How I built a $100M startup after losing EVERYTHING | Aydin Mirzaee

Aydin is the co-founder of Fellow and he's today's guest on Startup Strategies with Juliana Hahn. From losing everything in the dot-com crash at age 13 to building a $30+ million SaaS platform, Aydin has navigated multiple pivots and a strategic exit that shaped his approach to AI-first product development. In this episode, he reveals how he and his 20-year co-founding team bootstrapped their way to a multi-million dollar SurveyMonkey acquisition, then leveraged that experience to identify the manager productivity gap that became Fellow.

Aydin shares how he:

• started with childhood ventures building websites and attempting to compete with Yahoo before losing his father's money in the dot-com crash
• bootstrapped Fluidware to nearly 100 employees before executing a strategic acquisition to SurveyMonkey
• identified the manager productivity gap during his SurveyMonkey experience and used it as the foundation for Fellow
• navigated COVID as their 'Instagram moment' - pivoting from manager co-pilot to meeting productivity platform, then again to AI-first meeting assistant
• scaled Fellow to over $30 million raised with 10x revenue growth since 2021 by understanding that every pre-AI company must disrupt itself or risk being displaced by AI-native startups

Let's break down his Startup Strategies.

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