Most people see a polished startup launch and think it came from genius. Nico Christie says it came from something far less glamorous and far more repeatable: putting in hours, suffering a little, and refusing to stop at 95 percent.
In his journey from Miami pro dunker to co-founder of Fundamental Research Labs and creator of Shortcut, he shows how startup success can come from the same mindset that builds a 47 inch vertical jump. Obsession, clear feedback loops, and a belief that your ceiling is higher than people think.
This is the story of how he works 14-hour days to build digital humans with AI, and what any founder or ambitious operator can steal from that approach.
Rethinking Product Demos For Real Customers
Nico has a simple test for most launch videos you see online. Who are they actually talking to?
A lot of teams create glossy, overproduced demo videos that brag about fundraising and famous investors. They shout things like, “We raised 50 million dollars from XYZ fund, we have this person on our cap table,” and so on. None of that helps a real customer decide to use the product.
He calls that performative theater for Twitter. It looks good on social feeds, but it does nothing for the person who might actually pay for the product.
His view is that a demo should be more like a direct conversation with a customer. No fluff, no investor name-dropping, just a clear walk through of what the product does and why it matters.
For their own launches, Nico and his team follow a strict rule. Every product intro is 2 minutes long, and most of that time is spent showing real use cases in a simple way people can understand.
Here is the difference he aims for:
- Do: Show how the product works in a real workflow.
- Do: Make the value obvious without buzzwords.
- Do: Talk like a human, not like a pitch deck.
- Don't: Lead with investors or fundraising numbers.
- Don't: Flex about advisors or cool offices.
- Don't: Try to impress other founders more than customers.
That simple approach worked. One of their launches hit around 4 million views on LinkedIn, another 4 million on Twitter, and about 10 million views on Reddit with more than 10,000 comments from people asking for access.
For Nico, the right reaction to a demo is simple: “Holy crap, these people are going to make so much money.” If customers feel that, the startup is on the right track.
Meet Nico Christie: From Pro Dunker To AI Founder
Nico is the co-founder of Fundamental Research Labs and the creator and CEO of Shortcut. Fundamental spun out of MIT about 18 months ago, where his co-founder, Robert, was a professor.
On paper, they look like an odd founding team. Nico was a Miami pro street ball dunker. Robert is a leading AI and neuroscience researcher. At first glance, they do not share much in common.
The link between them is not sports or academia. It is an obsession with being the best in the world at something and a comfort with long time horizons.
Dunking As A Blueprint For Mastery
Before AI, Nico was not just good at dunking. He was, as he puts it, arguably one of the very best dunkers in the world.
He hit a 47 inch vertical. That last inch did not come from talent. It took around three years of focused work just to go from 46 to 47 inches. Same rim, same court, one inch higher each time, thousands of jumps, day after day.
From that period, he took a core belief. Doing the thing is the best way to get good at the thing. There is no shortcut around reps.
He also holds a hard view on effort and pain. You get exactly what you deserve, and if you are not suffering, you are probably not doing enough. The work will hurt, and that is fine.
His process for mastery is simple:
- Put in a huge number of hours.
- Use every resource available, like the internet and AI, to speed up learning.
- Repeat the core moves until the smallest improvements start to show.
He realized at a young age that he was always the best locally in his city. That gave him early confidence. The better he got, the more he wanted to train. The more he trained, the more he improved and the more he loved it. That loop pulled him forward.
Dunking also opened doors. It let him travel, meet others like him, and build a niche career. He wrote a book called How I Learned to Jump Higher than LeBron James, which sold tens of thousands of copies. It paid the bills for a while.
At the same time, he knew it would not last forever.
From Dunking To Data: Moving Into Tech
By 22, and for sure by 25, he had checked every box he ever dreamed of in dunking. He had also seen the ceiling. There was only so far that path could go.
He knew he needed a more stable career alongside sports. So he did something he calls “bizarre” in hindsight. He decided to get very good at programming.
He already had a master’s degree in data science and had used Python and R. That gave him a base. From there, he opened LeetCode and decided to grind it every day for hours.
