How I got here

In my own words

2008–nowAustin

At 13, I was sleeping on a couch in a converted garage.

That year my family lost nearly everything, and I sank into a depression that lasted a year and a half.

This is how I got from that couch to founding my company, Crawft.

Life was easy until I was 13

I was born in Austin and grew up in a three-story condo downtown, near Rainey Street. My dad owned a business that brought in about a quarter of a million dollars a year. I never thought about money.

I was a fearless, restless kid. At seven I colored chopsticks, wrapped them in yarn and beads, and walked the Lady Bird Lake trail asking strangers, “Will you buy my magic wand?” Enough of them said yes, and I spent the money on candy.

Then, the year I turned 13, all of it fell apart. It started with my father.

Cruce at 12, laughing in a lake in a red and black life jacket, holding on to the edge of an inflatable float. — Me at 12, a year before everything changed.

My father started hearing voices

It had been building for a while. My father heard voices he called “the three masters,” and they told him he had been chosen. To most people he seemed normal: charismatic, still running his business. Then he went on a retreat at a commune deep in the Costa Rican jungle, a place people went to take hallucinogens. Afterward, the voices told him he had become a god.

About a year later, right around when I turned 13, they told him to move to that commune for good, and he planned to take my little brother and me with him. For my mom, that was the final straw. She filed for divorce and fought in court to keep us home. We had evidence, but the court decided my father was mentally fine and gave him partial custody. My mom managed to keep my brother, who was eight, at home. I had to spend that summer with my father at the commune: makeshift houses in the middle of nowhere, no Wi-Fi.

My mom flew for three days to bring me home

That summer, at the commune, my father committed sexual crimes. I called my mom and told her. She stayed up for three days straight, catching flight after flight to reach me, and brought me home to Austin.

I haven't really seen my father since. He left the country and doesn't pay the child support the court ordered. The money went with him.

I hit bottom

My mom had no money of her own. We went from the condo downtown to a converted garage under 500 square feet: my mom, my little brother, my grandma and me. I slept on the couch. We ate from food banks, dealt with bed bugs for the first time in our lives, and went into debt.

After that summer and everything we'd lost, I sank into a deep depression. I was pulled out of school and spent my days in a partial hospitalization program, talking with therapists and other depressed teenagers, and I was put on antidepressants. When I went back to school, I skipped every class and disappeared into screens. Nothing anyone tried made it better. It went on for about a year and a half.

I chose to fight

Then something clicked. No therapist, counselor or school was going to fix this for me, and other than my mom, no one would ever care about my life as much as I did. As I saw it, I had two options: cease to exist, or fight for my existence and build a life I could finally be free in. I chose to fight.

No one was going to save me but me.

Running came first

One of the first things I did was run. Then I started going to the gym. My body got stronger first, then my confidence, then my discipline.

Running became a daily habit. None of it happened in a straight line, though.

Cruce running on a track in a headband and race bib 549, other runners behind him. — A Thanksgiving Turkey Trot, 2025.

I got better in loops

I'd be disciplined for a few days, slip back into old habits, regret it and start again. That loop repeated for a long time, but each time around, the disciplined stretch lasted longer and the slip got shorter. Days became weeks, and weeks became months. Over a year or two, I became a different person: energetic, confident and disciplined.

One row per loop, from age 14 to today. Not to scale.

I found my own way out

I was still in the middle of those loops in the spring of ninth grade, at Crockett High School in South Austin, where fights broke out most days. Then a classmate threatened to shoot me and showed me photos of himself and his friends with guns.

My mom asked the district for a transfer and asked me to look up schools. Mostly for fun, I searched for any school I could want and found Alpha, a private school in Austin where AI tutors cover academics in the mornings and students spend the afternoons on their own companies and projects. I didn't wait for anyone else to make it happen. I called admissions myself and applied that week. Alpha gave me the first full scholarship in its history, and I walked in about two weeks after the threat.

