He Made $360K at 23… Then Built the #1 VR Office App | Renji Bijoy

Renji, founder and CEO of Immersed, described the company as building virtual offices for AR/VR and said it had become the most-used AR/VR app. The School of Hard Knocks podcast hosts James, Jack and Josh interviewed him for their first episode. :chatgpt-content-reference{index="0"}

Immersed is designed to turn a VR headset into an extension of a laptop rather than a gaming device. Users can wirelessly connect a computer, work across as many as five virtual screens, use whiteboards and share a virtual office with remote coworkers; Renji said some users spend 40–50 hours a week working in the headset. :chatgpt-content-reference{index="1"}

Immersed also offers virtual cafés for people working alone. The idea is to give remote workers the feeling of being around other people—even strangers working independently from different countries—without physically going to a coffee shop.

Renji said he is not personally a VR gamer and entered VR specifically to build this product. His original personal need was simple: he wanted to take his laptop anywhere while retaining a large multi-monitor workspace.

Renji was originally a pre-med student but independently pursued mathematics and computer science. He said he did well on the MCAT, was accepted to medical schools, then threw away the acceptance letters because he knew medicine would not make him happy; his parents were extremely unhappy with the decision.

His parents initially viewed technology work as something closer to IT support, while Renji wanted to build technology itself. He summarized the difference by saying he did not want to “support the iPhone”; he wanted to build the iPhone.

Renji traces some of his technical and strategic tendencies back to competitive gaming. He said he became a serious Halo player around age 12, repeatedly won local tournament finals 25–0, moved into larger online and national competition and at one point placed roughly 30th among about 50,000 competitors.

He also pursued wrestling and bodybuilding in high school and later basketball, and identified a recurring personal pattern: whatever he did, he wanted to become unusually good at it.

Once Renji became a software engineer, he concluded that programming came unusually quickly to him. He said concepts that had taken colleagues several years to learn could sometimes take him only one to three months.

Early in his career, Renji prioritized responsibility and advancement more than higher pay. He repeatedly wanted broader roles, leadership and harder work rather than remaining within the narrow job description for which he had been hired.

He changed companies seven times in roughly two years as a way of advancing rapidly. By age 23, he said he had become a lead software architect working on CNN's Great Big Story project and was earning about $360,000 a year. :chatgpt-content-reference{index="2"}

Despite the unusually high salary and seniority he had achieved by 23, Renji felt he had reached a career ceiling. He left the web-development track to pursue graduate work in computer vision, including areas such as autonomous vehicles and drones.

Renji spent about two and a half years at Georgia Tech pursuing what he initially expected to be a PhD. After concluding the PhD path could consume roughly eight years, he stopped after earning a master's degree and then started Immersed. :chatgpt-content-reference{index="3"}

Immersed became a finalist for both Y Combinator and Techstars, and Renji chose the Techstars route because he believed his weakness was business rather than product development. He already knew how to code but said he knew little about legal matters, hiring, finance, fundraising or marketing.

He moved to Chicago for Techstars and said roughly 10,000 companies applied worldwide while only 10 were admitted to that program. He described himself as an unusual member of the cohort because he lacked the Ivy League or prior-exit backgrounds of many of the other founders.

Renji was the only solo founder in his Techstars cohort, even though he had originally had a cofounder. The former cofounder decided not to leave Atlanta, his wife and children for the accelerator and questioned whether startup life was worth missing formative years with his family. :chatgpt-content-reference{index="4"}

The Chicago Techstars program was deliberately extreme: Renji described days running from roughly 5 a.m. until 11 p.m. or midnight for 12 weeks. Participants were effectively told beforehand that they would have little contact with friends and family, while founders still had to find time—often on weekends—to run their actual companies. :chatgpt-content-reference{index="5"}

Renji nevertheless credits Techstars with turning him from primarily a coder into a more capable company builder. He said the program taught him how to prioritize the right features, communicate the company's work, hire effectively and raise capital.

He singled out Chicago managing director Logan LaHive as an important influence and later friend. Renji described LaHive as the founder of Belly, a loyalty-program company that had raised about $40 million from Andreessen Horowitz, and said LaHive was extremely demanding but highly valuable to the founders in the cohort.

The first three years of Immersed were dominated by building the product and finding early users rather than explosive growth. Renji said early financing was only around $300,000–$350,000 and milestones such as reaching 20 or 100 daily active users genuinely mattered.

