San Francisco · Google · Y Combinator Blog
How Vin Bui became engineer #1 at Nowadays, and started treating it like his own company
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Vin Bui was on a leave of absence from Cornell when he found Nowadays.
Key facts
- He uses Ghostty for his terminal, Claude Code CLI over any GUI, and orchestrates different AI models depending on the task
- That meant building engineering from the bottom up, setting up processes, leading SOC 2 compliance, handling security, and becoming the main point of contact for anything touching engineering or IT
- Today it’s the platform Fortune 500 companies like Google, Airbnb, and BlackRock use to bring their people together
- Nowadays is now an 11-person team, and Vin's role has evolved
Summary
He had left his own YC company from the Winter 2025 batch and was back on campus, not enrolled, scrolling through Work at a Startup looking for what came next. He sent a message to co-founder Anna, went through the interview process, and became the first full-time hire at Nowadays (S23), a San Francisco company that uses AI to make planning corporate events simple. Vin joined the company as employee number one, and the first technical hire. That meant building engineering from the bottom up, setting up processes, leading SOC 2 compliance, handling security, and becoming the main point of contact for anything touching engineering or IT. Could he have impact? He had the background to fix it and knew he could build something meaningful.