Founder’s Campfire is a podcast show created and hosted by Tran Le, a senior at Stanford studying computer science. Through reflective conversations with early founders, Le hopes to build a community of founders focused on reflection, sharing and growth at Stanford and beyond. Whether you’re a founder, dreamer, investor or simply a curious listener, there’s a place for you around the campfire. Join Le as she shares stories, insights and lessons on entrepreneurship.

In this episode of Founder’s Campfire, Tran Le interviews Jason Chao, her former co-founder and a current computer science master’s student. Chao’s early entrepreneurship journey began as a high school dropout when he raised a million dollars through an initial coin offering to build a wireless mesh networking firm.

Though this venture did not succeed, it inspired him to pursue computer science at Stanford with entrepreneurial aspirations. As a third-year undergraduate, Chao built a real estate transaction management platform.

In this podcast, he delves into struggling as a solo founder, building a solution for one customer that did not scale to others and pivoting away from real estate. Leveraging his experiences and lessons, Chao takes listeners behind the scenes at his current start-up, Loral Labs, and building the future of APIs for AI agents.