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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. 1d ago

    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"

  2. 2d ago

    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”

  3. 3d ago

    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”

  4. 6d ago

    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"

  5. Jul 8

    START: Bao Nguyen, Co-Founder & CEO, Hessian “Forward-deployed AI Agents”

    Bao's job was automating other people's jobs. So he automated his own. His team used to forward deploy the old way — go into customers' offices, sit next to their teams, watch how the work actually got done, then build the automations by hand. Then they asked the obvious question: why are humans doing all of this? Now Hessian's AI agents construct a digital twin of your business, map your back-office workflows, and take the work over end-to-end — plugging into whatever you already use. Slack. HubSpot. Salesforce. No new dashboard. No workflow migration. No figure-it-out-yourself AI tooling. The thesis behind it is blunt: the future of enterprise AI isn't selling more SaaS. Businesses want to adopt AI. They don't know how. Another tool doesn't solve that problem — it adds to it. So the companies that win won't sell software. They'll sell outcomes. 🎙️ Bao Nguyen, Co-Founder & CEO, Hessian on Fondo START pod 01:28 — Introducing Hessian's vision for forward deployed AI agents that automate business operations.01:58 — Why conversations with customers revealed that AI adoption is still a major challenge for mid-market companies.02:34 — How Hessian evolved from a workflow orchestration platform into an AI-first automation company.03:15 — The insight that led the team to replace traditional forward deployed engineering with AI agents.03:57 — Why Hessian integrates into existing workflows instead of requiring companies to adopt another SaaS product.04:28 — Bao's perspective on why enterprise AI is shifting toward outcome-based implementations rather than software licenses.05:02 — Early customer results, including significant time savings and eliminating the need for a dedicated AI engineer.05:34 — Meeting his co-founders at university and getting accepted into Y Combinator on their first application.06:22 — The difference between building startups in London versus San Francisco, and why speed matters.07:20 — The biggest lesson from Y Combinator: validating ideas with customers before investing heavily in product development.08:05 — Thoughts on OpenAI's token offer and the changing economics of AI startups.08:48 — Who Hessian is built for today and how the company approaches AI-powered back-office automation across different stages of growth. ‍ Check out hessian.sh

    START: Bao Nguyen, Co-Founder & CEO, Hessian “Forward-deployed AI Agents”

  6. Jul 7

    START: Jessica Hubley, Founder & CEO, Story LLP "Limitless legal wisdom. Complete legal operations"

    Most founders don't need another lawyer. They need a better system. Jessica Hubley spent years in Big Law, served as General Counsel at a venture-backed startup, and built her own practice serving startup founders. She kept seeing the same problem. Not that founders lacked intelligence. They lacked exposure to the legal playbook. They didn't know what kind of lawyer they needed.Or what needed to happen next. So she built Story. "Story.law is your expert General Counsel - fear no legal!" Aegis transforms your mess wherever it lives today - bringing AI and human legal experts together Cap table.Data room.Pro forma.Document intelligence. Built on top-tier lawyers' logic. Not software that asks founders to think like lawyers. Software that brings lawyer logic directly into the workflow. Because founders shouldn't be paying thousands of dollars for lawyers to operate software. "A cap table is math. Software is better at math than lawyers." The goal isn't more legal spend. It's spending less on lawyers - and getting an equal or better result. Organized before diligence. Prepared before fundraising. Deal-ready before the deal. The future of startup legal isn't replacing lawyers. It's making expert legal judgment available exactly when founders need it. ‍ 🎙️ Jessica Hubley, Founder & CEO, Story LLP on Fondo START pod 00:00 — Jessica Hubley, founder & CEO of Story, joins the show 00:11 — What Story.Law is building: automated in-house counsel that also manages human lawyers 00:44 — Why founders come to Story - and why second-time founders get it immediately 01:30 — The bigger vision: custom contracts drafted and signed in under 30 seconds 02:04 — From Stanford Law to Big Law to hitting the glass ceiling 02:47 — GC at a health tech startup, then a nonprofit teaching trafficking survivors to code 03:06 — The insight: a YC/Yale founder and a trafficking survivor had the exact same legal problem 03:33 — The Bookface post that got responses for three years straight 04:45 — The absurdity of paying lawyers thousands a month to operate cap table software 06:35 — Founder legal 101: the three mistakes almost everyone makes at the start 10:56 — The #1 reason YC companies die (it's not product-market fit or funding) 14:45 — When you shouldn't spend money on lawyers yet ‍Check out story.law

