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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. START: Ian M.J. McInnis, CEO & Co-Founder, WithAI “Custom command centers for hedge funds”

    1d ago

    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 aren't the same problem In software, we've moved from autocomplete to agents to long-running agent swarms - each step climbing another level of abstraction In investing, human judgment still has to exist at the object level So the challenge was never deploying agents The challenge is giving them the context to be useful Every source of knowledge Internal and external Structured and unstructured Connected to the people making decisions. That's what Ian M.J. McInnis and his co-founder Ben Finch built at WithAI (YC P26) Not another AI tool A customized environment where agents can work the way investors actually do. Ian knows the problem firsthand. Before co-founding WithAI, he worked at the center of AI and investing at Bridgewater, studying how AI would reshape markets and knowledge work. His conclusion after trying the alternative: "The DIY approach ends in pain" The future isn't simply managing swarms of agents It's knowing what to delegate What to automate And where human judgment remains essential That's why WithAI focuses on amplifying investors rather than replacing them Research faster Monitor more companies Surface information that would otherwise be missed "AI for asset managers, built with you": Security, infrastructure, and white-glove service for harnessing the latest agents 🎙️ Ian McInnis, CEO & Co-Founder, WithAI on Fondo START pod ‍ 00:20 Why AI adoption in investing requires more than simply deploying agents 00:35 Building a customized AI operating environment for asset managers 01:12 Making hedge fund-grade AI capabilities accessible to smaller firms 01:55 From Princeton mathematics to a career in investing 02:35 Becoming one of Bridgewater's internal AI specialists 03:25 The origin story of WithAI and partnering with a longtime collaborator 04:35 Identifying the missing tools investors would need in an AI-driven future 05:05 Lessons from an initial YC rejection and what changed 06:15 Why AI agents are creating immediate value for knowledge workers 07:20 The fundamental difference between software engineering and investing 08:35 How to balance AI automation with human judgment 09:50 Where investors can safely delegate work to AI agents 11:00 Measuring AI-driven investment outcomes and client value creation 12:15 The ideal asset manager profile for WithAI today 13:10 Opportunities and excesses emerging in AI infrastructure investing 14:00 Thoughts on SpaceX, xAI, and technology valuations 15:00 The future of AI adoption across institutional investing Check out www.withai.co

    19 min
  2. START: Maanav Agrawal, CEO & Co-Founder, Memoir "Marketing campaigns from everything your team ships"

    2d ago

    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 himselfHe saw it in other industries like real estateHe saw it across his YC batch and among founders generally The problem wasn't always the product. It was making sure people knew the product existed. So he and Co-Founder Jason Zhan built Memoir (YC P26) A marketer with the soul of an engineer.  Memoir connects to your product source of truth and understands what changed, why it matters, who should hear about it, and how to tell the story. A new feature shipsA PR worth talking about gets mergedA meaningful update goes live Memoir turns it into: → Social posts → Blogs → Changelogs → Demo videos → Customer updates → Launch content All in your company's voice. They built it for themselves: Engineers who love building But, like most founders, don't always have time to build in public. Now they don't have to. The work speaks for itself - automatically Memoir turns product velocity into market velocity 🎙️ Maanav Agrawal, CEO & Co-Founder, Memoir on Fondo START  00:53 "Shipping is not the bottleneck, attention is." 01:19 How Memoir connects directly to GitHub and monitors product changes 01:38 Deciding which product updates are important enough to share publicly 02:03 Keeping founders in control with approval before publishing 02:40 Why some of the best products never get the attention they deserve 03:20  The challenge facing startups without dedicated marketing teams 03:49 Why engineering teams move faster than marketing teams can keep up 05:17 The original YC idea: developer infrastructure and latency optimization 05:58 The realization that marketing was the biggest bottleneck in real estate 06:18 The insight behind Memoir: unify engineering velocity and marketing velocity ‍ Check out trymemoir.ai ‍

    8 min
  3. START: Reuben Torenberg, Senior Vice President, CBRE: "Q1 2026 SF Office Market Report"

    3d ago

    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 Mission Bay Coinbase, Nvidia, and the Warriors all landed at Mission Rock (It's effectively full - premium space there is almost impossible to get) Reuben Torenberg has brokered SF startup office deals through every major cycle since 2016 The 3% vacancy boom and record rents The 38% vacancy COVID collapse And the AI-driven resurgence happening now We're probably still early in this cycle The AI wave showed you can do more with less And that's changing how founders think about space 🎙️ Reuben Torenberg, Senior Vice President, CBRE on Fondo START 00:36 Why brokering compounds the longer you do it 01:08 SF's pre-COVID boom, then the jump to 38% vacancy 02:18 How AI restarted SF office demand 02:42 Where we are in the cycle, and why it isn't the top 03:25 The leasing numbers that signal a real shift 04:34 Why startups are leasing differently now 05:34 How distressed buildings changed hands at a discount 06:11 How landlords regained leverage 07:38 What landlords actually check before they'll sign you 09:48 Why plug-and-play subleases win with startups 12:18 Advice for founders hunting their first office 13:01 Treating the office as a recruiting tool, not a status symbol learn more at cbre.com

