There is a misconception that the most successful founders are young.
This is largely perpetuated by the few exceptional cases of wunderkinder that have become startup lore.
Mark Zuckerberg with Facebook at 19. Larry Page & Sergey Brin with Google at 25. Bill Gates & Paull Allen with Microsoft at 20. Steve Jobs with Apple at 21.
In reality, the most successful founders are around 45 years old.
And it stands to reason. Older founders have more experience in their sector. more extensive network. They tend to have more financial resources to put into a new venture.
And, quite simply, they’re more emotionally mature. Studies have shown that older founders tend to be more positive, stable, and resilient. All of which are key traits for handling the demands of startups.
That doesn’t mean, however, that an exception can’t come along every now and then.
Today, I want to bring you a story of such an exception – Founder and CTO of Indico Data, Slater Victoroff.
A few years ago, while still in his dorm room, Slater and his co-founder had an idea: to create a platform capable of transforming raw data into structured, actionable insights, enabling the development of better enterprise workflows.
This idea quickly gained traction, earning them a spot in Techstars Boston.
Just like some of the tech giants that came before him, it wasn’t long before Slater faced a critical decision – to stay in school or dedicate himself fully to their burgeoning startup.
Opting for the latter, he dropped out to focus on scaling Indico Data. His efforts paid off handsomely as the company grew to handle billions of monthly API calls, attract a developer ecosystem of around 10,000 people, and close multiple six-figure enterprise contracts.
I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Slater to learn about his journey for an episode of our podcast, The Startup Journey.
In our conversation, he shared priceless insights that any entrepreneur could apply to their journey.
Keep scrolling to read it in full, or give it a listen right here. 👇
Contents
About Slater & Indico Data
Rui: Slater, thank you for taking the time to sit down with me today.
To start, could you, in your own words, give us a quick overview of yourself and Indico?
Slater: Absolutely. Thanks so much for having me. One of the things I love about Indico is that it’s a true dorm room startup. It was founded from 5 p.m. to 5 a.m. on Sunday nights, specifically eating pineapple and onion pizza from Domino’s. So, judge that as you will. We were at Olin College, and it was our love of machine learning that brought us into the space. I was doing Kaggle competitions with a friend, and we were doing pretty well. What pushed us over the edge was asking ourselves, what do we do when we have spare time? For us, it was machine learning.
After working on it for a year, it grew to the point where we couldn’t do both that and school simultaneously. We raised $3 million and realized we probably weren’t going back to school.
Validating the Idea for Indico Data
R: This goes to the Silicon Valley lore. And against the odds. From my experience, founders in the best position to succeed are often older and have a few years of experience in a given industry.
They detect inefficiencies, set out to solve the problem, have the network, and the pockets to bootstrap at the start.
But I’m always amazed by examples like yours—kids in a dorm room building a successful business, raising $30 million.
How did you validate this idea and build the first version of the business?
You mentioned it took you roughly a year to gain enough traction to know you had a viable business. What happened between the moment you noticed, “Okay, this is what we want to do,” and the moment you were in a position not to go back to school?
S: There are two main pieces, and I’ll start with your first reflection. Typically, you’d be in a better position to start a company after gaining industry experience. It would have been a lot easier. It was not the plan for us. I would tell everyone, as we worked on Indico, or even just ML together, that I wasn’t dropping out of school. Eventually, they were right—I did drop out.
One important mentality for us was contrary to popular belief—I don’t think people should drop out of school to start companies. It’s usually a terrible idea, even though I might be an exception. I believe in the value of school. In fact, I would almost frame it as getting so much value out of the first three years that I didn’t need the last one. The process for us was slow. It was a year after the founding of Indico, but that founding represented a significant step.
We spent a year doing Kaggle competitions. During one summer, people reached out wanting us to do contracting work. We had some idea that we were good but didn’t realise how good.
We made a bet—if we made $1,000 in the next two weeks, we’d start a company. We doubled that goal, so we had to make a company. By October of our junior year, we got all the incorporation done and set up. At first, it felt like the most legitimate side project we’d ever done, but we didn’t have a lot of faith it would work out. We gave it a real shot.
Our approach was very developer-centric. We built ML APIs and asked ourselves, what would we use? We started building and putting it into people’s hands. Interestingly, the first approach didn’t work. We validated that developers were interested, and we could build an API that made machine learning more accessible. But there was no business model. The technology was too new, and the buying power wasn’t in the hands of developers yet.
We transitioned to a more traditional enterprise focus. The classic idea—do things that don’t scale. Cold outreach, personal meetings, and doing whatever it took to make it work. We sold the end result, built internal tools to do it more effectively, and used our developer tools for real products. After a year of pounding the pavement, smothering customers with time and love, and focusing on delivering value, we finally had everything in place to productize. This was when we started to grow very quickly.
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The Myth of the Overnight Success
R: So I want to caveat this next comment by saying I don’t believe in the idea of an overnight success.
