“You watch movies like Social Network and that reinforces this vision of being in Silicon Valley and building awesome things that are going to be used by millions of people.”
Vijit is the founder of Lark, a modern billing platform for AI companies. He grew up in a town close to Delhi, went through first grade to high school there, then spent four years at college in Dallas before finding his way to the Bay Area. His school was a smaller one, not an Ivy League name, so he learned to take a non-traditional path: reaching out to people and convincing them he was worth a shot. He sees that as the same skill startups run on. You have to get someone to trust that you care about the problem and can build what they want.
The San Francisco idea took hold young. “You watch movies like Social Network and that reinforces this vision of being in Silicon Valley and building awesome things that are going to be used by millions of people.” AI has scrambled how software gets priced. “The way people price is just blown up. People want all types of crazy things. So we’re essentially building the most flexible billing system that lets companies choose the pricing they want without making any compromises.”
He and his co-founder both came from Stripe. “We were literally at lunch one day and I was like, we should just start a company maybe. And he was like, yeah, let’s do it. It was the fastest yes I had ever heard.” At Stripe they kept seeing customers pour engineering time into billing setup that should not have needed it; Lark replaces that with a dashboard and a few clicks. Going through YC taught them a harder lesson. Neither had done sales, and selling, he says, is completely different from building something cool. Getting that part right is what makes or breaks a company early on.