PODCAST · business
START
by Fondo
Fondo is an all-in-one accounting platform for startups. Get your books closed, taxes filed, and cash back from the IRS.
Episodes
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START: Melissa Bime, CEO & Founder, Infiuss Health: "AI-Powered clinical rehearsal. Run the trial before you run the trial."
A clinical trial at Stanford enrolled a patient living in Africa. He was never physically there. He had been diagnosed with a rare genetic disorder, and Stanford was running a trial for it. The research team gathered his genetic information and medical records. They monitored him remotely and...
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START: Ludovic Granger, CEO & Co-Founder, Leadbay: "Qualified leads for agentic workflows"
Most sales teams are competing for the same companies. Not necessarily because they're the best customers, but because they're the easiest to find. They have LinkedIn profiles, public hiring activity, and enough online signals to show up in every prospecting database. But plenty of good…
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START: Faiz Vadakkumpadath & Niyaz Puzhikkunnath, Co-Founders, Papaya "Continuous optimization for AI agents"
When everyone has access to the same AI models, what actually makes one AI product better than another? It's no longer just about the intelligence. It's about how reliably you put it to work. An agent that responds faster. Makes fewer mistakes. Delivers better outcomes for customers. That's the...
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START: Simon Shu & Justin Sato, Co-Founders, Restart: "The AI company builder"
How many companies die as an idea because the founder can't build the first version? That's who Simon Shu and Justin Sato have in mind with Restart, which they call the AI company builder. You describe the idea in plain language and Restart sharpens it, then builds a working web product while you...
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START: Rodney Fong, President & CEO, San Francisco Chamber of Commerce
What does it take to build a world-class startup ecosystem? Rodney Fong's answer starts with connection. As President & CEO of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, he brings together founders, established businesses, policymakers, finance, technology, and the broader community - helping turn…
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START: Thomas Chan & Justin Tang, Co-Founders, Lantern AI "End-to-end AI hiring manager"
Most hiring software finds the candidates you ask for. But what if you're asking for the wrong person? Lantern AI, founded by Thomas Chan and Justin Tang, is building an AI hiring manager for the question that comes before the search: who should you actually hire? It learns what strong talent…
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START: Anand Pajaniradjane, CEO & Founder, Scope: "The Agent Experience Platform"
Scope already had a live product with revenue when its customers started pulling founder Anand Pajaniradjane somewhere else. It started in GEO and AI search optimization. In customer conversations Anand kept showing people a testing suite the team had built around its own MCP, and they got more...
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START: Sam Mathew, CTO & Co-Founder, twentyfour26: "On Demand CNC Prototyping"
Wait two weeks to find out a part doesn’t work. Then wait two more weeks to try again. Sam Mathew knows what that does to a builder. He started in hardware. During COVID, he switched to software because he couldn’t get parts. Slow iteration wasn’t just costing him time. It was discouraging him…
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START: Dekai Li, CTO & Co-Founder, Trident "Autonomous offensive security agents."
Shipping code got faster. Security has to keep up. Before starting Trident, Dekai Li’s co-founder saw a workflow that concerned him: A product manager supplied a project description. An engineer pasted it into a coding agent. The output became a pull request. Dekai’s concern: manual pentesting...
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START: Ryan Nowicki Stewart, CEO & Co-Founder, Pennant: "The Corporate Governance OS for Public Markets"
The earnings call gets the headlines. The shareholder vote can change the company. CEO compensation. Board control. Major corporate transactions. Some of the biggest decisions at public companies are shaped through shareholder votes - but most people never see the work behind them. Ryan Nowicki...
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START: Sky Yang, CEO & Co-Founder, Imagine AI "Reverse engineer B2B growth, starting with LinkedIn.
Most companies ask what they should post on LinkedIn. Sky Yang is focused on a more valuable question: How does all that activity actually translate into growth? At Imagine AI, his team is treating LinkedIn less like a content calendar and more like a measurable growth system. They study how...
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START: Silen Naihin, CTO & Co-Founder, Experiential Labs: "Open source AI gateway that turns your traffic into a model you own"
Every AI model. One key. Zero markup. That’s the starting point. The bigger ambition: help companies turn their AI traffic into better models they own Silen Naihin helped grow AutoGPT to 160,000 GitHub stars. Now, at Experiential Labs, he’s working to bring model access, evaluation and training...
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START: Benjamin Swerdlow, CEO & Co-Founder, Freestyle: "Full Linux VMs for AI Agents. Built for complex tasks that run for hours, days, or weeks."
“I don't believe Claude Code will exist in its current form in six months” Ben Swerdlow, founder of Freestyle, thinks coding agents are moving from local machines to the cloud, where a single task could get the attention of 20 agents at once. Each gets a complete copy of your stack, production...
