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Amazon blocked AI agents from shopping on its site. That might be the biggest opening Amazon’s competitors have ever had. More and more buying now starts with an agent. Caelean Barnes says Cloudflare reported that agent traffic overtook human traffic earlier this year. These agents read your docs, compare you with competitors and decide what to use without ever looking at your homepage. Companies that let agents in get chosen. Companies that block them get skipped. That’s the shift Gauge is built for. Gauge calls itself the Agent-Led Growth platform. Gauge helps companies get recommended and implemented by AI agents. Its customers include Perplexity, Strava, Airtable, Product Hunt, DigitalOcean, LendingTree, Timex, Supabase, PostHog, Mintlify, Clerk and OpenRouter. Agents don’t shop like people. They skip the homepage pitch and go straight to llms.txt, the docs and the reference pages. They get stuck at a credit card form, a sign-in or any step that needs a human. Gauge runs coding agents like Claude Code and Codex through real tasks against a company’s product. It then shows where the agents pick a competitor or give up. Gauge says the results are real: PostHog grew traffic from AI tools 41×, and Clerk tripled adoption of its CLI. Some people have stopped opening their software at all. Caelean met someone who hadn’t logged into Salesforce in six months because her agents were running it for her. His first step for founders is simple: point an agent at your website and see how far it gets. Built for humans. Chosen by agents.  🎙️ Caelean Barnes, CEO & Co-Founder, Gauge on Fondo START  on Fondo START with David J Phillips, CEO and Founder, Fondo.com 01:15 What Gauge does 02:05 From eShares intern to Carta 03:25 How Carta grew by working with lawyers 05:15 Why companies are building for agents first 07:00 Asking agents instead of opening dashboards 08:00 Agents running Salesforce 10:00 Agent traffic overtakes human traffic 12:40 How agents decide what to use 15:05 Why docs and open onboarding win 16:00 How to make your product agent-ready ‍Check out withgauge.com ‍

"What Elon's doing in space, we're doing here on Earth." That's how Sajan Khosa describes Liquid Energy (YC F26) and its NanoDC: a solar-powered autonomous data center built for AI inference. NanoDCs are built at a factory and shipped to the site. Each unit generates its own power using solar and batteries, with panels that fold out like an accordion. The compute is cooled with patent-pending high-density air cooling and connects to the internet via Starlink. No construction. No grid interconnect. No water supply. Liquid Energy says NanoDC can be deployed anywhere on the planet in four weeks. Units are shipped to the site ready to be turned on in 30 minutes. Sajan says they can go from the first conversation to live inference in six weeks, compared with four to 12 months for traditional compute arrangements. Customers don't need to purchase the hardware. They sign a compute contract, Liquid Energy deploys the units, and additional capacity can be added by simply deploying more. And when asked what breaks first as AI demand scales - GPUs, the grid, or data centers - his answer was immediate: "The grid." Sunlight in. Tokens out. ‍ 🎙️ Sajan Khosa, CCO & Co-Founder, Liquid Energy on Fondo START with Guest Host: Kamran Karic, COO & Co-founder, Ploid ‍ 00:45 From conversation to live inference in six weeks 01:32 Turning data centers from a construction  problem into a tech problem 02:28 Eliminating traditional infrastructure costs 03:17 Why GPUs aren't necessarily AI's biggest bottleneck 04:42 Deploying compute in harsh environments 05:14 Zero water consumption and ~85% lower cooling costs 06:29 Developing and testing the cooling technology 07:04 Why Liquid Energy is betting on solar 07:38 Why the electrical grid is AI's biggest bottleneck Check out www.liquidenergy.world

Your phone has years of context about you. Yet most new apps still start from zero. Where you go. What you eat. What you wear. How your interests change over time. J Yim and Nora Xiao saw an opportunity in all that information sitting in people's camera rolls. So they built Rollup. An SDK that turns photos into personal context, helping apps understand users without starting from scratch Photos stay on the phone, while apps gain insights into users' interests, habits, and preferences For example, screenshot six bomber jackets from different brands, and a shopping app could recognize what you're looking for without asking. But the real breakthrough came when other founders started asking to buy the technology powering Rollup's original shopping app. So J and Nora pivoted from building an app to selling the underlying SDK. Just nine days later, they reported six figures in contracted ARR and seven figures in pipeline revenue. Some customers even skipped the free trial and asked to pay immediately. Their vision? A future where every consumer app becomes a personal AI, powered by a deeper understanding of its users. They started by building one personalized shopping app. Now they're building the technology that could make every consumer app personal. 🎙️‍ Nora Xiao & J Yim, Co-Founders, Rollup, with Guest Host: Maanav Agrawal, CEO & Co-Founder, Memoir on Fondo START ‍ 01:08 Meet Rollup Co-Founders J Yim and Nora Xiao02:13 Turning camera rolls into personal context03:17 From shopping app to SDK04:22 Unlocking the value of personal photos05:11 Identifying moments, trends, and shopping intent06:18 Six figures in contracted ARR after nine days07:14 Finding product-market fit08:16 The strategy behind Rollup's pivot09:12 Building a strong co-founder relationship10:21 What inspired J and Nora to become entrepreneurs12:14 The future of personal AI13:19 Expanding beyond photos14:08 Privacy, on-device AI, and user trust Check it out at tryrollup.com

