"As soon as I graduated from business school I started a company called ProFounder with two cofounders, Jessica Jackley who had started Kiva before, and Dan Mauriello. While doing that, I met my current cofounders for LikeaLittle, Shubham and Prasanna. They had left Microsoft, came to Stanford, and used to hang out there because they were trying to start a company. A mutual friend introduced us and after a month or two we decided to join forces.
So we started ProFounder. I worked there for about six months and then it moved on to L.A and I didn’t want to go to L.A; I decided I wanted to stay in Silicon Valley and do some consumer Internet things. So, Shubham, Prasanna and I came back to Palo Alto, lived together in a one-bedroom apartment with no furniture, slept on the floor, subsisted off of rice, and tried a bunch of stuff until we caught something that worked.
This was January 2010. For several months we just brainstormed; it wasn’t until October that we actually came up with LikeaLittle. We had probably tried 10 ideas before that and they all failed miserably. So, in October 2010, we created a first edition of LikeaLittle.
We’ve been working together for almost a year, but before YC we had not done any fundraising. We were bootstrapping the entire time; we were living in a one-bedroom apartment our entire time together and then for a two month period, [my cofounders] lost their visas, so we had to go and live in India together. So we lived with my cofounder’s family in India and were doing the startup from there. It was interesting, the power would go out all the time and our users were in America so we had to be on U.S. time; all kinds of crazy stuff was happening.
But, in India there were no expenses. The family would make us food and we’d stay with them; we literally had a zero dollar burn rate in India. So that was pretty fantastic; we kind of had an infinite runway. We’ve basically spent the entire year living off of rice and beans and sleeping on the floor, together."