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START: Putri Karunia, CEO & Founder, Lunagraph "Design with code, on your familiar design canvas"
For years designers made pictures of a product and engineers turned them into code AI changed that. Designers can now build with code themselves But their work is scattered. One of Putri Karunia's users told her he now spends only about 10% of his time in Figma. The rest is split across code,...
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START: Andrey Gizdov, CEO & Co-Founder, OpenVector: "Vision Language Action Systems for the Physical World"
There are over a billion cameras in the world. They can all see. Almost none of them can tell you what they saw. Andrey Gizdov has been in computer vision since 2016, when CNNs were all the rage, researching real-time vision models. He met his co-founder Vishal Urlam at a hackathon. His…
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START: Jonathan Li, Founder & CEO, Quippy "Helps build social skills through daily practice"
Quippy lets you rehearse the conversation before you have it. Pushing back on a boss. A first date. Short practice scenarios, line-by-line feedback on what landed and what backfired, and the app turns your weak spots into drills. Then you do it again tomorrow, and it gets sharper each round…
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START: Eric Chernoff, CEO & Founder, Fancysauce.ai "AI Cost Management, extra Fancy: Track usage, monitor ROI, and optimize spend across every AI workflow"
A CFO at a publicly traded company on variable AI pricing: "This is introducing my worst nightmare, which is a blank check" Claude, Codex, Cursor, Devin, Gemini... Every workflow creates usage and every token creates cost, and unlike something like a Gong license, the price isn't fixed. That's…
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START: Ryaan Aqid, Founder & CEO, Quirk “ Infrastructure for information asymmetry”
Somewhere, someone already has the thing you're looking for. A dataset, a patent, a capability, a customer, an answer. Most of the time neither of you ever finds out. That's the problem Ryaan Aqid built Quirk around, and he first recognized it in Bangladesh, watching workers earning $50–100 a…
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START: Ilya Valmianski, CEO & Co-Founder, Signals "The AI store associate that turns buyers into regulars"
Spend enough at a luxury house and someone actually calls to ask how the bag is working out. Ilya Valmianski brought that up on the show as the piece of retail everyone else quietly gave up on, less because it stopped working than because people are expensive and most brands can't put a store...
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START: Aoden Teo, CEO & Co-Founder, Miso Labs: "The most emotive foundation models for voice"
Voice AI can pass a Turing test. For about a minute. That's a generated clip, though. Have a human actually talk back and the number collapses to six or seven seconds, roughly where generated voice sat three years ago. One reason, per Aoden Teo of Miso Labs: real conversation isn't turn-based....
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START: Zach Nieman, Founder, Snap Studio: “Unleash Your Studio - The Ultimate Portable Vocal Booth"
It started with a dream. “Guys, let’s make it to the GRAMMYs.” 18 months later, he did it. Zach Nieman’s GRAMMY-Nominated production “Cali Coast (Psionics Remix)” by Soul Pacific led him to walk the red carpet and planted the seeds for his first startup. It all began when he was recording music…
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START: Varun Agarwal, Founder, Envariant "Interpretability and reasoning infra for foundation models."
Fine-tune a frontier LLM on addition and it handles one through five digits without breaking a sweat. Six digits, a friend of Varun's found performance collapsing to zero. The model had learned addition up to the length it saw in training and nothing underneath it, no rule it could extend. Varun...
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START: Abhinav Gopal & Darren Hsu , Co-Founders, Rubbrband "AI creative company"
Hollywood-grade storytelling, startup-speed execution. Most AI ads feel disposable. Rubbrband is betting the future looks cinematic instead. Jeremy Lee, Abhinav Gopal, and Darren Hsu: 3 CS researchers out of Berkeley who loved film built video models for Hollywood. They got good enough at…
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START: Neal Patel, Founder, Producer, Comedian, Artificially Unintelligent Tech Comedy: “Tech stand up comedy shows”
You can't do a joke about the Jira board at a normal comedy club. The audience won't know what the Jira board is, and explaining it kills the laugh before you get to it. Neal Patel wanted to do that set anyway. For years he worked two jobs, software engineer during the day and stand-up three or...
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START: Saksham Aggarwal, CEO & Founder, Cardboard "Agentic video editor"
Creating video is getting easier. Finishing it isn't. AI writes code and you still review it before it ships. AI makes clips now, and someone still has to assemble them into something you'd actually publish. That's the layer cofounders Saksham and Ishan are building at Cardboard. Two engineers…
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START: Jayram Palamadai, Founder & CEO, Byteport: “Transfer data on any network 10x faster”
30 petabytes of collider data. That was Jayram Palamadai's job at CERN, where he worked as a distributed computing engineer getting collider data out to physicists. At that scale you stop thinking about files and start questioning the protocol underneath them, so he designed a different...
