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9:56

START: Rodney Fong, President & CEO, San Francisco...

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2026/10/08

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 San Francisco’s density of talent into opportunity.Through YES SF, the Chamber hosts 300+ events a year, creating a physical hub where ideas, industries, and people can collide.Rodney’s philosophy

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11:45

START: Thomas Chan & Justin Tang, Co-Founders,...

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2026/10/07

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 looks like at your company, then searches 50+ data sources for people a keyword match on the job description would miss.As hiring managers react to its picks, Lantern sharpens its sense of what they want

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12:14

START: Anand Pajaniradjane, CEO & Founder, Scope:...

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2026/10/05

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 excited about that than the product he was actually selling.Then one Wednesday a unicorn told him the GEO product was well thought out and well done but they weren't sure they had budget for it.Anand

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9:46

START: Sam Mathew, CTO & Co-Founder, twentyfour26:...

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2026/10/02

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 from building hardware.Now he’s back, making parts for other builders.twentyfour26 manufactures metal parts in San Francisco for robotics and consumer hardware startups.But it didn’t start as a machine

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12:12

START: Dekai Li, CTO & Co-Founder, Trident...

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2026/10/01

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 couldn’t keep pace with how quickly developers were shipping.That’s the problem they built Trident to address.Trident uses AI to continuously pentest applications and APIs, review code, and identify

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10:57

START: Ryan Nowicki Stewart, CEO & Co-Founder,...

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2026/09/30

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 Stewart spent years inside that process.At State Street, he met with boards and C-suites and helped the firm arrive at voting decisions as a major institutional shareholder.Later, at PJT, he sat on the

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14:50

START: Sky Yang, CEO & Co-Founder, Imagine AI...

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2026/09/29

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 content performs, who it reaches, and how those interactions connect back to prospects and the deal cycle—then use that data to help companies make better decisions about what to say and who should say

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13:42

START: Silen Naihin, CTO & Co-Founder, Experiential...

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2026/09/28

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 ownSilen Naihin helped grow AutoGPT to 160,000 GitHub stars. Now, at Experiential Labs, he’s working to bring model access, evaluation and training into one unified experience. The open-source gateway gives companies control over model access. From there, the team is building simulations around their traffic to understand different workloads and

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17:03

START: Benjamin Swerdlow, CEO & Co-Founder,...

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2026/09/23

“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 environment included. Each can spend a week testing and refining its approach. You compare the results and take the best one forward.The economics aren’t there yet. Ben expects cost per task to fall

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12:23

START: Putri Karunia, CEO & Founder, Lunagraph...

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2026/09/22

For years designers made pictures of a product and engineers turned them into codeAI changed that. Designers can now build with code themselvesBut 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, prototypes and code changes for engineers to reviewThe AI coding tools also work one step at a time. Ask for something, get something back, ask againDesign doesn't work that way. You try a few ideas side

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12:50

START: Andrey Gizdov, CEO & Co-Founder, OpenVector:...

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2026/09/21

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 co-founder had deployed cameras and IoT devices across India's power grid to monitor it.Then they went to conferences on cameras and intelligence and found the state of affairs grim.From that point, they knew

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12:45

START: Jonathan Li, Founder & CEO, Quippy "Helps...

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2026/09/18

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 because it's learning what you specifically keep getting wrong.Jonathan Li built the whole thing solo, and he's in the current Fall YC batch.His bet is on the habit, more so than the content. You can

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15:45

START: Eric Chernoff, CEO & Founder, Fancysauce.ai...

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2026/09/16

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 the problem Eric Chernoff is building Fancysauce to solve: AI Cost Management, extra Fancy. Track usage, monitor ROI and optimize spend across every AI workflow. Fancysauce shows every token and ties

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6:25

START: Ryaan Aqid, Founder & CEO, Quirk “...

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2026/09/04

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 month while Upwork listed work paying ten times more. Nothing separated them except information. The opportunity already existed; the connection never happened.It runs through everything. Institutions

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9:24

START: Ilya Valmianski, CEO & Co-Founder, Signals...

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2026/09/03

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 associate on every order.Signals makes that level of attention cheap enough to give every customer one.Today it looks like an AI store associate that reaches customers over iMessage after they buy. It

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14:17

START: Aoden Teo, CEO & Co-Founder, Miso Labs: "The...

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2026/09/02

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. Around 20% of the time more than one person is speaking, and laughter drives a lot of that overlap, since you laugh at a joke while it's still being told. We also adjust our pacing toward whoever we're

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7:17

START: Zach Nieman, Founder, Snap Studio: “Unleash...

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2026/08/25

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 at home. The gear was right. The room wasn't.Zach had the interface, the cables, the mics, and the chops to lay down a real take. He hit record and realized: “It sounded like garbage.”So he built a

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8:47

START: Varun Agarwal, Founder, Envariant...

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2026/08/21

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 calls it a fatal flaw, one he expects to surface in deep tech and safety-critical applications, and rather than argue about it he'd rather hand builders a way to look inside and check.You hand

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5:36

START: Abhinav Gopal & Darren Hsu , Co-Founders,...

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2026/08/20

‍🎙️ Abhinav Gopal & Darren Hsu, Co-Founders, Rubbrband on Fondo START pod‍Check out www.rubbrband.com‍

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9:31

START: Neal Patel, Founder, Producer, Comedian,...

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2026/08/18

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 four nights a week in New York clubs at night. Plenty of the comedians he ran into were also in tech. Backstage they'd trade jokes about tech, about Jira, and all the little things that only people in

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