I bet my career on AI in 2015. It took a while.
Building with AI since 2015. From training neural nets in a London flat, to raising $10M for Stepsize, to building ClickUp Brain for millions of users. Now building solo with the very tools I spent a decade helping create.
In 2015, my brother Nick, our friends Jared and Matt, and I sat in a London flat training a recurrent neural network to write code. The model was terrible. The code it produced barely compiled. But here's the thing: we could see exactly where this was going. Nearly a decade before ChatGPT made everyone else see it too.
That terrible prototype sparked an insight I bet the next ten years of my life on: for AI to truly build software for us, it would need to understand codebases. Not just generate code, but grasp the messy reality of how software actually gets built. Teams, context, decisions, tradeoffs. The whole picture.
The Stepsize Years
That conviction became Stepsize. We started above a Chinese restaurant (literally, my co-founder's parents' place) and built an editor-first issue tracker and AI-powered updates platform for software teams. We raised $10M from Stride, Index Ventures, Richard Branson, and Techstars. We went from that restaurant to pitching on stadium screens. We served customers like Snyk, Amazon, and Sainsbury's. I built a team of 15 brilliant people and led them through eight years of the long, hard, sometimes brutal work of building something that mattered.
Our vision for Stepsize: Making software universally accessible
Here's the humbling part: the vision was right, but the plan was wrong. We thought AI needed structured data to understand software. Turns out, “attention is all you need.” The breakthrough came from a direction nobody, including us, predicted. That's a lesson I carry with me: conviction aboutwhere things are going matters more than being right about how they'll get there.
In 2023, Stepsize was acquired by ClickUp. The vision we'd been chasing for nearly a decade — AI that truly understands software — was finally becoming mainstream. The world had caught up.
Building at Scale
At ClickUp, I became Staff Product Manager for AI, leading Brain, the AI system that powers the platform. I built @Brain from scratch as a 0→1 product: an AI agent you can mention anywhere in ClickUp, like you'd tag a teammate. I took Ask AI from an early experiment to the most-used AI feature on the platform. Quality ratings nearly doubled, usage grew multiple times over, and AI features saw significant revenue growth.
As I write this, those features are ClickUp's highest quality AI features. Millions of people use something I helped build every day. I genuinely still can't get used to that.
What I Believe
You don't need to wait for anyone to start building momentum.
That's the core truth I've learned over a decade of building. Not a co-founder, not investors, not a team of specialists, not permission. The tools have finally caught up to the vision we saw in 2015. What used to require a full team — engineering, design, product, marketing, sales — a single person can now do with AI as their force multiplier. The old gatekeepers are gone.
But here's the catch: great people still matter. Youwant collaborators, community, people who sharpen you. The difference is you don't have to sit around waiting for them to appear before you start. When you build momentum and put yourself out there, shipping, sharing, learning publicly, you attract those people. They find you because you're already in motion.
And the hustle crowd gets this wrong too. This isn't about grinding yourself into dust in isolation. It's about leverage: using these tools to do more with less, and building a business and a life you actually enjoy. Doing things you love, with people you love, for people you love. That's what I'm building toward, and that's what I write about in Full Stack Founder.
Paris to London to Whatever Comes Next
I'm French-English, born in Paris, and I moved to London to join my brother Nick and chase the startup dream. We had no idea what we were doing, which was honestly probably the point. I hold an MSc from the University of Sussex, but most of what I know I learned by shipping things and watching them break.
Right now I'm building Fullstackfounder.ai as a community for builders who think the same way I do, and I'm sharing everything I figure out along the way. The newsletter, the products, the wins, the embarrassing failures. All of it, in public.