarks. Beat OpenAI’s Operator in accuracy. Investors demanded revenue -> We asked pilots to pay -> They said yes. First inbound leads starting to flow in. "Speedy Model" delayed to Jan (cooking something better). Lesson: If you want revenue, sometimes you just have to ask.

Day 41–47 of building a startup as a 20yo student. Less burnout, more shipping. Updates: Open Sourcing our infra this Friday (Benchmarking Top 3 globally). Launching a new high-speed/editable model on Monday. Pilots are piling up—market is bigger than I thought. Realized our startup owns 0.6% of all Cursor accounts in the country Still have no idea how to do PR, but we move.

Had a talk with my grandmother today,explained to her how difficult it is to get a job for people fresh out of uni, that there are less and less junior positions and people spend months looking for their first job. She responded with "Don't think about that, think about studies now"

Day 18–40 of building a startup as a 20yo student. Recovered from burnout and made some hard pivots. Updates: Fixed sleep schedule (bed at 23:00). Brain actually works now. Presented for a Uni scholarship: Judges didn't know what "RPA" or "Agents" were. Pivot: Rebuilding infra to go Open Source & SOTA (2x cheaper). Found out engineers at Big Tech are secretly using our product. Realised we don't have a single team photo for PR 💀 Currently building a self-improving hive-mind on the side while prepping the new model launch.

Day 18–21 of building a startup as a 20yo student (first clients & dev chaos) Still recovering from sleep deprivation (and I don’t even party 😭). Userbase keeps growing, but we’re barely keeping up with fixes. Started testing small apps on top of our tech - first one: eventscraper.lindra.ai Might actually save people hours if they see the value. Applied for an entrepreneurship scholarship at uni - we’ll see if 2 funded startups are enough 😅 Speedrunning revenue now. Every hour of sleep feels like lost shipping time, but I’ve learned my lesson there… almost.