‘Build in your own wins’: Relai founder shares his self-taught path to entrepreneurship

This is How I Got Here, a series where we chart the career journeys of technologists. Want to tell your story? Get in touch.

During his journey as a startup founder, Miles Mufuka Martin often faces two options: sink or learn how to swim.

The 27-year-old Pittsburgher is the cofounder of Relai, a startup that builds secure lockers where communities can drop off and retrieve items. Today, Relai operates 30 exchange zones across seven cities — but getting here required Mufuka Martin to build skills most founders outsource, like building the tech behind his idea.

With a degree in the humanities, he knew little about software development. After being “burned by a few very bad dev shop experiences,” he and his cofounder decided to take the work into their own hands. Mufuka Martin taught himself to code, eventually launching his own backend development firm, 35th Street Builders.

“Non-technical is not a permanent status,” Mufuka Martin told Technical.ly. “It’s not inherent to anybody. You can learn. You just need to know where to start.” 

That eye for opportunity has been with him since high school, when he started his first business selling snacks at a markup to classmates who didn’t want to make the 15-minute walk into town near his boarding school.

Now, he’s focused on building opportunities within himself and for others in the Pittsburgh startup ecosystem. He recently began Carnegie Mellon University‘s fellowship program for mechatronics, robotics and automation engineering, and he just co-hosted the Cursor Pittsburgh Meetup, where he’s encouraging others to code in a no-pressure environment. 

In this edition of How I Got Here, Mufuka Martin shares the challenges he faced building technical skills as a founder and the advice he offers others on navigating imposter syndrome in an inequitable playing field.

This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity. 

Were you surrounded by other entrepreneurs growing up? 

I’m definitely not the first entrepreneur in my family, but I didn’t have the language to understand that what I was witnessing was entrepreneurship. 

My dad’s from the Hill District here in Pittsburgh. My mother is from Zimbabwe. So, I’ve had two very particular circumstances of seeing how people get to a level of self-sufficiency. These environments require a default level of entrepreneurialism just to make the day-to-day happen.

Being scrappy, being creative, identifying patterns that might put you ahead — I was living around that the whole time. 

What are some of the greatest challenges you’ve had to overcome while building your startup? 

Learning how to code was hard. I don’t believe that learning was harder for me than for anybody else, but getting to the conclusion that that’s what I should do, and I can do it in a timely manner without losing the business opportunity, was difficult. 

I’m positive that a low barrier to entry wasn’t the case 15 to 25 years ago. Between YouTube and Reddit, there are so many tools to make learning easier now than ever. But there was still a lot of outside noise and buzz that this was a super high barrier, and you can’t learn it, and you can’t develop a proficiency. 

I internalized a lot of that to be like, ‘Hey, you study the humanities. What business do you have in this space?’ Overcoming that type of imposter syndrome was really tough. 

How have you overcome imposter syndrome and what advice would you give others?  

The advice I would give is to lean into your learning styles and communication styles, and while you’re doing that, create milestones that build confidence.

I think in America, culturally, building businesses is not celebrated. Having built a business is celebrated. Having lots and lots of revenue is celebrated. Being on the cover of magazines is celebrated. But the steps one through 10, those are not celebrated at all. 

So, I would give founders suffering from imposter syndrome this advice: You have to validate yourself. Build in your own wins. 

Have you learned any other major lessons along the way? 

I feel so incredibly lucky for the opportunity to try. In our current startup culture, I don’t think that’s acknowledged enough, especially when you have monikers like ‘grindset’ or ‘serial entrepreneur.’ 

Being a serial entrepreneur is definitely a privilege, let alone the capacity to try at certain intensities. Lots of folks don’t have a shot. There’s no savings to lean into. There are no emotional support networks. They don’t have the physical health to have extended days. I take all of that, and I really value it. 

I don’t think I’m a serial entrepreneur. I don’t believe I have another idea in my head that has the same scope or scale as Relai does. I’m just really grateful to try at this level for as long as I’ve been able to.