    17 min
  4. START: Leo Kankkunen, Founder & CEO, DAIVIN!: “Tankless Dive Gear - Breath Autonomy at Sea, Land & Space”

    5d ago

    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 past diving Water is hydrogen and oxygen. Apply a DC current, swing away the electrons binding them, and you get the purest form of breathable gas. The idea started with a simple frustration Leo is an electrical engineer and a diver. Every dive exposed the same limits: Bulky tanks, Logistics, Safety risks, Cost, and Operational complexity. Instead of accepting those constraints, he asked a question: Is there any way we could breathe like a fish? That sent him down a rabbit hole into electrolysis If water already contains oxygen, why haul tanks at all?  Why not generate breathable oxygen exactly where and when it's needed? Enter DAIVIN! (YC W26) - Tankless dive gear that generates oxygen directly from the water around you. No tanks to haul, fill, or run out of. But diving is just the wedge Anywhere breathing depends on a tank, the tank sets the limit.  Crisis zones. High altitude rescue. Anywhere time is human lives.  Generate the oxygen on site, and there's no supply chain to depend on. 🎙️ Leo Kankkunen, CEO & Founder, Daivin on Fondo START pod 00:18 What Daivin is building and why oxygen tanks are the real problem00:43 One glass of water holds roughly 20 hours of breathing01:05 The science of splitting water into oxygen and hydrogen with a DC current01:38 The wearable system that draws in surrounding water and produces oxygen02:10 Leo's path from electrical engineer and diver to founder02:48 Where the tech stands today: commercial close, consumer further out03:15 Why removing oxygen logistics matters in crisis response and rescue03:38 The Netflix versus Blockbuster framing for oxygen infrastructure04:05 Why water beats gas tanks for breathing beyond Earth05:20 From a Slush side event in Finland to a YC interview within weeks06:25 Building in San Francisco versus Finland and compressing months into weeks07:15 Leo's advice for founders: build what genuinely interests you Check out daivin.tech

    9 min
  5. START pod: Kashyab Ambarani & Rishi Mahadevan, Co-Founders, Verbiflow “The system that runs your outbound”

    Jun 18

    START pod: Kashyab Ambarani & Rishi Mahadevan, Co-Founders, Verbiflow “The system that runs your outbound”

    Startups spend more time wiring their outbound tools together than actually talking to potential customers Verbiflow was built to change that It's Outbound Infrastructure for growth teams Outbound used to be a stack One tool for email. Another for LinkedIn. Something else for cold calls. Verbiflow is the system that runs your outbound, all in one place Run sequences through email, LinkedIn, and cold calls Handles sending Manages replies Runs follow-ups Keeps it all in sync Because the real bottleneck isn't finding leads It's getting in front of the right people before momentum disappears And in a world flooded with AI-generated outreach, they're betting on: better conversations, not more messages From prospect to pipeline From outreach to conversation From disconnected tools to one outbound system 🎙️ Kash Ambarani & Rishi Mahadevan, Co-Founders, Verbiflow on Fondo START pod ‍ 00:57 Platforms for email, LinkedIn, and cold calling are completely separate 02:08 We built an MCP that gets you live in 10 minutes 03:25 Why AI "personalization" in email is making outbound worse 04:18 Cold calling is the most underrated channel right now 05:16 AI coaching and real-time objection handling on calls 06:03 A targeted list is way better than trying to fill a giant list 07:35 Try to get there in person and actually talk to them 08:10 How they mapped every Series A-C startup in SF by scraping T&Cs ‍ Check out verbiflow.com

    12 min
  6. START: Henk Pretorius & Harry Zhang, Co-founders, Timelaps | “Brand Intelligence on Auto-Pilot”

    Jun 16

    START: Henk Pretorius & Harry Zhang, Co-founders, Timelaps | “Brand Intelligence on Auto-Pilot”

