Sam McBride is the founder of Ani, an AI-powered investment analyst platform. A former employee of the finance industry, McBride left to learn coding and eventually found herself launching the fintech company.
In this week’s Founder in Five Q&A, McBride discusses her journey from hedge funds to coding, why self-awareness is a critical quality for a founder and how advancements in AI technology disrupting Ani’s growth, but ultimately made it work.
What advice would you give to a first-time founder?
Everything takes longer than you think. I left my hedge fund job after teaching myself to code and deciding to start a tech company. Not an obvious career move, and what I thought would take weeks took years. You have to genuinely love the grind.
Ani Tech has rebuilt its entire software stack from scratch to get to where we are now. If you don’t enjoy solving problems that keep breaking, you’ll find it brutal. You have to love the process of iteration and refinement.
When should a founder CEO pass the baton on to a new chief executive?
Self-awareness is a very important trait in a founder. Drop the ego. You should know when you outgrow the role and when the business outgrows you. I never understand why building a team that is so great it renders the founder redundant would be seen as a failure.
Tell us about a time you screwed up?
When we first built Ani Tech, we underestimated how much infrastructure true agentic AI would need. Plugging new agents into the old platform didn’t work, and I had to make the painful decision to rebuild everything.
It set us back months, but it’s why Ani’s system now actually works — our agents talk to each other, audit, and self-correct in real time. The big mistakes always come from moving too fast. The trick is catching them early and rebuilding with conviction.
How do you prevent burnout?
You need a high stress tolerance as a solo founder. I run and I’m a slave to my Garmin and make sure I sleep properly.
My investors are also my sanity check. I’ve got 19 of them, and they’re calm, rational people who are always there when I need them.
What’s the most misunderstood technology?
AI. People judge it through the lens of products and then blame the tech for user error — bad prompts, bad setup, bad data.
The tech’s fine; it’s the human layer that’s messy. One of the most valuable skills people should be learning to master now is writing great prompts, and knowing how to harness AI agents to work for you.
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