Max Brodeur-Urbas is the co-founder and CEO of Gumloop. The company just raised a $50 million Series B round led by Benchmark, with clients including Instacart, Shopify, DoorDash, and Gusto. Before this, he was an ordinary engineer at Microsoft, forced onto the entrepreneurial path after being deported while crossing the border.
This interview comes from the YouTube channel EO (Entrepreneur & Opportunities), released on March 16, 2026. Max didn’t shy away from any awkward experiences: the shock of deportation, the anxiety of changing business ideas weekly, the lack of confidence to price above ChatGPT. He also criticized the marketing bubble in the AI circle of “50 Agents running a company automatically.”
Original video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxFQykWiJqY
Max started by talking about a popular narrative on Twitter: I automated everything, work only one hour a week, made ten million with a SaaS on the weekend.
His evaluation was direct: Most of them are lying.
Hope is the easiest thing to sell.
(“You can sell hope really easily.”)
Max calls these people “course bros.” They sell an illusion: just buy this course, copy this workflow, and you can skip all the hard work and get the results directly.
He said if there really was a secret formula to make $30,000 in a weekend, no one would give it to you for free on Twitter. The real way these people found to make money is by selling the courses themselves.
Max further compared the AI bubble to previous crypto and NFT bubbles. He believes in every technology hype cycle, there’s a group of easily persuaded people who genuinely believe a new technology can save their situation. The course sellers exploit this psychology.
There’s also a type he calls “want-entrepreneurs”: people who think starting a business can be done with one click, buying a course gets them the recipe for a million-dollar annual income. These people will never succeed, but the recipe sellers will make a fortune.
So how should AI actually be used? Max’s answer is: AI augmentation, not AI replacement. The best users are those who use AI to enhance their work capabilities, not those trying to replace entire roles with AI. Keep the key steps requiring human judgment, automate the repetitive parts.
They’re lying to you, for the most part.
(“They’re lying to you, for the most part.”)
[Note: Max used a pun to describe fully AI-automated companies: “slop, not slot.” Slot is a slot machine, slop is garbage. Meaning you think you’re building a money-making machine, but you’re actually mass-producing garbage content. The term “slop” has become slang in the AI field specifically referring to low-quality AI-generated content.]
2. Big Tech is “Self-Comfort,” The 21-Year-Old Time Window is Irreplicable
Max studied software engineering at McGill University. His entire university goal was one thing: get a good job. He succeeded and joined Microsoft, then quickly realized he hated the job.
I haven’t used anything I learned in big tech in my startup at all.
(“I don’t think I’ve used anything I learned in big tech in my startup at all.”)
He believes the saying “go to a big company to learn for a few years before starting up” is essentially self-comfort. Most people get trapped by golden handcuffs—the salary is too high, life is too comfortable, they can never leave. The only value of big tech experience is adding a logo to the resume, so people don’t think you’re a “random person” when you start up.
Max repeatedly emphasized the scarcity of the time window from ages 21 to 23: no mortgage, no family burdens, no obligations to anyone. If you just log in, fix a ticket, and log off every day during these years, you’re wasting the most precious years of your life.
He said most of what he does now at Gumloop is the exact opposite of big tech practices.
[Note: Max was a software engineer at Microsoft. Gumloop’s co-founder Rahul Behal previously worked at Amazon Web Services (AWS). They were classmates at McGill University.]
3. Deported – “I Had No Way Back, Had to Start a Business”
After quitting Microsoft, Max moved back to Vancouver, planning to build things from his bedroom for a year. One weekend he drove to Seattle to visit his former roommate and was questioned at the US-Canada border.
The border officer asked where he was going, where he was staying, what his job was. After a series of questions, he was deported. The reason was suspicion he would overstay his claimed duration. He said he only planned to stay for two days.
This deportation came with a 5-year entry ban.
Max said at that moment he realized he had to start a business because there was no way back. He couldn’t go back to the US to find a job.
He recalled driving back from the border to his girlfriend’s apartment, saying he was “almost in a state of shock.” It took a few days to recover. But after calming down, what he did was simple: work full force for the next 6 months.
[Note: Max emphasized this did not involve any illegal activity. At the US-Canada border, if an officer believes a traveler has “immigrant intent” (i.e., may overstay), they have the right to deny entry. The accompanying entry ban duration depends on the specific ruling. This detail is consistent with public reports about Max starting up in Vancouver and being unable to be on-site in San Francisco during YC. According to BetaKit, Gumloop moved its headquarters to San Francisco in early 2025, and Max himself has also relocated there.]
4. One Idea Per Week – Actively Seeking Reasons for Failure
In the following months, Max entered a phase of high-density trial and error. He built a bunch of things: VR game moderation software, trust and safety tools, bot traffic detection, anti-fraud platforms. For each one, he quickly built an MVP, then tried to sell it on the market to see if anyone was willing to buy.
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