A Bengaluru-based engineer opens up about the setbacks he faced on his entrepreneurial journey after quitting his well-paid job at Amazon. Shakti Mani Tripathi is currently the co-founder and CTO of Reflecc, an AI agent that automates business and operational workflows for organizations. But the path from employee to entrepreneur was not an easy one for Tripathi. Tripathi details her setback in her now-viral X post.
Quit your job and start a startup
Tripathi said he has quit his job at Amazon after reflecting on a “wild” year at social media platform X. INR1 billion package to launch his own startup. According to his LinkedIn profile, he worked as a software engineer at Amazon and helped develop the Amazon Pay Later application.
“2024 was a turbulent year for me. I left mine behind. INR“My urge to finally ‘start my own business’ led me to work for a billion on Amazon without any backup,” he revealed.
After quitting his job without any backup, Tripathi founded his first startup called Hoabahoo AI in 2024. This startup idea was rejected by Y Combinator. He pitched it to more than 30 venture capitalists but was unable to raise funding. He eventually cut his losses and shut down Hoabahoo AI, citing high customer acquisition costs and lack of funding.
series of setbacks
Tripathi and his co-founder Kunal Ranjan then started working on “a B2B SaaS for engineering teams to monitor engineering productivity metrics.”
The idea was abandoned after the pair realized that it was impossible to measure the productivity of software engineers because there were “too many qualitative nuances.”
Tripathi then worked on Codermon AI, an AI agent for ad hoc tasks for developers. “We changed direction because of a crowded market,” he said.
After these repeated setbacks, he and his co-founders decided to explore the supply chain industry to develop an AI agent for procurement. Unfortunately, this also proved to be a dead end, as I realized I lacked previous work experience in this field.
Tripathi then started working on Reflecc AI and developed a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) in just 7 days. We then conducted interviews with over 50 prospects and industry thought leaders to validate our idea.
Their efforts paid off to some extent, as they were able to secure three Letters of Interest (LOI) from potential customers expressing genuine interest in the product. They even made it into the top 10% of Y Combinator applications, but were still ultimately rejected.
After thinking deeper, Tripathi and his colleagues realized that Reflecc AI was trying to solve too many problems at once by taking a horizontal approach. Realizing the need for focus, they decided to change direction once again.
They are currently building an AI digital marketer.
In his post, the Bengaluru engineer admitted that he had made many mistakes, but also said that he had learned a lot from these various setbacks. “I hope that 2025 will force me to stop being an entrepreneur and go back to being an employee again,” he concluded.
His posts reached over 40,000 people on X. In the comments section, many people shared their own failures and wished him luck.