AI coding agents learned how to build voice AI from the internet. That might be the problem. The standard approach is simple. Transcribe the caller. Send the text to a model. Turn the answer back into speech. Three steps. Countless posts and repositories. Repeated so often that coding agents tend to reproduce the same architecture. Alex Kolchinski's bet at ThunderPhone is that the default is already becoming obsolete. Instead of one fixed pipeline, his team mixes and matches models. Sometimes several cheaper ones instead of one expensive one. Sometimes audio goes straight to the LLM, skipping transcription entirely. Every decision comes down to three competing priorities: quality, speed, and cost. Alex calls it the Ferrari approach. While other teams have good reasons to build systems that work well enough to scale, ThunderPhone focuses on squeezing more performance out of every component. And there's a catch. Alex doesn't expect that technical advantage to last forever. Foundation models keep improving, and coding agents are beginning to figure out better architectures themselves. Until then, the edge is knowing what to build differently. ThunderPhone: "Voice AI that nails the calls others fumble" 🎙️ Alex Kolchinski, Founder & CEO, ThunderPhone on Fondo START   01:07 Why ThunderPhone moves beyond the standard voice AI pipeline 01:42 Navigating the tradeoff between quality, latency, and price 02:35 Why Storm prioritizes getting real customer calls right 03:45 How software and B2B changed Alex's founder playbook 04:45 Why the traditional three-step voice AI pipeline is becoming obsolete 05:00 How voice AI is outperforming humans on transactional calls 06:32 Why ThunderPhone isn't training its own foundation model 08:15 How two founders built the platform in 6–12 months and where coding agents fall short 09:30 The Model T versus Ferrari approach to building voice AI 10:15 Spark at 2¢, Bolt at 5¢, and Storm at 9¢ per minute ‍Check out thunderphone.com

The US produces enough biogas to make over $20 billion worth of chemicals a year 60% of it is wasted or flared in low-margin applications It comes off wastewater plants, farms and landfillsGas a large-scale chemical plant can't capture So Rise Reforming goes to the gasIts modular technology fits inside a shipping container and runs on-site The result is the cheapest feedstock and no fossil fuels as raw material Out come chemicals like dimethyl ether, methanol and dimethyl carbonateThat last one has no domestic manufacturer in the US The three founders met studying molecular engineering at UChicagoThey got close over late-night problem setsEnvironmentalists turned engineers, drawn in by the chemical industry's 5% share of global emissionsThen Y Combinator, to learn how to sell chemicals 1,800+ hours of stable syngas productionFirst in the Americas to produce syngas from wastewater biogasA binding biogas supply agreement and a conditional DME offtake for its first commercial unit DME is first, targeting aerosol and propane starting in 2027 Rise Reforming sums it up in six words:"Unlocking resilience for the chemical industry" ‍ 🎙️ George Rose, Founder & CEO, Rise Reforming on Fondo START   ‍ 00:45 Supply-secure chemicals from waste gases01:45 Why centralized plants are exposed to conflicts and natural disasters02:00 Making the chemicals where the waste is actually generated02:32 Dimethyl carbonate and the lack of a single domestic manufacturer03:04 DME, methanol, and the markets Rise Reforming is targeting04:48 Environmentalists turned engineers05:32 Green premium?05:57 Price parity with the natural gas alternative06:27 A new methanol process and the cheapest feedstock07:05 Meeting cofounder at UChicago over late-night problem sets08:25 Doing YC to learn how to sell chemicals Check out www.rise-reforming.com

