David J Phillips
@davj • 20,827 subscribers
Founder & CEO @fondocom – accounting & tax on autopilot for 2,000+ startups. Angel: Flexport, LiquidDeath, Rippling, 100+. Host: @thestartpod
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Introducing FREE TaxPass from Fondo.com We've helped thousands of startups like Legora, Cursor, ElevenLabs, and PostHog get their corporate taxes filed Startups shouldn’t have to juggle bookkeeping and tax filings with different providers Starting today, when you sign up for monthly bookkeeping, your first year of corporate taxes are filed for free (save $1,950+): • Delaware Franchise Tax • Federal Corporate Tax (Form 1120) • 1 State Corporate Tax filing We’ll also handle Form 5472 if you’re an international founder. All filed by our CPA-led team. If you’re a Delaware C-Corp and haven’t filed yet:
David J Phillips374,127 Aufrufe • vor 5 Monaten
AI shouldn't replace therapists. It should help them spend more time being therapists. Not because AI won't get smarter Because good therapy isn't just information It's trust It's compassion It's the human element. Most therapists spend only about half their time doing therapy The other half? Running the business Notes. Paperwork. Marketing. Insurance claims. Klarify automates the work around the session so therapists can focus on the work only they can do Today, more than 7,000 therapists use the platform The result is clear: they spend less time running a business, and more time doing the work only they can do 🎙️Moody Abdul, CEO & Co-Founder Klarify (YC P26) on Fondo.com START Huge thanks to Rippling for making this episode possible!
David J Phillips88,762 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten
The internet was the training set for intelligence Nobody has built the equivalent for the physical world Previously, Lucas Ngoo co-founded Carousell, scaled it $1B+ Now at CortexAI he's collecting the data robotics labs need to train foundation models Cameras, VR headsets, glasses on factory workers, retail workers, everyday people. Recording real-world manipulation work Not building the robot. Not training the model. Collecting what goes in 2026: scale data 2027+: start rolling robots out Initially 90% teleoperation, 10% autonomy While humans step in, the system keeps learning That's the flywheel toward full autonomy 🎙️ Lucas Ngoo, Co-Founder & CEO, CortexAI on Fondo.com Start (full ep in comments)
David J Phillips110,268 Aufrufe • vor 5 Monaten
Speed to lead sounds like a sales tactic It's actually the whole game Ruben Harris knows this better than anyone He built a 300-person call center across 3 countries to reach 1M people a month ...and saw exactly where the ceiling was The problem isn't effort. It's physics. A working-class student fills out a form at 10 PM. Nobody's staffed at 10 PM So 90% of leads go cold Not because they weren't interested Because nobody got back to them fast enough Outrival's AI agents respond in under a minute They call, text, email, and follow up One client made $ 10M in new revenue from leads they already had The best outbound AI isn't replacing humans It's doing the work humans never had time to do 🎙️ Ruben Harris, CEO & Co-Founder, OutRival on Fondo.com START Huge thanks to Rippling for making this episode possible!
David J Phillips80,212 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten
In many cases, the best AI companies aren't replacing software. They're giving it a login. Every software company for years has made the same pitch to manufacturers: clean APIs, migrate your stack, rip out your ERP It rarely works well. The ERP is the company brain. Years of data. You can't rip it out any more than you can rip out someone's memory nikolas & Co-Founder lukas figured out the obvious thing that everyone missed Stop trying to replace the software. Give an AI employee a login instead. Walter signs into SAP, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and Oracle the way a new hire would Ready to go from day 1. Works out of Teams and email like the rest of the team. Reads orders. Enters them. Places supplier POs. Catches pricing errors before they ship... Not another dashboard. Not another integration project. Not another rip and replace. A purchase order that used to take 15 minutes now takes a few seconds. The insight came from a $ 100M+ manufacturer who had a full-time employee doing nothing but typing purchase orders into an ERP Not because the work was valuable. Because the software demanded it. With Walter, your software stays. The manual work disappears. 🎙️ nikolas, CEO & Co-Founder of Walter on Fondo.com START Huge thanks to Corgi for making this episode possible!
David J Phillips58,965 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
Most companies don't realize they have a documentation problem until everyone already depends on it. Customers use it. New hires use it. Engineers use it. And when documentation falls out of date, the whole system starts working against itself People stop trusting what they're reading Teams lose context And nobody can fix it, because the problem is everywhere at once The longer it goes unfixed, the harder it is to untangle That's the opportunity Manicule saw They're building an AI-native DevRel company for developer tools - owning documentation, technical content, GEO, and distribution across social channels. The premise isn't that AI should replace expertise. It's that expertise should scale. Their AI agents audit and test at scale. Their humans own the architecture, the writing, and the creative direction. Every review improves the system Every project creates more context. Every iteration raises the bar What started as a highly manual business - helping developer companies create better technical content - has become a scalable AI-native operation Today, Manicule works with some of the fastest-growing developer tool companies - including Supermemory, Greptile, and Reducto - has scaled fast over the last few months, and has more demand than it can take on. Not because they publish more content. Because they help developer companies create content developers actually trust. 🎙️ Naman Bansal & Shreyans Jain , Co-founders Manicule (YC P26) on Fondo.com START Huge thanks to Numeral for making this episode possible!
