Anna Sun

Big ups to Anna Sun – this girl’s the real deal. She’s a YC S23 alum, and her story is straight-up inspiring. So, Anna’s not your average startup founder. She’s been around the block at some heavy hitters – Datadog, Amazon, DoorDash – you know, the big leagues. But what’s crazy is how she took all that grind and turned it into something totally new.

Anna went to MIT, right? Studied CS but also dove deep into Negotiation and Leadership. That combo? Perfect for someone who’s about to shake up an industry. While she was at MIT, she was class president and threw some huge events. That’s where she got the itch – she saw all the bullshit and inefficiencies in event planning and thought, “There’s gotta be a better way.” And boom, that’s how Nowadays was born.

Fast forward, she co-founded Nowadays in 2023 with her sister Amy, who left Google just to jump in with her. That’s some real sibling hustle. They built an AI-powered platform that handles sourcing venues, vendors, managing negotiations – basically, automates the messy, time-consuming parts of corporate events. They’ve got a database of 400,000 venues worldwide, and since launching in May 2024, they’ve already booked over 7 million bucks in events for big names like Google, Amazon, Notion, and Supabase. No cap, that’s some serious traction.

And get this – they raised $2 million from big-name investors like Y Combinator, Basis Set Ventures, Hike VC. That’s not just some local startup, that’s the real deal, validated by top players. Anna’s process to YC in summer 2023 was a big leap; it even inspired her sister to leave her Google gig and join the chaos. That’s the kind of conviction you don’t see every day.

What does all this say about Anna? She’s driven, no bullshit. She saw a problem early, used her background in tech, leadership, and negotiation to build something that actually works. She’s not afraid to jump into the deep end, and she’s got the hustle and smarts to back it up. Her story is about turning experience into impact – taking her past at tech giants and MIT and channeling it into a startup that’s changing how companies throw events.

Bottom line? Anna Sun is a straight-up innovator who’s not just crashing the startup scene – she’s rewriting the rules. And honestly, she’s just getting started.