Unrot × Sydney
No shame in trying
Vietnam-born. Father in tech, mother in fashion. Summers were not camps. They were engineers from his father's company teaching a child to code — Year 6 through the end of school, JavaScript and CSS whether he wanted them or not. He hated it. Then he didn't.
Lecture halls were optional. YouTube was not. RateMySchool — a clone of RateMyDorm for Vietnamese international schools — his first finished product. Clicktutor, number two on Product Hunt. Every app a solution to something he was already stuck in. That pattern is how Dory AI arrived: a study tool for people who were done with how we are supposed to learn. Thirty thousand users. Then an exit.
He was just literally forcing me to learn how to code. He thinks it will be good for the future, which turns out pretty well now... back then I was like, what is this?
Small pond, right fish
A DM from Ethan. A podcast interview. Then Sydney, and the skills the other lacked: Pete on frontend, Ethan on backend. The city was quiet for young builders. Build Club was the room that existed — Annie's co-working, other people locking in. They went every day. Sometimes past the last bus at 4am. Sometimes they slept there.
They missed the accelerator deadline. Asked Annie in. Promised the work. Won. Flew to San Francisco. He met the people from the videos. He did not stay. Networking, he said, is a distraction. Build, and the right people arrive. After Dory, a viral tweet about a TikTok posting algorithm. A hundred thousand views. A DM from Germany. Unrot that same week.
If you just build cool shit, then cool people will be attracted to you.
Move slow to go fast
He scrolls. He is the user. Four-figure mascot tests. Four to six months on onboarding before launch. Hundreds of Figma flows. Design was always the eureka — code from ten, but the click was never the line, it was the screen. Eighty percent of the time on the first five minutes. You get a few minutes to make the product a no-brainer. That is what onboarding is for.
Punishment apps fail. Unrot says scrolling is fine if you earn it. A way out, not a lock. The early months were slow. Trust had to be built. Then the curve they believed in arrived. Two million downloads. He is twenty-one. The goalpost keeps moving — six figures, then seven a month.
Our thing with Unrot is we basically say — scrolling is not bad. You've tried 50 apps like Opal that restrict you from scrolling, that punish you. But punishment doesn't work. With our app, we're saying scrolling's fine as long as you earn it.
Take big swings
The principle is not genius. It is the absence of shame. Freedom at home — not the closed path of lawyer or doctor. Permission to fail in public. Self-belief plus the right room. Aim past the possible. Take the swing.
Before twenty-two: a study tool tens of thousands used, a company sold, a lecture at a top university, an app millions use to fight the thing they cannot stop. None of it required being the smartest person in the room. It required trying.
I don't think I'm smarter than other people. I just think it's mainly self belief, and not having shame in trying new things and failing.