Distribution was initially a severe constraint because Oculus's store was focused on games and would not list Immersed. Renji spent roughly three years finding users willing to sideload an APK manually onto their headsets.

Immersed became what Renji described as the first non-gaming application admitted to the Oculus store in August 2020. Facebook provided a quality-assurance team to help eliminate bugs and polish the product before launch; Renji said usage “exploded” once the app reached the store. :chatgpt-content-reference{index="6"}

Renji believes Immersed won that opportunity because its virtual-office product had become more polished and easier to onboard than competing products. He specifically pointed to user experience, feature depth and actual usage as advantages.

He sees today's perception of headsets primarily as gaming devices as one of the biggest obstacles to mainstream adoption of Immersed. The company is trying to convert existing headset owners who also have desk or office jobs into regular work users.

Renji used roughly 20 million headset daily active users as an illustrative—not verified—market-size assumption. On that hypothetical base, he said even capturing 10% would mean about two million daily active Immersed users; he explicitly acknowledged that he was making up the 20 million figure for the example.

He believes major technology companies are spending tens of billions of dollars collectively on spatial computing and that substantial new hardware is being developed behind the scenes. He named companies including Microsoft, Apple, Facebook/Meta and Google.

Without some intervention, Renji estimated mainstream spatial-computing hardware could still be four or five years away. He also said Immersed was involved in private discussions aimed at finding a way to accelerate that timetable to something closer to a year, without revealing the details. :chatgpt-content-reference{index="7"}

Immersed originated in 2017 from Renji deliberately looking for a problem he personally had. He had heard startup advice that founders who solve their own problems do not have to guess as much about what users need, and he applied that principle to his own work setup. :chatgpt-content-reference{index="8"}

Renji had already noticed remote work increasing among technical teams years before COVID-19. He recalled going from perhaps one remote coworker in 2014 to two in 2015 and then more later, which convinced him the underlying trend would continue even though he could not foresee the pandemic.

His core thesis was that chat and video conferencing could not remain the final form of remote work. He believed VR might give distributed workers a genuine sense of occupying the same place rather than simply communicating through conventional calls and messages.

Renji began experimenting with VR before he had ever used a proper headset. He bought a roughly $20 Google Cardboard device, placed his phone inside it and used the crude experience as enough of a proof of concept to imagine what a much better system could become. :chatgpt-content-reference{index="9"}

He entered VR at an awkward point in the industry's investment cycle. Oculus had already been acquired by Facebook after the earlier VR startup boom, and by 2017 many of the companies created during that excitement had failed; Renji said that left him trying to raise money during the subsequent “trough of disillusionment.”

Renji argues that building a product for yourself can improve both product judgment and founder endurance. His qualification was that the founder needs to resemble at least some meaningful group of other users rather than being such an unusual edge case that nobody else shares the problem.

Renji sees conventional early-stage venture capital as structurally unfavorable to founders who have little negotiating leverage. In his description, angels and VCs are financially motivated to acquire substantial ownership, while a founder desperate for capital has limited ability to reject their terms.

He became a strong advocate for equity crowdfunding or a “community round,” which he distinguished from Kickstarter-style product preorders. His basic arithmetic was that 1,000 people investing $1,000 each can collectively provide $1 million without any one family member or friend risking $50,000–$100,000.

Renji said community fundraising can also create leverage with professional investors. A founder who can demonstrate that ordinary investors rapidly committed significant money may create fear of missing out among angels or VCs who previously had more leverage.

Immersed used Wefunder and, according to Renji, raised $2 million in two days in summer 2020. He said this established crowdfunding records at the time.

Renji's appearance on Forbes' 30 Under 30 roughly four months later generated another wave of investor interest. He began collecting contact information from people asking whether Immersed would run another crowdfunding round and said the list grew to roughly 300 people within two or three days.

A second Immersed crowdfunding campaign in roughly March 2021 raised about $8 million in two weeks. Renji contrasted this with traditional VC or angel fundraising, which he said could take three to six months to produce perhaps $1 million.

He stressed that crowdfunding is not automatic money; Immersed deliberately engineered social proof around its campaigns. During the first campaign, a roughly 40-person “Growth Squad” invested around $200,000 collectively—about $5,000 each on average—and immediately commented publicly that they had invested, helping expose the round to their own networks.

