No Fixed Route

Luke Mercado built Daybreak Health from zero to Series B, got angry and bitter about the US healthcare system, and walked away eleven months after the raise. Then he co-founded Foam AI, a debugging agent that figures out why your software broke, who is actually responsible, and sends a fix directly to the engineer who can action it. Not the get blamed engineer. The right one. In this episode we ge...

Priyanka co-founded Galen AI, a personal health intelligence platform that connected your lab results, wearables, genetic testing and EHR data into one reasoning layer that gave you proactive personalized health guidance. They were growing every single day through word of mouth and Reddit. And then ChatGPT for Health dropped. In this episode Priyanka walks through exactly what happened the morning...

Helen Huang, founder of Trove and former PM at Microsoft, GitHub, and Zynga, sat down with us in a Zoox autonomous vehicle in San Francisco. Someone emailed her to say they broke up with their girlfriend over her app. Then one of her investors sent it to his wife and it led to a "heated discussion."That app is Trove — a daily choose-your-own-adventure game that reveals your personality t...

Six years ago Oliver Hull was digging clams on the coast of Massachusetts with an anthropology degree. Today he is building Memo, a VC-backed hardware company backed by NVIDIA giving 2.7 billion frontline workers access to AI for the first time. In this episode we get into how he went from clamdigger to Congressional bodyman for a US Congressman where he helped evacuate over 200 families from Afgh...

It takes nine years on average to be diagnosed with a chronic illness. During those nine years most people are seeing dozens of doctors, waiting months for appointments, and largely not being heard. Marshall Gould is building Juno to sit with those patients in the moments the healthcare system completely ignores. In this episode we get into how a genomics researcher from Oxford co-founded SharedGe...

Mark Pothen cancelled his lease, moved everything to his parents house, and went to work unpaid at a primary care practice for six months. No salary. No product. No investors. Just him and his co-founder figuring out how healthcare actually works from the inside. That is how Beacon Health started. In this episode Mark breaks down how he went from working for free at a 2000 patient practice to clos...

Most businesses send out an invoice and assume the money is coming. It is not. The gap between billing and actually collecting is where millions of dollars quietly disappear every single month and Jerry Shu built Daylit to close that gap permanently. Jerry is the co-founder of Daylit, an AI agents company for accounts receivable that raised $110 million at seed stage after starting with nothing bu...

A founder who arrived in San Francisco knowing two people, pivoted her company mid accelerator when OpenAI changed everything, and has sat through ten days of silent meditation twice sits down inside a moving driverless Zoox to talk about the future of health. Karina Repko is building Miora, an AI health agent that books your workouts before the spots are gone, cancels them when your sleep data sa...

A former founder who was publishing AI research in high school sits down inside a moving driverless Zoox to unpack one of the most honest startup stories you will hear this year. Abrar Rahman built Dorsal FYI to fight medical bill overcharges, recruited co-founders in their 50s from Blue Cross Blue Shield and Cigna, got acqui-hired by govtech company Promise backed by Jay-Z's Rock Nation, and...

Discover the surprising story of Ryan Benmalek, an AI entrepreneur who skipped high school and entered college at 14. What will you learn from his journey in building robot companions and designing innovative hardware? Ryan Benmalek shares his insights on the challenges of building hardware, the importance of design principles, and the need to simplify systems for faster iteration. With a goal to...

In this episode, we sit down with Andrea, founder of Donna, a revolutionary document editor designed to replace the outdated "single page" interface of Google Docs and Microsoft Word. If you are a writer, lawyer, marketer, or anyone who lives in documents all day, you know the pain of hunting for files, fighting with bullet points, and losing your flow state. Andrea explains how Donna ac...

Sid Sinha is the CEO & Co-Founder @ Avant Health, an AI-native third-party benefits administrator reinventing employer-sponsored healthcare. Founded in January 2024, Avant has partnered with 3 of the top 10 brokerages in the US, delivering 15%+ cost savings and 50x better member support. Sid argues 70%+ of employees are in self-insured plans and most don't realize their employer carries th...

Ben Warren is the CTO & Co-Founder @ Mesa, an AI-native code forge built for AI agents and autonomous coding systems. Mesa runs agents in sandboxes mounted to your repo, so reviews happen with full codebase context. Ben breaks down why agents have too much and too little context, why GitHub still matters, and how Mesa landed 20-50 early customers through founder relationships at South Park Com...

Ayush Garg is the CEO & Co-founder @ AnswerThis, a YC-backed AI research platform that helps over 250,000 researchers accelerate scientific discovery. Built by a two-person team, AnswerThis went from $800 MRR to $600K ARR after a single viral creator video, indexing 300M+ academic papers to replace months of literature review with hours. ----------------------------------------------- Timestam...