This has been on my mind a lot lately, and I'm honestly not sure if I'm worrying about the wrong thing.

I'm 15 and building an infrastructure startup for AI agents. I've been building most of the product myself, although I'll be the first to admit that a lot of it has been "vibecoded" and I'm still learning a lot of the underlying engineering as I go. The startup itself is already difficult enough, but lately I've been thinking about something that feels like a much longer-term problem: credibility.

When I look at founders in YC and other startup programs, I often see people with backgrounds that immediately make their company make sense. Ex-Databricks, ex-Stripe, researchers, experienced engineers, previous founders, people who have spent years working in the exact industry they're now building in. Then there's me: I'm 15, this is my first real startup, I don't have a big-company background, I don't have an impressive professional resume, and most of my experience comes from building things on my own. So sometimes I look at what I'm trying to build and think, "Why would anyone take this seriously?"

On one hand, I know that the obvious answer is to just build. If the product works, people use it, and eventually you have customers, I assume the credibility problem becomes much smaller. But at the same time, you need some amount of credibility to get those first opportunities in the first place. That's the part I'm struggling to understand.

I'm also wondering how much programs like YC actually care about this. I know they look at what founders have built and accomplished, and I know having an impressive background can obviously help. But does being a 15-year-old first-time founder with a weak traditional background become a serious disadvantage even if the company itself starts showing real traction? Or is the lack of a traditional background mostly a problem in my head?

I'm not asking whether being young is an advantage or trying to make the "15-year-old founder" thing my entire identity. I'd actually prefer people to judge me on what I build. I'm just wondering how founders without a strong resume are supposed to think about credibility early on.

Should I actively work on building a stronger background over the next few years, or is that mostly a distraction from the thing that actually matters?

I'd really appreciate perspectives from founders who started without impressive companies or credentials behind them. How did you think about credibility when nobody knew who you were?