Andrew Pierno

Andrew Pierno

I've tried 83 projects.

4 made money.

You're here for the other 79.

Subscribe somewhere ↓

/in/andrewpierno

blog.andrewpierno.com

0

Projects Tried

0

Made Money

~0%

Hit Rate

Currently trying

→

Dad's Balls

Protein balls with creatine. Yes, the name is the marketing.

→

Filming every launch

Each new attempt gets a video. Most will flop on camera. That's the point.

When I'm not failing in public

Motion

Software Engineer2025 → now

Building AI productivity products at a $550M AI company. 120K+ customers, $39M+ ARR. Shipped the product suite solo from zero to launch; now leading a small team.

Muni Labs

Founder & CEO2024 → now

Microplastics testing company. 10 municipal and commercial customers. We fluorescence-stain tap water to reveal particles invisible to the naked eye.

UCLA Anderson

MBA CandidateExpected 2026

Nights and weekends. Because 83 failed startups wasn't enough to keep me busy.

The exit

🏰

Dark Tower

Acquired

Founder & CTO · 2020 – 2022 · Santa Monica, CA

Computer vision and ML for the security and surveillance industry. Built a federated MLOps pipeline and edge-computing infrastructure. Acquired by Blue Eye Corporation.

$8M

VC raised

110+

VC pitches

1B+

Events processed

Track record

Veritone

NYSE: VERI2020 – 2025

Director of Engineering, AI Labs

Founding member of AI Labs. Led a 14-person team on a DOD computer vision and drone project over a Link-16 network. Architected an EHR system that did $2M+ in revenue. Built an internal GPT-4 + RAG tool for security questionnaires. 95+ customer conversations, seven figures of revenue across 10 LLM demo products.

A computer vision startup

2017 – 2020

CTO

Led 25 engineers across front-end, back-end, DevOps, and AI. Real-time crime detection with YOLO on edge devices. Federated ML pipeline processing 2 billion security events. Three USPTO patents filed during this tenure.

A venture studio

2015 – 2017

Head of Engineering

Junior dev to Head of Engineering in 18 months. Built a consumer travel app as sole full-stack developer, scaled to thousands of users.

Side Project

thewatermap.com

10x cheaper microplastic testing

by munilabs.ai

See what's in your tap water. We use fluorescence microscopy to reveal microplastics invisible to the naked eye.

As seen on Reddit

"I've now tested tap water for microplastics in 20+ locations across West LA. Here's the contamination map."

109k views390 upvotes

r/PlasticFreeLiving

"I refuse to pay $600 to test my tap water for microplastics, so I built a fluorescence scope in my garage"

35k views141 upvotes

Water qualityMicroplasticsPublic healthmunilabs.ai

Heath Ledger

AI bookkeeping agent for Mercury bank accounts. Every SaaS could be an AI agent skill instead.

Agent Do

Agents post tasks. Other agents do them. The simplest possible agent marketplace — no orchestration, no tokens, just a task queue.

Patents

Billing data aggregation and forecasting system

US20240296485A1 · 2023

Auto-segmentation with rule assignment

US20190370559A1 · 2019

Learning to switch, tune, and retrain AI models

US20190373165A1 · 2019

Detecting changes in object size over long time scales

US20190370560A1 · 2019

xo.capital

Co-Founder · Sep 2020 – Sep 2025 · Santa Monica, CA

We buy and operate B2B SaaS companies.

11

Acquisitions

~$3.5M

Deployed

2

YC

supersend.ioBuiltSold

Cold email infrastructure

Customer journey platform

inlytics.ioSold

LinkedIn analytics

Twitter/X DM automation

screenshotapi.netSold

Website screenshot API

toyboxsystems.comYC S18Sold

3D printing for kids

sentimentinvestor.comSold

Market sentiment data

workclout.comYC W19Sold

Manufacturing ops

Google Sheets as an API

The Graveyard

4 of 83 projects made money.

~5% hit rate. The rest are here.

✓

Dark Tower

Sold

endlessposts.com

endlessblog.com

endlessstartups.com

Post-Mortems

thecompiler.io

Killing this project

102

Visitors

233

Page Views

72%

Bounce Rate

noco.io — AI App Builder

March 2025 – Nov 2025

110

Users

0

Successful Builds

$5k

Total Cost