Dreams and Delivery
Real stories from tech pros who deliver at work and build their dreams alongside it. We cover the tech landscape in an age of AI with layoffs and opportunities that come from change. Techy creatives, this one’s for you!
Dreams and Delivery
Lawrence Ma: Acquire Scout - Building Something You Own
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The White Belt Founder
This is a conversation about what it's like to be a beginner again on purpose: as a first-time founder, and as a brand-new senior white belt in a taekwondo class full of kids (he and another dad have been dubbed "the Dadvengers"). Lawrence and Christine talk about AI as a force multiplier for solo builders, protecting remote work and family time after years of return-to-office pressure, and why treating the founder journey as a marathon — not a race against every competitor who beats you to market — is the only mindset that holds up.
Just weeks after being laid off from MailChimp, Lawrence Ma has a working beta. Acquire Scout — a platform that aggregates business listings, scores them against a buyer's profile, and walks you through every step of acquiring a small business — is something he built solo, with Claude Max standing in for the three or four engineers a job like this used to take. Some nights that means being up until 2 or 3am, after his kids are asleep.
He's also a brand-new content creator, whose raw first video about his layoff hit 80,000 views and became the accidental springboard for everything else he's building.
About Lawrence Ma
Lawrence Ma is a software engineering manager turned founder, building Acquire Scout after a layoff pushed him to solve a problem he'd hit himself as a business buyer. He's led engineering at two startups and most recently MailChimp. Outside of work, he's a dad of two boys, a recently enrolled martial artist, and new to content creation, sharing the journey in real time.
Connect with Lawrence: Instagram & TikTok @thelawrencema | acquirescout.com
About your host
Christine Kahn is a Staff Technical Program Manager with 12+ years leading AI platforms and program delivery at Intuit, OpenTable, 20th Century Fox, and Realtor.com; and a musician and soundbath practitioner outside of it.
Connect with Christine: bio.site/dreamsanddelivery | LinkedIn
© 2026 Dreams and Delivery LLC. All rights reserved.
Welcome to Dreams and Delivery, a podcast for tech professionals, real stories from people who deliver at work and dream beyond it. I'm your host, Christine Kahn. By day, I'm a staff technical program manager in big tech. By night, I'm a musician and a soundbath meditation practitioner. This is a conversation about building something completely of your own. The role AI is playing in letting one person do what used to take a whole team and what martial arts teaches about balance, perspective, and the founder life. Lawrence Ma is a software engineering manager, turned founder. After a layoff from MailChimp, he built Acquire Scout, a platform that aggregates business listings from across the web, scores them against your buyer profile, and guides you through every step of acquiring a small business, from first contact to closing day. Currently in beta, and he's also a dad and a recently enrolled martial artist figuring out how to build something that's genuinely his. Welcome, Lawrence. It's so nice to meet you.
SPEAKER_00Thank you, Christine. Thank you for having me.
SPEAKER_01I've been following your journey and just so inspired to see what you're building and I wanted to learn more about it. Can you tell us what does a day look like for you now compared to when you were an engineering manager?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that's a great question. It's a little weird because obviously, way more structure when you're working a nine to five. I worked with a team that was based in Atlanta, so East Coast time. I'm on the West Coast. So I woke up pretty early, first meeting, like 7, 7:30 a.m. all the way till 2, 2.30 p.m. And that was just like a straight block of meetings. Uh but now don't necessarily have to wake up that early, but I still sort of wake up kind of close, just to kind of get into that same swing of things. I kind of created a schedule for myself in the very beginning, right after the layoff of like, what do I want to do in terms of applying for jobs, maybe studying for interview materials, and then also what I'm doing right now, which is like building a business, uh building a choir scout, uh, which recently has taken up basically all of my time. And so uh the weird part about that is it's like now that it's my business, that's something that I'm starting, there really isn't a stopping point. There isn't like, okay, at a certain point I can stop, but I am trying to make sure that, you know, dad comes first. Like I do all those things, take care of my kids, like get them from school and daycare and and so on and so forth. And then afterwards, I'll do some more building, like after dinner, for example, or after the kids are gone to sleep. Uh, but that can take me through sometimes 2, 3 a.m. I think last like five or six nights I've been sleeping at like two or three a.m. So uh it's kind of hard to stop. It's kind of hard because when you're you're like this is something that I want to build, something that I want to uh make a reality. It's really hard to stop doing those things, but it's really exciting.
SPEAKER_01Working on a podcast has been so fun for me that it doesn't feel like work, you know. You just get up and you're like, oh yeah, okay, I gotta prepare a script for tomorrow or edit something. Um could you tell us more about Acquire Scout? How did you come up with that idea and what's it been like building it?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean, uh I had been looking to buying a business for a while now, but obviously being laid off was sort of the catalyst that I needed to really get into that. So that's actually where it started. I started as me, uh trying to buy a business, looking in the tools that are available uh to buyers and realizing there really wasn't anything. There wasn't anything that uh was gonna help me in my journey. And so because of that, I just started building my own tools. But I at that point, I wasn't thinking, oh, I'm gonna start a company with this. It was more so I'm building these tools, it's looking, you know, like it's working. And then I realized after a while, like, well, why wouldn't I just create a business around this? Why wouldn't I create this as a tool and start like actually trying to market this? And um, that's where it started. And at this point, it's been like what, two or three weeks, which is sounds crazy because it feels a lot longer than that. But I'm already at beta. Uh, I already have real people using it and trying it out and also giving me fet feedback on like what their experience is like. So it's been super exciting.