By the second crowdfunding campaign, the Growth Squad had grown to about 700 people. Renji said the company supplemented that network effect with social-media hype, giveaways and intensive direct support for investors dealing with bank transfers, cryptocurrency sales, wallets and other payment problems.

The team initially hoped to raise about $7.5 million on the first day of the second campaign but reached only about $2.9 million. Some employees panicked, while Renji said he had already scenario-planned for much weaker outcomes and shifted tactics rather than treating the shortfall as failure.

He described those two weeks as extremely difficult but potentially transformative for the business. The alternative would have been returning to traditional VC fundraising, which he believed had been poorly suited to a company building for a hardware market that had not yet matured.

Renji's broader fundraising thesis is that people on the internet may accept small speculative bets on an emerging technology even when institutional investors will not. Individual $100 or $500 investments may be tolerable losses for those backers, while thousands of such investments can finance an ambitious company.

Most of the $8 million was used to expand Immersed's engineering team, with employee compensation its largest cost category. Because the company is technically demanding, Renji said access to strong engineers mattered more than almost any other use of the money.

Immersed deliberately weights compensation toward equity rather than trying to win salary bidding wars with companies such as Meta. Renji's logic is that someone motivated entirely by a $300,000 salary can easily leave for $400,000 elsewhere, whereas a person willing to trade some cash compensation for equity is more likely to believe deeply in the company's upside.

Immersed had roughly seven employees before its $2 million raise, approximately doubled afterward and then expanded by another roughly 2.5–3 times following the $8 million round. Renji said the company subsequently stayed around that size for about two and a half years.

He said Immersed was preparing another, undisclosed development intended to move the company to a new stage. The strategic objective was to remove bottlenecks that kept the company from reaching millions of daily users rather than simply waiting another four or five years for major technology companies to perfect mainstream hardware.

Large companies including TikTok and Meta became Immersed users without Renji personally hustling his way into those relationships. His explanation was that Immersed built a sufficiently strong product that people inside those companies discovered and liked it.

Renji cautioned against confusing networking persistence with genuine demand. He said he had seen decision-makers become irritated by founders who continually pestered them, while an organically loved product created a much healthier basis for a commercial relationship.

He still believes distribution matters: a strong product must be made visible enough through social growth and word of mouth for the right people to discover it. His hierarchy, however, is that marketing, financing, partnerships and team quality cannot rescue a product users fundamentally do not want.

Despite Immersed's usage and product quality, Renji explicitly said the company had not yet achieved product-market fit. He used the familiar analogy of pushing a boulder uphill until demand becomes so strong that the founder is suddenly chasing it downhill; Immersed's current hardware dependency prevents that kind of runaway demand.

Renji sees hardware availability—not necessarily software quality—as Immersed's biggest remaining constraint. Until ordinary users already own comfortable glasses or headsets suitable for work, the application cannot reach the scale of mainstream web or mobile software.

He believes spatial computing needs compelling adult use cases, not merely better games, to become ubiquitous. He compared a Game Boy, useful mainly to gamers, with an iPhone, which serves both adults and children and therefore addresses a dramatically larger market.

Renji cited the enormous scale of smartphones—roughly two billion iPhones and three billion Android devices by his estimate—as the kind of ubiquity spatial computing must eventually approach.

He views Apple's Vision Pro strategy as fundamentally different from Meta's headset strategy. In his framing, Apple's device is closer to “a MacBook on your face” or a spatial computer, while Meta has historically approached headsets more like gaming consoles; he believes productivity computing therefore has a much larger addressable market.

Renji does not expect AR/VR simply to eliminate physical offices. He believes it will increase optionality: some people genuinely work better away from home, while others value remote flexibility.

Immersed is therefore thinking beyond purely remote meetings toward “collocation.” In the future Renji imagines two people physically together, another person remote, and all three sharing a consistent spatial experience so that the remote participant effectively feels present in the same room.

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger was the most important recent mentor Renji named. Renji said Gelsinger had been unusually generous with his time despite running what Renji described as a roughly $200 billion company and despite Immersed being tiny by comparison.

Renji sees some strategic alignment between Intel and Immersed because Intel makes computing chips and Immersed is working on a possible next generation of computing. But he said other executives with even more direct business relevance had offered him far less access, which made Gelsinger's willingness to help stand out personally.

