Why Going Solo Made Him 10x Better: Zach Laberge on Building Omen AI, $41.5M Raised at 20

Key Takeaways

• No technical co-founder made him technical. "I knew nothing about plasma physics or spectroscopy… I had no co-founder that was technical. So I had to figure it out." Zach's case for solo founding is that it's a force multiplier — "you get a hundred times better because you have to do everything."
• The shutdown test is one question: "What's fundamentally going to change when I give you another three million?" When he couldn't answer it honestly at 18, he sold Frenter's customers, paid his team months of severance, and wound it down.
• Your next company starts from your strengths, not from a blank page. Weeks after the shutdown he pitched the buyers who had rejected Frenter, one said "we'd buy it," and he raised $3M in three days.
• Customers won't redirect you until you ask five of them. Omen started as an engine sensor; every customer said hydraulics were the real problem — but only after being asked why they'd nodded along.
• Being six months early feels like being wrong. A bitcoin miner called him an idiot for pitching coolant monitoring; then the liquid-cooling failures started.

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Introduction

The bitcoin miner laughed at him. Zach Laberge was nineteen, cold-emailing anyone who ran a data center, pitching the idea that the coolant flowing through liquid-cooled AI hardware would need to be monitored the way his company already monitored hydraulic fluid in Caterpillar excavators. "You're a f***ing idiot," the miner told him. "I've been in this space for twelve years. Never heard of this issue."

Zach left the meeting wondering whether the guy was right. Then word came that Nvidia's next generation of chips would run hot — hot enough, as he puts it, to turn coolant loops into the kind of pond water you'd never drink. "The perfect breeding ground for bacteria. I wonder if data centers are going to have the same thing." Six months later, the failures he'd described started happening.

That is the shortest version of how a kid from Halifax, Nova Scotia — who started his first company at 14 on a whiteboard, left school on the first day of grade eleven to run it, and shut it down at 18 — ended up running Omen AI, which has raised $41.5M from CRV, Nava Ventures, Sheryl Sandberg, and executives from Bridgestone, GM, and Johnson Controls to put spectroscopic sensors inside the fluids that keep AI data centers alive. He is 20. He has never had a co-founder. And in this conversation with Julian, he makes the most direct version of the case for solo founding the show has recorded: not that going solo is survivable, but that it makes you smarter.

The Shutdown Test

Zach's first company, Frenter, began as an "Airbnb for stuff" — a tool-rental marketplace sketched on January 28, 2020, followed by an eight-month business plan he now says he'd never write again. By the end it was a heavy-equipment telematics business with six figures in revenue, roughly $3M raised (1517 Fund led), a team with families, and a month or two of runway. Zach was seventeen or eighteen, and Canadian law made him personally liable for severance if the company couldn't pay it.

The Valley's reflex is keep going. Zach's answer is a question:

"What's fundamentally going to change when I give you another three million over the next few years? I didn't know if I could go to VCs and say, I'm going to completely change the outcome of this. So I didn't feel comfortable raising more money."

He sold the customers to a company that could support them, got his team "months and months of severance," and sent the wind-down email. The replies split by geography: "Folks from the Valley were like, 'Great email, excited to back you on the next one.' More traditional Canadian folks were like, 'Why didn't you keep going?'" He sides with the Valley — with one addition most founders skip. "You do have a responsibility. It's sometimes easy for founders to think, 'I'm taking all the risk; my employees always got a salary.' I had a lot of team members with kids."

$3M in Three Days

The restart came from the same rolodex that had said no. Weeks after the shutdown, Zach reached out to every construction and rental executive he knew — Cat, United Rentals — people who had never bought a Frenter product but who he'd kept warm on the theory that "life is a very long game." He pitched a director at United Rentals on a sensor that could sit on engines and predict failure. "That's kind of a cool idea," the director said. "I think we'd buy it."

"In the span of three days I had three million bucks raised to go work on this thing."

The logic behind it is the episode's most reusable framework. "You've really got to be critical of yourself and say, what do I have the highest chance to win at? If I went into 'I want to build a rocket' — huge learning curve, I don't know anybody. I'm a non-technical founder, and my greatest strength is, I think I'm a pretty good sales guy." He knew heavy equipment enough to be dangerous and knew the buyers by name. "I'd rather start where I know things and then maneuver."

