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Fondo is an all-in-one accounting platform for startups. Get your books closed, taxes filed, and cash back from the IRS.

  1. 2d ago

    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 losesNot because it's worseBecause 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. EditDesignPost Your flow is gone. So next time you don't bother That's how good products disappear Cyrus Kelly and co-founder David McDonough were involved in 11 startups. Every time, they became the marketing team Never once enjoyed it So they built tday Connect your GitHub repo Or point it at your product Every release becomes a demo video of the actual feature. On-brand graphics Published to your channels Ship an update and the demo updates itself Because it's tied to what your product does Not a one-time recording. Not three hours in tday instead of four hours in Canva. Minutes. Then never thinking about it again (unless you want to) The problem was never building It was that no one saw it Their mission is to make it so the best products do win. ‍ 🎙️ Cyrus Kelly, Co-Founder & CEO, Tday on Fondo START pod ‍ 00:20 — What tday does: marketing on autopilot for software companies00:50 — Origin story: three engineers, 11 startups, always stuck doing marketing01:35 — Why the best product doesn't always win01:50 — Starting university at 1302:15 — Building a student club platform with banking at 1603:05 — The tech stack behind it03:50 — Applying to YC four times04:05 — Interviewing with Tom Blomfield04:55 — How the product changed during the batch05:35 — Not a better design tool: two minutes instead of hours06:00 — Why repeated launches matter06:30 — The idea of a product that records itself06:50 — Who tday works best for07:45 — Getting the domain08:00 — What tday.com actually cost08:45 — Eight months of waiting, and how the domain shaped the product10:00 — Sam Altman offering $2 million in tokens11:15 — Token maxing: agents running in parallel12:20 — Where to find tday and Cyrus ‍ Check out tday.com

    START: Cyrus Kelly, Co-Founder & CEO, tday.com “AI that turns your product into on-brand marketing content”

  2. 3d ago

    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 dollars to a simple deepfake. That moment became the reason to build. Tarini had already been in machine learning since grade six Nearly a decade studying how AI works She saw where the technology was headed - and what was missing Fraud has existed for a very long time Cybersecurity has existed for a very long time Deepfake detection is that same discipline extended into the AI world. Today, DetectifAI serves clients across banking, finance, security, telecoms, and OEMs An API that integrates into existing enterprise infrastructure And on mobile, it goes even deeper - into the OEM layer itself. Which makes the vision tangible. You answer a call. Your phone gives you a rolling update on whether that voice is likely AI or a real human Detection during the call. Not after the money is gone. The scale comes from where it's deployed. A single OEM integration can unlock protection for millions of people. And deepfake detection is only the first step. The larger vision is an anti-fraud landscape that helps people navigate scam calls, robocalls, and anything that falls under the purview of fraud. The next generation of AI companies won't just build intelligence They'll build trust 🎙️ Tarini Padmanabhuni, CEO, DetectifAI on Fondo START pod 00:57 Founder origin story01:18 ML background01:42 Audio deepfake detection01:53 Enterprise customers02:15 Growing AI fraud02:39 AI cybersecurity03:16 Enterprise integration03:29 Telecom and OEM strategy03:46 OEM distribution vision04:13 Real-time call detection04:33 Broader anti-fraud vision04:58 AWS grant journey05:31 Building in San Francisco05:52 Residency experience06:15 Advice for founders Check out detectif.ai

    START: Tarini Sai Padmanabhuni, Founder & CEO, DetectifAI “Real-time deepfake voice detection”

  3. 5d ago

    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 support questions over and over again... To keep up, the team hired a virtual assistant and relied on tools like Zendesk and Freshdesk.  But every ticket meant jumping between their inbox, Stripe, their database, and their knowledge base.  The software wasn't built for how startups actually operate. So instead of accepting it, they built the tool they wished they'd had. Then shared it with a few founder friends. The response was immediate. That internal tool became Letterbook. Today, Letterbook is the AI-native alternative to Zendesk, Freshdesk, Zoho Desk, and Intercom - built specifically for startups. It connects to your inbox, Stripe, database, and knowledge base, then drafts a complete resolution for every support ticket: the reply, the refund, the cancellation, the next action. For many customers, 70–80% of tickets become a single approval instead of minutes of manual work. Their Product Hunt launch reached #3 Product of the Day. Most customer support platforms were built for enterprise support teams. Letterbook was built for founders. "The modern AI-native support platform" 🎙️ Dawson Chen, CEO & Founder, Letterbook on Fondo START pod ‍ 00:32 — From a 100,000-user AI app to discovering a support bottleneck 01:08 — Turning an internal tool into Letterbook 02:09 — Why AI-native support beats legacy help desks 02:47 — How context-aware AI drafts actions, not just replies 03:23 — Automating 70–80% of repetitive support work 04:20 — Why Letterbook is purpose-built for B2C startups 04:55 — Two YC founders, two co-founder breakups, one new company 06:42 — Building the default customer support platform for startups 08:08 — Lessons from launching to #3 on Product Hunt ‍ Check out www.letterbook.ai