‍A clinical trial at Stanford enrolled a patient living in Africa. He was never physically there. He had been diagnosed with a rare genetic disorder, and Stanford was running a trial for it. The research team gathered his genetic information and medical records. They monitored him remotely and enrolled him. The patient was Melissa Bime’s father. She was working at Stanford as a clinical trial nurse at the time. She had trained as a nurse in Cameroon and moved to the US, where she worked through the COVID vaccine trials. She says that was the spark. Why not build digital versions of patients and get them into clinical trials. That’s Infiuss Health. It builds medical digital twins from real-world and historical data. Trial teams rehearse a protocol across thousands of virtual patients before a single one enrolls. The twins flag who is likely to drop out mid-study. Who has a comorbidity that affects how the drug performs. Whether two hours of travel to a research site is feasible over two years. Infiuss reports up to a 30% reduction in sample size and design cycles 10x faster. During the recent Ebola outbreak, Infiuss helped companies running vaccine trials recruit patients with a specific genetic trait. Melissa’s long-term view is approval with a hundred patients instead of thousands. Her focus is small and mid-sized life science companies. Most have one or two drug candidates the entire company hinges on. Infiuss is built to give them more tries. "AI-Powered clinical rehearsal. Run the trial before you run the trial." 🎙️Melissa Bime, Founder, Infiuss Health on Fondo START   ‍ 01:29 From nursing school in Cameroon to healthcare entrepreneurship02:29 The diagnosis that changed everything04:22 Building computational versions of real patients05:27 Why clinical R&D costs billions and fails nine times out of ten06:23 What digital patient twins can predict today07:35 Cutting roughly six to eight months from the process08:05 Approval with a hundred patients instead of thousands08:59 A clinical trial without a control group09:50 Why smaller life science companies need more chances to fail10:21 “You shouldn’t have to go out of business ’cause you failed a clinical trial”10:55 Finding the right genetic trait during the Ebola outbreak Check out infiuss.com

Most sales teams are competing for the same companies. Not necessarily because they're the best customers, but because they're the easiest to find. They have LinkedIn profiles, public hiring activity, and enough online signals to show up in every prospecting database. But plenty of good businesses don't leave that kind of trail. Ludo Granger kept noticing this when visiting customers. He'd look at their prospect databases and find that he could sometimes identify roughly three times as much additional market opportunity. The companies were there. The sales tools just weren't finding them. A hotel, a restaurant, or an early-stage startup might be a perfect customer. But if it's not generating the right online signals, it can be almost invisible to traditional prospecting software. That became the problem Ludo wanted to solve with Leadbay. Instead of relying only on the signals everyone else is tracking, Leadbay tries to learn how a good salesperson evaluates a company. It looks at your business, identifies what a promising customer might look like, and uses feedback from the leads you pursue to get better over time. But Ludo isn't trying to build another database with more companies in it. He thinks the way salespeople use databases is changing altogether. During SF Tech Week, he used Claude from his car to work with five highly qualified prospects rather than sorting through thousands of accounts. Then he told the agent how to handle outreach and follow-ups. That's the distinction he's betting on. Finding more companies matters, but knowing which ones are worth pursuing matters more. Especially when the person making that first decision isn't a person anymore. It's an agent. 🎙️ Ludovic Granger, CEO & Co-Founder, Leadbay on Fondo START with Guest Host: Kamran Karic, COO & Co-founder, Ploid (YC F26)01:42 Why everyone is chasing the same companies 02:08 The untapped market traditional sales databases overlook 02:34 How Leadbay can expand a company's addressable market 02:51 Why startups should build something agents want 03:17 The shift from human interfaces to AI agents 03:48 How AI identifies promising businesses with limited online data 04:19 Teaching AI to recognize and improve lead quality 05:01 Finding five highly qualified prospects instead of 5,000 05:29 Trusting AI agents to coordinate outreach and follow-ups 07:04 Why qualified data is the fuel for AI-powered sales ‍ Check out leadbay.ai

