Episode Details

Welcome back to the finale of our deep dive with Kamil Mansuri, the self-funded founder of Bad Command AI! In PART THREE, we pivot from the foundational stories and lessons to the brass tacks of execution. How do you turn a corporate divestment into your first company by acquiring the very IP you worked on? What distribution channels can you tap into when the App Store is saturated? And how do you shift your mindset from just building "cool stuff" to creating a profitable, self-funded business? Let's dive in.

💡 Unlocking the Playbook

Acquire Your Own IP: When the company Kamil worked for was acquired, some products he’d worked on were being divested. Instead of letting them die, he and his partners took out a loan and purchased the IP themselves. This bold move turned a corporate shuffle into his first opportunity as a founder, giving him a head start with technology he was already deeply familiar with.

Find Alternative Distribution Channels: To avoid getting lost in the crowded macOS App Store, Kamil found a powerful partner in Setapp, a "Netflix for Mac apps." This single decision gave his products immediate global reach, tapping into a pre-existing user base and generating powerful word-of-mouth traction in markets he couldn't have penetrated alone.

The Engineer-to-Founder Mindset Shift: Kamil details the crucial pivot from building cool stuff for the sake of it to building products that solve a painful problem. This business-first mindset means obsessing over what customers will pay for and strategically planning for profitability from day one—a discipline that has allowed him to build a successful company without raising any venture capital.

🤫 The No Trade Secret
If you have a passion for something, do it. People are by nature change-averse, and potentially they are just scared. Don't quit your day job necessarily, but go out and build something and try. We have so many different ways to learn something. Go out and learn and just do. It's never too late to do something that you really want to do that you feel passionate about.

🗣️ Words to Build On

"You build up a career in finance and you're kind of more of like a management-level person, and then you kind of start again and you become a junior engineer, but that teaches you a lot." – Kamil Mansuri

"If you don't look at it that way, you're essentially a hobbyist versus somebody that's actually trying to build a business." – Kamil Mansuri

"Why does a Markdown viewer need 30 themes? Wait, 5 of them are animated... Why do I need this? You don't need it. It's just beautiful and I liked it. That's why I built it." – Kamil Mansuri

👤 About Kamil

Kamil Mansuri is the founder of Bad Command AI, a Princeton, New Jersey studio building native AI applications for Apple platforms. Bad Command AI builds practical AI products, including Telescopo (a Markdown workspace for macOS), Telepath (an on-device AI voice agent call center for Mac), and Telefoto (an AI headshot platform). Before founding Bad Command AI, Kamil was VP of Engineering at Vapor IO, leading engineering across edge computing, cloud infrastructure, private 5G, automation, observability, and AI infrastructure. He previously led mobile backend engineering at Take-Two Interactive, helping launch Garden Tails on Apple Arcade, and served as CTO at Momentum Technology, working on telecom infrastructure and automation for products including Robokiller, SpoofCard, and TapeACall. 

He also worked as Lead Automation Engineer at Comcast, building foundational software for enterprise change management and alerting systems supporting NBC Sports and Xfinity Business Internet. His background spans finance, software engineering, telecom, cloud infrastructure, gaming platforms, native Apple software, and AI products, including award-recognized products like Robokiller and Garden Tails, and today he focuses on