    Most brands don't know if their marketing is working. They launch campaigns. Spend real money. Watch the dashboards. Then hope. Months later, a report arrives explaining what happened.  The campaign is over. The budget is gone.The market has already moved. That's how brand tracking has worked for years. Henk and Harry are repeat founders with exits behind them - two decades building brand trackers for the world's largest brands on one side, a startup built and sold plus a market research career on the other. They'd watched the same problem from the inside for years. Tracking was expensive. Slow. Built around snapshots.  Not how brands actually grow. So they built Timelaps: An AI-native brand tracker that continuously surveys thousands of real consumers and shows whether your marketing is moving the metrics that matter.  Brand awareness. Consideration. Preference. Category ownership. Brand growth. Research-grade tracking. Updated continuously. Running in days instead of months. At a fifth of the cost of traditional tracking. From "What happened?" to "What's happening right now?" ‍ 🎙️  Henk Pretorius & Harry Zhang, Co-Founders, Timelaps on Fondo START pod ‍ 00:17 Building AI-native brand intelligence for modern brands 00:45 Why brand tracking remains one of marketing's biggest pain points 01:53 How two founders met at ODF and began validating ideas together 02:42 Combining market research expertise with startup experience 03:24 Landing customers from a prototype before building the full product 03:46 Winning Product Hunt with an early demo 04:35 Why the original customer problem never changed 05:30 The limitations of traditional brand tracking and brand audits 06:03 Moving from delayed reports to continuous insights 06:40 The metrics that matter most in brand intelligence 07:35 Making enterprise-grade brand tracking accessible to challenger brands 11:43 Why San Francisco accelerates founder learning and execution 12:47 The "Olympic Games of building companies" mindset ‍ Check out www.timelaps.io

    16 min
  7. START pod: Jameson Zaballos, Co-Founder & CEO, Napa: “Your storytelling problems, solved”

    Jun 12

    START pod: Jameson Zaballos, Co-Founder & CEO, Napa: “Your storytelling problems, solved”

    The internet got flooded with AI content. Everything started sounding the same. Same hooks.Same cadence.Same “we’re not doing X — we’re doing Y.” Jameson Zaballos thinks that’s exactly why human taste matters more now. Napa is the team behind those viral startup memes you’ve probably already seen. But underneath the memes is a bigger thesis:The future of founder marketing belongs to people who still sound human. Not polished.Not optimized. Human. AI can generate infinite content.But it still averages the internet. The founders winning attention right now are the ones adding taste back into the loop.Write like you talk. Post when nobody else posts. Make your ICP feel seen. Usenapa.com 🎙️ Jameson Zaballos, Co-Founder & CEO, Napa on Fondo START 01:07 Why founders can't cut through the noise02:12 "If you outsource the opinion to Claude, you level the playing field"02:45 How AI writing quietly cheapens your brand04:15 Why human unpredictability is still the moat05:58 The overlooked advantage of posting on weekends08:42 Why memes work when they reflect real customer pain09:55 The return of long-form storytelling

    12 min
  8. START pod: Parth Maheshwari & Chetan Manda, Co-Founders, Mochatrade | "US stock perps for Indian traders"

    Jun 12

    START pod: Parth Maheshwari & Chetan Manda, Co-Founders, Mochatrade | "US stock perps for Indian traders"

    Global markets were built for everyone. Access wasn't. Millions of traders outside the US watch Tesla move. Watch Nvidia earnings.Watch SpaceX rumors explode timelines. But when it's time to act? The door closes. Mochatrade is rebuilding that layer.A perpetual futures platform for US equities. Built for global traders first. Trade TSLA, NVDA, AAPL, and 50+ US stocks Up to 50x leverage24/7 marketsNo US brokerage account required Deposit in local currency. Trade in minutes. Stay self-custodial the entire time. Because the future of trading won't look like legacy brokerage apps. It'll be:BorderlessAlways-onCrypto-native infrastructure underneathSimple UX on top India already drives massive derivatives (60%) volume. But global traders still can't easily access leveraged US equities. That contradiction became the company. "We have experienced the pain point ourselves"  Parth and Chetan grew up in India watching this door stay closed. So they built the platform they wished existed. Not another broker. An access layer for the next generation of retail traders. 🎙️ Parth Maheshwari & Chetan Manda, Co-Founders, Mochatrade on Fondo START pod ‍ 00:57 Why global traders still can't access leveraged US stocks 02:21 Turning INR deposits into seamless US stock trading 03:27 Why India dominates 60% of global derivatives activity 04:06 Trading pre-IPO companies like SpaceX through perps 05:10 What perpetual futures actually are and why they're simpler 06:27 Why perps fix the retail options problem 07:45 From AI agents to financial infrastructure 08:52 Leaving AI to rebuild global market access 09:30 How three IIT friends and former roommates found the idea ‍ Check out www.mochatrade.com

    14 min
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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
    81
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Fondo
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