Founding Class application · Horowitz Andreessen Academy

Tom Vu

Seven years in professional kitchens. An artist. I don't write code; I run a team of AI the way I would run a kitchen, and together we built MATE.

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Proof of work · 01

MATE, one place for a shared home

Manage, Assist, Together, Everyday. A web app where a household keeps its documents, bills, parcels, recipes and calendar in one place, with a chat around them. It started on 2 October 2026. It has been live since the second week.

Why. After a sixteen hour shift at the bakery, with my visa renewal due and the lease in my name, I stood in the shower trying to remember which app held which document. The bills were in email, the lease in a photo, the receipts in three chats. I had just deleted apps to free up storage. I got out, dried off, and wrote the whole idea down before it went away.

Who it is for. People renting a shared house, who need to keep the lease, the Wi-Fi password and the bills where everyone can find them. Then the parent who keeps the family's documents, insurance and recipes. Then students, who need one place for notes, timetable and deadlines. I have been all three.

What exists today. A live web app on Render and Neon, free tiers. Twelve screens below are real and clickable. Three spaces (Home, Work, Community) are filled with sample data and marked Demo. Nolan, the companion, follows simple commands and has no AI behind it yet.

It feels empty at first, because there's no community yet. Make the design cleaner and easier to read.My cousin in Germany, first tester
MATE, Today screen
A walk through MATE, screen by screen
The first screen
The first screenYou pick a language and Tom, the colourless mascot, shows you around. English, Vietnamese, French, German and Dutch, because my friends live in all of those.
Today
TodayOne screen for the day: calendar, my timers, and the to do list in three columns, Doing, Next, Done. You drag the cards into the order you want and MATE remembers it per space.
Calendar
CalendarMonth, week and year, plus a Chores tab for the house. Each calendar has a colour: mine, the house, work. Countdowns sit at the top so a deadline is never a surprise.
Library
LibraryThis is the part I built MATE for. Shelves for the lease, payslips, warranties, passwords, the car, bills to keep. Search across all of it. Personal shelves are only visible to me.
Notes
NotesA real editor with headings, tables and formulas, filed into the same shelves as the Library. The sample is a physics lab report; mine are recipes, chapters and house notes.
Study
StudyFor the student I am about to be. Subjects with timetable, room, due dates and grades. Each subject opens its notes and documents in one tap.
Clock and timers
Clock and timersA chef thing. Pho broth 3 hours, brisket 1 hour 30, rest the meat 10 minutes, a Pomodoro for study. Tick a timer and it appears on Today.
Home space
Home spaceSwitch from Personal to Home and the same screens show the house instead: shared calendar, pinboard, dinner and pantry, bills due. Each space keeps its own layout.
House chat
House chatMessages and photos for everyone in the house. Anything said in chat can become a note, a bill or a calendar entry without leaving the chat.
Kitchen
KitchenRecipes, meals, menus, timers and a pantry. "What can I cook" looks at the pantry and the recipes together. Friends can send a recipe straight into your kitchen.
Bills
BillsSnap a bill, split it, and MATE keeps who owes whom. Overdue bills turn red and show up on Today. This replaced the spreadsheet and the screenshot in the group chat.
Nolan, my MATE
Nolan, my MATEA small companion that follows simple commands: note, private, calendar, find. Honest note: there is no AI behind Nolan yet. The plan is to add it once the privacy layer is finished.
Community
CommunityGroups, pages, courses and rooms for people outside the house: a market, a class, a kitchen crew. Everything in the demo spaces is invented sample data and is marked as such.

What is real, what is not

  • Real: Today, Calendar, Library, Notes, Study, Clock, Kitchen, Bills, house chat, four spaces, five languages.
  • Real: 6 people have opened it (my sister, my parents, cousins in Germany, a college friend in Australia). Most used versions one and two. The current version is going out to them this week.
  • Not yet: AI behind Nolan, encryption for private documents, Gmail and Apple Calendar import, payments. The app says so on screen, and asks testers not to upload passwords or bank details yet.
  • The Home, Work and Community spaces show invented sample data so a new user does not land on an empty screen. That was the first thing my testers asked for.

