How Three ‘Unfundable’ Engineers Built a $XXXM Company

This isn't your typical "we raised $50M and exited" story. This is what happens when you have no choice but to figure it out yourselves. When the tripod refuses to fall. When you run out of everything except ideas. This is the story of Heroic Labs.

Startup stories don't unfold in a straight line. They're usually built on moments of doubt, when the whole thing feels like it could collapse. For Heroic Labs founders Chris, Mo, and Andrei, three backend engineers from London, that moment came when they decided to blow up their entire business model.

But let's back up. Because before they made that existential bet, before they won customers that VCs said were impossible to land, before they built a decade-long company without raising money, they had to survive Y Combinator. And more specifically, they had to survive Lake Tahoe…

The Prequel: Lake Tahoe, Storm, and an Injured Leg

Picture this: Three weeks before demo day, the most important pitch of your startup's life. You've been working 18-hour days, six and a half days a week, living in an Airbnb, cooking and cleaning and coding together in a pressure cooker of optimism and anxiety. You finally give yourself one and only weekend off. A brief escape to Lake Tahoe, just a few hours away from Silicon Valley.

Chris is driving a speedboat. A wave hits. He's thrown to the side of the boat, his knee dislocating on impact. The boat dies, dead man switch knocked out. They're stranded for two hours in increasingly stormy weather, waiting for rescue.

Most founders would have gone to the hospital. Chris went back to the cabin, where Mo and Andrei performed an impromptu joint relocation with no medical training, no anesthesia, and no other option. Mo locked Chris from behind. Andrei pulled his leg. They basically grabbed one end of their co-founder and pulled him apart until his knee clicked back into place.

Three weeks later, Chris walked onto the Y Combinator demo day stage with a limp and delivered their pitch.

This is not a story about following the startup playbook. This is a story about what happens when you have no choice but to figure it out yourselves.

The Beginning: YC Crucible and the Graveyard Talk

Three engineers, no revenue, building game infrastructure in an era before Unity's IPO, when investors saw gaming tools as a graveyard. Their interview day at Y Combinator stretched from 8 AM to 5 PM. They watched other companies come and go, not knowing if they'd even get called. When they finally sat down with Geoff Ralston, Jessica Livingston, and Justin Kan, the questions came: thorough, probing, about the business, about them, about their chemistry.

They didn't think they'd make it. That night, they got the call.

What followed was three months of intensity: 8 AM to 11 PM, six and a half days a week. They cooked, cleaned, and worked on the idea together in a strange bubble they'd created for themselves. 

"You put yourself away from everything that's normal life," Chris recalls. "You spend vast amounts of hours either working through problems or trying to reach out to sell. Because you've got this timeline, this deadline to demo day. That demo day moment is make or break."

They only gave themselves one weekend in the middle. One weekend to drive to Lake Tahoe. We all know how that went. But that wasn’t the last obstacle. Far from it. Y Combinator graduation proved, the Demo Day, proved to be another one. The presentation went well. Thirteen investor meetings. All of which led nowhere.

Finally, they had a meeting with the legendary Bing Gordon (EA, Zynga) at Kleiner Perkins.  That should have been encouraging. He spent half an hour offering advice on how to win the market rather than demanding they impress him. His challenge: "If you can win Zynga, we'll put money into you."

But as they left, he offered one more piece of wisdom:

"The road you're in, is a graveyard, full of bones of previous dead companies."

"We went in optimistic," Mo says. "We came out deflated."

We were three backend engineers from the same university. On paper, unfundable. No diversity of skills, no business person, no one from the gaming industry. Just friends who'd worked in London FinTech and met for lunch to talk about what they could build together.

"But what we had was each other. We are almost like a tripod," Mo says. "We lean on each other through the emotional rollercoaster."

They would eventually win Zynga as a customer. But by then, the lesson had already been learned: nobody was coming to save them.

The Pivot aka. Existential Gamble

After emerging from Y Combinator's summer 2015 batch with their first customers, the team realized they were distributing their technology the wrong way. They had modeled themselves after a YC company that Facebook had acquired. But as core infrastructure, the kind intrinsically linked to a studio's success or failure, they needed a different approach.

So they rebuilt from scratch. Went open source. And lost customers in the process.

"We weren't sure if we were just giving away the secret sauce for free," Mo admits. But they traveled to customers, did the research, and came to a conclusion: "It has to be open source. The main driver needs to be around the adoption of the tech."

It was a bet that would define everything that came after. And it worked, but not in the way any VC would have predicted.