SPEAKER_01I'm curious of how you've been able to work with an AI assistant to make this streamlined for you, given you are a team of one right now and building software, launching it, marketing it, all of that is a whole thing.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's crazy. I actually have a video that I recorded, I think last night, uh kind of reflecting on this because I was kind of looking back through my GitHub, through like all the work that I've done on Acquire Scout and realizing that, okay, in like about two and a half, three weeks, I've gotten to this point where I have a working beta. And thinking back through my career, I I've led two different startups. Uh, so small teams, scrappy teams, and we build kind of similar things, dashboards and stuff like that. And trying to think like, okay, for those teams, like how long would it take them to build something like this back then? And maybe it was like two months or something like that for a team of three or four engineers, which sounds crazy. It sounds absolutely insane that that a team, and these are great engineers too, don't get me wrong. So AI is just like really accelerated the building for everyone, and especially for people like me who are like solo entrepreneurs and we have the idea, we have the uh the product that we want in our heads, and we just want to put it out there from going from idea to actual working beta is insanely fast.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that that's incredible. Do you think if this scaled and became a larger thing that you would eventually need a team to keep it sustainable?
SPEAKER_00Potentially. I think it depends on the this opener and the point. I think because I have an engineering background, I can hold off for a little bit longer. But definitely as it scales, and hopefully it does, it'll be a great problem to have if I get more and more users. I do feel like you probably need some more help and some more engineering help that really just like is focused on scaling. You know, obviously if it's just purely vibe coded app, I just don't feel like it's at that point where we can just say, like, okay, just go go nuts. Like we're gonna go have like 10,000, 100,000 users on a particular platform. But we're where I'm at, where we're just trying to start off and try to uh validate an idea, it's more than enough.
SPEAKER_01So would you have any tips for someone who's starting their own thing as far as making sure you don't over-engineer anything or have the right infrastructure from day one?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. I would say before you even build anything, go talk to people. Go figure out if the problem that you're thinking about actually exists for other people and just ask them, like, hey, if I were to build a solution like this, would you be interested? Yeah, I think that is very, very powerful. I think it was different for me because in this particular space, like I was the customer. So I knew for a fact, like, hey, I can't find, I cannot find a solution like this. And I think that's the main thing is if you can find the problem and then really talk to people, then I think it's worth building something. But don't just build something and just hope, like, okay, I hope I'm I'm gonna build the solution and I hope I'm gonna find a problem for this. So yeah.
SPEAKER_01How would you measure getting traction? Have you set up any analytics or is it still early stages for that?
SPEAKER_00I think it's early stages for that now, but just in terms of my conversations with different people and in the industry, I definitely feel like there's a need for this, even especially from the advisor point of view. So people, not just people who are buyers, but also people who are advising buyers can use a platform like this to help like track the the buying journeys for their clients. And I've already talked to a bunch like that, and I'm seeing a lot of traction there as well. So it definitely feels like one of those things where people are already asking for it. I just have to build it, which is never like anybody who's has any kind of uh experience with startups, that rarely ever happens, is that there's just a, you know, these this product market fit and people are just waiting for you to build it. And it's like, okay, once you build it, let me know. And that's where that pressure comes in, where I'm like, okay, I have to be up till 2, 3 a.m. in the morning to try to get this thing built.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I I definitely see a need for this, both on the side of people who are starting something and want to get in touch with investors, but also people who are looking to have passive income on the side and realize that perhaps the old model of just investing in stock and banking on a career forever is really gonna get you that stability in your life. And especially for families, you know, like your dad. I'm so glad that you're building this. I'll definitely get on that beta soon and test it out for myself. Can you share more about your your experience of being a father and how how that's looking like now that you have some time to structure the day better the way that you want?