Programming became his new dunk rim. Problems replaced dunks. He kept jumping.
Hacking MIT With Iteration
The first time he treated academics with real seriousness was when he wanted to get into MIT. He saw standardized tests as a system he could work with rather than a mystery.
His approach was simple and extreme. He found every practice test that ever existed and did one every day. Each took two to three hours. After each test, he studied the score, learned from his mistakes, and repeated the cycle. The scores climbed.
For the verbal section, he did something even more intense. He tracked every word that had ever appeared in the vocabulary questions and learned all of them. There was not a single word on the test that he did not already know.
The result was a perfect verbal score and a full ride to MIT. More than the outcome, it confirmed a belief for him. You can get good at things if you attack them with volume and smart feedback loops.
This is the same core idea he now calls end to end iteration, a guiding principle for his life and his company.
End to end iteration looks like this. If you want to hit 80 percent on a goal by Friday, you need a version, even a 1 percent version, by Monday morning. From there, every loop improves the score.
A few rules shape that process:
- Avoid spending time on things that do not move the main metric.
- Treat each result as feedback, not as a judgment.
- Improve a little on every loop and keep the cycle short.
Nico believes world class performance in any field comes from a mix of quick iteration, focused work, and a belief that your ceiling is higher than others think it is.
First Steps In Entrepreneurship And Real Value
His first job after dunking did not match his interests. He took the first role he could get, a finance consulting job, even though he had no real interest in finance or consulting.
The real break came when he found a genuine interest in technology. That interest pulled him toward a sports tech startup, where he could combine coding and sports.
He joined that startup as the first hire. To get in the door, he offered to work for free. From December to August, he did unpaid work and made himself useful. By the time the company closed its first fundraising round, his value was clear. He joined as part of the founding team and the first full hire.
At that company, he learned how to build a product people care about, not just a cool demo. He saw what it took to hire, to scale, and to ship software that sticks.
Those lessons set him up for his next ambition. He did not just want to join another startup. He wanted to co-found a company in the largest and hardest pool he could find, which for him was AI.
From MIT Lab To Digital Humans
At MIT, he worked in Robert’s lab. Robert is one of the top scientists in his field. The lab explored questions like: can AI systems smell, can they have long term autonomy, can they collaborate, can they have a sense of time?
In neuroscience, questions like “sense of time” are not strange at all. People have been trying to model those traits for decades.
From this work came the idea of building digital humans. For Nico and Robert, intelligence is only one part of being human. It matters, but it is not the whole story. They want to go far beyond that.
Fundamental Research Labs is their vehicle for this mission, and Shortcut is their first hit product.
Inside Fundamental: How The Company Is Built
Nico describes the company as a three headed beast. Each part supports the others.
1. Research
The research group runs many projects in parallel. Some lines of work may pay off soon. Others may take years or never work at all. That is normal for research.
They do not try to predict exactly which project will win. The goal is to keep the pipeline full of ideas that push forward their understanding of digital humans and strong AI agents.
2. Core Engineering Platform
The second head is a core engineering platform. This platform is the shared base that both research and products build on.
Their core thesis is that strong agents, especially in multi agent setups, are key to the future. The platform focuses on building these agents and making them useful in real settings.
By having a shared core, they can re-use the same deep tech across many different projects and products instead of building from scratch each time.
3. Products
The third head is products. Products sit on top of the core platform and turn research into tools that create revenue and value.
Shortcut is the best example so far. It is a superhuman agent for Excel that can automate most spreadsheet work. Nico believes Shortcut will automate all spreadsheet labor.
A key rule here is that any product that works should be unconstrained relative to its potential. In other words, if a product hits, they want it to have a very large ceiling.
At the same time, a big hit or a clear failure should not change the long term roadmap. The company was designed so that one product outcome does not tilt the whole mission.
Why They Started With Games
From day one, Nico and Robert planned to start in games. They were very open about the fact that neither of them had game industry experience.
So why pick games?
Because games are a perfect playground for rapid iteration. You can try ideas, get feedback fast, and the stakes are low compared to many real world settings.
