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From PM at Stripe to Building an AI startup, a recent founder's journey - Mounir Mouawad
Takeaway
Founding an AI startup feels like a Soulslike game — user problems are emergent, so abandon long roadmaps and iterate exploratorily.
Summary
- Mounir Mouawad left a PM role at Stripe (after Google and Amazon) to co-found Porsche AI — an open-source SDK for production agents in regulated industries — with his Stripe co-founder Emma.
- Compares AI product discovery to a Soulslike video game: no clear adjacency to prior user problems, users don't know what their problems are, and the tech moves faster than any 3-6 month roadmap.
- Argues user problems in AI are an emergent property — they crystallize only as users experience what the technology can do, so PMs must run shorter, exploratory cycles.
- Encourages PMs at big tech contemplating the leap to founder life to embrace ambiguity rather than wait for problems to take a familiar shape.
startupsfoundersproduct-management
Original description
I spent a bunch of time building products in Big Tech, most recently at Stripe but before that at Google and Amazon. In this short talk I am sharing the highs and lows of building a business in AI and how that differs from building products in Big Tech. May this be an inspiration to would-be founders or useful commiseration material for fellow founders :)