Tell me your situation.
I'll build the plan.

Three Bay Area high school friends from the Bellarmine speech & debate team. Started in their college dorms in early 2023, manually matching Indian developers to US startups via WhatsApp groups and Google Sheets. First client paid $500/week; they took a 30% cut. Hit $1M ARR bootstrapped, then dropped out of college, took Thiel Fellowships. Built an AI interviewer that ran 20-minute video assessments — pivoted from labor marketplace to AI training data infrastructure as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google needed domain experts for RLHF. By October 2025: $450M ARR, $10B valuation, and three 22-year-olds named the youngest self-made billionaires in history. Crossed $1B annualised revenue in early 2026. Currently pay over $1.5M/day to 30,000+ expert contractors.

Xiao Hong, 33, Huazhong University of Science & Technology grad. First built Monica — a Chrome AI plugin that quietly grew to 10M users mostly in Latin America, Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia. ByteDance offered $30M to acquire it; Xiao said no. In March 2025, Monica's team launched Manus, claimed to be the first general-purpose AI agent. Invite codes hit black-market prices of ¥100,000 (~$14K). $75M Series B at $500M valuation from Benchmark in April 2025. By December 2025, Meta acquired Manus for $2B+ — one of the first US-China AI acquisitions in years. Run rate hit $125M annualized eight months after launch.

Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara, both MIT classmates with quant finance backgrounds. They spent the first 2 years writing regulatory whitepapers to the CFTC, not code — proving event contracts belong under federal commodities law, not gaming. Reportedly burned through $30M+ in legal fees before the platform launched publicly in 2021. 2020 win: first federally regulated US prediction market. The 2024 US election sent volume vertical. $11B valuation in Dec 2025 with CapitalG, Sequoia, a16z, Paradigm — then $22B in May 2026: a $1B Coatue-led Series F, annualised revenue past $1.5B. Lopes Lara is now the youngest self-made woman billionaire ever.

Founded as a nonprofit research lab in December 2015 — Altman, Musk, Brockman, Sutskever and seven others pledged $1B. Mission: build AI for the benefit of humanity, unconstrained by financial return. Musk left the board in 2018 after his takeover proposal was rejected; OpenAI created a "capped-profit" entity in 2019 to attract Microsoft's $1B investment. The November 2022 launch of ChatGPT hit 100M users in 60 days — the fastest consumer product adoption in history. By 2025 the org restructured as a public benefit corporation. The Altman board firing of November 2023 lasted 4 days and resolved with him returning. Valued at $852B after a $122B round (March 2026); confidentially filed for an IPO in June 2026.

Liang Wenfeng, Zhejiang University grad, founded the quantitative hedge fund High-Flyer in 2015. The fund accumulated 10,000+ Nvidia GPUs for quant trading. In 2023 he spun out DeepSeek as an AI research lab, self-funded from the hedge fund's profits — no VC. January 2025: released DeepSeek-R1, an open-weights reasoning model built on its V3 base — whose training compute cost roughly $6M vs GPT-4's reported $100M+. The release wiped $600B off Nvidia's market cap in a single day. Open weights meant developers worldwide could fine-tune it locally. The model's chain-of-thought traces — visible by default — became a teaching artifact for the whole industry.

Four MIT computer science graduates founded Anysphere in 2022. They built Cursor — a fork of Visual Studio Code with AI deeply integrated, not bolted on as a plugin. Pricing: $20/month. They obsessed over latency, autocomplete quality, and codebase context while incumbents argued about chat UIs. Crossed $100M ARR by January 2025, $500M ARR by mid-2025 — faster than any developer SaaS in history. Valued at $9.9B in their June 2025 Series C, then $29.3B in the Nov 2025 Series D; ARR passed $2B by early 2026. Declined acquisition offers from larger labs. Now the default tool for solo founders shipping production code with AI.