The cost of being wrong is low, but the learning is rich. For a company built around iteration, that setting made sense.
The catch was that they did not know how to build game products people would love, how to monetize in that space, or how to hire well for game projects.
To fill that gap, they worked with Speedrun. That partnership changed how they viewed things like product storytelling. They were used to talking about science and achievement. Speedrun taught them how to tell stories around how they build.
They even set up a self imposed ritual. Every Tuesday, they would present their progress to the partners at Speedrun. The partners told them they did not need to do that. Nico insisted, because that weekly cycle felt like the right iteration speed.
That habit shaped the company. Today, they ship every day. Speed and iteration are baked into the culture.
Nico says he is very good at sprint style execution. Robert is more of a big picture thinker, someone who decided to build this kind of company when he was 17 or 18 and is comfortable being wrong for a long time if he knows he is right in the end. Together, they cover both ends of the spectrum.
From Games To Productivity To Embodiment
On their first pitch deck, they drew a simple path. Start in games, move into multi agent systems, then productivity tools, and finally embodiment.
Embodiment is the stage where digital humans do not just think, they act in the world in rich ways.
Today, they are in the productivity stage. Shortcut is the clear proof of that. At the same time, they have already shipped a top rated AI game on Roblox and are running other experiments in gaming.
Because their core platform stays the same, a product win or loss does not shift the long term plan. They always knew they would begin in games and move out from there.
They also care a lot about who joins them. Nico vowed to find people who feel the same level of commitment to their work and mission that he does. They hire for people who:
- Move with intense speed.
- Are comfortable with a long term vision.
- Treat iteration as a way of life, not a slogan.
That kind of team is rare, but it is what this sort of startup needs.
Passion, Hours, And The Long Tail Of Skill
Nico is open about one of his quirks. He is a person of strong passions. He loves music, he loves many things, and he finds it hard to imagine feeling lost about what to pursue.
For people who do feel lost, he offers a simple idea. Getting good at something is often the best way to start loving it. You might not love a thing at first. You might even hate it.
He gives the example of learning guitar. At first his fingers hurt and he was not sure he liked it. About a week in, once he could play a bit, he started to enjoy it. Competence bred affection.
What A 14 Hour Workday Looks Like
Nico says that 14 hours a day is the minimum for him right now. It is not a brag, just how he chooses to work.
He gets into the office around 6 a.m. and leaves around 7 p.m. so he can see his kid before bedtime. After that, he works again at night.
He views effort on a kind of log scale. In the early days, time spent has a huge payoff. Later, the returns on extra time appear smaller and smaller. The long tail flattens.
But that flat part is where most of the value sits. Getting from 95 percent to 98 percent in any field is harder than getting from 1 percent to 95 percent. The difference between 95 and 98, though, is everything. That is what sets you apart and lets you create real value.
For him, building expertise looks like this:
- Commit enough hours at the start to give yourself a real shot at liking the work.
- Expect plateaus and keep going anyway, because the gains near the top are slow.
- Try to line up what you love with where you can create value for others.
He points out that a lot of pro dunkers make good money and still love dunking. Earning from your passion does not have to poison it.
The trick is to keep the parts that drain you away from the core of your day. Outsource or drop tasks that ruin the well, even if that hurts the business a bit in the short term. Protect the work you love.
Also Read: How Julian Built a $400K/Month AI Fitness App (Starting From a Reddit Post)
Conclusion
Nico Christie’s path from pro dunker to AI founder at a fast moving startup is not about magic talent. It is about hours, pain, patience, and a clear system for feedback.
He treats everything the same way, from SAT vocab to LeetCode to building digital humans. Start with a rough version, iterate fast, push through the boring, flat part of the curve, and trust that the last few percentage points matter most.
If there is one idea to keep, it is this. Things you truly love deserve an unfair amount of your time. That is where mastery, and sometimes entire companies, come from.
For more stories like Nico’s, you can follow EO STUDIO on LinkedIn or find them on X at @eostudi0.
0 Comments