We're launching a Technical Founder Program, here's why

At 16, I joined a startup. At 17, I moved countries. At 18, I'm still building.

That's not a flex. It's context for why we're launching this programme, and why I think it matters.

How I ended up here

When I joined Knowunity, I didn't have a CV. I didn't have a degree, or relevant work experience, or any of the things you'd normally expect someone to have before being handed real responsibility inside a product serving over 30 million users. What I had was curiosity, a willingness to break things and fix them publicly, and a manager — Benedict — who understood that potential doesn't come with a timestamp.

He took a bet on a 16-year-old. That bet turned into nearly three years of shipping features, running experiments, building automations, and learning at a pace that no structured programme could have replicated.

The path between "helping with operations" and "owning features end to end" wasn't linear. It was messy, fast, and largely unplanned. That's not a bug. That's how consumer products work. They don't wait for you to feel ready. They demand adaptation, right now, or you fall behind.

That pressure taught me more than any classroom could have.

What the programme actually is

The Technical Founder in Residence Program is built around a simple idea: some people learn best by doing, not by watching. If you're a student who wants ownership over real problems inside a real product — not a sandbox, not a side project that lives in a Google Doc — this is designed for you.

We're looking for people who are impatient in the right way. Who'd rather ship something imperfect today than plan something perfect next quarter. Who are comfortable with ambiguity and energised by the idea of figuring things out on the fly.

This isn't a traditional internship. There's no predefined rotation. No manager hovering over your shoulder telling you what to build. You'll get context, you'll get support, and then you'll get space to actually make decisions that matter.

Why this matters for edtech

Education technology is one of those spaces where the gap between what exists and what's possible is still enormous. The people best positioned to close that gap are often students themselves — they understand the problem viscerally because they're still living it.

Giving students real ownership inside an edtech product isn't charity. It's strategy. The insights that come from someone who used the product as a student yesterday and is building it as an engineer today are genuinely hard to replicate any other way.

Who should apply

If you read the phrase "no CV required" and felt relieved rather than sceptical, you're probably the right fit. If you've built things — apps, automations, side projects, anything — not because someone told you to but because you couldn't help it, we want to hear from you.

Drop me a message. No formal application, no cover letter. Just tell me what you've built and what you want to build next.