Renji praised Gelsinger primarily for what he viewed as unusual character and generosity, and used the relationship to make a broader argument about non-transactional professional relationships. He believes teams built around people who elevate one another produce stronger long-term outcomes than networks dominated by self-interest.

Renji strongly favors Intel's vertically integrated manufacturing strategy. He contrasted it with companies such as Nvidia, Qualcomm and AMD that rely more heavily on outside manufacturing in Asia, arguing that owning fabrication gives Intel more strategic control; these were Renji's views rather than claims independently established in the conversation.

He also praised Intel's emphasis on domestic U.S. manufacturing and compared Gelsinger's long-term orientation with Elon Musk's. Renji argued that some public companies optimize more heavily for immediate margins and quarterly earnings, whereas he sees Intel as willing to accept short-term disadvantages to preserve longer-term technical and national capabilities.

The most important advice Renji said he received from Gelsinger was that his job had changed from building the product to building the leadership team that would build the product.

Renji expected to spend roughly 40% of his own time recruiting senior leaders. His reasoning was that exceptional department heads are rarely actively looking for jobs, so a CEO must court or “woo” people already succeeding elsewhere rather than simply post vacancies.

Renji expects AI and spatial computing to converge through multimodal systems. Current language models primarily process language, while a headset can potentially provide continuous visual, audio and interaction data; combining them could create an assistant that sees and hears what the user does, closer to a persistent “Jarvis”-style companion.

He believes the major unresolved question for such an AI assistant is hardware adoption. The software becomes far more powerful if people are willing to wear a device throughout the day, which earlier products such as Google Glass failed to achieve.

Renji also expects AI, AR/VR and humanoid robotics to converge. He cited Tesla's humanoid robot and Figure, which he said had recently raised about $70 million, as examples of machines that could eventually learn human tasks from data collected by devices observing what people see and how their hands interact with the environment.

His proposed loop is: spatial devices record human behavior, those observations train neural networks, and those networks then control robots performing analogous physical work. He jokingly described the eventual result as a “Terminator,” but the substantive point was the potential role of AR/VR as a data-collection and simulation layer for robotics.

Renji's view is that Google Glass did not fail simply because it was too early; he thinks the product itself offered too little utility. He recalled a tiny low-resolution display and a visible camera that felt socially unacceptable at a time when people were far less accustomed to constant public recording.

He saw Sony's PSP differently: the device itself was excellent, but economics and supply constraints limited adoption. He remembered it launching around $600 and commanding even higher resale prices, making it fundamentally different from inexpensive mass-market handhelds such as the Game Boy.

Renji personally wanted the PSP badly enough that he sold his GameCube to help finance one. He recalled receiving roughly $250 from the sale and his father covering about another $550 toward an approximately $800 purchase.

His broader product lesson is that technical brilliance is insufficient if manufacturing cost, pricing, timing or market conditions are wrong. He emphasized that companies are not entitled to success merely because they built something impressive.

Renji offered a rough startup-success distribution in which about 96% fail, a few percent survive or perform adequately and only an extremely small fraction become companies associated with founders such as Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg. These numbers were presented conversationally rather than as sourced statistics.

Renji believes Meta damaged the public perception of the “metaverse” partly through the widely mocked image of Mark Zuckerberg's avatar with the Eiffel Tower. He argued that this single cultural moment made the concept appear unserious and claimed the reputational effect ultimately corresponded to enormous economic damage; that valuation of the effect was his interpretation.

He pointed to Apple's messaging around Vision Pro as evidence that Apple deliberately distanced itself from that damaged vocabulary. According to Renji, Apple avoided emphasizing terms such as “metaverse” and “virtual reality,” instead framing the device around spatial computing.

Renji sees Meta's AR/VR instincts as fundamentally social because Facebook was built around relationships, while Apple's instincts are utility- and product-oriented. He therefore expects the two companies to pursue very different experiences even though both operate within the broad spatial-computing category.

For young people entering technology, Renji's strongest educational recommendation is basic coding literacy. He does not believe everybody must become an elite software engineer, but thinks programming should sit alongside reading, writing and mathematics as a general-purpose tool for automating repetitive work and understanding how technology operates.

He particularly values the discrete, step-by-step logical thinking associated with programming. Even a founder focused on sales or marketing, he argued, benefits from enough technical understanding to communicate clearly with engineers rather than effectively speaking a different language from the people building the product.

Renji said founder breakups are the leading cause of startup failure, using that claim to emphasize the importance of communication between technical and nontechnical cofounders. The conversation did not provide supporting data for that ranking.