    START: Jessica Hubley, Founder & CEO, Story LLP "Limitless legal wisdom. Complete legal operations"

  7. Jul 6

    START pod: Austin Wang, Co-Founder & CEO, Manaflow "Building the open-source terminal for coding agents"

    10 coding agents running in parallel. Zero idea which one finished. That was the problem. Around November, Austin Wang and his co-founder Lawrence Chen stopped opening their IDE. They weren't writing code by hand anymore Everything ran through Claude Code and Codex in the terminal 10 panes. 10 agents. 10 copies of the repo. And two problems appeared almost immediately. They couldn't tell what each agent was working on. They couldn't tell when an agent had finished. So they built cmux.com: Native macOS Ghostty-based terminal with vertical tabs, notifications, and built-in browser Each workspace shows the task, branch, ports, and pull request - so you always know what every agent is doing. When an agent finishes, it moves to the top with a blue notification ring. Like iMessage... But for coding agents. Who's adopting it first? Staff and senior engineers. It makes sense. They're already used to breaking large problems into smaller ones and delegating the work. The difference now? Instead of junior engineers, they're orchestrating dozens of coding agents in parallel. Even Austin and his co-founder don't work the same way. One prefers worktrees. The other doesn't. That's why cmux ships primitives, not prescriptions. Developers build the workflow that fits them. Because nobody has figured out the "right" way to work with coding agents yet. And as those agents write more of the code... The bottleneck won't be software. It will be human attention.  Austin Wang, Co-Founder & CEO, Manaflow on Fondo START pod 00:15 — Introducing cmux and the YC journey 00:00:50 — Pivoting from enterprise AI to dev tools 00:01:25 — Leaving the IDE for the terminal 00:02:00 — The problem that led to Arc-inspired workspaces  00:02:45 — Notifications for coding agents 00:03:25 — Why developers are moving to terminal-first workflows  00:04:30 — Why senior engineers adopt cmux first  00:05:50 — Primitives over prescribed workflows 00:07:00 — The future of autonomous code review  00:08:40 — Why human attention becomes the bottleneck 00:09:20 — Growing to 14.5K GitHub stars 00:11:15 — Building cmux for speed and performance Check out cmux.com

    START pod: Austin Wang, Co-Founder & CEO, Manaflow "Building the open-source terminal for coding agents"

  8. Jul 2

    START: Oliviero Pinotti, Co-Founder, Tensol "AI employees for your company, built on OpenClaw"

    Most companies don't need smarter AI. They need AI they can actually deploy OpenClaw is brilliant but can be brutal to set up. Days of configs.  Agents messaging random contacts on WhatsApp... Tensol: one click. Five minutes. Each AI employee runs 24/7 in its own isolated VM with full company context Connect Slack, GitHub, Sentry, HubSpot, Gmail. Every action logged. Enterprise-grade security built in When we recorded this ep: ~100 AI employees running. 300K+ Twitter views Not chatbots. Agents with their own computer for engineering, sales, SDR 🎙️ Oliviero Pinotti, Co-Founder, Tensol (YC W26) on Fondo START 01:33 what Tensol does and how it works02:07 300K Twitter views and what launch day looked like02:25 ~100 AI employees deployed within 24 hours02:44 Why it took off03:42 The problem Oliviero saw early: Mac Minis, firewalls, configs03:57 Tensol's answer: one-click deploy and isolated sandboxing04:37 How Tensol handles enterprise security and prompt injection05:46 Five minutes vs four days to get up and running06:59 Most common integrations: Notion, HubSpot, GitHub, email09:43 Getting into YC after multiple attempts10:43 The full-circle pivot back to the original vision14:02 Pricing, trial access, and getting started

    START: Oliviero Pinotti, Co-Founder, Tensol "AI employees for your company, built on OpenClaw"
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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
    91
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Fondo
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