Neville Engineer

Letter

I am writing this on April 28, 2026.
Tomorrow I turn 16.
Tomorrow I also go to the DMV to get my permit. If you are reading this after tomorrow — yes, I have it. Hopefully. But before the permit. Before the birthday. Before any of this. There is a story worth telling. And I think you should hear it.

I grew up in Pittsford, New York.
Quiet suburb outside Rochester. Long winters. Nothing much happening. The kind of place where you either find something to build or you spend a lot of time waiting for life to start somewhere else.
I was never going to wait.
I am a skier. I love the mountain. I love the feeling of committing to something at the top of a run when there is no going back — when the only option is forward. That is basically how I approach everything. You look down. You commit. You go.
That is the only way I know how to live.

It starts with my uncle.
His name is Jamshed Cooper. Everyone calls him JC.
JC is an entrepreneur. A builder. Someone who has spent his life creating things from scratch and betting on people that the rest of the world was not paying attention to yet. He saw something in me before I saw it in myself. And when I was 13 years old he made a decision that changed the entire trajectory of my life.
He brought me into his company.
Rayze was a data and AI engineering company. Real clients. Real products. Real stakes. And JC handed the technology to a 13 year old and said figure it out.
I was the youngest person in every room by a decade. I sat across from people who had been building software since before I was born. I made decisions that affected real products used by real people. I failed at some of them. I learned from every single one.
JC did not give me a title. He gave me a standard. He showed me what it looks like to take something seriously. To show up every day not because someone is watching but because the work deserves it.
And before I ever started Route5 he told me two things I will carry for the rest of my life.
Stay small enough long enough and you will be big enough soon enough.
And get the degree.
I think about those words every single day.

What I built before Route5.
I have never been someone who waits for permission.
At 13 I was working inside a real company. By 14 I had shipped apps to the App Store. Real products. Real users. Real feedback from real people who used something I made and told me what worked and what did not. I took a part time job at Sodexo because I wanted to know what it felt like to earn something in the real world — not from a screen, not from code, but from showing up and doing the work and getting paid for it.
And then I became a UGC creator at Cluely — one of the most viral AI startups in the world. I got to see from the inside how a product captures attention at scale. How a brand becomes a conversation. How the right story told in the right way changes everything.
Every single one of those experiences was teaching me something. I just did not know yet what it was all building toward.

The problem I could not stop thinking about.
At Rayze I watched it happen over and over again.
Decisions made in meetings that nobody followed up on. Commitments that felt real in the room and meant absolutely nothing by Friday. Smart people. Real intentions. Good teams. And still — the work quietly disappeared. Promises made and forgotten. Trust broken not by bad people but by broken systems.
I looked for a tool that fixed it. I searched everywhere. I tested everything.
Granola raised $125 million to be a better notebook. Motion raised $60 million for scheduling. Asana stores tasks a human remembers to enter. Fellow records meetings and stops there.
Not one of them owned what happened after the conversation ended.
The accountability layer — the thing that captures every decision, assigns every owner, sets every deadline, and follows up until the work is actually done — did not exist.
So I decided to build it.

The name.
Route5 started as a name my uncle JC had sitting around for something he was considering. He went a different direction and never used it. I saw it and something clicked immediately. A route. A path. Forward motion with a destination. I took it and built something entirely different with it.
The idea came together in California during a product validation trip. I was running research, pressure testing assumptions, mapping every competitor in the market. By the time I got on the plane home I knew exactly what I was building and exactly why everything else was solving the wrong problem.
I landed in Pittsford. Went back to my bedroom. And started writing code.

What happened next broke me. And then it built me.
I found people who wanted to build this with me. Seven of them. Eight conversations about vision and equity and what we were going to create together.
Every single one of them disappeared before a single line of code was written.
I want you to sit with that for a second.
Seven people. Eight promises. Zero follow through.
I know what it feels like to watch a commitment evaporate. To extend real trust to real people and watch them walk away like it never happened. To be 14 years old with a real idea and a real plan and no one left in the room.
I did not get angry. I did not spiral. I did not let it become a story about being let down.
I sat back down at my desk.
And I wrote the first line of code alone.
Then the second. Then the third. Then I looked up and it was 2am and the room was quiet and I had built something real and I had done it by myself and in that moment I understood something I will never unlearn.
You do not need anyone's permission to start. You do not need a co-founder who stays. You do not need someone older than you to tell you that you are ready. The only thing standing between you and the thing you are supposed to build is whether you open the laptop or close it.
I opened it.
Every night. For months. Alone.

What I built.
Route5 AI is a B2B SaaS accountability layer for teams. It automatically captures every commitment made in meetings, Slack, and email — assigns each one a real owner and a real deadline — and follows up automatically until the work is confirmed done.
Built entirely solo using Next.js, Supabase, OpenAI, Cursor AI, and Claude Code. Every line of code written by me alone while attending high school full time. No co-founder. No team. No outside funding. A live production product deployed to the world.
I built this while going to school five days a week. While working a part time job. While creating content for a viral startup. While writing investor applications. While being a normal kid in a normal town who just refused to act like one.

Where I am going.
I am currently applying to Y Combinator Summer 2026, a16z Speedrun, and Perplexity. Three of the most selective programs in the world for early stage founders.
I also applied to 10X as an engineer. A company paying $300,000 to $500,000 for founding engineers in New York City. Do I know how that will work out? No. Am I 15 years old applying anyway? Absolutely. Because the worst anyone can say is no and I have heard that before and it has never once stopped me from trying again.
This summer I am moving to the New York metro area. Closer to the city. Closer to the buyers. Closer to the conversations that matter. University comes next — the degree JC told me to get. Then the business scales. Then whatever comes after that.
I have a plan. It fits on three pages. Every number in it is real.

For every kid reading this.
I need you to hear this.
Not as motivation. Not as a speech. As the honest truth from someone who is living it right now at 15 years old in a bedroom in upstate New York.
You do not need to be older. You do not need more experience. You do not need the perfect co-founder or the right investor or the teacher who finally believes in you. You do not need to wait until you graduate or until the timing feels right or until someone gives you permission to go.
Nobody is coming to give you that.
The people you are waiting for might not show up. Seven of mine did not. The moment you are waiting for might not announce itself. Mine came at 2am alone in a room with nobody watching.
But it came.
And the only reason I was there to meet it is because I kept showing up even when I had every reason not to.
You have a laptop. You have a problem. You have tonight.
That is enough. That has always been enough.
Start.

The last thing.
It is the night before my 16th birthday. I have a DMV appointment tomorrow morning and a YC application due this weekend and a product live in production and a life that is just beginning to become what I always knew it could be.
I am applying to Y Combinator. I am applying to a16z. I am applying to Perplexity. I applied to 10X as an engineer at 15 years old not knowing what will happen but knowing that not trying was never an option.
JC told me to stay small enough long enough.
I am still small. I know that. I am 15 years old with a permit appointment and a dream that is bigger than anything I can currently see the edges of.
But I am still here. Still building. Still showing up every single night.
And if there is one thing I know for certain it is this.
The size is coming.