Raising $3.4M with a demo, no pitch deck

Timestamps:

12:54 - The Y Combinator Journey

16:24 - The Need for Solutions Like Bloom

24:23 - Raising $3.4 million in three days 

37:07 - The future of AI and software development

Check-out Bloom: https://bloom.diy/android

Episode Summary

David Oort Alonso is the co-founder of Bloom, a mobile app builder that’s aiming to make your phone a creation device. Trained in aerospace engineering and robotics in ETH, David’s path into software started with tinkering, then spiraled into a bigger thesis: the friction in software creation is still keeping most people from shipping real products.

In this episode, David shares why mobile is still fundamentally broken compared to web (hardware constraints, distribution, approvals, and iteration loops); how Bloom uses universal apps and a radically simpler sharing flow to get native apps onto real users’ phones in minutes; and the category race in “vibe coding” and why speed alone won’t win -reliability and retention will.

We also go deeper into the founder journey: the mechanics behind getting into Y Combinator after five rejections, and raising $3.4M in five days without a pitch deck, and why building from Zurich can be strategically smarter than competing for the same talent pool in San Francisco.

The cover portrait was edited by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.smartportrait.io⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.

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