Month: November 2025

• Annie Liao is a solo founder who moved to San Francisco to build an AI startup.
• Liao highlights the freedom and loneliness of solopreneurship, and says it has built resilience.
• She discusses the precautions she takes to be taken seriously as a female founder.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Annie Liao, the 24-year-old startup founder of Build Club, who is based in San Francisco. It’s been edited for length and clarity.

After raising $1.75 million in funding for my AI startup last year, I quit my chief of staff job at a Series B startup and moved to San Francisco to go all in as a solo founder.

The startup I used to work for had three co-founders, and I saw how they relied on each other for opinions and advice. If one person were sick, the other two could pick up the slack. As a solo founder, I’m completely on my own.

The experience has been risky and exciting, but the reality is a lot harder than I thought it would be. I also think people underestimate me as a female founder, but I take precautions and work hard to be taken seriously and prove them wrong.

I’m consistently building my mental resilience

I have a team of five employees operating across different time zones, but I spend most of my day working alone. My task list is endless, and there’s always another goal to chase, but my mindset is to just keep going and hope the hard work pays off. I’m building mental resilience every day, but there are times it’s hard to do it all alone.

The day we announced our raise should’ve been one of my happiest days as a founder, but it wasn’t. The night before, the landing page wasn’t ready, and my team of five had gone to bed, so it was just me working on the Webflow landing page until 3 a.m. I remember sitting there and having a bit of a cry to myself.

In that moment, I remember telling myself that this is the lifestyle I had chosen, and I was committed to building my business through the tough times. Even if things don’t work out, I see this as a giant journey where I’m upskilling as a person.

There are pros to scaling a startup alone, but I’d consider adding the right cofounder

I love that I can take risks and move fast. I have a very clear vision and mission for my startup, so being a solo founder allows me to make quick decisions and keep us moving in a streamlined direction.

I also have a specific way I prefer things done. Even when it comes down to things like hiring methods, it’s nice not to have to worry about a cofounder with an opposing opinion. That being said, it would mean a lot to have someone to share the highs and lows with.

I like finding friends to work with, and I’ve found a lot of comfort in the fact that my startup is naturally community-driven. But a lot of my days are just me sitting alone at a WeWork until 3 a.m. I don’t always feel like I have someone I can run to when things go wrong or even someone to just jam ideas with.

I’d add a cofounder if I found someone who has the same all-in mindset that I have. It’s like a relationship in the sense that you’re building a future together.

As a woman and solo founder, I’m more cautious about how I come across

I believe most people just want to work with smart, competent, and passionate individuals, regardless of gender. However, as a female founder, I have to take certain things into consideration.

When my female founder friends and I attend a tech event, we’ll make sure not to wear much makeup or dress up too much. It’s almost as though having time to be fashionable might make us seem like we’re not serious enough founders.

I’ve also noticed that a lot of male founders will grab drinks with an investor to close a deal, but as a woman, I feel hesitant to do that. I fear it might come across wrong. I’m even cautious about how I show up on social media, from the clothes I wear in pictures to making sure it looks like I don’t get out too much.

Don’t underestimate yourself

I think people underestimate female founders. However, a lot of us are equally, if not more, ambitious than our male counterparts.

My advice to someone who wants to be a startup founder is just do it. Take a bet on yourself and see what you can do.

Do you have a story to share about what it’s like being a solo founder? If so, please reach out to the reporter tmartinelli@businessinsider.com.

• Eric Aguilar was a Tesla engineer working on the rollout of the company’s Model 3.
• Aguilar left Tesla in 2018 and cofounded Omnitron Sensors a year later.
• His goal is to make lidar more affordable and reliable.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk believes lidar is a “fool’s errand.”

A former Tesla engineer, Eric Aguilar, cofounded an entire company to perfect it.

His bet: all robots — whether vehicular or humanoid — will need lidar to see.

Lidar is a sensor that uses laser light to detect the distance of objects. Historically, the sensor has been used for mapping, but in recent years, it’s become an extra set of eyes for self-driving cars, including Waymo’s robotaxis.

Aguilar cofounded Omnitron Sensors in 2019 and serves as CEO. He has worked with sensors for over 20 years, at Google X’s drone delivery project, Tesla, and Argo AI, a robotaxi venture backed by Ford and Volkswagen, before it shut down in 2022.

When Musk moved to forgo lidar, Aguilar, an electrical engineer by training, understood some of the Tesla CEO’s misgivings about the sensor. They can be costly and not built as efficiently as they could be, Aguilar says.

With Omnitron, he aims to make lidar both more affordable and durable by utilizing silicon and the semiconductor manufacturing process to produce the components inside the sensor at scale.

“This is what will unlock the market,” he told Business Insider. “This is what will open up the market to get companies like Mercedes and GM to buy lidars and put them in their vehicles.”

The problem with lidar

As more automakers explore driverless functions, Aguilar believes lidar will be an essential part of tomorrow’s cars.

Lidar can be a little like a disco ball: a laser is pointed at a mirror that is constantly moving on an electromagnetic motor, and the reflected light measures the distance of objects around whatever it’s mounted on, such as an autonomous vehicle.

To achieve a better range with a lidar, you need a larger laser and, consequently, a larger mirror. That makes lidars more expensive, and when placed in a moving vehicle, the sensor could require constant adjustment. Companies have to “recalibrate those sensors, redo alignment, or replace those sensors,” Aguilar said.

Aguilar said the problem with many lidar systems is how they’re built. There can be numerous moving parts inside the sensor, which require frequent calibration and are susceptible to wear and tear when placed on top of a frequently moving car, the cofounder said.

“When you talk to OEMs — Mercedes, Volvo, BMW, GM — they don’t want lidar to have to be replaced every two or three months,” he said. “And that’s what I was experiencing working at these companies: Every two to three months, something would break in this thing and we’d have to get them replaced.”

That’s where silicon comes in. With silicon, Aguilar said, you’re dealing with fewer and lighter moving parts that can last longer.

Silicon is much more durable, the Omnitron CEO argues, and could handle the kinds of temperature fluctuations an autonomous vehicle would experience. Then, by using a chip manufacturing process, the parts are built with nanometer-level precision and can be built at scale.

“So you get a wafer with hundreds and thousands of these devices instead of building one at a time,” Aguilar said.

Around the time Aguilar was at Google’s moonshot factory, a single lidar unit could cost $120,000. Today, a similar model could cost around 10 grand — a significant drop, in part thanks to better designs and increased manufacturing scale.

Aguilar says Omnitron’s process brings down those same lidar units to “the hundreds of dollars.”

Why self-driving cars and robots need it

In self-driving cars, Aguilar sees lidar as the key to covering rare edge cases on the roads.

Cameras are “terrible” in low-light situations, he said. The cofounder used shadows as an example.

“When a shadow is being cast, a car can get confused as to: Is that a real object or is that a shadow?” Aguilar said. That’s where lidar comes in.

The Omnitron cofounder also sees humanoid robots as a ripe market for sensors.

Companies like Agility Robotics use lidar to help their humanoid robots navigate their environments.

Much like humans rely on sensors beyond their eyes to determine the amount of force needed to pick up objects, Aguilar said robots will need lidar to understand the depth of their surroundings and the objects and people within them.

Aguilar’s case for lidar in cars or robots echoes what many CEOs in the self-driving space have already said on the sensors: It all comes down to safety.

“The bar for integrating (robots) into the human experience — it’s going to be much higher,” he said. “I’m not going to let this thing hold my baby, for example, if I don’t know that this thing is robust and this sensor is really, really important for that.”