The money changed his operating tempo, too. "When you get your first $500K check, you're like, I've got to preserve this. My view now is: I'm a custodian of this, and I don't think it's hard to get more of it if we keep making forward progress."

Engines Don't Break. Hydraulics Do.

Omen's first product was a vibration sensor on excavator engines, built in a spare bedroom with a CTO from Nest's early team. Customers liked the vision. They also kept mentioning that engines don't fail much — but hydraulics, "30, 40% of the machine's value," do, and the only way to check them was to pull a fluid sample, ship it to a lab, and wait two weeks.

Why hadn't they said so up front? "That's kind of what we came to them with. Most of these customers don't want to take you and point you in a different direction, because that's not really their business." It took asking five customers the same question to hear the same answer five times. The day after one of them said "just focus on the hydraulic sensor," Omen was a real-time fluid-monitoring company.

The move into data centers followed the same pattern a year later. "The coolant these guys are using is not so dissimilar from what's in Cat machines — we already monitor it." So he ran what he calls guerrilla warfare: "I don't care if he's the CEO of CoreWeave, I'm going to call him." His pitch at nineteen — "we've raised about thirteen million, and I'm just really interested in data centers, can I pick your brain?" — landed a meeting with the CEO of TensorWave, who found it hilarious that Zach had suggested a bar and then wasn't allowed to sit at it. He became an investor and advisor. Omen's sensors now sit in data centers managing 10–14 gigawatts.

Solo by Default

Zach has never had a co-founder, and he doesn't describe it as a decision so much as a filter. "I didn't know anyone who I thought was awesome enough — or the awesome people weren't willing to join me when I was just getting started." What he has had, at both companies, is a founding team with a direct line to him — a COO at Frenter who was 32 when Zach was 14, a CTO at Omen who was "my right-hand guy."

The distinction he draws is about who dies on the hill:

"It's the people who are going to live and die by this business. You can have really good early partners, but those partners are not going to be the ones who die on this hill for your vision."

He also isn't sentimental about the founding team staying the founding team. At the seed round he told his partner at CRV that "a different team is required now," reset to just himself, and rehired four or five people from a "not right now, but maybe later" pipeline of candidates who'd rejected him earlier.

The Bear Case, and the Force Multiplier

Julian's customary two-parter gets its cleanest answer yet. The bear case: "It can be lonely. At the end of the day, someone's name is on the loan agreement." The founder is the only person in the building who sees capital as a tool rather than a piggy bank — "whether it's forty mil in the bank or ten mil or ten dollars, it's just money" — and has to manage every interest that isn't aligned with building the company.

The bull case is the thesis of the episode:

"I knew nothing about plasma physics or spectroscopy. I've had to learn — because I couldn't hire someone. I had no co-founder that was technical. So I had to figure it out."

Because everything reports to him, he says, he got "a hundred times better" at hiring, at the science, at the parts of the business a co-founder would have owned. And the alternative has a hidden cost most people never price: "You get ten times smarter than the guy who says, 'I'm not going to learn anything technical because I have a co-founder to do that.' If you don't have the perfect co-founder, that's when your business falls apart — you're only 50% as good as you could be."

Zach also wants to buy the Toronto Maple Leafs. He's been clear about that since he was a kid. On current pace, no one on the tape was inclined to bet against him.

About Zach Laberge

Zach Laberge is the founder and CEO of Omen AI (omen.ai), the San Francisco company putting spectroscopic sensors directly into the fluids that keep AI data centers and industrial machines running — replacing ship-a-sample-to-a-lab testing with real-time readings of contamination, metal wear, and bacterial growth. Raised in Halifax, Nova Scotia, he founded his first company, Frenter (heavy-equipment telematics), at 14, left high school at 15 to run it, raised $3M led by 1517 Fund, and wound it down at 18 before starting Omen in 2024. Omen has raised $41.5M — a $10.5M seed led by CRV and a $31M Series A led by Nava Ventures — with backers including Sheryl Sandberg, Mann+Hummel, and executives from Bridgestone, GM, Johnson Controls, and TensorWave. He has built both companies without a co-founder. He is 20.

Resource mentioned in the episode: the advisor equity template Zach uses is the Founder Institute's FAST agreement.

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