Aghi recounts launching Kong with $600 and a tourist visa, eventually landing early backing from YouTube insiders and later securing a seed round with Jeff Bezos and Eric Schmidt. After a failed pivot to an API marketplace drained funds, the team open-sourced their platform in 2015—a move that saved the company. Strong community adoption led to Series B funding and over $10M in recurring revenue. Kong’s technical innovation in separating control and data planes positioned it as a leader in API infrastructure. Now, as AI agents emerge, Kong is evolving into a unified gateway for both API and AI traffic, managing authentication, rate-limiting, and billing. The journey spanned seven grueling years before breakout success, underscoring the value of resilience, low burn rates, and betting on foundational tech trends.