When everyone has access to the same AI models, what actually makes one AI product better than another? It's no longer just about the intelligence. It's about how reliably you put it to work. An agent that responds faster. Makes fewer mistakes. Delivers better outcomes for customers. That's the problem Niyaz Puzhikkunnath and Faiz Vadakkumpadath are tackling with Papaya (YC F26): continuously improving AI agents already running in production. After spending more than a decade developing their expertise at Amazon, the founders set out to build a company of their own. Their first product focused on data infrastructure. But as they began working with customers, they discovered something interesting. Customers liked the data product, but were especially interested in the AI agent harness the founders had built to make their system more reliable. Rather than asking customers to migrate their existing data infrastructure, they saw an opportunity to make that technology useful across a much broader range of applications. So they developed the harness into a standalone product, laying the foundation for Papaya. Today, Papaya analyzes how customers use production AI agents, identifies issues across prompts, context, caching, and tool calls, and opens pull requests with proposed fixes. It then tracks whether those changes actually improve quality, latency, and cost. Because knowing why your agent failed is only half the problem. Actually improving it is what matters. That's what Papaya is building toward: AI agents that get better over time, without engineers having to manually investigate and fix every issue. If you're running AI agents in production, check out what the team is building at papaya.fyi. 🎙️ Faiz Vadakkumpadath & Niyaz Puzhikkunnath, Co-Founders, Papaya on Fondo START with Guest Host: Maanav Agrawal, Founder & CEO, Memoir  ‍ 01:43 How Papaya identifies problems in production AI agents and proposes fixes 02:49 Why fixing agents matters more than monitoring them 03:02 Why companies prioritize agent quality over cost 03:34 Papaya's early traction and first paying customers 04:58 Automating the traditional software debugging process 05:47 Why AI could eliminate the traditional maintenance phase 06:18 Why identifying agent failures isn't enough 06:39 Optimizing agents that power critical business workflows 07:46 How Niyaz's experience debugging agents at Amazon inspired Papaya 08:33 How customer feedback transformed a data platform into Papaya ‍ Check out papaya.fyi

How many companies die as an idea because the founder can't build the first version? That's who Simon Shu and Justin Sato have in mind with Restart, which they call the AI company builder. You describe the idea in plain language and Restart sharpens it, then builds a working web product while you watch the pages, copy, and design fill in on a live preview. It publishes to a real URL when you say so, and changes work the same way: say what should be different and watch it happen. Most people building on it are starting their first company, and most of them aren't engineers. They're making SaaS, consumer apps, marketplaces, e-commerce, service businesses, and local businesses; even a coffee shop and a restaurant right alongside apps. The whole thing started from one question: what will companies look like five years from now? Advanced AI will make companies, the economy, and society work in fundamentally different ways. In that world, what changes for workers? They should get to be creatives and visionaries, and Simon and Justin are building Restart so anyone can. Simon brings experience from Tesla and Scale AI. Justin studied CS at Stanford after doing physics and AI safety research, and he's worked in AI engineering at several startups, including Tomo. They met over poker in SF. Restart has already grown to around 50K users, largely through social, and the team keeps shipping and improving the product. There's a free plan with daily build credits, so you can start building today. 🎙️ Simon Shu & Justin Sato, Co-Founders, Restart on Fondo START with Guest Host: @peggy_wang, Founder & CEO, @sparkchat_so @digipals_app  01:40 Meeting at a founders-and-investors poker game in SF02:15 The ride home where they started trading startup ideas02:42 Building a startup always felt inevitable to both of them03:27 Moving into Justin's Stanford dorm room04:03 Grinding it out and raising a pre-seed round04:20 The starting question: what will companies look like in five years?04:55 Shipping before it's ready, and getting to ~50K users05:18 Justin's LinkedIn post gets picked up by Indian news05:35 The 20-iPhone content operation06:21 "Restart is the AI company builder."06:30 The early wedge: incorporation, payments, software07:33 Who it's for: coffee shops, restaurants, and apps07:58 What they love about SF09:24 The guests flip it: what does the host think about AGI?10:30 Simon on turning workers into creators in the AGI era11:01 Justin on Restart's responsibility to make companies AI-native Try it at restart.new

What does it take to build a world-class startup ecosystem? Rodney Fong's answer starts with connection. As President & CEO of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, he brings together founders, established businesses, policymakers, finance, technology, and the broader community - helping turn San Francisco’s density of talent into opportunity. Through YES SF, the Chamber hosts 300+ events a year, creating a physical hub where ideas, industries, and people can collide. Rodney’s philosophy is simple: Put ambitious people in the same room. Make it easier to build. Give new ideas room to grow. 🎙️ Rodney A. Fong, President & CEO, San Francisco Chamber of Commerc on Fondo START with Guest Host: Grace Gong, Founder @ Smart Venture Media 01:01 SF Tech Week 01:48 the Chamber’s role and history 02:10 How YES SF connects founders and businesses 03:31 San Francisco’s comeback 04:50 Why SF’s talent density matters 06:10 YES SF’s 300+ annual events 06:53 Why this startup cycle feels different 07:35 A sea urchin startup idea 08:33 Robotics and everyday automation 09:13 The human side of technology

