Once Sudeep and Ben started full time on Thisten, things began moving fast. Although Rui was committed to Thisten, he started to feel guilty that he hadn't left Skip and was falling behind the pace that things were moving at.

From Tech development to Go-to-Market traction, Thisten was evolving and became more viable each day. To take things to the next level, the team decided to apply to Y-Combinator – the most impactful startup incubator in the world.

In No Comments Yet, Thisten co-founders – Ben, Rui, and Sudeep – recount the story of building a new startup (thisten.co).

After the co-founders tried to raise venture capital and failed at it, they made the only rational decision they could – quit their jobs and work full time on their startup.

In doing so, they had to work through the succession plan for the roles they had with Skip at the time. All they needed was a timeline, perseverance and grit to make it happen.

The only challenge they faced was addressing the roles and responsibilities of their co-founding team, before moving forward with everything. The conversations weren’t easy, but they were honest and necessary.

In No Comments Yet, Thisten co-founders – Ben, Rui, and Sudeep – recount the story of building a new startup (thisten.co).

Thisten co-founders – Ben, Rui, and Sudeep – recount the story of building a new startup (thisten.co).

In March of 2019, they had just finished soft launching and testing their product at SXSW, where they had gotten traction and feedback about what they were building.

Thisten, at the time, was developed as a speech-to-text transcription platform to make speaker sessions at conferences more accessible.

Following SXSW, the co-founders continued to build momentum with other events, and started reaching out to VC's to try and raise capital and take their startup to the next level of growth.

Thisten co-founders – Ben, Rui, and Sudeep – recount the story of building a new startup (thisten.co), and creating a product to test at SXSW in 2019.

Thisten, at the time, was developed as a speech-to-text transcription platform to make speaker sessions at conferences more accessible.

With tech issues and bugs being worked out right before the event, along with challenges in finding the right AV person to connect with, things weren't necessarily smooth – but they got done.

Seth Godin, SXSW, & Google Creative Lab – How could we fail?

For transcripts of No Comments Yet, check out thisten.co