Alpha put me in rooms full of adults

I used those afternoons to get into rooms I'd never have reached on my own. Within weeks, I started an interview study on the habit I was still breaking: how Austin high schoolers live with social media. That June I presented it in London at the Royal Anthropological Institute, the world's oldest scholarly association for anthropology.

At home, I turned my family's Friday board-game night into South Austin Games, open to anyone in Austin, and it grew past 1,000 members. Hosting strangers every week was good practice for my first job: at 16, I was the sales manager of Early Media, an Austin startup that turned indie films into viral clips, and I ran every client relationship. At SXSW, Austin's film, music and tech festival, I landed my biggest deal, about $15,000. That spring the company was acquired for millions, and my boss offered me an $80K job. Taking it meant leaving Alpha, and I was already building something of my own, so I said no.

Cruce in a maroon shirt laughing mid-conversation with two adults at an Austin networking event, string lights overhead. — At an Austin networking event, April 2025.

Running became Ippo

Running had helped pull me out of depression, so I turned it into a game. Ippo is an Apple Watch running game: the watch buzzes mid-run, you sprint to catch a creature, and effort, not speed, earns the rewards. To build the first version, I recruited four adult software engineers from Gauntlet AI, an Austin program that trains engineers to build with AI, and managed them for four weeks. I was 16. In April 2025, Capital Factory, Austin's best-known startup hub, picked me to pitch Ippo on its main stage.

I built it between school and home, where I've cooked dinner for my family most nights since the garage and help raise my little brother. In 2025 my mom, who has a heart condition, had three surgeries, two of them open-heart, and I helped her through all three. That winter I rebuilt Ippo three times, and on February 23, 2026, it went live on the App Store.

I pitched Ippo three miles off Oahu

Two months after launch, Limitless, a YouTube channel made in partnership with Alpha, flew me to Hawaii for a Shark Tank-style show that cost more than $1.7 million to make. The set was a deck floating three miles off Oahu, and any founder who got four noes was dunked into a tank surrounded by sharks. I pitched first and won a $25,000 offer from investors Chris Camillo and Bill Perkins on air.

The opening of my pitch, from the Limitless episode.

I stopped doing everything myself

That July, on a full scholarship, I spent two weeks at Wharton's startup program for high schoolers in San Francisco. I pitched an idea on the first day, 12 classmates asked to join my team, and I led five of us as CEO. We built NestIQ, an iPhone app with about 15 minutes a day of screen-free activities for parents to do with their babies and toddlers.

In the first week I did about 90% of the work myself, because that was how I'd always gotten things done. Then I gave each teammate a real job they owned. Out of about 100 students, NestIQ won Best MVP, the prize for the best working first version of a product, and nine days later it was live on the App Store. Getting a team to do the work well is a different skill from doing it myself, and I use it every day now.

I'm in a much better place now

Today I'm a senior at Alpha. Five years ago I was sleeping on a couch in a converted garage and skipping every class. Now I have a 4.43 weighted GPA, two apps on the App Store and a company of my own, Crawft. It's Mac software for private schools that shows teachers what their students have actually been working on, and I'm building it for Alpha first.

At the bottom, “no one was going to save me but me” was how I got out. Now it's how I start everything. I'm not finished. I still fight the same loops; I just win far more of them now.

I wish I could tell my 13-year-old self just how far I'd come. I don't think he would believe I made it out.

Cruce sitting on the grass at an Austin park in a maroon T-shirt, his face turned up and away from the camera, the downtown skyline and a cloudy sky behind him. — Austin, spring 2026.

The rest of my story is on this map

I've left a lot out. Everything since that couch has its own place in this world, with the photos, videos and details that didn't fit here. Go to Hawaii to watch the whole pitch, sharks included, or to Crawft, in Austin, to see what I'm building now. The Workshop, a cluster of small islands, holds everything else I've built, including Crew, the system I designed to run teams of AI agents. Start wherever you're most curious.

Cruce SaundersLevel 0