Founder's Campfire: Jason Chao on challenges of building AI agents, crypto, and real estate tech

The Stanford Daily Podcast

In this episode of Founder's Campfire, Tran Le interviews Jason Chao, her former co-founder and a current master's student in computer science at Stanford. Jason’s early entrepreneurship journey began as a high school dropout when he raised a million dollars through an ICO to build a wireless mesh networking company. Although this venture ultimately did not succeed, it inspired him to pursue computer science at Stanford with the goal of becoming a technical founder. During his junior year, Jason built a real estate transaction management platform. He shares his struggles of being a solo founder, building a solution for one customer that didn’t scale to others, and ultimately pivoting away from real estate. Leveraging his experiences and learnings, Jason discusses his current start-up, Loral Labs, and on building the future of APIs for AI agents.

00:00 — Raising a million dollars and dropping out of high school 03:11 — Returning to high school and entering Stanford 05:04 — Exploring telecom and real estate tech 14:36 — Pivoting away from real estate tech 16:31 — Building Loral Labs and AI agents

Follow Jason on his journey: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jchao01/

Check out Loral Labs: https://lorallabs.com/

Founder’s Campfire is a podcast show created and hosted by Tran Le, a senior at Stanford studying computer science. Through reflective conversations with early founders, Le hopes to build a community of founders focused on reflection, sharing, and growth at Stanford and beyond. Whether you're a founder, dreamer, investor, or simply a curious listener, there's a place for you around the campfire. Join Le as she shares stories, insights, and lessons on entrepreneurship.