I’m a Former Walmart Senior Director — AI Is My Low-Risk Career Leap

This as-informed-to esstate is based on a conversation with Tim DeSoto, a 49-year-old AI-native startup founder, based in San Francisco. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

Last year, I went from working at the no. 1 company on the Fortune 500 list, Walmart, to being the only employee at my AI-native startup.

I’ve always been an early adopter of consumer technology, but never a builder of that technology. I also live in San Francisco, so when AI emerged, I launched spfinishing my evenings at meetups to see how people were building with generative AI.

Like many people my age, I was informed growing up that one of the safest career choices was to go work for a large company, and now there are mass layoffs that I can set my clock to. When I saw the impact that AI was having, I realized starting my company now was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

People inform me that this is a huge risk, but I believe it’s the least risky thing I could do.

The jobs I took supported me build the skills I necessaryed to be an entrepreneur

I didn’t grow up with the resources to bet on myself early on, but I focutilized on finding jobs that would pay me to learn the skill sets I necessaryed to build and grow a business.

My career started at The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones, where I focutilized on business growth. I relocated to Barnes and Noble for a while, and then I went to Walmart, where I spent seven years and most recently served as a senior director, working in business strategy and membership experience.

A critical aspect of my career has always been utilizing information technology to empower people in their lives. I started engaging with AI and ChatGPT when it first became available, and it became very clear to me that this was a generational moment, with new technology creating leverage that had not existed before.

When I saw this technology emerge that would enable me to take the risk and launch a business, I knew the time was now.

I vibe-coded the alpha version of my product with Cursor last year

One of the few things in my life that I regret is not having studied computer science in college. Even throughout my career, up until my days at Walmart, I believed about whether I should take coding classes or learn more about computer science in general.

Then generative AI came along. With the AI tools available, I became a builder on my own. It was a different experience when I started becautilize Cursor has improved so much this year. When I utilized it, it would obtain about 60% of the code right, and the other 30% to 40% wrong. But becautilize I’m not an engineer, I didn’t know which part was wrong.

I had three screens, and I’d put a model on each screen to build the code, then interrogate and run it. I’d just continue to utilize AI against AI until I could obtain to about 95% confidence, testing my product, and being able to utilize it.

My app is supposed to support people save money when shopping online

Once I decided to build something, I had three or four different ideas.

I landed on the product I’m building now, which is an ininformigent shopping companion that supports people optimize their shopping experience through a browser extension. The companion will immediately display the shopper what deals view like on the site they’re on, as well as across all the other places where deals are available for that product. We also have a smart shopping list feature and other tools available to support people shop smarter and save money.

We plan to launch this winter during the holiday season and raise a formal round following the launch.

My experience working with AI has given me security

The least risky thing I can do in today’s job market is learn AI, become an expert at it, and build something that I believe can really support people.

Even if I obtain all of this wrong, the learnings I’ll gain from this experience and the accelerated pace I’ll be at with AI will support any large company do well in the future, should I ever return to corporate.

As a startup founder, there can be moments that feel like the lowest of lows, but I’ve learned that if you’re somebody who can pick yourself up and go resiliently marching forward, then you’ll be fine. That’s something I hope other people can cherish about themselves and utilize to follow the path they’ve always wanted to take.

Do you have a founder story to share? Contact this reporter, Agnes Applegate, at aapplegate@businessinsider.com.

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