The Scaling: Always On, Everywhere

Mo once shipped a critical patch while on safari in South Africa, with elephants visible in the distance. Andrei took a 2 AM customer call in Bali.

These weren't anomalies. They were the reality of building core infrastructure as a remote-first company with no safety net.

"Where we were or who we were with didn't matter," Chris explains. "We would always solve whatever problem they were having."

This approach shaped how they built their technology, with extreme resiliency, knowing one of them might need to fix it at 3 AM from anywhere in the world. Eighteen-hour shifts continued for years after Y Combinator, even as the team grew.

"We never disconnected," Chris says. "Even when the team was growing, we were still the most senior engineers. The person fastest able to fix or change any piece of it to fit what a studio needed was gonna be one of the three of us."

The Anti-VC Path

In the end, Heroic Labs never raised venture capital beyond Y Combinator's initial check. Every investor who showed interest ultimately wanted proof they could win first, land a major customer, then come back.

"What they're essentially saying is, we'll invest when you no longer need investment," Andrei observes.

Looking back, they wonder if Heroic Labs would even exist if they'd taken institutional money.

"We would've been running on the SaaS model," Andrei points out. "Making the big pivot to open source would probably not have been very welcomed."

More fundamentally, outside capital would have altered their perspective.

"We would've thought, finally, someone who knows more than us believes in us," Andrei says. "We would've been honored even. We would've let their biases influence our decision-making, almost pre-influencing ourselves before we even sought advice."

Instead, being cash-poor forced brutal focus.

"It makes you really focus on where your revenue is gonna come from, what your customers actually need," Mo explains. "That's a harsh reality you've gotta look at, where your next bit of food is gonna come in."

The YC advice stuck with them: only hire when you're bleeding.

"We've only hired when we realized, okay, we need help. We know what to do, but we don't have the time to do it," Mo says.

The result? Ten years later, profitable every year. Zero customer churn except when game studios themselves shut down. A team they've never laid off, where younger members are now getting mortgages.

"When I realized the younger members of our team were starting to get mortgages and buy their first properties, that we were able to give them that stability, it's something they can rely on and build their lives on," Andrei reflects.

The Invisible Tax of Being a Founder

Jensen Huang, founder of Nvidia, once said that if founders knew the pain in advance, nobody would ever start a company. Ask them what they'd whisper to their younger selves, and the answers come quickly.

"Everything takes longer," Mo says, then adds with a laugh: "Oh, and buy some Bitcoin."

"You're not as prepared as you think you are for the sacrifices, the missed opportunities, the delay this will cost your life," Andrei reflects. "If it's successful right away, no problem. But if it takes a while, a lot of things are on hold until you figure this out."

They'd meet up with friends from their peer group, people with normal jobs, buying apartments, starting families.

"It's hard to relate," Chris admits. "You can't speak to the kind of things everyone else is doing because you're not doing them. And you're not keeping up with your reading list, movies or TV shows. You're not traveling as much."

Mo's wife would ask: "Are we doing the right thing? This other person just bought their house." All he could say was,

"We think we are. It's an investment, like a rocket you're just putting fuel in to take off."

The doubt never disappeared.

"You just get better at dealing with it," Andrei says. But there was imposter syndrome even when things started working. And constant questioning of whether it was the right way to spend my 20s and 30s. Because you can't get that back."

Mo reflects on what he'd tell his future kids:

"I would tell them to take an hour or two a week to themselves and just think through the why behind certain actions. Just self-reflect. Rather than just go, go, go for ten years straight on adrenaline and cortisol.”

Philosophical Musing

There's something deeply contrarian about Heroic Labs' existence. In an era when "fundable" became synonymous with "viable," when founders optimized their teams for pitch decks rather than building.

They didn't know the rules well enough to follow them. They were malleable but had no one to mold them except their customers and each other. They confused ignorance for independence and stubbornness for strategy. And somehow, that became their greatest strength.

Perhaps that's the real lesson: the best companies aren't built by a strategically diversified team of superstars who are following the playbook. They're built by founders who don't have a choice, who lean on each other, and who refuse to run out of ideas. Who pulls each other's dislocated knees back into place in a cabin because that's what needs to happen to hit the deadline. 

The venture capital model works. It's built trillion-dollar companies and funded entire generations of technology. But it's not the only path. Sometimes, maybe more often than we admit, the unfundable team becomes the one that lasts. Not because they had a better thesis or a more impressive pedigree, but because they were too naive to quit, too stubborn to fail, and too good friends to let each other down.

About Heroic Labs: Core infrastructure for game studios. If you've played games from Zynga, Gram Games, or dozens of other studios, you've used their tech without knowing it. That's by design.