Start

Happy Friday! We’re streaming @fondocom @thestartpod the weekly show for AI founders Excited to sit down and chat with: – @RTorenberg021 (Senior Vice President, @CBRE) – @PaytonInSpace (Founder & CEO, @DispatchSpace P26) – @yuvansundrani (Founder & CEO, @autosanaai S25) – Ben Collins (Founder & CEO, @WithWoz1 W25) Huge thank you to our sponsors @Rippling, @rhobusiness, @posthog, @UseCorgi, @numeral, @EragonAI, @mastra, @NapaMediaLLC, @compai, @fondocom, and viewers like you Let’s go!! 🚀

Legacy help desks were built for old support orgs Letterbook was built for modern startups 🚀 @darweenist Co-founder letterbook.ai on @thestartpod livestream today w/ @davj x.com/davj/status/20…

Tune in live to the @thestartpod hosted by @davj, CEO & Founder @Fondocom: -@aresta_katz - CEO & Founder @ @theregbase (P26) -@austinywang - Founder & CEO @manaflowai (S24) -@eganmichael - CEO & Co-Founder @CodeCanaryAI (S22)

START LIVE! April START Live! / San Francisco, CA / April 17, 2026: Welcome to @thestartpod the weekly show for AI founders x.com/i/broadcasts/1…

Tech is the biggest story in the world and its media is somehow the least fun to watch Adil moved from Paris to SF to change that Now he's building a full media company around one idea: tech doesn't need to be packaged like homework live night show. print magazine. animated recaps & more coming soon... Most major industries figured out how to entertain Now it's tech's turn 🎙️ @adilmania, Founder @siliconmania, on @fondocom @thestartpod

So fun hanging with @davj and @MichaelFenrock on the START podcast today! We talked about our @ycombinator experience, what we learned from our YC partner @xuster, and Fenrock's origin story. Check it out. 😎

this was fun 😂 ty @davj for the invite 🤙

Everybody loves the acquisition Very few people love the integration That’s where the value gets built Accounting firm multiples have moved fast in recent years Because buyers see future advisory margin, future growth, and the chance to build platforms in a fragmented industry But that value only gets realized if integration works. Most accounting firms are still small. Roughly 80% sit at $1M in revenue or below The opportunity is obvious. The execution is not Quanto helps accounting firms grow with smoother onboarding and stronger operations 🎙️ Anderson Petergeorge, CPA, Cofounder, Quanto on @fondocom @thestartpod

if you’re in marketing, you’ll want to listen to this

Patent law might be the perfect use case for AI agents

AI is an average of everything before it. Your creativity is your edge

what's the future of food look like? "...decentralized"

Liam Karlsson had no clue why his SEO clients were losing traffic while rankings held Then his 57-year-old mom asked ChatGPT for new running shoes Nike answer. Bought the shoe. Was super happy. Google was never part of that customer journey... That was the seed of Rankad.ai He pitched cofounder William Gyltman. They went all in Track and grow brand visibility across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Copilot. Enter your domain, 30 seconds later you're in the app. AI agent optimizes your site directly 🎙️ Liam Karlsson (@LiamKarlsson05) & William Gyltman (@william_gyltman), Co-Founders, Rankad.ai on Fondo START pod with @davj

"Make no mistakes DO NOT HALLUCINATE. YOU ARE AN EXPERT SOFTWARE ENGINEER"

Amazon sellers do not have a data problem. They have a decision problem. They already have the clicks, conversions, impressions, and keyword history. What they lack is a system that knows what to do with it So brands pay agencies $5k to $50k a month - and still lose money on ads. Matthew Chen built Laurence (YC W26) to change that A quantitative system for Amazon advertising. Built for continuous decision-making under profit constraints. It uses existing ad copy, reinforcement learning, and custom models to run ads on autopilot. When confidence is high, it acts. When data is sparse, it borrows signal from similar keywords. The result: about 40% better performance for customers. Amazon is the wedge. Autonomous performance marketing is the bigger vision. 🎙️ @mlaurencechen, Founder & CEO/CTO, @trylaurence on @thestartpod with @davj

Construction doesn't fail on the jobsite. It fails in the drawings. The jobsite just reveals it Project managers spend half their time scanning plans page by page for conflicts between disciplines. Plumbing through steel beams. Electrical into HVAC... They still miss most of it. Millions in rework when caught in the field Milind Sagaram built @HelonicAI to catch these issues before construction starts AI reads the PDFs. Finds clashes across architectural, structural, and MEP sheets. Generates draft issue reports automatically The surprise: construction teams aren't resistant. They want it more than anyone expected 🎙️ @milindsagaram Co-Founder & CEO, Articulate / @HelonicAI (YC F25) on @Fondocom @thestartpod

Me training for whatever tax deadlines your startup will face in April

Pamir Ehsas spent years as outside counsel serving startups. He saw the same problem on repeat Simple legal work took weeks. Pricing was opaque. Lawyers kept starting from scratch instead of using AI So he built Arcline. AI generates the first draft. Elite lawyers from the best firms, and schools (Harvard, Oxford etc.) do the final revision Up to 80% of the work gone. Same-day turnaround (Try getting that from a traditional law firm) 50+ venture-backed startups already onboard when this ep was recorded Most legal AI tries to replace the lawyer. Pamir replaced the busywork 🎙️ @PamirEhsas, CEO & Co-Founder, @ArclineLegal on @thestartpod (full ep in comments) w/ @davj & Guest Hosts @james406 @timgl

Hollywood isn't dead. It's evolving. And we're leading that evolution. We just shipped Koyal v2.5: The best Agentic AI filmmaking platform. It goes from your script or music to full video with consistent characters, settings & storylines. Large Production houses, music labels & ad agencies use @KoyalAI for storyboarding & pre-viz. Smaller studios use it for making content they never had the time, budget or resources to create. Write a scene. Direct the camera. Build a world. @KoyalAI brings it to life. Here's what's new: - Go from script to video: Write a scene with dialogue, pacing, emotion. Koyal fully realizes it. Using the best voice models on the planet. - Direct the camera: Push in. Pull back. Drift through a scene. Real 3D camera blocking. Shape the shot the way you see it in your head. - Build a world that stays:Lock in a location and return to it. Your scenes stay consistent from the first frame to the last. Plus: dialogue, SFX, annotations for editing, and more control over every shot. Under the hood, we benchmark 40+ models weekly with real humans so Koyal always uses the best available (more on that next week!) Our agents pick the best models for each scene in run-time so you focus on the story, we handle the complexity. You don't need to prompt a film, you can direct it. With Koyal, we're looking to replace the camera, not the filmmaker behind it. Try it now at beta [dot] koyal [dot] ai DM me for credits!

An employee used his corporate Gemini account to generate fake receipts for reimbursements Not because he was lying. He just didn't have the real ones That's when the CISO realized they needed Oximy Ask an enterprise how many AI tools they use. They say 10. The real number is probably 40+ Most of the risk isn't malicious. People just want to get things done faster. So customer lists end up on free tools with no DPA The first instinct is to block everything. But people bypass restrictions anyway The real question: how do you say yes to AI without losing control? That's Oximy. A control layer for enterprise AI adoption. Track usage, manage spend, enforce governance 🎙️ @namanambavi, Founder & CEO, @OximyHQ on @fondocom @thestartpod (full ep in comments)