That said, people could perceive you as an overnight success and think, “These kids in a dorm room raised $30 million. It’s that easy. It’s luck.” And they couldn’t be more wrong, right?
S: I wish it was easy. I think making a company is arguably the hardest thing a person can do.
You used the term “overnight success,” and I love this because people don’t know how long overnight success takes.
UiPath is a great example. Everyone talks about UiPath as an overnight success, but they were around for seven years before they broke a million in revenue.
From that point, they grew quickly, but those seven years were full of toil, heartache, and uncertainty. For most folks, that’s 100% of their experience—they never make it to the other side. You have to take the wins where you can. It’s all about execution.
Going to Market
R: I’d like to touch on a couple of things you mentioned, namely cold outreach and doing things that don’t scale.
I’ve lost count of how many entrepreneurs hide behind a brand that doesn’t exist. They create a website, believing it will sell for them, protecting a brand yet to be built.
They fail because there are no trust builders and no use cases. The advice is to sell the vision, not just the product or service.
Early adopters buy into the vision. I love that you touched on this point and the cold outreach – because, in the end, it’s about the founders.
S: If you’re not willing to put yourself out there, pitch what you’re selling, and do the awkward, uncomfortable things—like emailing your second cousin to talk to their boss—then you’re not going to make it. I didn’t have a big business family to call on, but it’s about taking every meeting you can. Early momentum comes from those efforts. People see one viral post and don’t realize the hundred others that nobody saw.
The Early Days of Indico Data
R: Early in my career, I looked at successful entrepreneurs and thought they knew everything.
Now I know they were just figuring things out. They went door-to-door, got rejections from investors, and faced challenges with co-founders and early employees.
Let’s talk about the early stages of your company. You were the CEO, dealing with investors, and the CMO, running highly targeted technical marketing campaigns.
Founders do everything at the start—accounting, sales, and more. Tell us about those first few months.
S: Let’s wind it back even further to the dorm room and the tasks involved in setting up a company. We had to deal with incorporation docs, study securities law to figure out how to raise a friends and family round and spend time networking.
People don’t realise how many functions are happening in a company like Google. When you’re two people, you have to figure out how to do everything.
Our CEO often talks about “the next hat you take off.” Some people think, “We’re not doing X; we need to hire someone for X.” As a founder, that’s never the right mentality.
If you can’t get a function to work for your business, you’ll never find someone else to do it. You have to figure it out first. Once you do, then you can hand it off to someone who might do it better.
But you have to break through and frame things yourself. That’s a responsibility you can’t hand away.
R: I agree. The commitment and involvement early on are crucial—and most founders get it, it’s their baby.
It’s also really hard to attract great people when it’s just an idea on a napkin. So that involvement makes sense. I often use myself as an example; I was the first marketing hire at Altar. I was brought in when things were already working, and they needed to set a better strategy and professionalise something they were already doing well.
S: Exactly, that’s when it makes sense for founders to hand something off—to make it better.
Funding & The Road to Product-Market Fit
R: Let’s change gears here and move further down the line. After that first year and raising the $3 million, during the road to product-market fit, can you share some stories or insights about that phase?
S: The hardest things are consistency of execution and tracking progress. We got really upside down here.
First, I’ll talk about the things we messed up and then how things eventually came together.
There are many metrics you can look at, and often a VC might ask for a metric that doesn’t make sense in your business context. Knowing which metrics are useful is really hard.
We had vanity metrics and critical metrics. For instance, we focused on API volume, hitting a billion API calls a month. It seemed like progress, but it was from one customer, and the value per call was small.
There’s a balance between recognising when something isn’t working and when it just needs a tweak. Enterprise sales cycles are long—about 12 months. If you change your marketing strategy every three months, you won’t know if it worked.
Recognise how critical each bet is, commit to it, and understand that at the end of an experiment, there will be successes and failures. Look at your funnel critically, know what’s working well, and what needs improvement. Don’t present problematic metrics to VCs, but focus on them internally.
People understand user innovation, but business models and pricing innovations are just as important.
R: Consistency of execution and measuring success is crucial.
Now, let’s go a bit tactical. Can you share some important lessons on dealing with investors?
S: For both investors and customers, the most valuable experience I had was theatre.
Doing musicals and plays in high school and college helped me present myself confidently. There’s a careful balance because many technical entrepreneurs hate networking and being evaluated by people who don’t understand their work. Viewing it as playing a role helps compartmentalise and reach people effectively.
For investors specifically, always talk to a founder who has done it successfully and was involved in pitching.
VCs won’t always tell you what they really think. Recognise that investors want to find good investments and come across as good partners. Cold reach-outs to VCs are okay; don’t get discouraged. Fundraising isn’t about your win rate; you need just one correct investor.
R: Finding someone who has done it before is critical. I’ve seen people follow the wrong advice very often, so knowing who to trust is crucial.
