> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.compile.la/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # From Corporate VP to Founder, Rooted in LA - URL: https://www.compile.la/from-corporate-vp-to-founder-rooted-in-la/ - Published: 2026-09-28T21:35:25.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-28T22:26:31.000Z - Author: Darren Alfonso Ari Wilson joined VideoAmp as Vice President of Engineering in April 2026\. After four months, he was involved in the planning of a major layoff driven by AI efficiencies, a common theme in 2026\. When the time came to execute the layoff, he was informed that his role was being eliminated too. “You have to realize you could be a target as well,” he says. Now, instead of heading back to a corporate leadership role, Ari is a solo founder. “I’ve always dreamed of doing my own thing. Solo founding or small team founding is in a good state because of AI tooling.” While AI opens up new capabilities for businesses, it introduces potential time and cost inefficiencies, like choosing the wrong model or thinking levels. This is the problem Ari is solving with his company, Bakeoff. Bakeoff runs coding agents and models against tasks drawn from a company’s own codebase and measures which are best. Ari defines best as “how good the output is, how long it takes, and how much it costs.” He adds, “If you just leave it on Extra High or whatever the latest model is, it’s going to cost 80 times as much as the cheaper models and it’s going to be slower too.” Working directly with businesses allows Ari to refine his product vision, “I think it’s the only way to know which direction to take this idea.” Ari’s first programming experience came at an early age, but not on a computer. “I was always into computer science and math. My first time programming was in middle school on a TI-BASIC calculator.” At Bakeoff, he’s using popular, modern programming languages, “At first, I wrote everything in Python because AI research is in Python and it’s succinct.” But, as expected, Python’s optional typing became a barrier, “With agents, you need verifiability, functional correctness, unit tests, integration tests, and type safety. The two languages that spoke to me were Go and Rust. Go has been my primary language. It’s a cleaned-up version of C without extraneous primitives, handles concurrency and multi-threading natively very well, and has a great standard library.” Ari is leveraging AI to reduce necessary but unglamorous administrative work and keep himself organized. He uses his “Founder Wiki” with Claude to ask questions, review information, and prepare for the day ahead. For example, after a customer call, Claude will ingest the transcript into his Founder Wiki and propose next steps. “I’ve done task lists, sticky notes, all sorts of organizational systems. When I was still at a big company I even had an admin for a while, but the best thing I’ve come up with so far is my Founder Wiki.” ![Ari Wilson photo](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a4/b1/a4b18877-561a-494f-b192-85940e5b9e31/content/images/2026/09/ari-wilson-profile-pic.jpeg) Born and raised in Orange County, Ari wanted a different experience for college, “There’s a certain California-centricity to people who have never left the state before and I was worried that I wouldn’t have any outside perspective.” He majored in computer science and math and earned a master’s degree from Vanderbilt University in Tennessee. After graduating, Ari joined Google in Santa Monica during The Great Recession. Over the next thirteen years he rose from engineer to senior engineering manager. Ari shared, “One of my fundamental career lessons is during times of economic uncertainty is where there’s the most opportunity. That’s where the good ideas rise above the rest.” He continues, “If you have good principles, good ideas, good connections, it’s the right time to build, even though it’s the scariest time.” Ari is choosing to build his company, Bakeoff, right here in the South Bay of Los Angeles, where he’s created a strong network. He’s currently bootstrapping while proving out his customer thesis and looking for the right cofounder. Like many of us, Ari loves what LA has to offer both professionally and personally. “Talent here is undervalued. We have Caltech, Harvey Mudd, UCLA, USC, UCSD and UCI producing incredible talent in the second-largest metro area.” In January, Ari was hiring for a role that could be based in either LA or the Bay Area. He found the market in LA was much more favorable and less constrained, “The difference was dramatic.” As someone with a family, Ari prefers LA over other tech hub cities, “The beach is accessible. The weather. You get more housing for your dollar. The schools are very, very good.” But the size of LA also creates a barrier. “The tech community is very distributed and hard to get together.” Ari explains, “There’s not an obvious meeting point. You can’t just go to \[Santa Monica\] every Wednesday and there'll be 100 founders there and you can just have a chat.” In other cities, there’s a bunch of different coffee shops where founders and builders are known to congregate. “LA is strong if you have a personal network. However, if you’re a 22-year-old out of UCLA without a network, LA doesn’t have an obvious centralized path like applying to Y Combinator or pitching on Sand Hill Road.” But he’s bullish on the angel investment environment. “If you’re looking for angel investment, you can definitely find it.” Successful professionals in LA are looking to diversify out of traditional businesses like construction, finance, banking, and entertainment into technology. Ari clarifies, “The money is here, it’s just the contact between the money and founders is not great.” As we wrapped up our conversation, Ari had a few encouraging words for founders. “Where AI still fails and doesn’t do a good job is judgment and intuition: ‘What should I do? How’s it going to go? What are the results going to look like?’ Being a founder is a master class in applying judgment.” His advice to aspiring founders: “The time to become a founder has never been better.” \- *Follow Ari Wilson and Bakeoff at* [*ariwilson.com*](http://ariwilson.com/?ref=compile.la) *and on* [*LinkedIn*](https://www.linkedin.com/in/ariwilson/?ref=compile.la)