Cole Morell

About

I'm 19. I was born and raised in Roseville, California, in the same house I've lived in my entire life. I'm a business student at Chapman University, though if I'm being honest I learn almost nothing in my classes. Right now most of my time goes to a company I started called Layout, which is the agentic ordering layer for restaurants. Before Layout I built a handful of other things, and before any of those I was making rainbow loom bracelets at my brother's baseball games when I was six.

The thing that hasn't changed across all of it is the same loop. I run into a problem. I ask five other people if they have it. If they do, I go build the fix. If they don't, I move on. Pretty much everything I've made started that way, and I think it's the only honest way to start anything.

My brother plays college baseball and he's a senior now. When we were little that meant most of my weekends were at fields watching him. I figured out pretty quickly that other parents at those fields had wallets, and that if I had something to sell I could probably get some of it. So I made rainbow loom bracelets and sat in the bleachers and sold them for $3 each. One weekend I cleared $300, which when you're seven feels like $300,000. I added snow cones the next summer. I would also build random things from YouTube videos, the one I remember most being a cardboard hydraulic arm made out of syringes and tubing, which actually worked. I have no idea why I cared so much about a cardboard arm. I just liked the part where you put time in and something existed at the end.

A lot of my brain is still wired that way. If I play Fortnite for six hours, I get nothing out of it. If I build something for six hours, even if it's bad, there's a thing on earth that wasn't there before. The exchange rate on that just feels infinitely better.

In freshman and sophomore year of high school, my friend Jack and I started Vex Hosting. It was an auto-deployment Minecraft server hosting platform. You'd come to the website, sign up for a server, click a button, and it would deploy live with a control panel where you could install mods and plugins. It was the first business I ran with paying customers. We built a billing panel, a game panel, the platform itself, and eventually a mobile app on top of it. I wasn't writing most of the code. My job was the business side, which mostly meant figuring out how to get in front of Minecraft kids on the internet. We ended up with hundreds of millions of views on Facebook, which still sounds insane to me when I say it out loud, but that was the era. Vex eventually wound down, there aren't active users anymore, but it taught me a few things I still carry. That there's almost nothing standing between a teenager with a credit card and the same infrastructure a real company would use. That distribution is the actual hard part, we could build the platform fine, but getting people to it consistently was the part that took years to learn. And that your first business will probably not be the big one, and that's fine. The point of doing it is to be the kind of person who has done it.

After Vex I started building iOS apps on my own. The first one was a water tracker, because everybody builds a water tracker. I learned the interface, the database, the auth, what talks to what. Then I tried to integrate an on-device CoreML model that would recognize a glass of water from a photo. There's a scene in Silicon Valley where Jian Yang builds an app that's supposed to identify any food and only ever says "hot dog, not hot dog." My water app pretty much said "16oz, not 16oz." It's funny but it's also the most important kind of failure, where you actually finish something and find out the part you were most excited about doesn't work.

The next app was a small thing called Pinch. I was walking back from class one day with my hands full, bags and backpack and laptop, with AirPods in, and I needed to change the volume. The options at the time were either pull my phone out, which I couldn't do, or talk to Siri out loud in public, which is genuinely embarrassing. I had also just tried on the Meta Ray-Bans with the wristband that uses gyro to control inputs, and I realized the gyro in the Apple Watch I was already wearing was more than enough for this. So I built Pinch. You twist your wrist like you're turning a volume knob and it controls the volume on your phone. It only triggers within a certain motion range so it doesn't go off accidentally. Stupid simple. Solved my exact problem.

In summer 2025 I was at a coffee shop in Roseville. The line was out the door. I love this shop and I go to it constantly, and that morning I just thought, why is this experience like this in 2025. I ended up talking to the owner. I asked him why he didn't have a mobile app where I could order ahead and pick it up. He didn't have a great answer. I told him I'd build one. I didn't really know what I was doing, but I had a problem as a user, I asked a few of my friends if they'd use something like that, and they all said yes. That's the loop again.

A few weeks later I showed him a Figma mockup. He liked it. I went and built an MVP over about three months. It worked. He didn't end up using it, which honestly was fine, because it was flaky and I was a kid and he didn't owe me anything. I sat on it for a few months trying to figure out what I had. Eventually it clicked that what was sitting on my hard drive wasn't an app for one shop. It was a template for every shop with that same line.

So I went and white-labeled it. That was Layout version one. The company has since pivoted. Layout is now the agentic ordering layer for restaurants — infrastructure that lets any AI assistant place real orders at restaurants through one account and one card. Users order through whatever AI they're already talking to. Merchants connect once and reach every AI assistant for free. The ordering layer sits underneath all of it.

