EPISODE
Nate Bosshard, Jerry Qian, Joshua Reeves, Bruno Koba, Jason Cornelius, Farhan Khan, Wyatt Lansford, Luigi Pederzani, Dhruv Roongta, Anmol Tukrel, Joshua Browder, Anson Yu, Aden Clemente, Zane Hengsperger, Paige Finn Doherty, Vihaar Nandigala, Burkay Gur, Jack Raines, Arlan Rakh, Alessia Paccagnella, Joshua March, Kevin Chandra, Theo Browne, Bob Wei, Elena Sakach, Sayan Bhatia, Raf Garcia, Adi Singh, Adith Reddi, Casey Caruso
00:03:10 Nate Bosshard, founder of Offline Ventures and co-founder of Tonal, has a background in marketing leadership at companies like GoPro and The North Face. In the conversation, he reflects on his early entrepreneurial ventures, such as selling used records on eBay, and discusses the evolution of Y Combinator's Demo Day to a quarterly event. He also highlights Andrew Dudum of Hims & Hers as an underrated entrepreneur, noting the company's rapid growth and successful public offering.
00:27:15 Jerry Qian, co-founder and CEO of Reacher, an AI-powered platform that automates creator marketing workflows for brands, discusses how Reacher helps brands find the right creators, personalize outreach, manage payments, and generate scripts to create viral content. He highlights the emergence of TikTok Shop as a significant social commerce platform and emphasizes the role of AI in enhancing creator marketing. Jerry also shares that Reacher has achieved $137,000 in monthly recurring revenue.
00:30:35 Joshua Reeves, CEO and co-founder of Gusto, a company reimagining payroll and HR services for small businesses, discusses his journey from Stanford electrical engineering graduate to entrepreneur, highlighting his experience with Y Combinator's Winter 2012 batch and the early days of Gusto. He shares insights into the company's initial focus on payroll, the importance of using their own product before paying themselves, and the challenges of raising funds during a time when many startups were centered on social and mobile platforms. Reeves also reflects on the significance of customer-centricity, drawing inspiration from Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford commencement speech, and emphasizes the value of understanding and serving customers to build a successful business.
00:36:10 Bruno Koba, co-founder of Gauss, introduces their AI-driven investment analyst designed to assist retail investors in making informed decisions by monitoring markets, filtering noise, and delivering personalized insights. He emphasizes the platform's focus on reducing emotional investment mistakes and catering to thesis-driven investors who lack time for extensive market research. Bruno also shares his background, including roles at Nubank and Monashees, and mentions Gauss's subscription model, charging $19 per month, with plans to transition to a Registered Investment Advisor (RIA) model.
00:42:15 Jason Cornelius, co-founder and CEO of Perseus Defense, discusses the development of affordable 16-inch guided missiles designed to counter drone threats. He highlights the limitations of existing counter-UAS solutions, such as electronic warfare and high-cost interceptors, and introduces Perseus Defense's cost-effective alternative, aiming to produce missiles for under $10,000 per unit. Cornelius also shares the company's rapid prototyping progress, including multiple missile iterations and live-fire tests, and mentions engagements with the Department of Defense to advance the technology's deployment.
00:47:30 Farhan Khan, co-founder of Meteor and former University of Washington computer science student, discusses their AI-native browser designed to automate repetitive online tasks, positioning it as a superior alternative to Google Chrome. He explains that Meteor employs AI agents to handle activities like scheduling meetings and data entry, aiming to save users significant time. Farhan also shares his entrepreneurial journey, including previous projects and his decision to drop out of college to focus on building Meteor.
00:51:30 Wyatt Lansford is the co-founder and CTO of Pally, a platform that consolidates contacts and conversations from various platforms into one place, utilizing on-device AI to maintain user privacy. In the conversation, Haz Hubble, Pally's founder, discusses the platform's functionality, emphasizing its local data processing to ensure privacy, and shares the company's growth metrics, including reaching over 3,500 users and achieving $125,000 in annual recurring revenue within two months of launch. He also recounts his entrepreneurial journey, highlighting his admiration for Richard Branson and an early venture selling FIFA Ultimate Team coins at age 12.
00:55:00 Luigi Pederzani is the co-founder and CTO of mcp-use, an open-source toolkit that enables developers to build and deploy AI agents using the Model Context Protocol (MCP). In the conversation, he discusses mcp-use's open-source strategy, its growing GitHub repository with over 7,000 stars, and the company's bottom-up approach to enterprise adoption, similar to Supabase. He also mentions raising $6 million in funding and his previous experience in Zurich working on virtual try-on technology for e-commerce.
