Zingage Engineering

[Written by Zingage Head of Operations Samantha Tepper]

The mythology of startup creation follows a familiar script: brilliant founder has breakthrough insight, starts company in garage, changes world. But there's a more interesting pattern hiding in plain sight: many of the most transformative companies aren't born from solitary inspiration – they emerge from the DNA of other great companies.

This isn't just about talented people leaving to start new ventures. It's about how solving hard problems inside fast-growing companies creates the perfect conditions for identifying massive opportunities.

Consider Snowflake, now valued at over $50 billion. Its founders, Benoit Dageville and Thierry Cruanes, spent years as data architects at Oracle, where they intimately understood the limitations of traditional data platforms. This deep operational experience with Oracle's technology and customer needs didn't just inform Snowflake's creation – it was essential to it. They didn't just have an idea for better data warehousing; they had years of pattern recognition about what actually worked and what didn't at massive scale.

We see similar patterns elsewhere in enterprise software. Some trace Retool's innovative approach to internal tooling back to experiences at Palantir, where the challenges of working with complex data systems reportedly inspired new thinking about how to build internal tools. While the exact details of this lineage aren't widely documented, it points to a broader truth about how innovation propagates through the technology industry.

Why does this pattern keep repeating? Three factors make great companies natural incubators for even greater ones:

1. Scale creates visibility into problems worth solving. When you're operating at scale, you encounter problems that aren't just annoying – they represent massive market opportunities if solved. The internal tools teams build to solve these problems often have immediate product-market fit because they're built for real needs.
2. High-performance teams develop exceptional pattern recognition. Working on complex problems at scale gives builders a sixth sense for which solutions could become standalone products. This isn't just about technical insight – it's about understanding what makes a solution truly valuable.
3. These environments force pragmatic innovation. When you're building internal tools for a growing company, you can't hide behind theory. The solutions either work at scale or they don't. This creates a unique kind of builder – one who combines vision with practical experience.

We're entering an era where the most valuable companies will emerge from the DNA of today's scale-ups. Not through acquisition or investment, but through the natural evolution of solving hard problems with great teams. The next wave of breakthrough startups are probably being built right now as an internal tool somewhere.

At Zingage, we're assembling a team of renegades who refuse the AI replacement narrative, and embrace abundance. We're building Agent Swarm that allows everyday entrepreneurs - not just those in Silicon Valley - to bootstrap their businesses from zero to thousands of customers. If this sounds interesting, we'd love to chat at hiring@kuzushi.io.

Kuzushi is the team behind Zingage.com. We are a team of builders deploying AI for the Bedrock Economy.

The Bedrock Economy is the part of the economy that’s essential to our everyday lives, yet hard to automate and impossible to offshore. These are the same people taking care of our parents, moving goods from coast to coast, and building infrastructure for the coming decades.

When COVID hit in 2021, more than 200,000 businesses in healthcare, construction, food, and hospitality closed doors permanently. Though demand was often through the roof, these businesses struggled operationally. Behind the scenes an army of back offices battling with fragmented software, employee turnover, and a changing regulatory environment. With healthcare costs up 25% in the last 5 years and the price of housing seemingly unreachable for millions of Americans, the stakes have never been higher.

"Our goal is to make running these essential businesses as easy as selling on Shopify."

By adopting AI, the Bedrock Economy can leapfrog from paper forms and fax machines to autonomous agents. Companies will soon be able to automate whole categories of back-office processes without ripping out their system of records, going through expensive retraining, or needing hyper-customized software.

A picture of our customer workflow pre-Kuzushi. They were using 5 different systems to manage their patient onboarding process.

At Kuzushi, we are building anthropomorphic AI – a digital colleague on your side 24/7.

We see a future where everyday entrepreneurs can scale without growing their headcount, reinvest these savings into their employees, and elevate the role of back offices from paper pushers to process designers. We see a future where new entrepreneurs are ushered into best operational practices from Day 1, so that they can get back to growth.

Since launching in 2023, we’ve successfully scaled our first vertical. We’re now working with some of America’s largest Healthcare providers, onboarding thousands of new patients and clinicians every month, and slated to reach profitability this year. We raised a seed round from the same investors behind generational companies like Airtable, Deel, and Figma.

At Kuzushi, we’re humanists at heart. We believe entrepreneurship is the essence of the American Dream, and we believe that our work will enable today’s employees to earn a stake in tomorrow’s economy. You’ll be working alongside teammates who’ve scaled marketplaces to 9-figures in GMV, early builders at AI and fintech unicorns like Ramp.

Kuzushi is always looking to work with talented engineers, designers, and researchers. We heavily prioritize learning speed over seniority and give highly competitive ownership for ones who are in it for the long run. When you join, expect to work on large-scale data platforms, pioneering building blocks for “work”, and designing AI-native user interaction.

What is Kuzushi?

Kuzushi means to break balance. It is a term used in Judo that describes what a Judoka must establish or capitalize on to take down their opponent. We named the company Kuzushi because we believe that winning in markets is the same. It is a series of Kuzushi moments that we either create or seize to push forward against tiny odds of success. Kuzushi is the most high agency way to describe “why now” moments.

We see Kuzushi or the opportunity for Kuzushi in so many places. Two examples: on engineering we are able to ship code multiple folds faster by leveraging Cursor; in sales, we’re automating high touch b2b outreach with AI copy that would’ve cost hours of sales time to create. Neither of these opportunities will last forever but while they do we will capitalize to maximize distribution and fortify our position.

“Whatever you do, do it constantly and massively increase the scope of your ambition.”

This quote from Napoleon defines our culture at Kuzushi. We apply unrelenting and continuous pressure forward until we’ve won every customer. Every week we ask ourselves, how can I be 10x faster, how can I do 10x more?

Interested in joining us?

We are New York-based, well-funded, and are hiring for our Founding Team. If you are interested in joining us, reach out to us at dt@kuzushi.io.