A Bengaluru-based techie has opened up about the setbacks he faced in his entrepreneurial journey after quitting his high-paying Amazon job. Shakti Mani Tripathi currently serves as co-founder and CTO of Reflecc, an AI agent to automate business and operational workflows of organisations. However, the journey from employee to entrepreneur was not an easy one for Tripathi, who recounted his setbacks in a now-viral X post.
Quit job to launch startup
Reflecting on his “wild” year on the social media platform X, Tripathi said he quit his Amazon job with a ₹1 crore package to launch his own startup. According to his LinkedIn profile, he worked as a software engineer with Amazon and helped develop the Amazon Pay Later application.
“2024 has been a wild year for me. Left my ₹1 crore job at Amazon without any backup, out of an urge to finally ‘start up’,” he revealed.
After quitting his job without a backup, Tripathi founded his first startup, called Hoobahoo AI, in 2024. The startup idea was rejected by Y Combinator. He pitched it to over 30 venture capitalists but failed to raise funds. He finally cut his losses and shut down Hoobahoo AI due to high customer acquisition costs and lack of funds.
A series of setbacks
Next, Tripathi and his co-founder Kunal Ranjan started working on a “B2B SaaS for engineering teams to monitor engineering productivity metrics.”
This idea was abandoned after the duo realised that one cannot measure the productivity of a software engineer as there is “too much qualitative nuance.”
Tripathi then worked on Codermon AI: an AI Agent for developers’ ad-hoc tasks. “Pivoted due to an overcrowded market,” he said.
After these multiple setbacks, he and his co-founder decided to explore the supply chain industry to develop an AI agent for procurement. Unfortunately, this too proved to be a dead end for them as they realised they lacked prior work experience in this domain.
Tripathi then started working on Reflecc AI and developed the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) in just seven days and then conducted interviews with over 50 prospects and industry thought leaders to validate the idea.
Their efforts paid off to some extent – they managed to secure three Letters of Intent (LOIs) from potential clients, indicating genuine interest in the product. They even made it to Y Combinator’s top 10% of applications, but still got rejected in the end.
Upon further reflection, Tripathi and co realised that Reflecc AI was trying to solve too many problems at once by taking a horizontal approach. Recognising the need for focus, they decided to pivot once again.
They are currently building an AI Digital Marketer.
In his post, the Bengaluru techie admitted that he had failed a lot but said that he also learned a lot from these various setbacks. “I hope 2025 doesn’t force me to quit my entrepreneurial journey and return to being an employee…once again,” he concluded.
His post has reached over 40,000 people on X. In the comments section, many shared their own experiences with failure and wished him luck.
