Karu
Thompson
Navo
Lab
I started Navo Lab in December 2025, at 18, with no funding. It is now a profitable AI-first growth agency doing about $10K a month in recurring revenue, with a team of five running marketing for HVAC and home-services companies in Florida and Minnesota. The bet behind it is that the trades are the most underpriced market in marketing, and the best kind of business model to quickly get exposure to all the core entrepreneurial skills, while being able to hire and scale fast, in turn accumulating capital. We are AI first in our operations, allowing significantly faster and higher volume of shipping than your average agency. I closed every client myself.
Visit Navo Lab →Violin
Violin and orchestral performance has taught and built many skills that are crucial to business and fast paced entrepreneurship. Repeating the same passage two hundred times taught repetition at volume, focusing my mind fully on practice taught me strong discipline, and having taste for very subtle imperfections while still moving fast.
Self-Taught
versus
Stanford
I skipped college to build businesses, and this is the way that I'm tracking it against the version of me that would've gone to college. I document what I build, earn, learn, and all my failures, measured transparently against a mockup high performing stanford student. This is a true experiment to see whether college would be been the right path or not.
Essays from inside a real company run by a teenager: the sales calls, the pricing mistakes, what clients actually pay for, and the running ledger of the whole experiment. New posts on Substack most weeks.
Find me in the audience.
© 2026 Karu Thompson — subject to change