David J Phillips48,703 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten
A production issue shouldn't require a detective Yet that's how most observability works today Most observability tools just dump alerts. Duplicates, no context, and you still fix it yourself Nicolò Magnante (YC P26) and his cofounder Arseniy Shishaev (YC P26) - who spent years building part of Datadog's metrics product - think that's backwards So they built Superlog (YC P26): Observability that's meant never to be opened A wizard scans your repo, installs proper OpenTelemetry, and runs daily to keep up as you ship When something breaks, it groups the errors into one incident, investigates with full context - logs, traces, recent deploys, past Slack threads - and drops a single mergeable PR in Slack. Merge it Ignore it Or open it in Claude Code and tweak it Vendor-neutral, so you keep every log, trace, and metric - even if you leave Not another notification. A fix. Nicolò Magnante (YC P26) CEO & Co-Founder Superlog (YC P26) on Fondo.com START Huge thanks to Eragon for making this episode possible!
David J Phillips40,983 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten
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 leverage 24/7 markets No 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: Borderless Always-on Crypto-native infrastructure underneath Simple UX on top Global traders still can't easily access leveraged US equities. India alone drives 60% of the world's derivatives volume. That contradiction became the company — starting with India, then the rest of the world. "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, on Fondo.com START Huge thanks to Comp AI for making this episode possible!
David J Phillips26,566 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
Every voice AI has the same problem The moment you stop talking, it starts talking But humans don't work that way In real conversations, pauses don't always mean interruption. Sometimes they mean: keep going Amit Yadav spent years building real-time AI systems at Meta Reality Labs for Ray-Ban smart glasses Now he's building Fern: a sales copilot that assists teams live during meetings Not after the call ...During it The hard problem isn't the answers anymore. It's timing. Turns out the hardest thing to teach an AI isn't what to say It's when to stay quiet. 🎙️ Amit Yadav (Amit Yadav), CEO & Co-Founder of Fern (ishikilabs), on Fondo.com START Huge thanks to Rho for making this episode possible!
David J Phillips34,155 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten
Today, I’m thrilled to share that has raised a $7M seed round to accelerate our mission of putting accounting on autopilot for startups. With Fondo, startups don’t need to worry about tax penalties, financial statement errors, or missing out on up to $500k in tax credits. Onboard in minutes then set & forget — taxes are filed on time, timely and accurate financial reporting is delivered, and cash back tax credits from the IRS (up to $500k per year) are claimed and received. Over 1,000 startups trust us to put their bookkeeping, taxes, and tax credits on autopilot and starting today any startup can try Fondo for $1: We are very grateful for our supporters in this round. The round is led by マネーフォワード (Sandy Kimura, 辻庸介/Yosuke Tsuji@マネーフォワードCEO) with participation from Y Combinator (Gustaf Alströmer, Michael Seibel, Dalton Caldwell, Arnav Sahu), @foolventures (Maggie Dorn, Brendan Mathews, Abigail Malin), Next Coast Ventures (Mike Smerklo, Michael Maloney, Kaitlyn DeBernardo), twenty two ventures (Katey Caldwell), a16z scout fund (Theo - t3.gg, Warren Shaeffer), Index Ventures scout fund (Nitzan Shapira), Costanoa Ventures scout fund (Todd Johnson), 1121.vc (Mike Rosengarten), Rho (Everett Cook), Capchase debt (Miguel Fernandez) and angels including Craig J. Lewis, Chris Bakke, james hawkins, Josh Cohenzadeh, Greg Castle, Loren Brill, Austen Allred, , Matt Doka, shell shock, Jason Levin, David Walker, Shail Patel , Reuben Torenberg, Danika Koenig, Bisla, & others.