00:59:10 Dhruv Roongta is a 20-year-old entrepreneur and co-founder of Slashy, an AI agent that integrates with various applications to automate repetitive tasks. In the conversation, he discusses how Slashy connects to tools like calendars, Gmail, and Notion to streamline workflows, reducing the need for manual input. He also shares that 40% of their batch uses Slashy, with a 30% week-over-week growth, and mentions that 30% of the VCs at Demo Day are utilizing the product for meeting preparation.
01:04:10 Anmol Tukrel, CEO of Closera, a Y Combinator-backed startup, discusses how his company leverages AI to automate time-consuming tasks for commercial real estate brokers, such as creating sales materials—a process that traditionally takes four weeks and costs $5,000, but with Closera, can be completed in about five minutes. He also shares his background as a former Google product manager who monetized projects like Gemini and NotebookLM, and as the creator of iDentifi, an app aiding the visually impaired, which was featured in a Google commercial alongside notable figures.
01:08:05 Joshua Browder, founder and CEO of DoNotPay, discusses the emergence of AI-driven solutions in niche sectors, highlighting a startup utilizing AI for waste collection. He emphasizes the potential for building substantial businesses in specialized areas that large AI models may overlook. Browder also reflects on his early entrepreneurial ventures, including selling jailbroken phone themes at age 13, and expresses admiration for Larry Ellison's pricing strategies and business acumen.
01:14:50 Anson Yu is the founder of Normal, a company that automates hardware testing and compliance processes, focusing on robotics, drones, and other electrical components with radio features. He discusses how Normal streamlines testing infrastructure, which is often cumbersome or located overseas, to support teams in efficiently validating their hardware products. Since launching three weeks ago, Normal has achieved $35,000 in revenue and completed its funding round.
01:18:50 Aden Clemente, CTO of Effigove, is developing an AI operating system for local governments, starting with a 24/7 311 call center service. He discusses the limited availability of 311 lines in cities and how Effigove's AI-driven solution aims to provide consistent information services to all municipalities, regardless of size. Clemente also shares that Effigove is live in one city with an $80,000 ARR and has two additional contracts pending.
01:24:45 Zane Hengsperger, founder of Nox Metals, is revolutionizing the U.S. metal supply chain by integrating software and automation to deliver raw materials more efficiently to manufacturers. In the conversation, he discusses how his company purchases large metal billets, cuts them using advanced band saws, and supplies precisely sized blocks to clients like Hadrian for CNC machining. Hengsperger emphasizes the importance of reindustrializing America by enhancing factory efficiency through technology, aiming to provide next-day delivery of custom-cut metal blocks to factories nationwide.
01:29:55 Paige Finn Doherty, founding partner of Behind Genius Ventures, discusses her journey into venture capital, highlighting her early investment in Knox, a company aligned with the reindustrialization of America. She emphasizes the importance of strong storytelling in founders and shares her excitement about the energy at Demo Day, mentioning her recent investment in Knox and the firm's commitment to supporting technical storytellers at their earliest stages.
01:35:45 Vihaar Nandigala, co-founder and CEO of Orange Slice, discusses how their AI-driven platform identifies high-intent prospects by analyzing online data sources to help B2B sales teams target companies in immediate need of their products. He shares his background, including a previous role as an investment banker at J.P. Morgan and his entrepreneurial journey, highlighting that Orange Slice has achieved $53,000 in monthly recurring revenue with 90% profit margins. Nandigala also reflects on his early entrepreneurial experiences, such as selling origami creations during his school years.
01:41:55 Burkay Gur is the co-founder of Fal, a generative media platform established in 2021 that enables developers to create AI-generated audio, video, and images. In the conversation, he discusses Fal's role in accelerating consumer AI applications, the challenges of scaling GPU capacity to meet growing demand, and the importance of reliability in AI infrastructure. He also reflects on his early entrepreneurial experiences, including renting out toys as a child, and emphasizes the significance of building a talented and dedicated team.
01:55:45 Jack Raines, an investor at Slow Ventures, discusses the evolving role of AI in startups, emphasizing that AI has become a standard tool akin to cloud computing, and highlights the importance of domain expertise in AI-driven ventures. He also introduces Slow Ventures' new etiquette finishing school aimed at improving founders' professional presence, and shares his experience of making his first online earnings through trading SPACs in his Roth IRA.
02:05:50 Arlan Rakhmetzhanov, an 18-year-old entrepreneur from Kazakhstan, is the founder of Nozomio, an AI lab developing tools to enhance software engineering. In the conversation, he discusses Nia, an API designed to provide coding agents with enriched context by indexing entire codebases and documentation, thereby improving their performance. He also shares his journey of dropping out of high school, raising $1 million in pre-seed funding within days, and being accepted into Y Combinator's Summer 2025 batch.
