START

Direct sales reply rates are going down. AI spam is making it worse Nikhil Reddy saw the shift early: as trust matters more, partnerships become a real revenue channel Problem is most partnership teams are still running on spreadsheets. They don't know where to focus. Attribution across emails, events, and co-marketing is a mess Arzule uses CRM data, market signals, and ecosystem signals to help p...

Setting up a single trigger in Zendesk takes 30 clicks With Pillar it takes one sentence JJ Maxwell built an open source copilot you build into your app. Users talk to it in natural language and it drives the app for them The problem: products can do a lot but users don't always know what's there. So they ask support. Or they churn Before Pillar, JJ built a creator ad marketplace with about 40,000...

The script has been the same for decades: find a co-founder Investors demanded it. Accelerators screened for it. The narrative became so entrenched that founders started pairing up out of obligation, not alignment. Julian Weisser, founder of SOLO and ODF, has a name for this phenomenon: co-founders of convenience And he's proving they're not just unnecessary-they're often the reason companies fail...

Nate Matherson has spent 10+ years as a founder. He's built companies and even exited. After that first exit, he started angel investing in dozens of companies, then launched a fund. Numeral was one of his early bets. He sent Numeral's CEO Sam an email. By the end of the day, he was working there as Head of Growth. Now he's helping scale the YC-backed sales tax platform serving over 2,000 customer...

Jayden Clark didn’t abandon music. He re-scored it for distribution.  After music school, a hedge fund tour, and a B2B SaaS sprint, he launched MOTS—short, sharp episodes designed to be both of the moment and built to last a quarter.  His north star isn’t “go viral.” It’s “be clear.” The insight is disarmingly pragmatic: structure is not the enemy of creativity—it’s the amplifier. Lists compress c...

Sky Yang (CEO) & Neo Lee (CTO) are Co-founders of Imagine AI, an AI-powered content engine that clones B2B founders—replicating their voice, context, and backstory to create scalable personal brands. Before Imagine AI, Sky was elected student body president at UCSD by 32,000 students at age 19, then secured $150 million in state funding for university housing through coalition-building and adv...

Rebecca Medina and Jeff Phillips built an AI-powered talent marketplace that's disrupting recruitment with transparent pricing, direct negotiation, and same-day PM hires for SMBs. Rebecca Medina had the network. She had decades of Big Tech experience. She had the credibility. But when she needed project management help on a client engagement as an independent consultant, none of it mattered. "Even...

Julian Weisser is the Founder and CEO of Solo Founders , a three-month residency program in San Francisco where founders live and work together while maintaining full authorship of their companies. He's also the CEO of On Deck Founders (ODF), a program that over seven years and 26 cohorts has helped over 1,000 people start companies that have collectively raised more than $2 billion.  As an angel...

Allen Naliath is the Founder and CEO of Friday , a Chrome extension that integrates AI email management directly into Gmail. Two years ago at Stanford, he struggled with the confidence to ask for what he wanted. So he engineered a solution: a 30-day rejection challenge where he had to hear "no" once per day or start to ask for increasingly audacious requests. The problem: people kept saying yes. H...

Lindsay Amos is the Founder of Amos Communications , a boutique firm for founder-led marketing and PR. From 2018 to 2024, she ran communications at Y Combinator, where she coached thousands of startups and wrote YC's handbook on startup PR. Before that, she worked in comms at Square and Meta, giving her a 360° view of how stories move from boardrooms to bylines to buyer behavior. Today, she advise...

Joe Holberg is the Founder & former CEO of Spring , a workplace financial wellness platform that began D2C, pivoted to employer-paid, and became a top-rated U.S. offering for three consecutive years, serving 25,000+ users. He bootstrapped from 2015 to 2018, raised a $1M seed, and sold Spring to Mariner Wealth Advisors in 2023, remaining through early 2025. Before Spring, he taught with AmeriCo...

Jay Ram is Founder & CEO of Hud , the evaluation and RL platform for AI agents. Hud helps startups build RL environments , run fast reward loops, and plug into any RL backend —so teams can cut costs and push last-mile accuracy once they've hit PMF. Before Hud, Jay left a lucrative quant career, shipped an AI prank-calling app that briefly hit #1 on the App Store (≈500k calls) , and decided he...

Kevin Xu is Founder & CEO of Alpha AI , your “AI money friend” that plugs into real-time markets and your portfolio to explain what just happened—and what matters next—inside a simple chat. Before Alpha, Kevin became a WallStreetBets folk hero as turning $35K in a 401(k) into $10M through high-conviction swing trades. He previously founded Fan Hero (YC S13), worked at Stripe (~#300) and Google...