He recalled being on a ranch with figures including Tim Tebow and politicians where participants discussed U.S. technical competitiveness. Renji repeated a claim from those conversations that China graduates as many or more engineers each year as the total number of engineers in the United States; the podcast did not verify the statistic.

That discussion reinforced Renji's belief that the United States should place more educational emphasis on engineering, coding and the hard sciences. He contrasted that with what he sees as heavier emphasis elsewhere on technical disciplines and argued that any educational shift would take a generation to show its full effect.

Renji received TikTok's STEM feed unusually early, around the week following a congressional hearing involving TikTok. He happened to be visiting TikTok's U.S. headquarters at the time and wondered whether being on its network had anything to do with his early access, though he did not know.

He found the STEM feed genuinely educational and said nobody else in his own office initially seemed to have it. He also remarked that a very large share of the employees he observed at TikTok's U.S. headquarters appeared to be Chinese; this was his personal observation rather than demographic data.

If he could restart Immersed, Renji said one of his biggest changes would be choosing investors much more carefully. He encountered what he called “landmines” among angels and VCs and concluded that the source and character of capital matter alongside the amount raised.

Sovereign's Capital was the major exception he named. Renji described it as a Christian venture firm, said his experience with it had been extremely positive and called it the only VC he would proactively want on the cap table of any future company he starts.

Renji would also demand much more proof before giving people money, ownership or important roles. Earlier in his career he tended to believe ambitious promises from prospective executives or outside partners; now he says he would scrutinize track records, résumés, portfolios and demonstrated performance before committing equity or capital.

He described himself as much more trusting earlier in his career and now sees due diligence as essential because every important partner must meet the same high standard required for the company itself to reach product-market fit.

Renji has been openly Christian throughout his startup career and believes that openness is operationally easier than concealing his faith. His argument was that employees, investors or partners who would strongly object can identify the mismatch at the beginning rather than discovering it after a relationship has already formed.

He believes parts of the technology world are skeptical of Christianity partly because Christians themselves sometimes behave hypocritically or fail to represent their beliefs well. Rather than treating that tension as a reason to hide his religion, he says he makes his faith visible—including on LinkedIn—so people know the framework from which he operates.

Renji said one personal religious conviction is avoiding profanity, and he believes that unexpectedly affected investors' perception of his age and maturity. When he was 24, he said VCs often assumed he was in his mid-30s because of how he spoke and conducted himself; he also acknowledged that he did not volunteer that he was only 24.

He believes his faith has helped create trust with prospective employees. Renji recalled candidates telling him they trusted him more than founders at competing startups because they believed he genuinely cared about people, even when those candidates did not share his religion.

Faith also functions for Renji as a psychological framework for bearing startup risk. During severe business setbacks, he said his belief that his ultimate future does not depend on a financing round, partnership or company outcome helps him take risks and recover perspective.

He therefore interprets some decisions that others might consider unusually risky as acts of faith rather than recklessness. His point was not that outcomes are guaranteed, but that his religious beliefs reduce the existential importance of any single business failure.

Renji's ability to leave a nearly $400,000-a-year career was helped by unusually low personal expenses and substantial savings. At one point he said he was paying only about $170 a month in rent because roughly 10 men shared a house costing about $1,700 a month.

The high salary and extremely cheap lifestyle created a large financial cushion before he became a founder. Renji estimated that his savings could have supported his own minimal lifestyle for perhaps a decade and said the money effectively funded his first couple of years building Immersed.

His advice to people who want to leave a comfortable job is therefore not simply to quit immediately. He recommends recognizing how the current job, income or unused time can be deliberately converted into resources for the next stage.

He illustrated that principle with low-wage jobs as well: someone earning $8 an hour at McDonald's still has income to work with, while a student earning $10–$16 an hour sitting at a quiet computer-lab desk may also have hours of paid downtime that can be used to learn or build something.

Renji recommends trying many activities before committing to a path because sustained ambition requires genuine interest. His own central motivation is using technology to build things that make people's lives easier.

He considers that intrinsic motivation essential because Immersed was far harder to build than he expected. Without enjoying the underlying problem itself, he believes he would probably have abandoned the company during its difficult early years.

Renji closed by directing listeners to search his name online and said he is active across Instagram, TikTok, Twitter/X, LinkedIn and YouTube.