Founders You Should Know - Aug 2 Showcase recap
(the one where we dressed up as Elon Musk and sang a Hamilton spoof)
Dear Founders You Should Know friends,
At FYSK, we spend our days curating. For 6 weeks, we roll up our proverbial sleeves as we handpick every attendee out of thousands of applicants, and every founder from hundreds of nominations. Why? Because curating the right elements of our showcase creates something greater than the sum of its parts.
Curating the right people creates, dare we say, unexpected magic. This month we’d like to share a story about Sean, who originally came to FYSK in April with his girlfriend. At the showcase he was really impressed by one of our founders, and now he has a new role as an ML engineer at that company.
He sent us a note a few weeks ago: “It’s amazing to me that I was able to make this transition after spending only a combined couple of hours at FYSK. It’s by far the best, most natural and most talent-filled event I’ve ever been to.”
Organizing FYSK every month feels a bit like putting together a circus. There’s 12 acts and a blowout intermission – that often puts the show in showcase. The whole week before the event, we host rehearsals every night so we can work out all the kinks and make sure our founders share the stories that will be most interesting to you. Our showcase is the culmination of a tremendous amount of work – and we ‘celebrate’ this by fading into the background at the event and getting out of the way so you can all meet each other. My personal favorite moment of the entire month is approximately 6 minutes after the show begins and I get to sit down with the rest of the audience and watch the show unfold 🙂.
This is our recap of last month’s showcase. If you’d like to connect with any of these founders, send me a forwardable email blurb and I’m happy to suggest the connection.
If you’re looking for a new role, APPLY NOW for our next FYSK on September 20th in SF.
Warmly,
Jen and the FYSK team
Jam
What it is: Fastest and clearest tool for reporting bugs
Founder: Dani Grant
Open roles: Full stack eng, mobile eng, product designer, marketing designer, content marketer, community manager, growth marketer, sales, customer success, customer support
Cursor
What it is: AI-first code editor
Founder: Michael Truell
Open roles: Founding full-stack engineer and founding machine learning engineer
Kumo
What it is: Predictive LLMs for private enterprise data
Founder: Hema Raghavan
Open roles: Data engineer, forward deployed data scientist, SWE- cloud platform, SWE lead/Manager - applied ML, fullstack SWE, SWE - dev tools and productivity, etc.
Playground AI
What it is: AI first image editor
Founder: Suhail Doshi
Open roles: AI researcher, ML performance engineer, software engineer-product, senior product designer
AccessOS
What it is: Access management to make companies faster and more secure
Founder: Kanishk Vashisht
Open roles: engineers and designers
LanceDB
What it is: Developer-friendly, serverless vector database for AI applications
Founder: Chang She
Open roles: data infra, backend eng
Truco AI
What it is: AI-powered conversational systems for business
Founder: Swetha Mandava
Open roles: Looking for a cofounder
Socket
What it is: Security against open source supply chain attacks
Founder: Feross Aboukhadijeh
Open roles: Staff SWE- backend, Staff SWE- program analysis, Eng manager, security architect, head of threat intel, staff security researcher, Developer relations, Head of Ops
Glean
What it is: AI powered workplace search
Founder: Arvind Jain
Open roles: engineers: ML, deep learning, LLMs, product eng, backend eng, PMs, designers
Nooks
What it is: AI salesfloor
Founder: Rohan Suri
Open roles: Backend eng, fullstack SWE, applied ML eng, PM
Flair AI
What it is: Design platform for staging product photoshoots digitally
Founder: Mickey Friedman
Open roles: founding engineers
Speak
What it is: AI powered language tutor to practice speaking out loud
Founder: Connor Zwick
Open roles: Senior backend eng, Senior fullstack eng, Applied ML eng - speech, Applied ML eng - language, Product design lead, BizOps, growth marketer