What is your founder story?

Sep 18, 2026 · 6:03 PM UTC

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If you are a founder, join my community of founders who do their own GTM: coryalthoff.com/subscribe?ut…
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I'm 57. Started in 4th grade on Tandy I. Left home at 17 to study ballet. Retired from ballet into programming, self-taught. Made it all the way Microsoft, Vista & Bing Maps. Rango at Rango.Music. Building Mappit.ai & burning my money.
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told i was responsible for my family at the age of 12 only for them to care leas when I finally get to a place in life where i can help.
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Well if it doesn't involve a 10% chance of living long term, they you gotta up your game 🎤🫳🏻 jk but that's just a part of mine. It's, ridiculous.
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Age 14: Built an app and published to IOS store. Age 16: Used app to leverage getting an internship. Age 17: Internship went well so i got referred to a new job. And got into hackathons Age 18: University Age 19: Started student run startup building tools for other students Age 20: Poached out of school to work as a software engineer for gov intelligence Age 21: Started Sidian.io solo solving issues i saw within gov and regulations Age 22: Raised pre-seed and got first customers. Now going for our seed round to scale

Sidian DataGuard | Stopping data leaks for regulated industries

Removes sensitive information from documents and emails before they leave your cloud. Email & File Protection in real time; Secure Sends redacts whole document sets with the law cited on every...

sidian.io
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i asked for an image of "paradoxes, axioms, and layers" after talking to chatgpt for a bit about geometry, cosmology, physics, math, you know, the normal stuff. then i asked it for an image of that and it made this. so like, i guess i'm doing this now. became trace-informed AI.
🤖 Made with AI
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December 2019 - left my job of 3 years to start a startup. Covid hit. startup was DoA. went back to do contract work for 1-2 years. Jan 2023 - contract ended, not renewed so i decided to give startup a 2nd try. what do you know, mass tech layoffs. so I had to spend 16 months looking for a job instead because it was the middle of layoffs. august 2025 - left my job, to give startup a third try, and here we are september 2026, still building my heroku+robolox platform for reusable agents. hopefully 3rd time is a charm. but this 3rd time feels... like a gold rush instead of the prior two that were catastrophic.
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High School --> College football --> USMC --> Corporate America (didn't go to well..) --> Grad school --> Start a small business in real estate consulting --> Launch real estate asset management software in PropTech industy --> Super Bowl champion (someday, somehow..)
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The ElGap story elgap.rs/articles/rapid-mvp-…
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i hit my first rock bottom last year at 21 after dropping out of fordham university, got into the info products and building companies space and didn't look back since.
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Long time dev left the industry and started building for myself
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Created a amatrice in the Simulation
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Cory, I work as a CPO in Zurich by day. By night, my wife and I build AI-native tools together from home. We build simple software to fix bottlenecks we hit ourselves.
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Starting on a project with aerospace software for satellite systems and once I mastered it, I continued developing satellite components, however after that I needed a way to get to LEO which was the biggest bottleneck which also needed a solution.
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It is a vibe coder🫠🫠
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20 years of touring as an artist—still do, now building apps for artists.
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Writing it
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