Most hiring software finds the candidates you ask for. But what if you're asking for the wrong person? Lantern AI, founded by Thomas Chan and Justin Tang, is building an AI hiring manager for the question that comes before the search: who should you actually hire? It learns what strong talent looks like at your company, then searches 50+ data sources for people a keyword match on the job description would miss. As hiring managers react to its picks, Lantern sharpens its sense of what they want. And when their requirements don't match the talent market, it pushes back instead of just following the brief. That's the interesting part. Sometimes the best candidate misses a box or two; sometimes the person a company thinks it needs isn't the one who'd help it most. A great headhunter knows when to challenge the brief, and Thomas and Justin are building that judgment into the software. "Turn your taste into hires."  ‍ 🎙️ Thomas Chan & Justin Tang, Co-Founders, Lantern AI on Fondo START   ‍ 01:27 Thomas introduces Lantern's AI hiring manager and personalized talent discovery.01:53 Explains why static job descriptions can overlook exceptional candidates.02:39 Justin describes Lantern's interactive approach to learning hiring preferences.03:26 Thomas explains how Lantern challenges unrealistic hiring requirements.04:17 Discusses Lantern's sourcing strategy using 50+ data providers.05:19 Shares how AI is influencing demand for engineering talent.06:43 Explains why companies need to rethink hiring as technology evolves.08:25 Describes how Lantern evaluates candidates beyond their resumes.09:48 Explains how AI can assess supporting evidence of candidates' work.10:24 Discusses how Lantern helps hiring managers streamline recruiting. ‍ Check out www.lantern.md

Scope already had a live product with revenue when its customers started pulling founder Anand Pajaniradjane somewhere else. It started in GEO and AI search optimization.In customer conversations Anand kept showing people a testing suite the team had built around its own MCP, and they got more excited about that than the product he was actually selling. Then one Wednesday a unicorn told him the GEO product was well thought out and well done but they weren't sure they had budget for it.Anand brought up AI agents in the same conversation and got forwarded to the right person on the spot. He built a small MVP that night.The next morning he talked to about 15 companies and roughly 12 said they'd pay for it if he could make it work.That became Scope's new direction. AI agents now discover software, evaluate it and use it to complete tasks, but they don't use it exactly the way people do.An agent might click through a UI, dig into a GitHub repo or go looking for examples, and its behavior can shift a lot depending on the product and context. Scope has now logged millions of agent runs studying that behavior.The company is building an Agent Experience Platform that shows software companies how agents find and use their products and where that experience breaks down. 🎙️ Anand Pajaniradjane, CEO & Founder, Scope on Fondo START   ‍ 01:04 Scope’s mission: making software discoverable and usable by AI agents01:58 How customer demand pulled Scope away from its original GEO product02:32 The week Anand realized the new product had stronger customer pull02:57 The unicorn conversation that strengthened the signal03:27 Building the first MVP overnight and validating demand in person03:53 Roughly 12 of 15 companies indicate they would pay for a working product04:39 How AI agents discover and evaluate software differently from AI search05:12 What agents actually inspect: interfaces, repositories, and examples06:03 Why context changes agent behavior and one-size-fits-all doesn’t work yet06:51 Anand’s experience in Founders Inc.’s Artifact program08:18 Applying to YC as a solo founder08:47 Anand’s first YC interview experience09:58 Why AI agents are becoming a new class of software user10:31 Scope’s focus on sharing what it has learned from customers and agent behavior11:43 Where to follow Anand and Scope Learn more at www.tryscope.com

