How Vin Bui became engineer #1 at Nowadays — and started treating it like his own company
- ID
- 37484
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 20 Oct 2026, 11:30 PM
- Fetched
- 21 Oct 2026, 12:41 AM
- Provider
- Y Combinator Blog
- Category
- startup
- Original URL
- https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/how-vin-bui-became-engineer-1-at-nowadays-and-started-treating-it-like-his-own-company/
- Source URL
- https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/rss
Summary
- Score
- 4.5
- Created
- 21 Oct 2026, 12:42 AM
- Tags
- Audience
- developersstartup_foundersvibe_coders
What happened
Y Combinator's profile of Vin Bui describes how he became the first full-time engineering hire at Nowadays (S23), a San Francisco company using AI to plan corporate events end to end, after leaving his own YC Winter 2025 company while on leave from Cornell. He describes the role as being a "technical founder" — building engineering processes from scratch, leading SOC 2 compliance, handling security and IT — and says the most interesting thing he has built is AI voice systems that call hotels and negotiate on behalf of clients. His tooling is Ghostty, the Claude Code CLI over any GUI, and switching between models per task (the excerpt cuts off mid-sentence).
Why it matters
If you are weighing a first-engineering-hire role, this is a concrete scope list to negotiate against: at Nowadays the job included SOC 2, security, and IT ownership on top of product work, not just shipping features. If you are building voice agents, note that the described use case is outbound negotiation with hotels — a task with real counterparties and commitments — so treat call reliability and what the agent is allowed to promise as the design problem, not the voice quality.
Discussion angle
The article gives no metrics on the voice negotiation system — no call volumes, success rates, or failure modes. Worth discussing live: what would you need to see before letting an agent negotiate prices with a vendor on your behalf, and where would you draw its authority?