---
title: "A Microsoft engineer walks away from $200,000 to build an AI money coach alone"
description: "Junead Khan, 25, quit in Seattle with no investors and no customers; a year on, his startup Treasury has earned just over $6,000"
author: "Jan Sokol"
published: 2026-10-11T11:00:02Z
modified: 2026-10-11T20:46:51Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/a-microsoft-engineer-walks-away-from-200-000-to-build-an-ai--1c12d6
language: en
tags: ["ai", "startup", "workforce", "automation", "business"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# A Microsoft engineer walks away from $200,000 to build an AI money coach alone

*Junead Khan, 25, quit in Seattle with no investors and no customers; a year on, his startup Treasury has earned just over $6,000*

By Jan Sokol · October 11, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/a-microsoft-engineer-walks-away-from-200-000-to-build-an-ai--1c12d6

## In brief

- Junead Khan, 25, joined Microsoft in 2023 and earned more than $200,000 in 2024 including stock and bonuses
- He says Microsoft’s greater focus on security and stability by early 2025 slowed shipping and made the job less fun
- After Y Combinator and other accelerators turned him down, he resigned in August 2025 and launched Treasury two months later
- He has built a following of around 30,000 across platforms and works alone, coding with Claude Code and Codex
- Treasury has paying customers and more than $6,000 in revenue; Khan takes no salary and lives on his savings

Junead Khan joined Microsoft full-time in 2023, his first job out of college. In [an as-told-to essay for *Business Insider*](https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-engineer-quit-big-tech-job-build-ai-startup-solo-2026-10), recorded by Jacob Zinkula, the 25-year-old from Seattle describes arriving in the middle of the AI boom and working on the rollout of the company’s data centers around the world. “It was a great opportunity,” he says. In 2024 he earned more than $200,000, counting stock and bonuses.

He left anyway. He had no customers, no venture backer and no partner.

## When the empire slows down

Khan dates the change to a run of service outages. By early 2025, he says, the company was putting more weight on security and on keeping its services stable, and getting things shipped seemed to take longer. “That started to take some of the fun out of the job for me.”

This caution had been ordered from the top. In May 2024, as [Axios reported](https://www.axios.com/2024/05/03/microsoft-cybersecurity-overhaul), Satya Nadella told employees that security now came first, and Microsoft tied part of its senior leaders’ pay to cybersecurity milestones. A week earlier, on an earnings call, Nadella had promised [“putting security above all else – before all other features and investments.”](https://www.techradar.com/pro/security/microsoft-ceo-says-it-is-putting-security-above-all-else-in-major-refocus) The order came after a series of damaging cyberattacks.

A reflection rather than a finding: an organization that has been burned learns to move carefully, and a careful organization is a hard place for a young man in a hurry. Khan was watching new AI coding tools appear and wanted to get his hands on them sooner. He felt he was not picking up the AI skills he was after.

![A large office chair stands beside a padlock while a man carrying a red toolbox walks away against a teal background.](https://rews.cc/img/f6f2f99caddacc90d31c9facbbc453aadfdc26d7.webp)

## Money in two countries

The idea came before Microsoft did. Khan was born and raised in Britain and moved to the United States in 2019 to study computer science at the University of North Carolina. He had money to look after on both sides of the Atlantic, and the financial tools available to him handled that badly. AI models were improving fast. He began to wonder whether he could build a financial adviser for ordinary people, the ones who have no adviser or won’t pay thousands of dollars a year for one.

He started building it in the summer after graduation, before his job began. He called it Treasury, and he describes it as “an AI money coach.” For about the next two years he worked on it at night and at weekends.

## Waiting for permission

Last year he applied to several startup accelerators, Y Combinator among them. His plan was simple: if one accepted him, he would quit and go full-time on Treasury.

None did.

So he changed the plan. He began to treat the money he had earned at Microsoft as his own seed funding. He also planned his exit around the calendar of corporate pay. He waited until some of his stock had vested and until he had stayed long enough that he would not have to repay part of his sign-on bonus. Big companies hold on to their people with schedules like these, and he left on the date they allowed. That was August 2025, after about two years at the company. Treasury officially launched two months later.

![An hourglass with gold coins falling into its lower chamber, where a small golden sprout grows from a coin pile, against a teal background.](https://rews.cc/img/9de27c82100ec1d3c90a14be93fca59bc2b35cbd.webp)

## An audience instead of investors

He was not raising venture money and not paying for advertising, so people would have to find the product some other way. He began documenting the work in public, mostly on TikTok and Instagram but also on LinkedIn and X. He posted the good weeks, the bad ones and the launches that failed. He was also thinking about his career: as AI made software engineering more accessible, he reasoned, a personal brand would matter more, and a public record of the attempt might help him find a job one day even if Treasury failed.

He started with almost nothing. About a year ago he had fewer than 500 followers on TikTok. Now he has more than 9,000 there, and around 30,000 across all his platforms.

## One man and his tools

AI made him think he could do it alone. A few years earlier, he believes, he might have needed a co-founder to build the product. With Claude Code and Codex he writes code much faster, and a basic version of the software, built without a co-founder or venture money, seemed within reach. He still works on Treasury by himself.

![A person stands beside a giant computer mouse whose cord becomes a crane lifting an orange block above stacked geometric buildings on a blue background.](https://rews.cc/img/96003849424d4e35bd48d8df1203a06523142c72.webp)

He has not ruled out raising money. But he would rather first test the idea with an audience, on his own terms, than give up equity before he has really tried. That preference comes at a time when [venture capital has been flowing mainly to the AI giants](https://rews.cc/a/venture-capital-is-just-for-ai-giants-now-so-startups-are-as-caa34b) and small founders have been left to find money wherever they can.

## The ledger

Treasury now has paying customers and has brought in more than $6,000 in revenue. That is about 3 percent of what Microsoft paid him in 2024. He pays himself no salary. The revenue stays in the business, and he lives on the savings he built up before he resigned.

When he quit, he gave himself a year and promised to take stock after it. By the calendar that year has passed, and he is still going. He says the product is good and that he has an audience that wants the company to succeed. His task now is to reach more people.

He admits that leaving a well-paid job without customers or funding was a risk. He used to tell himself that he would quit if a particular accelerator took him, and that each next step would follow some outside sign. “Sometimes we look for those things as validation,” he says. “I’ve learned that sometimes the only permission you need is your own.”