In this episode of Founder's Campfire, Tran Le interviews Jason Chao, her former co-founder and a current master's student in computer science at Stanford. Jason’s early entrepreneurship journey began as a high school dropout when he raised a million dollars through an ICO to build a wireless mesh networking company. Although this venture ultimately did not succeed, it inspired him to pursue computer science at Stanford with the goal of becoming a technical founder. During his junior year, Jason built a real estate transaction management platform. He shares his struggles of being a solo founder, building a solution for one customer that didn’t scale to others, and ultimately pivoting away from real estate. Leveraging his experiences and learnings, Jason discusses his current start-up, Loral Labs, and on building the future of APIs for AI agents.

00:00 — Raising a million dollars and dropping out of high school 03:11 — Returning to high school and entering Stanford 05:04 — Exploring telecom and real estate tech 14:36 — Pivoting away from real estate tech 16:31 — Building Loral Labs and AI agents

Follow Jason on his journey: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jchao01/

Check out Loral Labs: https://lorallabs.com/

Founder’s Campfire is a podcast show created and hosted by Tran Le, a senior at Stanford studying computer science. Through reflective conversations with early founders, Le hopes to build a community of founders focused on reflection, sharing, and growth at Stanford and beyond. Whether you're a founder, dreamer, investor, or simply a curious listener, there's a place for you around the campfire. Join Le as she shares stories, insights, and lessons on entrepreneurship.