S: Exactly. The specificity of experience matters. I used to think credentials were a fuzzy mess, but it’s about finding someone with experience closely matching your situation. If you’re at $1 million in revenue, don’t ask someone who has never joined a company below $5 million. Find someone who has been in a situation as close to yours as possible.
The Early-Stage Startup Team
R: Who did you have with you in the early days? What was the team composition?
S: The original team was me, Alec Radford, Madison May, and Diana Yuan. We were all college friends, which was a huge plus. We had a group of hungry, intelligent folks who knew how to work together.
R: Can you break down the roles each of you took early on?
S: The job titles were fuzzy, but in some ways, we’ve never changed. Alec was the researcher, now at OpenAI.
I was the CEO, handling a lot of architecture early on. Madison became the CTO, and Diana was brought in for business expertise.
Over time, roles evolved. Now, I’m the CTO, focusing on intellectual property, tech partnerships, and team building. Madison is the ML architect, and Diana is the VP of Talent and Ops, making Indico an amazing place to work.
Creating a good work environment where smart people feel supported is key to a successful company.
Nurturing a Positive Startup Culture
R: It’s all about the people – and that only becomes clearer to me the more I do for my business, the more startups I work with and founders I speak to.
You can have the best ideas, the infrastructure, whatever you want, but if the culture isn’t working and people aren’t incentivised to do the right things for the right reasons, you’re in trouble.
Did you realise this early on, or was it something that came later? Do you have any horror stories or huge successes that highlight its importance?
S: We intellectually realised it early on. People kept telling us culture is important, so it was always top of mind. Because it was so important to us, it never became an issue.
One of the toughest challenges was recognising when our culture had to change through our growth. As founders, we sometimes set bad examples, like sleeping in the office and staying up all night. That became a big problem. We had to define our culture around working late and set conscious expectations.
We were lucky to have a strong start on culture. Our core values have been strong throughout the years. They emphasise sharing, a do-first mentality, and working on something fundamentally new. At Indico, we believe everyone’s information is valuable.
Any team member should feel comfortable raising their hand, even in an all-hands meeting, to challenge me or anyone else. It’s our job as the leadership team to create an environment where people feel comfortable doing this.
R: How do you make that happen? How do you empower people?
S: It’s a good question. Enforce is a tough word. Culture trickles from the top down. Modelling healthy and productive behaviour is crucial.
Have difficult conversations openly, show how to talk through tricky issues, and contribute back to the community. Hiring the right people early on is also key. Culture doesn’t self-correct; it continues to go off the rails if not addressed.
We implemented a reverse policy in hiring. Before making a hiring decision, the committee must have at least one person who strongly advocates for the candidate.
This person helps onboard the new hire unofficially. If everyone feels a bit uncomfortable during the interview process, it speaks volumes.
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A “Day-in-the-Life” of an Early-Stage Startup Founder
R: What was a day in your life like back then? How many hours did you work, and how did you split your focus?
S: I’ll rewind a bit before Indico for context. I worked very hard, and in my sophomore year, I worked 220-hour months.
It was rough, and I burnt out hard. I vowed never to do that again. My default state is comfortable working about 60 hours a week. I prefer jumping in and out of work, taking breaks during the day, and working a bit on weekends.
Brad Feld has a term I like—work-life harmony. If you get it right, work and life support each other. In the early days of Indico, I worked 12 to 16-hour days and often slept in the office. I loved Indico and didn’t even blink about doing it.
But over time, we realised this couldn’t continue without becoming toxic.
We introduced policies like having a nap room and taking breaks during the day.
We also stopped using Slack at certain hours to avoid setting the wrong expectations. As a leadership team, we tried not to openly communicate late-night work to avoid influencing others negatively.
Advice for Entrepreneurs Launching a Startup Now
R: Let’s do a rapid-fire session with some finishing questions. Can you share one key lesson you learned on product?
S: Don’t under-implement. Get something out to market quickly, but ensure the MVP is truly viable.
R: One key lesson you learned in marketing?
S: It has to be much simpler than you think. Engineers should be involved in everything, but marketing is the hardest for them to plug into because the message has to be so simple.
R: One key lesson you learned on managing people?
S: Servant-based leadership. You’re there to help them, not the other way around. Bake cookies, get coffee—do what it takes to support them.
R: One key lesson you learned on creating and maintaining a good culture?
S: Play video games with your team. Do small stuff that matters. We rock climb and share weekend pictures. Working with friends is better than working with people you don’t like.
R: Finally, one resource that was invaluable to your success?
S: My co-founders were the most valuable resource. Being in the trenches together was crucial. I admire solo founders, but I couldn’t do it alone.
Thank You, Slater…
… For taking the time to sit down with me.
For our readers, the insights Slater provided are invaluable.
Whether you’re an entrepreneur embarking on your startup journey or an established founder seeking to scale your operations, the lessons from Indico Data’s success are clear: relentless dedication, commitment, strategic decision-making and putting people at the centre of everything can transform ambitious ideas into successful startups.
Thank you for reading and listening.