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START: Gaurav Maken, Community Partner, Pioneer Fund "500+ Y Combinator alumni investing in top Y Combinator startups"
Pioneer Fund met Gaurav Maken at Y Combinator Demo Day, and today he works there as Community Partner. What stayed with him was the way the meeting ran. The people across the table were curious rather than performing, and they wanted to understand what he was building. That's carried into how...
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START: Aram Shatakhtsyan, Founder & CEO, Modelence "Build production-ready apps with AI"
Every startup can build a demo. Then comes everything else: authentication, databases, hosting, monitoring, email, analytics, real-time infrastructure. None of it makes the demo, and every team rebuilds it anyway. Aram Shatakhtsyan spent nearly a decade scaling a startup and kept hitting the same...
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START: Charu Sharma & Michael Mernagh, Co-founders, Fenrock AI: “The First AI Workspace for Banking Back Office”
99% of U.S. banks aren't JPMorgan. All of them are regulated like it. The bottleneck isn't serving customers. It's everything that happens after. Loans. Compliance. Fraud investigations. Customer operations. The work keeps growing. Headcount doesn't. JPMorgan has tens of thousands of analysts. A...
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START: Chloe Sow, Co-Founder, Infera "The operating system for your laboratory”
Scientific discovery shouldn't slow down because of software. But every instrument in the lab ships its own, and someone has to learn all of them. Researchers don't want to memorize instrument interfaces. They want experiments to run. They want answers. They want data. That's the problem Infera…
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START Nasrat Khalid - Founder & CEO, Aseel “Connecting artisans to global markets and enabling transparent aid”
You can track a burrito from the restaurant to your door in real time You donate to a family in a crisis zone. Usually you get a thank-you email. That's where it ends. Nasrat Khalid couldn't understand why. We expect complete visibility when we order dinner. Why not when we're helping another…
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START Sherwood Callaway, Founder & CEO, Sazabi “Observability On Autopilot”
AI changed how software gets built. The tools we use after we ship haven't caught up. Code is getting cheaper. Production is getting harder. That's the gap Sherwood Callaway saw after building with Cursor and Claude Code. AI had transformed how software gets built, but when something broke in...
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START: Cyrus Kelly, Co-Founder & CEO, tday.com “AI that turns your product into on-brand marketing content”
Your product didn't fail. No one saw it. The best product often loses Not because it's worse Because no one saw it Teams ship daily Marketing got faster too It just never stopped needing you Open the recorder. Fumble the demo. Redo it fifteen times. Edit Design Post Your flow is gone. So next…
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START: Tarini Sai Padmanabhuni, Founder & CEO, DetectifAI “Real-time deepfake voice detection”
A phone call used to mean trust. Now it could be AI. DetectifAI is building the next layer of cybersecurity for the AI era Not another chatbot Not another AI wrapper Foundational models built to detect audio deepfakes It started with something personal. Tarini's grandfather lost thousands of...
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START: Dawson Chen, CEO & Founder, Letterbook "AI-native customer support platform"
100,000 users sounds like a dream Until you're personally answering 50+ support tickets a day... That was Dawson Chen. He'd scaled Martin, an AI personal assistant, to more than 100,000 users, but growth came with a new problem: Refund requests Subscription cancellations Login issues And the same...
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START: Emma Lawler, Product Lead, Rippling "Rippling Automated Compliance"
As a founder, Emma Lawler felt like SOC 2 was a major distraction from building. But when she started selling to enterprise logos, it became something that was impossible to ignore. Now, as Product Lead at Rippling, she channeled her first-hand experience of getting SOC 2 compliant to rethink how...
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START: Agaaz Singhal, Founder & CEO, Tranzmit AI "Self-improving AI paywalls"
96% of users aren't saying no to your product. They're saying no to your paywall. And the only tool most teams have for that is manual A/B tests. Thousands of dollars per experiment. Weeks to trust one result. One variable at a time. Every test starts from zero. Stop guessing. Start compounding....
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START: Tarun Vedula & Alex Blackwell, Co-founders, Zatanna: “Turning all software into agent-first APIs”
Right now most AI agents interact with software the way humans do They open a browser, look at a screenshot, and try to figure out what to click That's like ripping the LIDAR off a Waymo and handing it a camera Tarun & Alex kept running into this problem. They were building an AI receptionist for...
