This told essay is based on conversations between Praneet Dutta, a 32-year-old CEO from Palo Alto, and Joe Chuke, a 33-year-old CTO from Seattle. The two met at Google and later reunited to co-found AI startup Pomo, Business Insider reports. be exclusively reported Raised $4.5 million in seed funding. Their words have been edited for length and clarity.
Praneet Dutta: I met Joe many years ago on my first day at Google. When we finished orientation, we took the same Uber Share.
Joe joined Google just a few months ago. We weren’t on the same team. I worked in machine learning and he worked in cloud infrastructure, and over the next few months we realized we had similar career aspirations.
Joe Chuuk: We met about eight or nine years ago. I spent about two years at Google and then moved to Meta to work on advertising infrastructure. Most recently, I was responsible for trust and safety at Databricks.
Dutta: After two years working on machine learning at Google Cloud, he moved to Google DeepMind, where he remained until August 2025. Joe and I have always kept in touch as friends, but we also had a tacit understanding that one day we would like to start a company together.
We finally left our respective roles around the same time last year to co-found AI startup Pomo.
We’ve always wanted to start a company together, but we waited years for the right time.
Chok: Although we were on different teams at Google, we found ways to collaborate with each other on different side projects. I was very interested in learning more about machine learning and he was interested in the infrastructure side.
We wanted more freedom to make decisions and move quickly, so we had many conversations about whether a big tech environment was actually the best fit for us. We both realized that a startup environment might be a better fit.
Dutta: When Joe moved to Seattle, he came to see me and we stayed in touch. We have both been exposed to the advertising and marketing ecosystem through our previous jobs. He got exposure on Meta and I co-authored a study with the team at Google DeepMind to improve image generation for advertisers’ products.
Last year was a pivotal year. Because the time was right and we saw an opportunity to use AI to help companies make marketing decisions faster.
Finally, the timing was right and AI brought our idea to life.
Dutta: Early 2024 saw a paradigm shift in the capabilities of these AI models. We have also started interviewing marketing personnel. Through that interview, I realized that the technology already exists, the opportunity exists, and the Silicon Valley funding lifecycle has always existed, but it’s much faster now.
We also both secured green cards, which gave us the immigration stability we needed. All of this combined made us feel like, “Okay, now is the time to do this.” My last days at Google were bittersweet, but I’m still friends with some of my old colleagues. We often miss Big Tech, but we know that sometimes we have to be uncomfortable to accomplish great things, and we understand the risks we’re taking.
The biggest change from Big Tech to AI startup was how quickly decisions had to be made
Dutta: The fundamental difference between big tech companies and startups is the speed of decision-making. As a startup, the cost of indecision is much higher for us. As co-founders of the company, Joe and I always have to think about how quickly we can move the business forward.
In Big Tech, there are different tiers of approval. This culture shift to immediate positivity was the biggest thing for us to get used to.
Chok: But the flip side of this is that all these processes and solutions that we’ve seen in Big Tech help us not have to second-guess ourselves so much when we need to act quickly. Now, when I see a similar problem or process, the solution immediately comes to mind.
There’s no need to slow down and overthink. I’ve seen many engineers smarter than me do it, so it’s been validated as the right choice. Unless it makes sense and is not difficult to build, we will proceed with what is already being done.
Read the rest of our Tiny Teams series for an inside look at how small teams can use AI to achieve big results
Grind mode is the most valuable skill at the moment
Chok: Having the will to put in the effort is a very important factor right now. We believe that this is one of the most important things in the AI era.
With the right AI tools, anyone can now build something. So being able to really distinguish yourself from others depends on your technical knowledge, to be sure, but also on whether you can act fast enough to do it in the first place.
We currently have a team of six people and we prioritize that in our recruitment.
Dutta: I’m a CEO, so I don’t have a lot of time to write code. On the software side, realistically there were five people who built this system end-to-end. This only happened because we enabled our entire team to use these AI coding agents.
Do you have a similar story? Contact this reporter, Agnes Applegate: aapplegate@businessinsider.com.