Founder Wellness: the modern Startup secret sauce

Jason Lin
5 min readJul 8, 2021

Before I begin my blog series on the future of technology and ideas to watch over the next decade, I’d like to explain how I got here.

Most of you are probably wondering, so who’s Jason? Who are you to “preach” about tech when almost everyone today is in some way shaped by changes brought by technological disruptions (and in authority to discuss them) for better or worse?

It’s been over 5 years since I won my first hackathon at the University of Michigan. Twenty-five hackathons and a dozen accolades (@Facebook, Stanford, UCLA) later, I’m sitting here wondering what went wrong during my first stint to bring to life a startup idea I so desperately thought revolutionary.

As a technical founder, I’ve built numerous products at Spotify, Apple, Lyft, and prototypes that went into production (aka “were adopted”) by the biggest tech giants — a smarter Siri, IoT-connected smart speakers, multiparty VR controls, etc. After owning a team’s work at Alphabet’s Moonshot Factory, formerly known as Google[x], I’d surely learned what it takes to build a venture from zero to one, bootstrapping or hatching if you will, a business from scratch.

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