    START: Dawson Chen, CEO & Founder, Letterbook "AI-native customer support platform"

  4. Jul 17

    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 all automated compliance frameworks are run.  It started with a retro.  Every other SOC 2 vendor works the same way:  Detect a problemAlert your teamFix it...somewhere else The problem with this checklist is that "somewhere else" requires dozens of additional integrations. Because these vendors are just reporting layers on top of your stack. Rippling is your stack.  Which means most of your compliance evidence is collected before you start AND when there's a gap in compliance, Rippling fixes it. Unencrypted device --> encrypt it. Wrong app access --> de-provision automatically Incomplete security training --> gate system access until its done.  Because compliance really isn't about the report. It's about operating your company securely -- and proving it without a yearly fire drill.  Emma shares more about how her own founder journey influenced building Rippling's powerful new automated compliance product, available today for SOC 2 Type 1 and 2.  🎙️ Emma Lawler, Product Lead, Rippling on Fondo START pod ‍ 00:57 Introducing Rippling Automated Compliance02:07 The evolution of compliance software03:02 AI's role in compliance workflows03:41 Understanding SOC 2 requirements04:20 Compliance and enterprise procurement05:03 Building secure operating practices05:46 Product development at Rippling06:28 Building with a lean team07:15 Lessons from founding startups08:55 Learning through product pivots11:01 AI in modern product development12:41 Planning and research with AI16:05 Defining product-market fit17:56 Using first-party data for compliance21:35 Advice for early-stage founders ‍ Check out www.rippling.com/products/it/automated-compliance

    START: Emma Lawler, Product Lead, Rippling "Rippling Automated Compliance"

  5. Jul 15

    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. Tranzmit AI builds, tests, and evolves paywalls instead. Analyze the behavioral data, generate variants, score them against simulation and conversion history, ship the winner with guardrails and auto-rollback. 50x faster than manual A/B. 25M paywall views a month feeding the loop. Every result sharpens the next one. Four months ago, Agaaz Singhal was pointing the same engine at the opposite end of the funnel. We recorded this episode in March, when Tranzmit sat on top of the cancel button: Detected at-risk customers before they cancelledIntervened with personalized conversationsIdentified the root cause of frustrationFiled live Jira tickets for engineeringRecovered customers who were ready to leave Five lines of code. Three-minute setup.Not just to stop churn. To understand it. Read the behavioral data, generate the intervention, measure it, loop.Same engine. The screen changed. In the episode Agaaz describes product teams flying blind for weeks, stitching together analytics dashboards while customers walked. Behavioral data, an intervention at the moment that decides revenue, measured and fed back. Same loop, pointed at the front door. Running 24/7. "Building self-improving software infrastructure" 🎙️ Agaaz Singhal, Founder, Tranzmit AI on Fondo START pod 00:26 Building AI product teams to reduce churn on consumer platforms00:42 AI-native cancel buttons that understand why customers leave01:11 Five lines of code. Three-minute implementation.01:25 Predicting churn before users hit cancel02:05 Recovering up to 28% of customers at the point of cancellation02:35 Why product teams spend weeks trying to understand churn03:20 Scaling a consumer platform to 700K monthly active users03:35 The insight that led to building Tranzmit AI03:50 Building in San Francisco at Founders Inc Check out tranzmitai.com

    START: Agaaz Singhal, Founder & CEO, Tranzmit AI "Self-improving AI paywalls"

  6. Jul 14

    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 dentists, and at conference after conference people asked the same thing: do you integrate with X or Y platform? Seven other people were doing the same thing. None of them could integrate. Alex and Tarun could, because they knew how to reverse engineer network requests That's when they stopped digging for gold and started selling shovels Zatanna turns legacy software into APIs by working at the network layer. No browsers. No screenshots. Just requests 10x faster on the workflows they benchmarked. Near-zero browser costs. Reliability goes from 70% to nearly 100%. Computers shouldn't navigate the web like humans do. Humans use screens. Computers use requests "No browser bots to babysit" ‍ 🎙️ Tarun Vedula & Alex Blackwell, Co-founders, Zatanna on Fondo START ‍ 00:57 From jury research to API infrastructure 02:04 The "sell the shovels" realization 03:18 Why browser agents break at scale 04:42 Turning legacy systems into APIs 05:47 Why repetitive workflows shouldn't use browsers 06:37 Teaching AI agents to navigate like computers 08:34 Founder-market fit and knowing when to pivot 10:20 From sneaker bots to reverse engineering anti-bots 12:23 The future of AI vs anti-bot warfare 13:37 Why companies are still stuck at 70% reliability Check out www.zatanna.ai to learn more.

