Day: August 25, 2025

• Kevin Wu left his job at Boston Consulting Group to start Leaping AI, an AI voice agent startup.
• Wu said consulting made him confident in business, but didn’t fully prepare him to be a founder.
• As a founder, he said he works as much or more now but that it’s more enjoyable than consulting.

This is an as-told-to essay based on a conversation with Kevin Wu, CEO and cofounder of Leaping AI, an AI voice agent startup that participated in Y Combinator earlier this year. This story has been edited for length and clarity.

I grew up in Germany and studied computer science. When I was 19, I founded my first startup and I was the CTO, but it really wasn’t a founder-market fit, so we discontinued it after a couple of months and went back to school. After I was thinking, “What should I do with my life?”

I knew that I didn’t want to be a CTO again. I didn’t want to program. I was interested in business, but to do business as someone who studied computer science was hard. Why would they hire some random computer science grad to do business? One of the only fields that I found was open to taking non-business majors to do business was consulting.

I’m pretty hardcore in things like test prep. I probably did over 200 mock interviews or case studies for six months straight, and I ended up joining Boston Consulting Group in their Berlin office.

I think consulting is great for a young grad. You learn business within two years. You learn how to communicate, how to present, how to work in a team, how to write emails to CEOs of companies. You learn how to be in Zoom meetings with them and not mess up. You learn about different industries; I worked for so many different and interesting clients. It’s a business school MBA in real life.

The camaraderie is also insane. You have young, ambitious people from everywhere on your team, and you’re working hard, then you’re partying hard, and it’s like you’re not sleeping at all.

However, at some point, it’s up and out — you either make the next step or you leave. I wasn’t motivated anymore after two years, because you’re doing a lot of PowerPoint and Excel, and it was just not intellectually stimulating.

I got bored with it, so I decided to leave and found an AI voice agent startup called Leaping AI. We got into Y Combinator‘s winter cohort this year and then raised $4.7 million in seed funding.

Because of consulting, I feel like I’m able to understand business and economy. I know what a P&L is and I understand that businesses have to make money and they have costs and what exactly does that mean. I understand how to conduct myself when I’m talking to CEOs that I want to sell my product to.

I’m also very confident. I learned that in consulting. Before consulting, I was this random computer science grad with no people or leadership skills. Now, even though we’re still in the beginning, I’m confident enough to lead teams and be the guy at the helm.

Consulting doesn’t fully prepare you for entrepreneurship

You have some of the highest-achieving individuals in the world in consulting, but it is very hard out of consulting to do entrepreneurship.

When you’re in consulting, you don’t meet any tech people. You only meet other business people, which can make it hard to found a startup, since most of them today are in tech.

Consulting is also a risk-averse culture. Entrepreneurship is, in a way, hitting rock bottom. You don’t have a job, nobody pays you, and nobody knows who you are. There’s a high risk that it may fail.

In consulting projects, the client will tell you what the goal is and what they need. The path is already given. Whereas in entrepreneurship, there is no path. You have to forge your own and decide what you’re going to do and then do it even when there’s high uncertainty.

In consulting, whatever you do, you have to align it with your managers and customers and everybody involved. But sometimes as an entrepreneur, you just have to do it without talking to everybody about doing it. In Silicon Valley, we call it founder mode.

Also in consulting, most younger consultants aren’t doing sales. But as an entrepreneur, you have to be the one bringing in new customers. I think that is a skill that is very important to entrepreneurship that is not taught in consulting.

Making great tech products is also something an entrepreneur should do. So another good path into entrepreneurship would be to work at a tech company in product management or as an engineer, where you actually learn what great products look like.

I work more as a founder, but I love it

They tell you that doing consulting will help you figure out your passion, but actually, I don’t think that’s true, because you’re just implementing what other people tell you to implement. There’s no time to do what you want to do. Plus, you’re just so tired, you’re working 60 hours a week.

As a startup founder, now I work equally or more hours. I haven’t taken a vacation for two years. So it’s funny that I was burned out as a consultant, and now I work even more. But it’s still more enjoyable than consulting because you can shape your own path and don’t have a boss.