Builder AI + Finance Go-to-market
EverettCedarholm
Jakarta · 2019 → I joined a pre-seed startup backed by Sequoia and Lightspeed as its tenth hire, and stayed while it grew past a thousand people.
Selected work
Claude Job Search Agent
Claude Code skills that run a job search the way a career center teaches it: work a company list you keep, score every role on fit and on want separately, and edit your own .docx resume against each posting instead of generating a new one.
Exit Probability Model
Models trained on historical Crunchbase data to rank which Series A startups reach a successful exit in five to seven years. It beats random by 3.5× — and a write-up of why predicting an exit still isn't predicting a return.
ShopSherpa
A web app that reads real user discussions and online writing to produce clear, trustworthy buying guidance — structured data processing underneath, AI summarization on top.
Background
Most of what I know about building, I learned while the building was already moving.
In 2019 I joined a pre-seed startup in Indonesia backed by Sequoia and Lightspeed as its tenth employee, and helped scale it past 1,000 people — USD 125M+ raised, more than 100 locations, and operations running across Indonesia, India, Thailand and China.
I built departments from zero — first around customer experience during the fastest stretch of growth, then around profitability and unit economics, designing the systems that let the growth actually pay for itself.
Now I build independently. I experiment, ship prototypes, and make tools that bring structure to messy information — the same problem, at a different scale.
- Joined as
- Employee #10
- Grew to
- 1,000+ people
- Raised
- USD 125M+
- Footprint
- 100+ locations
- Markets
- Indonesia · India · Thailand · China
- Backers
- Sequoia · Lightspeed · YC
- Built from zero
- CX (Customer Support & Account Management) · Commercial Finance
The advantage goes
to the builders
Writing
The pineapple test
Applying to jobs has never been easier, and that's the problem. A posting can take a thousand applications in an hour, proof of effort has disappeared, and recruiters are now burying traps in the listings to catch the machines. What the pineapple test tells us about hiring, and why the real fix sits at the apply button.
If AI is core to business, why is it still an elective in the MBA?
AI is already rewriting how companies operate. The argument here is that business schools have to follow — past prompt literacy, toward real technical foundations.
Wading through chaos
What Jakarta's flooded streets taught me about resilience — and what global tech teams keep getting wrong about operating when the ground is unstable.
Get in touch
A short email every month or so — new writing, what I'm building, and job news when there is some. See what lands