A 14-Year-Old Founder’s First Project Retrospective

1) The Starting Point

Last summer, I built a demo of an AI video generation platform in 45 days.

Back then, AI video was just starting to take off, and my motivation was simple:

make creation as easy as speaking.

Investors were optimistic about the direction. Startup mentors gave me practical advice. More than 20 beta users—mostly classmates—complained about bugs while constantly pushing me to ship new features.

I was beyond excited—

at 14, I had built something that adults actually recognized.

2) The Pause

Then school started.

As a 9th-grade student, academics completely took over my life:

• waking up at 6:00 a.m.
• arriving at school by 7:00
• getting home at 7:00 p.m.
• finishing homework around 10:30
• weekends filled with assignments

When winter break finally gave me a full stretch of time to reopen my laptop, the market had already changed.

Industry giants like Runway and Pika had taken over the mainstream.