After Y Combinator, we struggled financially for about a year, living off savings and working out of a friend's living room, which was made possible by the generosity of his parents.

We bootstrapped for a year in San Francisco, which was tough, and when I raised our first round, it mainly went to cover expenses I was already paying personally.

We spent two years without salaries, focusing on our first headset and exploring the potential of wearable computing, which is now a hot topic in tech.

We launched our product online, supported it via email, and maintained a frugal, cash-neutral operation while reaching an international market from the start.

We did not expect the first batch of startups to make money; it was an experiment for us to learn how to be investors, which shaped our approach to supporting founders.

Even when we couldn't draw a salary for months, we were committed to our startup and would have kept going regardless.

I had to earn every single user and every single dollar that came in, which taught us to be extremely efficient and scrappy with our incubation capital.

To gain the trust of early customers, we initially targeted fellow companies in Y Combinator who were also new and had never paid themselves, which was a strategic move to build our initial customer base.

In the early days, we struggled to raise money, which taught us to focus on solving real problems and to build an efficient, profitable business from day one.