Bryan's most technical skill is Google Docs. He's never written a line of code in his life. So how did he end up co-founding Commissioned, an AI startup that automates a process most machine learning engineers spend months and six figures on?

In this episode, Bryan breaks down how a movie night led to meeting his co-founder, why VCs keep telling him he's "too early," what it's like bootstrapping an AI company as a college junior at Carnegie Mellon — and why he's choosing C's in his classes to go all in.

Topics covered:

— What fine-tuning actually is (and why it's different from just prompting ChatGPT)

— How Bryan cold-emailed Spikeball's CEO as a teenager and landed a role

— The DoorDash hackathon moment that sparked Commissioned

— Bootstrapping to 88% margins with zero VC money

— Developing perfect pitch in 4 days

— Why "if you're early, you're on time"

🔗 Try Commissioned: commissioned.tech

🔗 Connect with Bryan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bryanbbravo/

#entrepreneurship #aistartup #collegefounder #finetuning #startupstorybook

Parth Mehta taught himself to code over one summer and built Makistry — an AI-powered CAD platform with 300+ users and 7,000+ designs. He’s a sophomore at UT Austin, plays squash for the university team, performs original music at Austin open mics, and calls school “my side hustle now.” In this episode: the battle robot class that sparked the idea, leading a team of peers when nothing he tried worked, imposter syndrome on calls with executives three times his age, and why there are “no miracle people.”Try Makistry: makistry.aiParth on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/parth-mehta100/

Arnav Gupta is a freshman at Stanford running a full-time startup. Athira connects students with tutors in under 30 seconds for 15-25 minute micro-tutoring sessions — and the AI behind it is learning how great tutors sense confusion, adapt their tone, and personalize in real time. In this episode, Arnav talks about meeting his co-founder through Y Combinator's matching platform before even starting college, launching to 500 users in two weeks, why he thinks LinkedIn is making high schoolers worse, and the ethical line between supplementing human teachers and replacing them.

🔗 Learn more about Athira: https://athira.tech

🔗 Connect with Arnav: https://www.linkedin.com/in/arnav-gupta-bb7a06232/