Founders You Should Know Feb 5th Showcase Recap 🕺🪩
Our February showcase, built by the "n+1 effect"
Our purpose at Founders You Should Know is simple — we aim to connect the most talented engineers and operators with the most exciting breakout startup opportunities.
A common question we get is “which side is harder to bring together? The founders or the talent?”. Each side has its own challenges. Founders of the fastest growing startups are incredibly busy, and it is hard to get 12 of these founders together to show up at a certain place at a specific time. But they know the lynchpin to their company’s success is assembling the best team — that’s why they set aside whatever 15 simultaneous tasks they have to do for 3 hours to spend time getting to know you.
Truthfully, the more difficult challenge is finding the most talented people in market. Why? The strongest talent have lots of options — from OpenAI and Anthropic offers to starting their own company, the world is your oyster if you’re a gifted engineer. Strong engineers and operators don’t announce they’re in market because they don’t need to, and aren’t desperate for a job.
So how did we end up filling our showcase with 250+ talented engineers and operators? We like to call it the “n+1 effect”. Great people know great people. Our team has been hosting events for engineers for over 10 years now — in fact Jen used to host robotics events back in 2018 with showcase founders Minn (Lighthouse) and Brian (Physical Intelligence). Word of mouth works overtime for every event we host. People refer their friends, their partners, their former colleagues, and everything in between. We’re positive that’s the best way to hire.
We practice what we preach — when we hired our first full-time Founders You Should Know colleague back in November, we turned to our community. We interviewed a close friend’s friend from high school, the mentee of our dog park buddy, and long-time FYSK attendees. We met our new colleague (Rachel!) because a long time community member was her high school debate coach.
There was no better way to kick off our first showcase of the year than with the 12 fantastic founders we had the opportunity to feature and connect our 250+ community members with, and we know they’ll continue to send strong talent back to our community.
If you missed out this time or want to join in on the fun again, apply now for our March 12th showcase in SF.
Lighthouse
What it is: Lighthouse is the fastest immigration solution for the technology industry.
Founder: Minn Kim
Open roles: Design Engineer, Product Engineer
Assembled
What it is: Assembled is building AI tools to enable superhuman support for customers like Canva, Robinhood, & Stripe.
Founder: John Wang
Open roles: Software Engineers, AI Deployment Strategists, Sales
Physical Intelligence
What it is: Physical Intelligence is bringing general-purpose AI into the physical world.
Founder: Brian Ichter
Open roles: Software Engineer, ML Engineer, Research Scientist, Research Engineer, Electrical Engineer, Industrial Design Engineer
Mandolin
What it is: Mandolin is developing AI agents for accessing lifesaving drugs.
Founder: Will Yin
Open roles: Member of Technical Staff, Forward Deployed Engineer, Infrastructure Engineer, Customer Operations, Founding GTM, Full-Time Recruiter, Executive Operations
Eve
What it is: Eve is a legal AI platform that helps plaintiff law firms with all of their case work, from intake through resolution.
Founder: Matt Noe
Open roles: All roles across the board
Gentrace
What it is: Gentrace helps test generative AI across teams by automating evals, tuning retrieval systems, and editing prompts for reliable LLM products and agents.
Founder: Doug Safreno
Open roles: Software Engineer
Boon AI
What it is: Boon AI is the AI workflow platform for supply chain and logistics.
Founder: Deepti Yenireddy
Open roles: Staff Engineer, Senior Engineer, Junior Engineer
Coval
What it is: Coval is building simulation, evals, & observability for voice agents.
Founder: Brooke Hopkins
Open roles: Senior Software Engineer
New Lantern
What it is: New Lantern launched Curie, the first-ever AI Radiology Resident, which helps radiologists analyze medical images and write radiology reports faster and easier.
Founder: Shiva Suri
Open roles: Frontend Engineer, Backend Engineer, Full-stack Engineer, Infrastructure Engineer
Distyl
What it is: Distyl builds AI-native technologies for humans and AI to collaborate and scale Fortune 500 operations.
Founder: Arjun Prakash
Open roles: Lead AI Engineer, AI Engineer, AI Strategist, Platform Engineer, AI Researcher
Fal
What it is: Fal is the fastest way to run diffusion models with ready-to-use AI inference, training APIs, and UI Playgrounds.
Founder: Gorkem Yurtseven
Open roles: ML Performance & Systems Engineer, Senior ML Researcher, Platform Engineer, Senior Account Executive
Owner
What it is: Owner gives local restaurants the same tools that major national brands use to drive sales.
Founder: Adam Guild
Open roles: Engineering Talent
Thanks for appreciating, CEO Radar - compounding relationships is the thing!
This is the definition of a high-value network in action. The best engineers don’t job hunt, they get hunted. And talent density compounds through relationships, not job boards. Also, the “n+1 effect” is so real. The strongest hires usually come from people who already operate at a high level. Such a great piece.