From 47-Inch Verticals to AI Agents: Why Suffering Builds Winners

"The right response to your demo should be holy crap, these people are gonna make so much money." This isn't typical startup advice from a typical founder.

Nico Christie was arguably one of the world's best dunkers, hitting a 47-inch vertical and writing a bestselling book about jumping higher than LeBron James. Now he's the co-founder of Fundamental Research Labs and CEO of Shortcut, an AI agent that automates Excel work, having spun out of MIT 18 months ago.

In this interview, Nico reveals how the same obsessive mindset that made him a world-class dunker now drives his approach to building AI agents, why suffering is essential for significant achievement, and how his company's unique three-headed structure—research, platform, and products—is designed to build true digital humans that go far beyond just intelligence.

Nico: Hey, I'm Nico. I'm the co-founder of Fundamental. I'm also the creator and CEO of Shortcut. Fundamental is a research lab. We spun out of MIT about 18 months ago where my co-founder was a professor, and since then we've been on the pursuit of building digital humans, and Shortcut's our first winning product, which is the first superhuman Excel spreadsheet agent that can automate most of your work on Excel.

And on the surface, it's really, you wouldn't picture like a Miami pro street ball dunker and an MIT professor starting a business together. I was arguably not just Miami's best dunker. I was arguably one of the very, very best dunkers in the world. In most ways it's completely uncorrelated and unrelated to what I'm doing now, except for I know what it looks like and what it's required to be the best in the world at something.

Nico: You're doing the thing is the best way to get good at the thing. I hit a 47 inch vertical, but to get from 46 to 47 took like three years of dedicating my life and you dunk on it 1000 times and then the next day you raise it by 1 inch and you do it again and again. You can just get good at things by putting in many, many hours and you have no business breaking into some other technology or some other field or whatever until you've put in your hours and gotten good at it.

And thankfully there's unlimited resources, the internet and AI for you to get good. You get exactly what you deserve that if you're not suffering, you're not doing things enough. I believe you need to suffer in order to really do anything significant.

I knew at a young age that I was extremely gifted, as in I was always the local best in my city, and what that caused was a sort of a sense of confidence that like I can start to work more and more on this. And then what that built was a really positive feedback loop that I would get better and better at it because I loved it and then I would love it more and then I would start to meet people who were just like me and I would travel.

Nico: I ended up writing a book called How I Learned to Jump Higher Than LeBron James and sold like tens of thousands of copies. I was providing for myself. But I knew that this wouldn't scale and it wouldn't last, and frankly I actually had accomplished all of what I had ever dreamed for in dunking, and that went till I was about 25 and even at about 22 I knew that I would need a traditional career to support myself in addition to that.

So when I moved out of dunking, bizarrely artistically decided I'm going to get good at programming. I had done a master's in data science. I had used Python and R a bunch, and I thought, you know what, I'm just going to grind LeetCode every single day, and I did that for hours a day.

When I wanted to get into MIT, it was the first time I had ever taken academics seriously, and I had realized that getting a perfect score was totally doable. It was just a gamified system, and what you should do is take as many tests as possible and iterate. So I got every practice test that's ever happened. And I did one a day, which takes 2 to 3 hours, and then I got the feedback from every single score and I would do it again. And like you can imagine, the scores would climb.

Nico: The other one that I did, which is very bizarre, is I accounted for every word that has ever shown up in the vocabulary for the verbal section, and I learned every vocabulary. There wasn't one word that I didn't know. And this is just like, I think it's a very silly anecdote, but of course I got a perfect score on the verbal and I got into MIT with a full ride, but it was because I just decided that you could get good at these things.

So we talk about like end to end iteration is a key philosophy of this company, but also it's always been one in my life. So end to end iteration is like you want to score by Friday and you want to hit 80%, you better have a score by Monday morning of it doesn't matter, it could be 1%. But from there, every time you have an iteration cycle, you can improve. What you don't do is set up the things in the periphery that don't help you get there fastest.

Learning and getting world class at anything is actually a relatively similar thing regardless of the field, and it requires quick iteration, specificity, and the belief that like your ceiling is actually higher than other people probably think it is.

Nico: So I actually took the first job I could find, which was as a finance consultant, but I had zero passion or fundamental interest for consulting or finance. It took until a real authentic interest in technology that I actually bridged that I jumped out of finance consulting as the first hire I joined and started a sports tech business that brought those two interests together and it closed my doorway into coding, entrepreneurship, and starting companies.

And what I offered to do was do free work, so I worked for free from December to August. I provided instrumental value to the company to the extent where when it was time and we had closed our first fundraising round, it was obvious that I should be joining as a part of the founding team on the first hire.

So I was actually at MIT. I was working out of Robert's lab. Robert is one of the premier scientists in the world. Robert has a paper on olfactory smelling. Like, can AI or machines smell? Can they have long term autonomy? Can they collaborate? Can they have a sense of time? Like all of these things in neuroscience are not nearly as dirty of words, and in fact they have been attempted to be modeled for very many decades. So when we talk about building digital humans, we mean going far beyond intelligence, that's just a key component of who we are, but not really what it means to be a human.

Nico: So we're very, very intentional about how we organize our company. This is like a three-headed beast. We have research, which definitionally will have like a bunch of things happening in parallel, some of which will be fruitful in the short term, long term, some of it might not ever be, and then you have a core product or core platform, and this platform is like the basis for how we do research and for how we build products for us, our core thesis, our core tech platform is building strong agents, specifically multi-agent frameworks.

So you have the research lane, you have this core engineering platform, and then from there you also have products, and products can be built off of this core platform to give us advantage. And one of these products is Shortcut. And when a product succeeds, it has to be massively unconstrained in relation to its potential opportunity. So Shortcut is going to automate all spreadsheet labor.

So because we are so intentional with how we orchestrate at this company, a breakout success or even a failure, don't change anything about our roadmap.

Nico: So yeah, 14 hours a day is like the minimum. It's table stakes. I get in every day around like 6. I leave at like 7. I want to see my kid before she goes to sleep. And then I work at night.

It's probably log scale, as in, you know, there's a very powerful relationship between the initial time you put into something and then there's some sort of ceiling in which the returns diminish. The thing is, is that as the ceiling happens and as the long tail flattens, that's actually where the majority of the value accrues. So that like getting from the 95th to 98th percentile in anything is harder than getting from 1% to 95%, but the difference between the 95% and 98% is like it's everything. It's how you distinguish yourself amongst others and how you really create value.

So, as long as you have that framework for that, it actually becomes very tolerable to understand that you might see very menial improvements.

Nico: You know, I think this is one of my weaknesses as a person is that I am a man of passion and passions. I love music. I love so many things. So for me, I can't imagine not knowing what you want to do. I maybe at the shallow level, I can say getting good at things is a good way to start to love them. So put in enough time to give yourself a chance to love something is probably the best chance you have.

I remember learning guitar and thinking this really hurt my fingers, and I wasn't sure I liked it, but I remember about a week I started really loving it.

The things you love, you end up getting really good at. And if you get really good at things, you're able to provide and capture a lot of value on those things. I know a lot of people who make a lot of money in professional dunking, for example, and it hasn't poisoned their passion. I think if you really love it enough, it's not a concern, but you should find the parts that taint the well and abstract those away from you as much as possible, even if it hurts your business, I think.