This story is part of CNBC Make It’s The Moment series, where highly successful people reveal the critical moment that changed the trajectory of their lives and careers, discussing what drove them to make the leap into the unknown.
Dhruv Amin and Marcus Lowe left Google and built a startup that was “profitable from Day 1,” operating at a $2.2 million run rate by September 2023, Amin says. They predicted continued success, forecasting monthly revenue to multiply at least five-fold by late-2024.
Then, they shuttered the whole thing to start over from scratch — all due to ChatGPT, says Amin.
Today, Amin and Lowe, both 33, are the co-founders and co-CEOs of Anything, a vibe-coding startup valued at $100 million following an $11 million funding round in September, according to the company. The business was originally known as Create, a marketplace connecting startups to freelance engineers and artificial intelligence-powered coding tools to build websites and apps.
Why blow it up? Amin cites “the ChatGPT moment” in November 2022, when OpenAI debuted the generative AI chatbot. Its leap in capabilities from previous AI models “was a surprise to everybody,” Amin says.
