Why I'm Building a Startup

TLDR

AI has made the traditional tech path feel obsolete. Watching coding agents replace the work of entire engineering teams made it clear that a ten person team will soon become one human in the loop. I stopped waiting for safety and started building. Now, I have a sense of direction I didn't know I was missing.

What Pushed Me Toward This

For most of my life, the plan seemed obvious:

Study hard.
Get the offer.
Climb the ladder.
Start a company later.

That script fell apart once I saw how fast AI was changing the world.

The "safe path" suddenly looked shaky. The prestige tied to tech jobs was fading, and the idea of relying on a company for stability felt outdated. If I stayed on that path, I would be placing my future in the hands of forces I could not control.

That realization is what pushed me toward Lunon.

I wanted to build something real instead of gambling that I would not be replaced. I wanted ownership over my future rather than hoping a corporation would keep me around when the next round of automation hit.

What Changed My Thinking

I have always been entrepreneurial. In middle school, I was obsessed with Fortnite like every other boy at the time, but I noticed a problem no one was solving. Fortnite had rare cosmetics that everyone wanted but newer players could not access, and the demand created a gap no one was addressing.

I decided to fill it.

I built one of the first Instagram marketplaces for buying and selling accounts with rare items, which grew past 20,000 followers. Certain accounts regularly sold for five hundred to a thousand dollars.

I handled everything.
The deals.
The disputes.
The pricing.
The inventory of hundreds of accounts.

The entire operation ran through a system I built at fourteen years old. My parents eventually shut it down once they realized how many strangers I was talking to, but the experience stayed with me.

For years, nothing replicated that feeling.

And then Lunon did.

It brings back the same energy I had staying up until four in the morning making deals with people all over the world as a kid, only now the stakes are higher.

Why Now

A lot of people say college is the best time to take risks. I used to roll my eyes at that. But now it makes sense. Right now I have no family to support, no mortgage, no employees relying on me. The cost of failure is time and effort, not survival. If I wait ten years and try this later, I will have responsibilities that make risk much heavier.

And honestly, the world of tech does not feel safe anymore. Every month I see AI models writing cleaner code, building full apps, solving tasks that used to take entire teams. If I wait for comfort, there may be nothing left to wait for.

What I Am Learning

Building Lunon has pushed me into topics I never expected to touch. Complex reasoning systems. Model selection. Speculative decoding. Retrieval pipelines. Vector search. Hard engineering problems I never saw coming. Even today, I am writing this after finishing a custom routing system with temperature control and dynamic model selection. This is the kind of work I used to think only senior engineers could handle.

Now I am doing it myself.

And that is the real reason I chose this path. I got tired of projects designed to impress other people. I got tired of safe wins. I got tired of watching my future depend on whether a company decides I am worth keeping after AI takes over half their engineering roles.

If I am going to spend my life creating things, I would rather start now.

— Connor