How Long Did Vineet Edupuganti Work Before Founding Cogent?

Vineet Edupuganti worked for four years before founding Cogent. The right time to start a company is when a founder would invest a ton, maybe all of their own capital, in a clone of themselves running the company.

At Stanford he already thought founding could be interesting, from his family background and from being at Stanford. Friends were trying to build things of their own. He asked a venture capitalist when the right time was to start his company. The test was to imagine a clone running the company and decide whether he would invest his own capital in that person. The answer was obviously no. He had no skills and would never work for the clone of himself. The trigger was to go see excellence, absorb it for a couple of years, learn the ropes, and then start and actually be successful.

Wanting the founder title and starting a company the next day chases the next locally optimal step and can be short-sighted. Working backward from the goal and taking the right intermediate steps gets a founder further along, as if progress is already running in parallel. He came into starting Cogent feeling much further ahead than a blank slate.