SPEAKER_00I mean, I've always been blessed, um, at least for the past five, six years, being able to work remotely. Um, and that's definitely not not something that I want to give up. But I think, you know, just knowing like also the way that companies are acting with a lot of like return to office mandates. I'm not really down for that. I want to continue working remotely. And so like buying a business and also starting my own is also another way for me to think like long term about like how do I like lock in that flexibility? How do I lock in that ability to spend more time with my family? Um, because that's super important to me. Um, obviously want to spend as much of my time as I can with my boys. They're eight and three at this point. So especially when they're young, I want to make sure that I spend more time with them. Why martial arts? I kind of always wanted to. I never really had a chance. I I always I told the story to my son a long time ago about how I actually got into karate when I was maybe five years old. And it was at that time, there was like a big class. They only accepted five students out of like 30 people who applied. And I got it. I came home, told my dad, like, hey, dad, I got into karate class. And he actually told me he didn't want me to go or he didn't want me to attend the class because he was afraid that if people knew I would fight or knew how to fight, then I would get into fights at school. And so I was sort of like uh this moment of like, oh no, I I wish I had do that. And then I just kind of forgot about it. I just like never really thought too much about it. And then uh partly because of the layoff, partly because of I just felt like, why, why haven't I just been holding off on these type of things? Like, just just give it a try. Who cares? But it ended up turning out great. And actually, I convinced one of the other dads to join me. They we've been attending class and we already got my first belt promotion, so I'm not a white belt anymore. I'm a senior white belt. But it it almost is like an analogy for my whole life right now. I just feel like right now I'm just like a white belt in all aspects, like business acquisition, starting my own business, and taekwondo. It's like kind of a great analogy for what I'm going through right now. And I also just feel like who cares? Like that's part of the journey. Like everyone has to start somewhere. You can't automatically be like a successful entrepreneur unless you are a beginner entrepreneur. You can't do that. So that's where I'm at right now. And it's just like one day at a time just trying to, you know, get there. And, you know, maybe one day I will be a black belt in all of those things.
SPEAKER_01Why not? Right? What have you got to lose? Try something, see if it takes. If people are looking for someone who's creating what you're doing, you need to make yourself visible, right? Or else they're not going to find you.
SPEAKER_00I mean, how can you ever get good at something unless you try at it or at least start it, right?
SPEAKER_01Have you already been videoing and editing and all that stuff prior to this? Because it just felt so natural from the videos I saw. Maybe being a dad and videoing them growing up kind of gave you the skills you needed for this.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. I mean, it really was just personal before. Like I did editing, but editing just like family videos and like I'm in my personal Instagram account, like editing the kids and stuff like that. And uh, but yeah, for the content creation thing, again, another thing that I just had always thought about doing, kind of was thinking like maybe I should try it. And literally it was like after the layoff announcement, I just thought, I'm I'm gonna try it. I'm gonna try to do this and I release my first video. The first video was just me, just like a raw video talking about my layoff, kind of like an instant reaction to it. And this real on Instagram is now at like 80,000 views or close to 80,000. So that's what sort of has like spring, like been the springboard for the entire like Instagram uh content creation, you know, career. It's been really, really fun to kind of like talk to people. And obviously it's very relatable right now, just because a lot of people are going through a very similar situation. So, but the other part of it is it all sort of feeds itself, you know, like the content content creation, starting my own business, buying a business, they all sort of feed themselves. And it's been kind of a synergistic thing going on where I'm doing all these things at once, but they feel like they're so connected.
SPEAKER_01What AI tools have been your go-to? I've been using Cloud mostly, but I'm curious for someone who's actually built an app end-to-end, what it really looks like in the investment side of it.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I've been using Cloud as well. So I just very recently kind of signed up for Claude. Uh I went all the way to Max, actually, Cloud Max. I was starting off at Pro, but I realized like I every single day I was running out of, you know, usage. So, and I'm just building a lot these days. So I just felt like, okay, I'm just gonna bump it up to max for now. Maybe I'll, you know, bump it back down uh once things kind of calm down a little bit. But I've been building so much with it. So it's definitely been worth it. It does definitely feels like, yeah, it's expensive, but at the same time, like think about how much more I get to do. Like this is used this used to be three or four engineers. I had to do this. Now it's just me. So instead of hiring somebody, I can just do this with Cloud Max.
SPEAKER_01I've also been hitting my limits with Pro. There's so much possibility now if you get in first and you're testing it before others.
SPEAKER_00I heard this other tool that's similar to Acquire Scout that's already out there or has been out there. And the way I think of it right now is just like this is all just a foot race, but it's not a sprint, it's a marathon. And so even when you see other competitors on the field and they're just like running, you just have to keep going and just realize like, look, maybe they'll get tired. Maybe I'll I'm just gonna keep going and see how far I can go, but not really thinking about what other people are doing or running their race. I'm running my race. And so I'm gonna keep running and then I'm gonna see where it lies at the end of it. But I think it's it's easy to look at what others are doing or what maybe somebody else has created a tool that you were thinking about creating or a site that you were thinking about creating. Like there's always gonna be competition. There's competition everywhere. And so the matter is like, are you going to stick it out? Are you going to keep it going uh longer than they are? And are you eventually going to have a better product than they are? And to me, I feel confident that I can do that.
SPEAKER_01Where can people connect with you if they want to learn more about Acquire Scout or even just partner with you?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so Acquirescout.com, uh that's my that's the website. Still in beta right now, so not quite like out to the public. Also, my socials, so Instagram is the main one right now. It's the Lawrence Ma at the Lawrence Ma, and then TikTok is the same handle.
SPEAKER_01Thank you, Laurent.
SPEAKER_00Thank you so much, Christine. Thank you for having me.
SPEAKER_01To everyone listening, if this resonated, subscribe and share it with someone who needs it. I'm Christine Kahn, and this is Dreams and Delivery.