Marvel Gomulya

This is the most insightful era of my life, during which I am learning everything from sales, operations, finance, hiring, fundraising, and designing complex AI agents. I look forward to seeing how this era pans out.

Fueled by my past endeavors in education, I wanted to find a way to monetize and build a career in this space. My fellow team members at LITE and I set out to build Unilite, an all-in-one AI-powered software that helps high school students get accepted into their dream universities. We faced numerous challenges: we pivoted our business model midway, my co-founders left (at one point, I was the only one remaining), we had no one to build the software, so I had to act as the de facto CTO, and we often had to lay off team members we had hired just a few months prior due to company changes. Despite everything, we eventually figured out a business model that worked to some extent and built many innovative features along the way, including perplexity for university resources before perplexity gained popularity, GPT canvas for university essays before Canvas launched, and the most comprehensive video guides for admissions to top 20 US & UK universities. Ultimately, we were able to help students from top international schools in Indonesia gain admission to prestigious universities like Cambridge, Berkeley, and Columbia while making a few thousand dollars in monthly revenue.

UC Berkeley was the first time I felt intellectually challenged by the courses and people here. I took my time at Berkeley as a chance to have tons of fun with friends with whom I could resonate and explore my professional interests. I learned to play poker, worked on internships, went on road trips, had impulsive nights out, and engaged in deep conversations. I built my closest friendships here, including becoming best friends with my now co-founder at Covena.

Inspired by my suboptimal high school experience, I decided to start a leadership program for ambitious high school students. I initially brainstormed with my college friends, but everyone thought I was crazy. I ignored them and started on my own. I approached my previous school to partner with them, but they did not like my idea. With no connections to the market, it was probably the perfect time to wrap it up and say I had given it a shot. However, I was too stubborn and willful for that. I cold-messaged every high school student I knew, asking them to introduce me to every other high school student. In the end, I was able to convince five crazy high school students to help me with this. Afterwards, I tried to run the program, but we faced a setback when one of the key mentors left during our initial stage. We had to quickly find a replacement within a week. To make matters worse, we did not get enough people to join; we received only 13 applications, far below the minimum of 20 required to run the program. This put us in panic mode. We pushed back the deadline to give ourselves more time and messaged everyone we knew to increase the number of applicants. As a result, we were able to turn things around and eventually reached 28 applicants by the end. During that time, I was determined to do whatever it took to make this happen. Fast forward, LITE built the most beloved leadership training program for Indonesian high school students. Students loved our program, with 9.8/10 satisfaction scores, and we often received entire essays of thank-you notes - the most customer love I had ever received for anything I had built.

I left high school early at 16 years old to attend a local college in the US. During this time, I decided to channel all my obsession with video games into getting my life together. I tried everything, from creating podcasts and machine learning software to selling items on eBay and participating in school clubs. This period was my first taste of real hustle. I remember sleeping at 12am and waking up at 6am religiously, then working again all the way to 12am. I mapped out every single day in 15-minute blocks (a few friends even started asking me how I was able to handle everything). By the end, I had become the president of the two biggest clubs on campus, a feat no one had ever achieved before. This was the most transformational period of my life, and it set me up for greater ambitions down the road.

I went to a very academically strict high school. All they cared about was homework and study. Although I always did well (participated in olympiads and scholarships), I felt out of place. I had no room to project my entrepreneurial drive in school. So I ran into video games, obsessively. I channeled my drive into being the very best at most video games. I achieved top 1% in most games I played (Rules of Survival, Call of Duty Mobile, Clash Royale, the list goes on) and even became literally #1 in some of them. This was also when I learned I had ungodly amounts of stamina if I had something I was obsessed with. I could easily pull off a 24-hour gaming sprint multiple times a week, even when my friends were exhausted after just 3-4 hours of playing.

I recall playing an academic quiz where the rules were simple: say 'yes' and you sit down, say 'no' and you remain standing. The teacher posed a question: is baking a cake a reversible process? Instantly, everyone sat down, leaving me the only one standing, my knees shaking. The wait felt like an eternity, until the teacher finally spoke up and said I was the only one who got it correct.

I sold Hot Wheels in the primary school lobby and flipped a lot of in-game items in Minecraft servers. I vividly remember my math teacher asking me what I wanted to be when I grew up. While others answered 'doctor' or 'police officer', I confidently replied 'a businessman'.