David J Phillips

Starting a startup completely changed the trajectory of my life Before: – 22 years old – $100k in debt – Skinny-fat – Hacker house After: – 25 years old – $350k in debt – Just fat – Homeless Here’s what I did after:

Started working with 10 solo founders this week and they are incredible - $400k ARR, no teammates - best teenage scrabble player in India - space tech founder w/ paying customers in <3 months - employee #6 at recent unicorn Can’t wait to see where they take things.

Full ep here: fondo.ai/4fuP5LY

The next big space race won’t be about going up It’ll be about bringing things back down After four years building satellites at Astranis, Payton realized something: as launch costs collapse, the bottleneck flips There’s still no infrastructure for manufacturing products in space and returning them safely to Earth So Dispatch is building it The thesis is simple: gravity is an invisible constraint on manufacturing. Remove gravity and semiconductor defects drop Pharmaceutical crystals become more stable Biological structures that collapse on Earth can solidify in microgravity To prove the concept, the team built a full-scale heat shield, drove into the Mojave Desert, and blasted it with a rocket engine at 14× expected re-entry force It survived 6× what they needed The long-term vision: Factories in orbit. Permanent industrial infrastructure in space. 🎙️ Payton Case (@PaytonInSpace), CEO & Co-Founder @dispatchspace, on @fondocom @thestartpod Big thanks to @rhobusiness for making this episode possible!

Mom I made it. On a serious note, always great catching up with @davj Thanks to @posthog and @Fondocom

@Aakash_Mahali @posthog @Fondocom Thanks so much for joining the pod @Aakash_Mahali! Let's go @RunCanary!! 🚀

Full ep here: fondo.ai/3RaFiAZ

Ansel Dias is using his robot factory to build more robot factories @AutoFAB_inc is a robotic desktop factory that prints, assembles, quality-checks, and packages hardware autonomously It’s already being used to manufacture more of its own robotic arms The insight behind it is simple: Prototyping is easy Production is the completely different ballgame - and that’s where hardware startups die Factories. QA. Packaging. Scaling production. That’s the bottleneck AutoFAB wants to eliminate The long-term vision: AutoFABs making more AutoFABs 🎙️ @AnselDias, Founder & CEO, @AutoFAB_inc on Fondo START pod Huge thanks to @theresidency for making this episode possible!

OpenAI is offering $2M in tokens to every YC company in the spring and summer batches. We extended the summer deadline to May 25 so more founders can get in on it. ycombinator.com/apply

Fitness habits are built in imperfect moments. That’s where AI can make the biggest difference. @__ruiters, CTO @hybrd_app on START x.com/davj/status/20…

The year is 2027. Your manager messages you "We need to talk." You hop on a Zoom call. It's you, your AI agent, your manager, her agent, a random lady from HR, their HR agent, and 14 separate call recorders. Your manager slides a piece of paper across the desk. It's a Slack DM from your agent to her agent. It reads "Tell your human they're really bad at their job and AI could have replaced them at GPT-3." She asks you to explain yourself. You say that you didn't say anything, this is clearly the agent. "Doesn't matter. You build your agent's prompt anyways." You and your agent get fired. You apply for a new job, and make it to the final round. It's down to you and one other candidate. Finally, you get an email. "Unfortunately, we have decided to go with another candidate." You ask what you could have done better. They reply "You did great, but you're only available 16 hours a day. The other candidate never sleeps." It was your agent. They took your job. But now, you can be a founder. You can finally build that startup that runs hundreds of tests from a single drop of blood. Life is good.

Full ep here: fondo.ai/3P6q6nL

The most valuable thing in AI won't be the answers It'll be knowing which ones are right Pedro Nobre is building that Cajal works at the intersection of formal verification and AI They use Lean - a language where math and software get proven correct or incorrect Binary. No ambiguity. The catch: the space of possible proofs is combinatorially huge Humans navigate it with strange inductive biases Machines couldn't Reinforcement learning changed that. Cajal is already working with frontier AI labs on theorem proving. Applications span software verification, cryptography, quantum information theory, and smart contracts 🎙️ @pedro_nobre0, Co-Founder, @CajalResearch on @fondocom @thestartpod Big thanks to @Rippling for making this episode possible!

Telling the IRS that I calculated my tax return with Claude

Follow this PROVEN PITCH DECK SCRIPT to raise money from VCs 👇️

After SaaStr panels, meetings, and "we should definitely follow up", founders need a room that doesn’t feel like more work. So we hosted one. The room was exactly what we hoped for: fun, low-pressure, and full of people actually building. Thanks to everyone who came through! @Fondocom x @foundersnetwork x ​OpenCap Stack

the best product teams used to be the fastest to respond the next ones won't have to respond at all

Full ep here: fondo.ai/4wqy6R6

A bug shows up in your product Lucent spots it Drops an alert in Slack Someone tags a coding agent in the thread It ships a PR Fixed before anyone knew it was broken This is the workflow @lucent_ai users are actually running today Lucent watches your session replays like a human analyst: friction points, bugs, failed upgrades... Patterns no human has time to sit through Connects to PostHog. Quick set up. Julius, Mastra, BrowserUse & more already on it Every session replay you're collecting and not watching is data you're wasting Lucent can help 🎙️ @RaeAlisa_, Founder, @lucent_ai on @fondocom @thestartpod Big thanks to @NapaMediaLLC for making this episode possible

Hanging out with my kids and none of them asked to see the cool agentic workflows I'm building

Stop tokennmaxxing