“You get a hundred times better because you have to do everything in the beginning.”
Zach Laberge is the solo founder of Omen AI. He's 20. He started his first company at 14 in Nova Scotia, dropped out of high school at 15 to run it, and shut it down at 18. A few weeks later, he had $3M raised for Omen.
Omen makes a sensor for heavy machines like excavators. The most expensive thing that breaks on those machines is the hydraulic system, and the only way to see a failure coming is to pull a fluid sample, ship it to a lab, and wait two weeks. Omen's sensor tests the fluid on the machine, in real time. Caterpillar works with them, and the same sensor is now going into the liquid cooling systems in AI data centers.
That's not what Zach set out to build. He started with engines. His customers went along with it for months before one finally told him hydraulics were the real problem. In this episode he gets into why customers let him build the wrong thing for so long, why he went back to the industry that had rejected him instead of starting fresh, and the conversation with his seed investor where he reset his founding team back down to just himself.
Listen now on the Solo Founders Podcast:
Solo, together.
Kieran