David J Phillips125,541 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr
As a founder, Emma Ryan Lawler felt like SOC 2 was a major distraction from building. But when she started selling to enterprise logos, it became something that was impossible to ignore. Now, as Product Lead at Rippling, she channeled her first-hand experience of getting SOC 2 compliant to rethink how all automated compliance frameworks are run. It started with a retro. Every other SOC 2 vendor works the same way: Detect a problem Alert your team Fix it...somewhere else The problem with this checklist is that "somewhere else" requires dozens of additional integrations. Because these vendors are just reporting layers on top of your stack. Rippling is your stack. Which means most of your compliance evidence is collected before you start AND when there's a gap in compliance, Rippling fixes it. Unencrypted device --> encrypt it. Wrong app access --> de-provision automatically Incomplete security training --> gate system access until its done. Because compliance really isn't about the report. It's about operating your company securely -- and proving it without a yearly fire drill. Emma shares more about how her own founder journey influenced building Rippling's powerful new automated compliance product, available today for SOC 2 Type 1 and 2. 🎙️ Emma Ryan Lawler, Product Lead, Rippling on Fondo.com START Full ep:
David J Phillips15,552 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
Most brands don't know if their marketing is really 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, Co-Founders Timelaps on Fondo.com START Huge thanks to Eragon for making this episode possible!
David J Phillips22,277 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
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 I.M.J. McInnis and his co-founder Ben Finch built at @withai_inc 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 M.J. McInnis (I.M.J. McInnis), CEO & Co-Founder, @withai_inc on Fondo.com START
David J Phillips17,930 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
99% of session replays are your app working exactly as expected (hopefully) The other 1% is where the friction hides The bugs. The failed onboarding flows. The conversion leaks. No team has time to watch them all... That's the problem Michael and his co-founder kept hitting at their last company They had analytics. They had session replays. They had ideas to improve conversion. The small fixes always lost to bigger priorities... So they pivoted and built CodeCanary: An AI product engineer that connects to GitHub, PostHog, and Slack It watches your session replays, finds the UX friction, and opens pull requests with the fix Always on. Always shipping. Not dashboards Not alerts Actual fixes 🎙️ Michael Egan, CEO & Co-Founder, CodeCanary on Fondo.com START (full ep in comments) Big thanks to PostHog for making this episode possible!
David J Phillips21,731 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten
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 🎙️ Kashyab Ambarani & Rishi Mahadevan, Co-Founders, Verbiflow ( on Fondo.com START
David J Phillips16,908 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
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 (Leo Kankkunen) Founder & CEO DAIVIN! (YC W26) on Fondo.com START
David J Phillips15,710 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
ANNOUNCEMENT: We finally did it Years of negotiation One perfect domain is now 100x easier to find us, log in, and get your taxes filed — with up to $500k back from the IRS ⏰ 9 days left to file (October 15) Comment “ for FREE AirPods when you sign up for the upcoming tax deadline by Friday
David J Phillips40,064 Aufrufe • vor 11 Monaten
“I hate CRMs” (so he built one you don’t log into) Octolane = self-driving CRM Gmail · Calendar · Meeting summaries · 1-line JS → captures deals, drafts follow-ups, updates stages & more The origin wasn't a pitch. It was a product: • One shipped daily • Fixed bugs live • Let the market watch Built in public 👉 $2.6M raised in <1 week (no deck) 👀 Free plan launches Jan 27 🎙️ Coffee with One 🇺🇸, CEO/Co-founder Octolane AI on Fondo.com START 00:30 Self-driving CRM; no login 01:50 Auto-updates; drafts follow-ups 04:05 1-line JS IDs visitors 04:45 Connect Gmail; 30-day scan 05:34 Pricing: free; $49/seat; Jan 27 06:28 Webhooks/APIs; AI chat Q2 07:54 Duke→Mintlify→YC 09:30 Salesforce Tower moment 11:30 $2.6M; no pitch deck 12:13 Focus ≠ tunnel vision 13:45 Build in public 14:50 Character over credentials 17:03 Better models = better product 20:39 "We already have AGI" 22:24 SF is back; Mayor Lurie 24:19 Public now; PLG; Jan 27 launch
David J Phillips29,698 Aufrufe • vor 7 Monaten
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 LLP " 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.com START
David J Phillips10,627 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
The internet is getting agentified Winners make agents deployable. Routable. Trusted. New distribution is agent-first Your audience isn’t developers It’s their agents Dedalus Labs = Vercel for AI Agents What it does (so you ship): • Hosts your MCP servers on their cloud • Autoscaling + load balancing handled • Idea → production in one click • OpenAI-compatible SDK = one clean API for orchestration • Route any LLM, connect any MCP tool from the hosted marketplace • Ship in minutes Host MCP. Autoscale. Load balance. Click - you’re in prod. 🎧 Cathy Di Co-founder & CEO Dedalus Labs on Fondo.com Start 00:23 Dedalus: hosts MCP; ship fast 01:07 Users: weekend hackers → early founders 01:39 Break-In: 3-week sprint, credits, demo day 03:40 MCP: tools as capabilities 05:22 APIs vs MCP: overlap, reliability, auth 07:05 Open vs closed: agents route around walls 07:57 Marketplace 08:19 Private servers: benchmarking; web agents, APIs 11:27 Follow Cathy & Dedalus
David J Phillips27,396 Aufrufe • vor 7 Monaten