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START: Kyle Wong, Co-Founder & CEO, InstaAgent “Scale marketing campaigns across hundreds of personas”
Before AI, marketing teams built five creatives for every campaign. Now they can generate fifty. But more content didn't solve marketing. It exposed a new bottleneck. Most of it is slop. AI solved the quantity problem. It created a quality problem. Kyle Wong and co-founder Colin Tseung built...
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START: Koby Conrad, Founder & CEO, Sunflower Sober: “The #1 AI Companion for sobriety"
1.2 billion people struggle with addiction. There will never be enough clinicians to treat them. Koby Conrad believes AI changes that equation. His own story starts much smaller. High 24/7 from 19 to 24. He got sober. Taught himself to code. Built a side project called Sunflower. Years later…
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START: Bao Nguyen, Co-Founder & CEO, Hessian “Forward-deployed AI Agents”
Bao's job was automating other people's jobs. So he automated his own. His team used to forward deploy the old way — go into customers' offices, sit next to their teams, watch how the work actually got done, then build the automations by hand. Then they asked the obvious question: why are humans...
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START: Jessica Hubley, Founder & CEO, Story LLP "Limitless legal wisdom. Complete legal operations"
Most founders don't need another lawyer. They need a better system. Jessica Hubley spent years in Big Law, served as General Counsel at a venture-backed startup, and built her own practice serving startup founders. She kept seeing the same problem. Not that founders lacked intelligence. They…
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START pod: Austin Wang, Co-Founder & CEO, Manaflow "Building the open-source terminal for coding agents"
10 coding agents running in parallel. Zero idea which one finished. That was the problem. Around November, Austin Wang and his co-founder Lawrence Chen stopped opening their IDE. They weren't writing code by hand anymore Everything ran through Claude Code and Codex in the terminal 10 panes. 10...
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START: Oliviero Pinotti, Co-Founder, Tensol "AI employees for your company, built on OpenClaw"
Most companies don't need smarter AI. They need AI they can actually deploy OpenClaw is brilliant but can be brutal to set up. Days of configs. Agents messaging random contacts on WhatsApp... Tensol: one click. Five minutes. Each AI employee runs 24/7 in its own isolated VM with full company...
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START: Maximilian Arnold, Co-Founder, Ontora: “AI Employee Interviews That Map How Work Works”
Most companies think they have a documentation problem. They don't. They have a context problem. Every company runs on things that were never written down - they just live in people's heads. That's the insight that led Max Arnold and his co-founders Leon Iwanowitsch & David Korn to start Ontora…
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START: Seb Poole, Co-Founder & CEO, Modern “Secure AI for enterprise IT”
Every company runs on a hidden workforce. The people who reset the passwords. Clear the MFA requests. Provision the access. Push the tickets through the systems so the rest of the company can work. Seb Poole wants to give that work to agents. Not a better way to track the request. A workforce…
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START: Ian M.J. McInnis, CEO & Co-Founder, WithAI “Custom command centers for hedge funds”
The biggest hedge funds have entire teams building AI. Most asset managers are on their own. But closing that gap isn't about buying more AI. It's about a problem most people get wrong. You can test code by running it. You can't test an investment by buying it. Software engineering and investing...
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START: Maanav Agrawal, CEO & Co-Founder, Memoir "Marketing campaigns from everything your team ships"
Shipping isn't the bottleneck anymore. Attention is. Maanav Agrawal kept seeing the same pattern. Some of the coolest products weren't getting the attention they deserved Meanwhile, companies that consistently shared what they were building were generating inbound He'd lived it himself He saw it…
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START: Reuben Torenberg, Senior Vice President, CBRE: "Q1 2026 SF Office Market Report"
In 2022, San Francisco leased five million square feet of office space The entire year In Q1 2026 alone: more than four million At the time of this recording (Apr 2026) tenant demand reached 7.5 million square feet The highest ever recorded. OpenAI has accumulated nearly a million square feet in...
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START: Leo Kankkunen, Founder & CEO, DAIVIN!: “Tankless Dive Gear - Breath Autonomy at Sea, Land & Space”
A single glass of water holds about 20 hours of breathing Leo Kankkunen is building the gear that pulls it out Tankless diving technology that generates breathable oxygen directly from water. It sounds impossible at first. Then you hear the physics... Then you realize the implications stretch far...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Fondo is an all-in-one accounting platform for startups. Get your books closed, taxes filed, and cash back from the IRS.
HOSTED BY
Fondo
CATEGORIES
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does START have?
START currently has 126 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is START about?
Fondo is an all-in-one accounting platform for startups. Get your books closed, taxes filed, and cash back from the IRS.
How often does START release new episodes?
START publishes regularly with 126 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
Where can I listen to START?
You can listen to START on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts START?
START is created and hosted by Fondo.
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