When we caught up with Vivian Liu in summer 2023, she had just left General Motors to launch Making Auto Easy, or Mae—a platform designed to empower women to make confident car purchases. She was leading a team of five, hunting for "the perfect woman" in a technical role, and openly grappling with imposter syndrome.

"I will be the first to say that I am afraid to fail," she told us then.

Eighteen months later, Mae has completely pivoted. The B2C dream is gone. In its place: voice AI technology built specifically for dealership sales floors.

The turning point came when Liu walked into four dealerships with her B2C product. Two signed up that day—but not for what she was selling. They wanted to turn it into a B2B product for their sales teams.

"That's a signal you can't ignore," Liu says.

So what does Mae actually do now? When you walk into a dealership, most salespeople still start with pen and paper—jotting notes, asking questions, then manually entering data into the CRM later. That's where things fall apart: details get lost, steps are skipped.

Mae is now a sales assistant powered by voice AI, designed specifically for live dealership experiences. It helps salespeople stay fully engaged with customers while capturing what matters behind the scenes—supporting them with tools and insights that drive better follow-up, coaching, and decision-making.

"We're reimagining what those first fifteen minutes of the car buying experience can feel like," Liu explains. "Less waiting, more human, and powered by AI that understands how dealerships actually work."

Mae is still a team of five, but the makeup has completely shifted. They're now majority engineers, and all have been promoted from within. Remember that "perfect woman" Liu was hunting for back in 2023? She found her. Japnit Ahuja, Mae's first technical hire, is now Co-founder and CTO. "She's done an incredible job building our bench of engineers and developing them alongside the product," Liu says.

In the months leading up to Techstars, Liu made a decision that would seem counterintuitive for most early-stage founders: she turned down funding. After a pitch event, an investor reached out with strong interest, but the fit wasn't right.

"Saying no to money was a hard decision to make," Liu admits. "But looking back, it was absolutely the right call."

Not long after, Mae was accepted into Techstars San Francisco's 2025 AI cohort—the most competitive cohort in the accelerator's history, with an acceptance rate below 0.4 percent. They signed their first enterprise deal and started getting inbound interest from publicly traded auto groups.

When Liu asked Techstars Managing Director Neal Sales-Griffin why Mae was chosen, he pointed to founder-market fit, traction, and their founding team video. "We have a sellable vision," Liu says. "He saw and felt it too."

In 2023, Liu talked openly about fear of failure. Now? "Honestly, less imposter syndrome," she says.

The shift happened halfway through Techstars. "I gained real clarity around our vision and I could articulate it in a way that clicked not just to me, but for my team and anyone who heard or saw it."

But it's not that the feelings disappeared—they transformed. "I've realized my imposter syndrome isn't about fear, it's about potential. It comes from knowing how high my bar is for myself and wanting to reach it. Which I think is a strength."

The lowest points have come when salespeople weren't engaging with Mae the way the team expected. "It's a constant cycle of 'it's working!' then 'it's not!' and then figuring out why," she explains. The biggest insight? "You can't just train people—you have to design around behavior."

Mae's first enterprise deal came from one of their earliest customers. After piloting Mae in one store and seeing results, the client expanded it across their entire auto group within two months. "I learned the importance of having customer champions, someone to advocate on your behalf," Liu says. "But you also need the end users—in our case the salespeople—to love it as well."

What helped build trust was speed. The team would take feedback face-to-face and come back the next day with updates. "I think that helped to instill trust early on."

For the next twelve months, Mae is focused on growth—officially moving from building to selling and scaling. "We've been heads down with our paying customers to make sure what we bring to the next dealerships truly works the way we intend it to," Liu says. "The auto industry has seen so many new tech tools that overpromise and underdeliver and we didn't want to be one of them."

The milestone is simple: create magic in the car buying experience and keep customers genuinely happy. "If we do that, the rest will take care of itself."

Looking back at everything—the pivot, the rejected funding, the Techstars acceptance—would Liu do it all again?

"Absolutely. Now is every day the dream? No, but, this IS the dream. Realistically, I'll be a founder for life."