Wait two weeks to find out a part doesn’t work.Then wait two more weeks to try again. Sam Mathew knows what that does to a builder. He started in hardware. During COVID, he switched to software because he couldn’t get parts. Slow iteration wasn’t just costing him time. It was discouraging him from building hardware. Now he’s back, making parts for other builders. twentyfour26 manufactures metal parts in San Francisco for robotics and consumer hardware startups.But it didn’t start as a machine shop. Sam and his co-founder, Hemant Mahendru, were building software for manufacturers. Selling it was hard. So on the first day of Founders Inc., they changed the business: instead of selling software to manufacturers, they became one and started taking orders themselves. Their approach is deliberately focused. Rather than trying to manufacture everything, they standardize the machine, materials, tools and workholding around a narrower set of parts. Their software handles quoting and programming, and they run production themselves. Upload a STEP file. The software checks whether the design fits their setup, flags anything that needs changing, and turns accepted designs into a quote and machining plan. When the part fits and capacity allows, they can cut it the same day. For a hardware team, that’s more than a shorter delivery time. It changes how often they can test a design, learn what’s wrong and try again. The obvious cost of waiting is a delayed prototype. The less obvious cost is a builder deciding to work on something else. Sam’s building for the people who want to stay in hardware. "Send CAD. Get metal." 🎙️ Sam Mathew, CTO & Co-Founder, twentyfour26 on Fondo START  01:57 Making new toys from old ones 02:22 Dropping out in 10th grade to build an edtech startup 04:05 The outdated spreadsheet that sparked the company 04:43 Lessons from their first YC interview 05:18 Pivoting from manufacturing software to making parts 06:00 Turning CAD files into metal parts 06:28 Why faster access to parts matters for hardware builders 06:52 The cost of waiting between prototypes 07:35 The practical reason Sam shaved his head 07:48 How a seed-round joke became a viral video ‍ Check out twentyfour26.com

Shipping code got faster. Security has to keep up. Before starting Trident, Dekai Li’s co-founder saw a workflow that concerned him: A product manager supplied a project description. An engineer pasted it into a coding agent. The output became a pull request. Dekai’s concern: manual pentesting couldn’t keep pace with how quickly developers were shipping. That’s the problem they built Trident to address. Trident uses AI to continuously pentest applications and APIs, review code, and identify security issues across cloud infrastructure. But finding a possible vulnerability isn’t enough. You have to prove it’s real. Dekai says validation is one of the hardest parts of AI pentesting. That’s why Trident’s findings come with reproducible evidence, and fixes can be proposed as draft pull requests for engineers to review and merge. The goal isn’t to give back the speed AI makes possible. It’s to build security that can keep up with it. Check out Trident "Continuous Security. AI agents test your apps, APIs and cloud, review every pull request, and answer your team in Slack." ‍ 🎙️Dekai Li Co-Founder & CTO, Trident on Fondo START  w/ Guest Host, Grace Gong, Founder, Smart Venture Media ‍ 01:05 Why manual pentesting struggles to keep pace with development02:12 Earning trust as young cybersecurity founders03:25 Validating vulnerabilities and navigating AI guardrails04:02 Building credibility through experienced hires and product results05:18 A customer case: five critical vulnerabilities in 20 minutes06:10 The founders’ cybersecurity backgrounds and path to Trident07:02 How AI coding workflows helped inspire the company08:13 Lessons from YC and building around customer feedback09:32 Scanning software packages before they enter the codebase10:21 Focusing on the security problems customers prioritize‍ Check out tridentsecurity.io

The earnings call gets the headlines. The shareholder vote can change the company. CEO compensation. Board control. Major corporate transactions. Some of the biggest decisions at public companies are shaped through shareholder votes - but most people never see the work behind them. Ryan Nowicki Stewart spent years inside that process. At State Street, he met with boards and C-suites and helped the firm arrive at voting decisions as a major institutional shareholder. Later, at PJT, he sat on the other side of the table, advising companies navigating those same investors. And behind a single decision could be thousands of pages of SEC filings, third-party research and years of internal notes. Ryan describes the workflow as “a total patchwork.” So he and his co-founder Tommy - who he’s known since undergrad and started alongside at BlackRock -  built Pennant. Pennant is building the corporate governance OS for institutional investors. The platform brings meetings, filings, proposals, voting policies and decision records into one place - helping teams analyze and coordinate proxy voting, apply their own principles at scale and maintain a clear record of how decisions were made. And because Ryan and Tommy spent years working with the exact people they’re now building for, their product bar is simple: Would our former bosses and teammates use this day in and day out? That mindset has shaped how they build. Instead of guessing what customers need, the Pennant team spends time on the desk with institutional investors, starts with their biggest problem and builds from there. Know the workflow deeply enough, and your former job can become your startup’s unfair advantage. ‍ 🎙️Ryan Nowicki Stewart, CEO & Co-Founder, Pennant on Fondo START  ‍ 00:57 From BlackRock and State Street to building Pennant01:27 The hidden governance layer behind public companies02:05 Meeting Tim Cook as Nike’s compensation committee chair03:47 How boards think about CEO pay and incentives05:42 Why shareholder voting matters to institutional investors06:08 The thousands-of-pages “patchwork” Pennant is replacing07:18 Building software their former teammates would actually use08:17 Why Pennant starts with each client’s biggest problem ‍Check out getpennant.ai