How Vin Bui became engineer #1 at Nowadays — and started treating it like his own company

Vin Bui found Nowadays while he was on leave from Cornell, back on campus but not enrolled and scrolling through Work at a Startup for his next move. A dog logo pulled him in first. Then the website did the rest. He saw something that looked rough enough to fix, and that was enough to send a message to co-founder Anna.

The interview process led to him becoming Nowadays’ first full-time hire, employee number one, and its first technical hire. Nowadays started out selling to small startups. Now the San Francisco company uses AI to help Fortune 500 customers like Google, Airbnb, and BlackRock plan corporate events.

Vin doesn’t talk about his role like a normal early engineer. He calls it being a technical founder without the title. That meant building engineering from the ground up, setting up processes, handling SOC 2 compliance and security, and becoming the go-to person for anything that touched engineering or IT. He learned what good looked like by talking to heads of engineering at other companies, then built the systems himself.

He says the role forced him to mentor himself. No one was there to hand him a blueprint, and that was part of the appeal. He had already been a YC founder, so he judged Nowadays the way a founder might judge a co-founder: could he make a real impact, and were Amy and Anna the kind of founders who could actually make the company work?

What sold him was not just the codebase, though he says he could see immediately what needed fixing. It was also how the founders showed up. He watched how they presented the company, attracted customers, and talked through their plans, and came away convinced they were thoughtful and competent. His favorite technical project there is AI voice, systems that call hotels and negotiate on behalf of clients. Around that, he has built a work style he clearly enjoys: Ghostty for terminal work, Claude Code CLI instead of a GUI, and a habit of testing new models and wiring together custom workflows.

Nowadays has grown to 11 people, and Vin’s job has changed with it. He still builds, but now he is also the first person teammates go to when they have a big idea that is still half-formed. He doesn’t call himself a manager, since he says he doesn’t manage anyone. He trusts people, gives them autonomy, and helps sort out the hard parts before handing them off. And for all the startup intensity, he says the team still makes room for life outside work. In his telling, that mix is the point.