Engineering Founders
Early team building and pivoting to competitive advantage as a solo founder w/ Tony Dong @ Propel
Episode Summary
Tony Dong (Founder & CEO @ Propel) shares how he navigated the early days of solo founding, hired eight engineers in a month, and rapidly built early momentum. We explore how he leveraged existing relationships, storytelling, and competitive advantage analysis to pivot Propel’s focus, providing value quickly in your product, and building credibility for early sales. Plus, support systems for early founders, strategies for going broad vs. narrow, and how Tony’s current tech stack / AI tools are accelerating how they build.
Episode Notes
Tony Dong (Founder & CEO @ Propel) shares how he navigated the early days of solo founding, hired eight engineers in a month, and rapidly built early momentum. We explore how he leveraged existing relationships, storytelling, and competitive advantage analysis to pivot Propel’s focus, providing value quickly in your product, and building credibility for early sales. Plus, support systems for early founders, strategies for going broad vs. narrow, and how Tony’s current tech stack / AI tools are accelerating how they build.
Tony is the Founder & CEO of Propel, an AI engineering agent that integrates into your team’s workflows to automate engineering tasks and elevate developer productivity.
Before Propel, Tony served as the VP of Engineering at Rippling, where he led the development of the company's Platform and HR products. As a seasoned entrepreneur, Tony was also the founder and CTO of a YC-backed startup and held key engineering roles at Periscope, TellApart, and Twitter.
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SHOW NOTES:
- Tony’s journey transitioning from eng leader to founder (2:29)
- Lessons learned from founding Pershop & working @ Rippling (3:47)
- The origin of Propel & turning frustration into a startup idea (5:58)
- Recognizing the right moment to pivot your product (7:55)
- Incorporating competitive advantage analysis into strategic decision making (10:29)
- Accelerating user research & establishing credibility in your product area (12:32)
- The process of pivoting / solving highly valuable problems (14:15)
- Examples of how a product can quickly prove its value to customers (16:35)
- Strategies for proving value quickly during the early product building stages (17:51)
- Dynamics of being a solo founder & early team building (19:30)
- Pitching Propel as a solo founder / building support systems (21:13)
- How Tony hired a team of eight within one month, using relationships and public storytelling (23:32)
- How hiring contractors & sharing publicly helped drive early team building (25:19)
- Frameworks for attracting talent as a competitive advantage (27:44)
- Assessing hiring candidates: using every available AI tool, real projects & hands-on collaboration (31:09)
- Tony’s current stack & AI tools enhancing team productivity and innovation (33:49)
- The impact of AI on early-stage company building (35:39)
- Tony’s thoughts on capturing a broad market @ Propel (37:03)
- Understanding today's fundraising landscape (39:00)
- Rapid fire questions (40:48)
LINKS AND RESOURCES
- Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect - Today, every business can choose to be a hospitality business—and we can all transform ordinary transactions into extraordinary experiences. Featuring sparkling stories of his journey through restaurants, with the industry’s most famous players like Daniel Boulud and Danny Meyer, Will Guidara urges us all to find the magic in what we do—for ourselves, the people we work with, and the people we serve.
- The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket - In this exposé, author Benjamin Lorr pulls back the curtain on this highly secretive industry. Combining deep sourcing and immersive reporting, Lorr leads a wild investigation in which we learn the secrets of Trader Joe's success from Trader Joe himself, why truckers call their job "sharecropping on wheels," what it takes for a product to earn certification labels like "organic" and "fair trade," the struggles entrepreneurs face as they fight for shelf space, including essential tips, tricks, and traps for any new food business, the truth behind the alarming slave trade in the shrimp industry and much more.
- CAFEC Pour-Over Flower Dripper DEEP 27 - Tony’s favorite coffee dripper!
This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:
Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host
Jerry Li - Co-Host
Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/
Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/
Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/