Bengaluru Techie’s AI Startups Fail After Quitting ₹1 Crore Amazon Job: “2025, Please Be Kind”
A Bengaluru-based tech enthusiast, Shakti Mani Tripathi, has candidly shared the challenges encountered in his entrepreneurial journey following his departure from a lucrative position at Amazon. Currently, Tripathi is the co-founder and CTO of Reflecc, an AI tool designed to streamline business and operational workflows for organizations. Transitioning from a high-powered employee to an aspiring entrepreneur presented several hurdles for Tripathi, which he recounted in a post that garnered significant attention.
Reflecting on his tumultuous experiences on the social media platform X, Tripathi disclosed that he left his Amazon role, which offered a ₹1 crore package, to venture into the world of startups. During his tenure at Amazon, he contributed to the development of the Amazon Pay Later application as a software engineer.
“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.
Initially, after quitting his position without a backup plan, Tripathi founded his first venture, Hoobahoo AI, in 2024. Unfortunately, this initial startup faced obstacles: it was turned down by Y Combinator, and despite pitching it to over 30 venture capitalists, he couldn’t secure the necessary funding. The startup eventually folded due to steep customer acquisition costs and a lack of financial backing.
Subsequently, Tripathi and his co-founder, Kunal Ranjan, embarked on a project to create a “B2B SaaS for engineering teams to monitor engineering productivity metrics.” However, they ultimately abandoned this concept after concluding that measuring the productivity of a software engineer involves too many qualitative nuances.
Tripathi’s next venture was Codermon AI, an AI agent designed for developers’ ad-hoc tasks. Unfortunately, this idea was also scrapped after they realized the market was oversaturated.
Persevering through these challenges, Tripathi and his co-founder explored the supply chain industry, developing an AI agent for procurement. Once again, they hit a wall, recognizing that they lacked the necessary work experience in this domain.
This led to the inception of Reflecc AI, where they managed to develop the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) in a remarkably short span of seven days. They then engaged with over 50 prospects and industry thought leaders to validate their concept.
Their efforts yielded some success, securing three Letters of Intent (LOIs) from potential clients, expressing genuine interest in their product. Despite these promising indicators and reaching the top 10% of applications at Y Combinator, they faced rejection once more.
Upon further introspection, Tripathi and his team realized that Reflecc AI was attempting to tackle too many challenges simultaneously by adopting a broad approach. Acknowledging the need for a more focused strategy, they chose to pivot once again.
Currently, they are developing an AI Digital Marketer.
In his candid post, the Bengaluru techie confessed to experiencing numerous failures, but he also highlighted the wealth of lessons learned from these setbacks. “I hope 2025 doesn’t force me to quit my entrepreneurial journey and return to being an employee…once again,” he reflected.
His post has resonated with over 40,000 users on X, with many commenters sharing their own stories of failure and extending their best wishes for his future endeavors.