What I changed after feedback

  • "Too empty" became sample recipes, timers, notes and a demo house, so every screen shows what it is for.
  • "Hard to read" became a simpler layout: one column of cards on Today, bigger type, fewer buttons per screen.
  • "Where do I start" became Tom, the mascot, who walks you through the first screen in your language.
  • Next: desktop layout, then the privacy layer, then Nolan gets a brain.
How it was built · 02

I run my AI team like a kitchen

I am the head chef. I write the brief, decide what goes on the menu, taste everything before it leaves the pass. Each AI is a station. None of them decides what MATE is.

I have thirteen rooms in Claude, each with one job: email, study abroad, the Academy, MATE, art, the book, games. They all read one shared memory in Notion first, so I never explain myself twice. Gmail is sorted by 37 filters with a summary every four hours.

For MATE, I write the specification in plain English, with examples, the way I would brief a new cook. An executive Claude breaks it into jobs and sends each to the right station. Claude Code writes the code. I test every branch on my phone and my Mac, and nothing goes live until I say so. In three weeks that produced 25 branches, 256 passing tests and a live app.

I could not have written this code myself, and I say so. What I bring is the problem, the taste, the decisions, and seven years of knowing what breaks at 3 am.

Head chefTomProblem, specs, features, testing, privacy decisions, talking to testers.
Sous chefExecutive ClaudeReads the brief, splits it into jobs, keeps the shared memory in Notion.
LineClaude CodeWrites and tests the code from the specs. 25 branches, 256 tests.
Pantry and platingGemini, ChatGPTMarket research, reviewing the plan, drawing the mascots from my sketches.
Where I come from · 03

Seven years in kitchens

Melbourne and Tasmania, 2019 to 2026. A hot pot chain at 14, a poultry line, McDonald's shift manager, a hotel kitchen, then pastry chef at Banjo's Shoreline: dough shifts from 3 am, sourdough and French sticks. Diploma of Hospitality Management, TasTAFE, 2024.

What the kitchen taught me is the thing I use most when I build: mise en place. Everything prepared, labelled, in its place before service, so that when it gets busy you are moving, not thinking. MATE's Library is mise en place for a household.

My 21st birthday I cooked six courses for fourteen people, alone, in eight hours after a night shift. Vegetables prepped the night before, pastry from my bakery. Canapé with prawn and caviar, French onion soup, ratatouille, Beef Wellington from scratch, cheese plate, baked Alaska. I planned it the way I plan a product: the oven is the bottleneck, so everything is timed around it.

Weaving the pastry lattice The Wellington out of the oven Ratatouille, plated Prawn and caviar canapés The cheese board
The 21st birthday dinner, six courses, cooked alone
Tom in chef whites at Banjo's, boxing sandwiches The sandwich line at Banjo's, hundreds of rounds French sticks fresh from the oven Hot cross buns proving Coffee crème donuts piped by hand The bakery display, morning Tom checking a sandwich before it goes out Prep at the hot pot kitchen, 2019 Hotel kitchen, Tasmania Plating under the pass
Banjo's Shoreline, the hotel kitchen, and the hot pot kitchen where it started
The other half · 04

Art, and the inside of things

I started painting in Melbourne when I was homesick, drawing classmates for free to practise. My Year 12 folio, Inside/Outside, is about the inner self and the visible body. I was art captain at Maribyrnong College and a Teen Council member at the National Gallery of Victoria in 2022.

Us Mind, oil on canvas
Us Mind · oil · the pieces of one person, and the peacock for my name
Love Heart, shadow from sculpture
Love Heart · shadow cast by cardboard and tape
Tom at the easel wearing his NGV Teen Council lanyard, 2022
National Gallery of Victoria, Teen Council, 2022

The full collection, 362 works across oil, watercolour, acrylic, drawing, charcoal, origami, fashion and film, lives at tomvulkouson.com. There is also a novel in progress, five chapters and about 30,000 words, whose characters became MATE's mascots.

I don't see art and software as different jobs. Technology is the walls and the doors of the house. Art is how the rooms feel when you walk in. MATE needs both, which is why it has a mascot who greets you in your language and not a login form.

Timeline · 05

Things I started, and finished

One year in San Francisco · 06

If I get a year at the Academy, I want MATE used every week by twenty shared homes and one bakery, and I want to learn what I cannot teach myself: how to turn a thing people use into a company. I would bring the Academy a cook's view of problems, and the habit of finishing.