Two Gen Z entrepreneurs behind Attention Engineering share how they secured early funding and built investor trust in San Francisco’s booming “Cerebral Valley.”
Two young founders in San Francisco are making waves in the city’s fast-evolving Artificial Intelligence scene. Aidan Guo, 19, and Julian Windeck, 23, cofounders of Attention Engineering, have raised $1.25 million in pre-seed funding to build what they call a next-generation desktop assistant powered by AI.
The pair’s startup, which employs five people, aims to create a tool that blends seamlessly into a user’s workflow — learning personal habits, offering proactive insights, and eventually automating tasks across the computer. Guo describes it as “a cursor for everything,” a system that not only observes but acts intelligently on the user’s behalf.
Their investors include Lukas Haas, Product Manager at Google DeepMind and scout for Sequoia Capital; Marvin von Hagen and Felix Schlegal, cofounders of Interaction; Bryan Pellegrino, cofounder of LayerZero; as well as venture firms Village Global and Liquid 2 Ventures.
Both founders followed very different paths to Silicon Valley. Guo, originally from Vancouver, took an unconventional route — taking a second gap year from college instead of attending Carnegie Mellon, joining programs like Z Fellows and Emergent Ventures, and learning directly from mentors. “People are generous with their time, especially if you’re young,” he said.
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Windeck, from Germany, took the academic route, studying computer science at Cambridge and conducting AI research at MIT before deciding that research wasn’t his calling. “I didn’t want to be some cog in the machine,” he said.
The two met through mutual friends in the Bay Area’s close-knit startup community and quickly discovered a strong working chemistry. Within months, they launched Attention Engineering, part of a new wave of AI startups helping to redefine San Francisco’s identity as “Cerebral Valley.”
Reflecting on their journey, the founders shared five key lessons for others looking to raise early funding: show progress (“slope”) instead of perfection; personalize cold outreach; maintain momentum during fundraising; move to San Francisco to immerse in the ecosystem; and be someone people genuinely want to work with.
“Everything in the Bay is built on trust,” Guo said. “There’s basically no governance — you can kind of do whatever you want. But that means people have to trust you again and again, with capital and with ideas.”
For these two Gen Z founders, that trust — built on transparency, momentum, and collaboration — has already translated into more than just funding. It’s the foundation for a startup betting on the next leap in human-computer interaction.
Africa Daily News, New York
