David J Phillips

Founder & CEO @fondocom – accounting & tax on autopilot for 1,000+ startups. Angel: Flexport, LiquidDeath, Rippling, 100+. Host: @thestartpod

[David J Phillips @davj]

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:

[David J Phillips @davj]

full ep here: https://t.co/IpPBjnc8HH

[David J Phillips @davj]

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

🎙️@MoodyAbdulf, CEO & Co-Founder @KlarifyAI on @fondocom @thestartpod

Huge thanks to @Rippling for making this episode possible!

[David J Phillips @davj]

Had lunch with a billionaire 5-time founder

Asked her "How do you come up with so many business ideas?"

She said it was simple, and asked to be excused for a second

Ended up being gone about 2 hours

When she came back, she was pretty woozy

Said she just had surgery to remove her kidney, and sold it for $200,000

"That's $876 million in ARR. I'm already looking at acquisition offers from Salesforce to build a CRM for your brain to map every body part."

Billionaires operate on a different level

[Rohin Dhar @rohindhar]

I think what often gets missed

Is Y Combinator moving to SF in 2023

May be what ends up having the biggest economic impact on San Francisco eventually

Just a machine gun of billion dollar companies being produced quarterly in SF, some that will grow much much bigger

[David J Phillips @davj]

@nicolomagnante @arseniycodes Thanks for joining us! Great to chat

[David J Phillips @davj]

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

@nicolomagnante and his cofounder @arseniycodes - who spent years building part of Datadog's metrics product - think that's backwards

So they built @superlogYC: 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.

@nicolomagnante CEO & Co-Founder @superlogYC on @fondocom @thestartpod

Huge thanks to @EragonAI for making this episode possible!

[David J Phillips @davj]

@shreyansj Thanks for coming on the pod Shreyans - great to have you

[Shreyans Jain @shreyansj]

this was fun

[David J Phillips @davj]

@NamanBansal0611 Thanks for joining us Naman! Congrats on all of the growth so far

[Sky Yang @skygodkingdom]

1,000 people already signed up to race 3 Porsche 911 in SF this Saturday.

We're CLOSING signups in the next few days.

Open bar, DJs, food trucks from SF's best, and some of you behind the wheel of a 911.

Most of the city will be there.

DM me if you want to pull up with your car for line up

Signup at: https://t.co/pCo3zEq5WN

Organized by @imagineagi

with @fondocom, @TrustVanta, @AWSstartups, @Rippling, @composio, @conduitai, @hyperspell, @cladlabs, @getreflex, @mindstudioai, @joinergo, @EntelligenceAI, @PlanetScale

[Naman Bansal @NamanBansal0611]

Thanks for having us on the pod @davj. After docs, the next frontier is devrel and our growth there has been insane - 100% MoM for 3 months!

PS: The level of research David did before our podcast was insane.

[Diane E. McCormack @dianeemccormack]

.@HinduHops made me pay for $20 cocktails just to tell me that comedy shows are the way to scale SaaS.

Sick views in NYC, I guess?

[David J Phillips @davj]

check out the full ep here: https://t.co/R17RtHVFt5

[David J Phillips @davj]

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.

🎙️ @NamanBansal0611 & @shreyansj , Co-founders @manicule on @fondocom @thestartpod

Huge thanks to @numeral for making this episode possible!

[Fondo.com @Fondocom]

NY Tech Week Founder Boat Party tomorrow!

200+ founders & friends on the water for sunset. DJ, food, drinks, & good vibes. 🌇

Excited to co-host with our friends at
@warpdotco, @AWSstartups, & NYC Founders Club.

RSVP in comments 👇

[David J Phillips @davj]

Watch the full ep here: https://t.co/Y2o3VQf8s9

[David J Phillips @davj]

@dylsphillips

[Aaron Epstein @aaron_epstein]

Common fundraising deck mistake: using boring slide titles like "Team" and "The Problem".

Instead, state the conclusion that you want investors to take away from the slide, and use the body as supporting evidence.

If an investor only read the titles on your slides, would they understand your business and want to invest?

[David J Phillips @davj]

@manav2modi Great to have you - thanks for joining us Manav!

[David J Phillips @davj]

AI agents can write code, analyze data, and pass the bar exam

They can't order you a pizza because they don't have a phone number

Think about how much of the real world still runs on phone numbers

SMS verification
Delivery coordination
Account creation
Calling a business...

Without one, an agent is stuck behind glass

@manav2modi & @themeetmodibuilt built @AgentPhoneHQ to fix that

Give your agent a phone number and it can suddenly act

He told his agent to order DoorDash

It created an account, talked to the delivery driver, made the payment

Pizza showed up at his door.

@ycombinator is a customer. After An engineer tried Twilio and got buried in compliance, AgentPhone had him live in a day

Every person will soon have hundreds, maybe thousands of agents working for them

The hard part isn't making them smart

It's giving them the tools to touch the real world

🎙️ @manav2modi, CEO & Co-Founder, @AgentPhoneHQ on @Fondocom @thestartpod

Huge thanks to @mastra for making this episode possible!