At 16, I joined a startup. At 17, I moved countries. At 18, I am still building. None of those steps began with feeling ready.
When Knowunity hired me, I did not have a CV worth betting on. I had curiosity, impatience and a habit of trying to make things work. Benedict saw enough in that to give a 16-year-old real responsibility inside a product already used by millions of students.
That decision changed the direction of my life. It also gave me a much clearer view of what “potential” actually means. Potential is not a compliment and it is not a promise. It is a hypothesis. The only useful way to test it is to put someone close enough to real work that their decisions have consequences.
Responsibility came before readiness
I started by helping within operations. The work was practical: understand what was slowing people down, solve the immediate problem and make the next version better. From there, the edges of the role kept moving. Operations led into growth; repetitive work led into automation; automations led into systems, features and experiments.
Nearly three years later, I am consistently shipping things that reach teams and students, then watching what the numbers say. The path between those points was messy, fast and mostly unplanned. That was not a flaw in the education. It was the education.
You do not become ready and then take responsibility. Responsibility is often what makes you ready.
I was trusted with problems a little beyond what I already knew how to solve. That gap forced me to ask better questions, find people who knew more than I did and turn incomplete information into a decision. Sometimes I was right. Sometimes the work had to be rebuilt. Both outcomes taught me more than waiting on the sidelines would have.
Real trust still has a feedback loop
Giving someone ownership does not mean abandoning them with a vague brief. The useful kind of trust has three parts: a real problem, the room to make decisions and feedback that arrives quickly enough to change the next decision.
At a consumer company, that feedback is impossible to avoid. A release meets real behaviour almost immediately. Students either understand it or they do not. A workflow saves time or quietly moves the bottleneck somewhere else. An experiment improves the number it was meant to move, exposes a different problem, or fails.
That pressure can be uncomfortable, but it is honest. It makes it difficult to hide behind activity, seniority or how convincing an idea sounded in a meeting. The work has to survive contact with users.
Consumer products do not wait
Consumer technology compresses the distance between learning and doing. Expectations move, new tools arrive and yesterday’s product assumptions stop being true. You cannot wait until every uncertainty has disappeared. You have to form a view, ship the smallest honest version, pay attention and adapt.
That rhythm taught me to separate confidence from certainty. I do not need to know that an idea will work. I need enough conviction to test it properly, enough discipline to measure it and little enough ego to change direction when the evidence disagrees.
It also changed my idea of experience. Experience is not only the amount of time you have been near a problem. It is the number of meaningful loops you have completed: decide, build, release, learn, repeat.
Turning an informal bet into a programme
The Technical Founder in Residence Program formalises the kind of opportunity I was lucky enough to find early. It is an 18-month path for technical builders who want to learn company-building from inside a product operating at consumer scale.
The first year is about building and shipping: owning products end to end and learning iteration speed, product quality, growth and AI in production. The following six months increase the autonomy: leading, launching and making founder-level decisions. After that, the path can continue into a leadership role at Knowunity or towards a company of your own, with a first-check commitment from Benedict.
The important part is not the title. It is the environment behind it: direct access to founders, engineers who work across boundaries and millions of users who make the quality of an idea visible very quickly. It is less like observing a startup and more like being handed a section of one.
Who should want this?
This is not for someone looking for a perfectly sequenced course or a role where every next step arrives as an instruction. It is for the person who notices an unfinished problem and finds it difficult to leave alone.
You should be comfortable saying “I do not know yet” without using it as a reason to stop. You should care about the outcome more than the boundaries of your job description. You should want direct feedback, even when it proves your first answer wrong. And you should enjoy the strange mix of speed and responsibility that comes with putting something in front of a very large audience.
None of that requires pretending credentials have no value. A degree, a strong CV and years of experience can all contain useful evidence. The mistake is treating those proxies as the only evidence that counts. A person can be early in their career and still show unusual judgement, pace, craft and care—if someone gives them a meaningful way to show it.
Potential has to become performance
Taking a chance on someone is only the first half of the story. The person receiving that chance has to honour it: learn faster than the role changes, own mistakes without becoming paralysed by them and turn trust into work that matters.
I am grateful Benedict made that first bet. I am equally grateful the team never treated my age as a reason to lower the standard. The expectation was not that I would already know everything. It was that I would keep figuring things out.
If you are a student or an early technical builder reading this and thinking, “I am not ready for that yet,” good. Readiness is not the entry requirement. Curiosity, urgency and the willingness to be accountable for what you build are much better places to start.