02:10:15 Alessia Paccagnella, co-founder of Vive Flow, introduces her company as an all-in-one solution for building production-ready applications without coding. She critiques existing no-code tools for their inadequate backend support and presents Vive Flow's hybrid approach, combining AI-generated flows with deterministic code mapping to ensure robustness. Since launching, they've seen rapid adoption, with 8,000 applications created in just three weeks.
02:12:45 Joshua March is the co-founder and CEO of Veritas Agent, a company that develops AI agents for the consumer lending industry. He discusses his company's focus on interfacing with borrowers to assist with sales, servicing, and collections for fintechs, banks, and credit unions. He also shares his entrepreneurial journey, including launching an e-commerce website at 19 and building a contact center software company to $15 million ARR before its acquisition.
02:16:35 Kevin Chandra, CEO and co-founder of The Prompting Company, discusses his San Francisco-based startup that helps products gain visibility in AI-generated content by creating AI-optimized shadow sites. He shares that the company has achieved $300,000 in annual recurring revenue, with Nvidia as a notable client. Chandra also reflects on his entrepreneurial journey, mentioning his early venture into jailbreaking iPhones and his admiration for Steve Jobs.
02:19:35 Theo Browne, a former Twitch engineer and Y Combinator W22 alum, is the CEO of Ping Labs, a company revolutionizing creator video technology. In the conversation, he discusses his transition from working at Twitch to developing tools that democratize studio-quality video production, emphasizing his passion for making technology more accessible to creators.
02:29:30 Bob Wei is the CTO and co-founder of Embedder, a company developing AI-powered coding agents for firmware engineers. In the conversation, he discusses his background in hardware and robotics, including experience at Tesla working on Robo Taxi, and highlights the inefficiencies in firmware development compared to web development. He explains how Embedder addresses these challenges by creating an information layer and hardware interaction layer, enabling agents to read chip documentation, write code, and test it directly on devices.
02:31:55 Elena Sakach, a partner at GV (formerly Google Ventures), leads investments in fintech, software, and artificial intelligence. In her conversation, she observed that valuations are consistently rising, attributed to the resurgence of public markets and the reopening of IPO windows, which have bolstered investor confidence. She highlighted GV's history of early-stage investments in fintech companies like Robinhood, Plaid, and Gusto, and noted the current barbell trend in fintech, with innovations targeting both underserved regions and mature markets.
02:38:45 Sayan Bhatia, co-founder and CEO of Kalinda, an AI-driven platform that accelerates medical record review for mass tort attorneys, discusses how Kalinda extracts and summarizes data from extensive records, enabling law firms to qualify potential cases in minutes. He highlights the platform's ability to process large volumes of documents efficiently, transforming a process that once took months into just a few hours. Bhatia also shares that Kalinda has generated $60,000 in revenue over the past four months and is currently working with three of the largest plaintiff law firms in the U.S.
02:43:00 Raf Garcia, founder of Kernel, discusses his company's development of high-speed cloud-based browsers designed for AI agents, enabling automation across sectors like healthcare and fintech. He highlights Kernel's rapid growth, including a 1,000% month-over-month revenue increase and the deployment of 200,000 browsers in three months. Garcia also emphasizes the competitive edge of focusing on technical excellence in developer tools, positioning Kernel ahead of larger competitors.
02:48:35 Adi Singh, co-founder of AgentMail, introduces the first email provider designed specifically for AI agents, emphasizing that it's "email for your AI" rather than "AI for your email." He shares that the idea stemmed from the challenge of providing agents with their own inboxes, a need recognized by industry leaders like Sequoia and LangChain. Additionally, Adi recounts his first earnings as a basketball scorekeeper after being cut from the team and expresses admiration for Warren Buffett's humility and passion for his work.
02:50:45 Adith Reddi, co-founder and CEO of Riff, an AI-powered music editor, discusses how Riff enables both professional and aspiring musicians to create music more efficiently by integrating AI tools that generate sounds and assist with arrangements. He highlights features like the ability to hum a melody and have it played on an instrument, aiming to make music production accessible to a broader audience. Reddi also shares that Riff has gained traction, with users already releasing songs on Spotify, and mentions the company's successful fundraising efforts.
03:05:41 Casey Caruso, managing partner of Topology Ventures, discusses the electrifying atmosphere of the latest YC Demo Day, noting the high quality of founders and their focus on addressing real-world problems beyond just AI. She observes a trend of younger entrepreneurs achieving significant traction early on and highlights Topology's investment focus on technical founders building innovative solutions, particularly in neurotechnology and underexplored AI sectors. Caruso also mentions Topology's backing of Sam Altman's new company, Merge, and emphasizes the importance of combining multiple modalities in neurotech advancements.