    START: Tarun Vedula & Alex Blackwell, Co-founders, Zatanna: “Turning all software into agent-first APIs”

  7. Jul 13

    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 InstaAgent to solve the second one. A consumer brand hands InstaAgent a single marketing brief. From there, the team handles the strategy, the creative, the distribution, and the analytics. The result isn't 50 generic ads. It's personalized content built for hundreds of distinct audiences - each with its own messaging, creative, and targeting. Think about a global CPG company. One hundred SKUs. Ten countries. That's a thousand creative variations before you even start optimizing performance. The hard part isn't generating content anymore. It's knowing what to create. Anyone can pay $25 a month for an AI model. Very few know how to turn that model into marketing that actually performs. That's why InstaAgent isn't positioning itself as another self-serve AI tool. It's an AI-native marketing partner - combining human judgment with AI execution to produce creative that brands can actually scale. The market is responding. From $0 to $1M ARR in just 10 months. Enterprise customers including Nestlé and P&G. Enterprise sales cycles closing in less than a month. The first wave of AI made content abundant. The next wave will reward the companies that know exactly who that content is for. 🎙️ Kyle Wong, Co-Founder & CEO, InstaAgent on Fondo START pod 00:15 — What InstaAgent actually does: scaling one campaign across hundreds of personas 00:40 — The full loop from a single brief: strategy, creation, distribution, analytics 00:55 — Why the bet is on TikTok and Meta, where AI video is moving fastest 01:20 — The old way: five creatives per campaign, slow and expensive 01:39 — How AI multiplied output to 50 — and why most of it misses 02:06 — Moving upmarket from SMBs to enterprise names like Nestlé and P&G 02:30 — The CPG math that makes manual creative impossible: 100 SKUs, 10 countries 03:20 — Replacing the Canva-and-Photoshop resizing grind 03:44 — Why an agency model beats self-serve SaaS for AI creative 04:45 — On token-maxing and the tokens offer from Sam Altman at YC 05:47 — From eight years at Goldman to a game that hit 1M users in a month 07:20 — How a hot sauce brand used synthetic personas to broaden its audience ‍ Check out instaagent.com

    START: Kyle Wong, Co-Founder & CEO, InstaAgent “Scale marketing campaigns across hundreds of personas”

  8. Jul 10

    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, that side project became a VC-backed company with a much bigger ambition. Today, Sunflower has:→ 500,000+ users and counting→ Grown from 200 to 100,000 monthly active users in under 6 months→ Reached a $1M run rate in about 10 months→ Tracked 109 years of sobriety every single day→ Expanded to users in almost every country, across 5 languages The product combines consumer software with clinical care. A consumer app featuring: An AI sponsor for addiction recoveryVisual sobriety progression trackingA social network built for recoveryCBT journaling and educational content across major addiction types Alongside a tele-therapy clinic: - Talk therapy in California and Texas, expanding nationwide with MAT- World-class doctors building the most effective protocols for addiction The mission began with one billion sober days.The team realized they'd reach that goal sooner than expected.So they raised the target.One trillion. Koby's growth philosophy mirrors the one behind his book, "Channels of Growth":Don't choose between product and distribution.Build both.Because at real scale, only a handful of growth channels matter. Find the one that fits your business—and optimize it relentlessly. His biggest prediction isn't about sobriety.It's about work. At Sunflower, they call it 'Operation Ender's Game' Map every task.Automate what AI can do today.Design for what AI will do tomorrow.The only role left? fleet operator. 🎙️ Koby Conrad, CEO & Founder, Sunflower Sober on Fondo START pod Chapters: 00:49 – Koby joins the show01:10 – The pitch: a sobriety platform built for the age of ASI01:35 – Sunflower's origin as a learn-to-code project01:54 – Koby's own story: high 24/7 from 19 to 2402:31 – From bootstrapped side project to VC-backed company02:46 – Zero to $1M run rate in 10 months03:00 – Tracking 109 years of sobriety every day03:10 – Why the mission grew from one billion to one trillion days03:52 – The growth framework: product and distribution, never one or the other05:03 – The only channels that scale: virality, paid, organic audience06:01 – Doing YC with his brother, from selling eggs to SF Compute08:00 – Operation Ender's Game and the fleet operator future

    START: Koby Conrad, Founder & CEO, Sunflower Sober: “The #1 AI Companion for sobriety"
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Fondo is an all-in-one accounting platform for startups. Get your books closed, taxes filed, and cash back from the IRS.

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  • Creator
    Fondo
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    95
  • Rating
    Clean
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    © 2026 Fondo
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