Let's Accelerate.

I'm Nico, and I like building cool things.

I love startups - in particular founding companies. I am currently having dreams of insurance (I'm founder/ceo of a stealth company with quite a few customers here, so I guess it's not really that stealthy) and chips; in the past I was founder/ceo of a gaming company with more than 200 million MAU every month (I’m still driving action from the board; we have something like 1/3 of teens in most western countries play our games every month). 

I can often be found walking my corgi puppy, Trudy, in fidi. All good companies have dogs!

At any given time, I make sure over 99% of my net worth (measured in both capital and time) is in startup equity; I only use my money and time to start new companies that change the way things work substantially.

 

Startups are cool because you can actually change the world at large. I like that, and am attracted to hard technical problems with big market or behavioral implications. 

 

Moving fast, ambition, longevity, and accelerating technical and scientific progress are things I care about. 


 

My car (really). It's a 1965 Dodge A100 we hand painted.

My philosophy on startups is that you need to be pretty tough and hardcore in order to make it. 7 day workweeks all day etc are the minimum. More importantly, you need to be able to survive running out of money a bunch of times, etc. I like to think of startups as cockroaches: they can't be crushed, and need to be able to scurry pretty quickly. 

To symbolize the mentality, we keep hissing cockroaches in our office :).

Prior to Basket, I studied Neuroscience at Columbia, where I was a Rabi Scholar (top 10ish STEM students/class). 

I also did work on AI stuff when LSTMs were all the rage, and VR as well, from 2018-2020.

Prior to that, I did a lot of computational biology work, including on Oyster Genetics with some smart peple, like Nobel Laureate Hamilton Smith. I also did a bit of protein folding and taxonomy research.

Also me a while back

Awards/extracurriculars:

 

StartX founder (Basket), StartX neighborhood mentor, and YC founder (still in stealth)


Forbes 30 under 30, consumer technology

 

Rabi scholar (top 10ish stem students @ Columbia)

 


I can be reached at nico.laqua01@gmail.com