Stephen Straus is co-founder and chief executive of KUNGFU.AI, an AI development, implementation and consulting firm in Austin, Texas, that he started in 2017. He is a former venture capitalist and a serial founder, and he co-wrote Wayfinding: A Business Fable About Leading in the Age of AI.
Venture Capital at Austin Ventures
He graduated from Colgate University and earned an MBA at Harvard Business School. He was a Kauffman Fellow and a general partner at Austin Ventures through the dot-com boom and bust, and he has started, run and sold two companies, including mbue, which Bluebeam acquired (KUNGFU.AI; Unite.AI).
Founding KUNGFU.AI in 2017
He has said that watching the internet arrive from inside a venture firm is what led him to start an AI services firm six years before ChatGPT. “I got real conviction that AI was going to be the next big technical transition that the world would go through, and like the Internet, it would change the basis of competition,” he told Unite.AI in 2026. Through his network he was introduced to Steve Meier, who had a sales and marketing background, and to Ron Green and Zhangzhang Si, who had deep machine learning experience, and the four became co-founders (KUNGFU.AI).
Writing Wayfinding
He wrote Wayfinding with Ben Szuhaj as a fable about a chief executive who has 90 days to deliver an AI strategy or be fired. In the Unite.AI interview he argued that most companies make a mistake when they use AI only to automate the business they already have, comparing it to automating Blockbuster Video while Netflix was coming, and said every company’s first priority should be working out how it could disrupt its own industry. The book also describes the firm’s project method, also called Wayfinding, which tests whether an AI system is worth building and will work before a team commits to a full production build.
Impact Dyslexia and Life in Austin
He is founding chair of Impact Dyslexia, a nonprofit for families, and leads the Startup Diversity and Inclusion Pledge. He sits on the engineering advisory board of the Cockrell School of Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, is a partner and mentor at Capital Factory, and lives in Austin with his wife and their four children.