Building the Future

What does it take to create change? Just ask these 17 founders, all age 27 or younger, who are doing it every day.

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BUILDING THE PERFECT PRODUCT FOR A REMOTE-WORKING ERA... WITHOUT REALIZING IT

Sam Udotong, 26, and Krish Ramineni, 26

Cofounders, Fireflies.ai

After working 20-hour days for years, living on the cheap while bootstrapping a company in San Francisco, Sam Udotong discovered something about his body. “I had trained myself to stop really enjoying food,” he says. That meant he could subsist entirely on Domino’s pizza and the meal replacement drink Soylent, and maintain focus. “It let me work more hours every day.”

That was 2016. By now, years later, he expected life to be different—or, at least, to come with better food. He and his cofounder, Krish Ramineni, have raised nearly $5 million in venture funding for that once bootstrapped company, Fireflies.ai, which is rapidly expanding across the globe. But Udotong is still drinking Soylent regularly, because COVID-19 put the founders back into 20-hour-a-day crunch mode. Fireflies.ai takes and organizes notes for people during meetings, which is highly appealing to remote workers. “When the lockdowns began, I remember thinking, Holy crap, our market just jumped ahead a few years,” Udotong says.

He and Ramineni, it turns out, were the right amount of early. But this is how the two of them have always operated—taking bets on the future and doing things a little differently.