Ex-Googlers shuttered successful startup, built AI company worth $100M

It’s part of the story Make CNBC The Moment series, in which highly successful people reveal the critical moment that changed the course of their lives and careers and discuss what pushed them to take a leap into the unknown.

Dhruv Amin and Marcus Lowe left Google to launch a startup that is “profitable from Day 1” and operates at a run rate of $2.2 million by September 2023, Amin says. They predicted continued success, estimating monthly revenue to increase at least fivefold by the end of 2024.

Amin says that they then shut down everything to start from scratch, thanks to ChatGPT.

Today, Amin and Lowe, both 33, are co-founders and co-CEOs of Everything, a $100 million vibration coding startup. $11 million financing round in September, according to the company. The business was initially known as Create, a marketplace that connects startups to freelance engineers and AI-powered coding tools to create websites and apps.

Why blow it up? Amin talks about the “ChatGPT moment” in November 2022, when OpenAI launched its generative AI chatbot. The leap in capabilities over previous AI models “was a surprise to everyone,” Amin says.

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Amin and Lowe predicted that by spring 2023, AI could finally approach human developers’ ability to write complex code. If this happens, human engineers may not be needed at all, making their jobs obsolete.

But if they rebuild their companies around AI and the technology doesn’t advance fast enough, their new model will fail. Customers would flee and the company would run out of money.

After months of anxious negotiations, in October 2023 Amin and Lowe undertook the difficult process of laying off half their seven-person staff and cutting ties with freelance developers, says Amin: “Within two weeks we were back in an empty office.”

First, they launched an AI-powered tool to create app components like login forms and calendar widgets. In April 2025, they launched a new product for building entire online businesses, including backend authentication and payment systems, requiring no coding experience, and renamed the company Anything.

“This was actually the moment where I felt like it was really taking off,” says Amin. The company within two weeks reboot announcementIt all adds up to a $2 million annual revenue rate, he says.

Amin says the AI ​​coding industry is “extremely early” in its development. mixed reviews overall For vibration coding services. Still, non-technical users have developed functional commercial applications with Everything, including a hair salon owner’s AI stylist mobile app and a dental hygienist’s app for tracking gum health. Amin wrote in a September 29 blog post:.

Here, Amin talks about his realization that artificial intelligence could disrupt entire business models, his anxiety about deciding whether to start over, and how he got the timing right when launching a startup in an emerging industry.

CNBC Did It: You decided to close and rebuild in October 2023. How painful a decision was this and how did your company’s investors react?

Amin: We went back to zero, which was very difficult. We had to leave half the team. We had to shut down the developer marketplace and tell our customers that we would no longer do this with developers.

At that time, people were still kind of mocking: “Is this AI thing going to become real? Will you actually be able to develop real applications?” [with just AI]?”

we had raised [$3 million] venture capital. we promised [investors] that we will hit [specific] timelines. Then we turned to everyone and said, “Actually no, we will go back to zero.” Everyone’s like, “Are you sure?” he asked.

What were your conversations like as you and your co-founder followed the advances of artificial intelligence?

We were talking all the time. We would revisit the position once a month. It took Marcus and I a long, long time to come to this conclusion. [to start the business over]and this felt like one of those decisions we both had to agree on as co-founders.

There were times when I was more optimistic about future prospects. [original] The marketplace and what we can do with it. There were times when Marcus was more optimistic. And there were times when we both said, “This technology is advancing so quickly and we’re using it in more and more places, does it make sense to develop a new product?” This was very difficult.

I think what broke the logjam for us was we launched a few prototype generators just to test and see if there was demand. [code-generation products] You can use it where you don’t have to talk to any of us. This gave us an early signal. When we talked to our customers, we felt that the code generation system had product-market fit.

How confident were you that the underlying generative AI technology would continue to advance exponentially?

He is confident but insecure about timelines. This was the scariest part. By 2024, major language models have reached a degree of stasis in terms of capability. At the time it was very unclear how good he was [that technology] he would get it eventually. There definitely was [times] “Oh, boy. Did we make a mistake trying to get back?”

Can we build something valuable and useful enough that people will want it and pay us for it? We had many opportunities to make a quicker profit; it would be: “Let’s make a prototyping tool. Let’s make a design tool, because they’re all [LLMs] These are the components we can make. “We will sell it to agencies.”

What stopped you?

Marcus and I have always had it [mindset] We had just gone through a really big turning point as we were trying to get closer to the company’s mission. This pivot would have been in vain if we didn’t follow the company’s mission: to enable people to create real production products even if they don’t know how to code.

Now there is a useful founding story: Even if the technology changes and the business model changes, this company will continue on this path. It was difficult back then. Now I can say with some pride: You don’t have to take my word for it that we’re serious about what we’re trying to do here. We drew this with blood, sweat and tears.

I expected it would take about a year for this technology to become good enough to create real production systems. In reality it took about two hours and I think we are still at the beginning. The complexity of the applications you can build with Any—what it will look like in a year, or even two years—will be dramatically different.

Hopefully we have our hardcore pivots behind us at this point. Now, I guess we’re more involved [mindset]: Let’s implement it, seize the opportunities, and really make it big.

Where would your business be today if you hadn’t closed the market to focus on AI?

This is very difficult to say. I wonder if the company will still exist. Could the business we built back then still be attractive? [investors]? I think marketplace models like this, while popular in 2021, are outdated without more pure AI. [focused].

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

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