The thing I keep coming back to is that the future of ordering is not another app. AI is the new drive-thru, and Layout is the infrastructure that connects restaurants to it. In March 2026 I pitched an earlier version of Layout at Chapman's Panther Cage pitch competition at the Leatherby Center. Six finalists, Shark Tank style. I didn't win. I learned a lot. More at layoutmobile.com.

In April 2026 I was sitting in my dorm at Chapman and there was a cockroach in our living room. My roommate is, for some reason, deathly afraid of cockroaches, which is genuinely funny, and he asked me in complete seriousness if I'd go grab his DoorDash order from downstairs because he refused to leave the room. Are we serious right now, we live on the fourth floor. But I went and got it. As I walked back in I said, half joking, "hey bro, pay me $5 because I just got that for you." He laughed it off. I closed my door, went back to my room, sat on my bed, and thought, wait. Would people actually pay $5 for that.

I posted a poll on Fizz, a college-only social app, asking if students would pay for last-mile delivery to their dorm room door instead of walking out to the curb. Around 2,000 upvotes. I let it sit for a few days because I didn't want to react to it immediately. Then there was a hackathon at Chapman, and I went in and worked on Roomdrop for 48 hours straight. We pitched it under sustainability, which was the closest track that made sense for what was honestly a logistics product. We didn't win. The product was real though. It pulls your DoorDash, Uber Eats, or GrubHub order from the curb to your dorm room door, and other students earn $4 a delivery doing the runs. The app is on the App Store now but the real launch is fall 2026 when students are back. roomdropapp.com.

I'm a Christian, and I attend a non-denominational church. I was born and raised in it, which means for the first 14 or so years of my life my faith was inherited. I did it because my family did, which is normal and totally fine, but it isn't the same thing as actually believing. The shift came on a mission trip, where for the first time it stopped being something I'd been handed and started being something I actually understood. That trip was the hinge point of my whole life and I don't think I'd be able to do anything I do now without it.

I bring this up because it's the single biggest driving factor in my life, and writing an About page that hides that would be dishonest. A lot of people I know in tech operate from a place where if the thing they're building fails, the world ends. I don't. If everything I'm working on collapsed today, I would still have the most important thing, and I would get to spend the rest of my life with God. That's a stable place to make decisions from, and it's a way more enjoyable way to live than the alternative. I think a lot of people in tech are quietly miserable because they've made a startup or a job or a number on a screen the foundation of their identity, and that foundation cannot hold the weight they're putting on it. Mine doesn't have to.

A few things I actually believe about work, in case it saves you having to ask. Building something at real scale used to be hard. It is not hard anymore. Two years ago I would have told you that shipping a product good enough for a Fortune 10 company to actually use was something only people with real teams could do. Now the tools are good enough that one person who actually cares can do most of it. The bottleneck has moved. The interesting question now isn't "can you build it," it's "is the market actually there, can you be the person to push through, will you stay up for 48 hours straight when something breaks and people are relying on you." If the answer to any of those is no, you're probably not going to get all the way there, which is fine. Not everyone needs to. I also think the best founders are obsessive. Not working all the time, just that their brain doesn't actually turn off when they leave the office. I'm 19 and full of myself so take this with whatever grain of salt you want, but obsession seems to me like the part you can't fake. You can fake a lot of other founder things. You can't fake actually thinking about your product when you're trying to fall asleep.

I'm also blunt to the point that some people find it off-putting. If you ask me what I think, I'll tell you. It takes more energy to filter what I'm about to say than to just say it, and I find that honest people are the most valuable people in my life because they're the only ones whose feedback I can actually use. So I try to be one for other people. Sometimes that lands wrong. I'm getting better at the social cues part.

Outside of work I play golf. I picked it up freshman year of high school and at one point I was averaging around 74. I'm horrible now because I haven't been playing as much, but it's still my favorite way to clear my head. I've gotten to play a lot of really cool courses around the country and golf is also weirdly the best business sport. I grew up playing baseball and competitive soccer but mostly just go watch baseball now to support my brother. I go to the gym two days on, one day off. I eat reasonably clean and ruin it with Chipotle and sushi.

I also have a video background that doesn't show up much in what I do day to day, but it matters to me. From sophomore year of high school through senior year I worked on and off for a production company called Illuminate Production Services in Lincoln, California. I'd fly around the country with them helping set up concerts and events, LED walls, trussing, all the stuff that nobody sees but is the reason the show happens. I did high school online for junior and senior year so I could travel for that kind of work. I own a Sony FX6 and have shot spec ads and a few short documentaries. I genuinely thought I was going to be a director for a while. I'm glad I'm not, but the eye and the gear stayed with me.

Email is the best way to reach me. cole at layoutmobile.com. I read everything. I don't always reply right away.

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You can also find me on LinkedIn, Crunchbase, and Instagram.

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