Daivik Goel is Co-founder & CEO of Shor , a global payroll platform for startups. Traditional EOR providers charge around $7,000 per year to manage an employee earning $20,000 per year. Shor uses automation to reduce costs and embeds payroll actions into Slack and WhatsApp through AI agents, so founders can request tax documents or payment updates without opening another dashboard. Daivik and...

Cody Schneider is the Founder & CEO of Graphed , an AI agent for marketing analytics. Graphed plugs into common data sources, manages the data warehouse , and lets marketers chat with their data to generate on-demand visuals—“stacked bar of new vs. total users week over week,” “add a line of best fit,” and similar prompts. It’s built to handle scale (Cody mentions onboarding ~25M rows of Faceb...

Craig Lewis is the Founder & CEO Ogentic AI , builder of Zing —an AI-native enterprise browser that turns intent → action in a secure, workflow-native workspace. Before Ogentic, he founded Gig Wage (750k contractors paid, ~$1B moved, $25M+ raised) and learned payroll inside ADP. That operator muscle fuels Ogentic’s pace: incorporated in June, alpha in July , beta in August . He also serves on...

Grace Gong is the Founder & CEO of Smart Venture Media , podcast host, angel investor, and author. She’s interviewed 500+ founders, investors, and operators on her podcasts, then parlayed that network into a high-signal community: curated founder–VC dinners, conferences (including the Smart AI Summit ), and rooms where intros turn into customers and checks. The flywheel started during the pand...

Collin Wallace is a partner at Lobby Capital with 20+ years as an engineer, inventor, operator, and investor. Before Lobby, he was Managing Director of Techstars Silicon Valley, launching the first two Bay Area accelerator programs with JPMorgan and eBay. He founded FanGo (Techstars S10)—acquired by Grubhub in 2011, where he became Head of Innovation (OrderHub + pre-IPO patents)—and later co-found...

Alessandro Chesser is the founder and CEO of Dynasty , a startup focused on making Qualified Small Business Stock (QSBS) trust stacking accessible to founders. Before launching Dynasty, he led sales at Carta from the early days to roughly $300M in ARR, gaining hands-on insight into equity workflows, 409A dynamics, and how distribution is built around real, recurring needs. Dynasty offers a subscri...

Jeff ‘Jiho’ Zirlin is a co-founder of Sky Mavis , the team behind Axie Infinity and the Ronin blockchain. At the forefront of Web3's most groundbreaking experiments, Jeff helped transform Axie from a small crypto-native community into a cultural phenomenon that onboarded millions to blockchain technology. With over $4 billion in NFT trading volume - earning a Guinness World Record - Axie didn't ju...

Parthi Loganathan is the founder and CEO of Letterdrop , a Y Combinator-backed startup that helps B2B companies build pipeline by focusing on the warmest leads and people who are actually in market. Since launching Letterdrop, he's helped companies move beyond saturated email and cold calling tactics to identify prospects who want to talk and send them highly tailored messaging. The platform analy...

In this episode , I sat down with John Paul Mussalli , the co-founder and COO of CareSwift , a Y Combinator-backed startup building AI-powered software to streamline documentation for EMT workers.  JP and his cofounders brings a unique blend of technical expertise and entrepreneurial drive to the healthcare technology space, having previously worked across diverse fields from real estate automatio...

Reuben Torenberg is a Senior Vice President at CBRE, the world's largest commercial real estate services firm. Reuben specializes in helping startups in San Francisco navigate the complex and rapidly changing office leasing landscape. Since joining CBRE in 2014, he's represented some of the biggest names in tech - including Airbnb, Coinbase, Cruise, and Dropbox - and is widely known as the go-to b...

Stephen Llevano is the founder and CEO of Capabuild , a software platform designed for restoration contractors who work on insurance jobs. Capabuild helps these businesses manage compliance, streamline field documentation, and create accurate estimates — fast. In this episode, Stephen shares the full story behind Capabuild: how it started, what he got wrong early on, and the key insights that help...

Jake Wedig is the Director of Tax at Fondo , where he helps startups navigate complex tax legislation and maximize their tax benefits. With deep expertise in startup tax strategy, Jake specializes in R&D tax credits, Section 174 compliance, and helping growing companies optimize their tax positions while managing cash flow challenges. In this conversation, Jake breaks down the recent changes i...