Founders You Should Know May 21st Recap
🧃 + 👨🏼🍳 + 🤖 = 📈📈📈
We’re taking a break from showcases for the summer, but we’re still here to help you land your next role. Apply now to our bespoke matching process — we’ll share open roles you’re a great fit for and connect you with hiring breakout founders.
Amidst all the excitement of our showcase last Wednesday, we forgot to celebrate a key milestone — FYSK turned 3! While we didn’t break out the cake and candles, our showcase had something very special to celebrate our third year of making long-lasting connections within the startup community. For the first time in FYSK history, we refeatured a founder.
The startups we host at FYSK may seem vastly different, but they all share three things in common: hyper speed growth, strong product market fit, and recruiting priorities that best align with our community. These are startups in that rare, goldilocks moment where they’re hiring not just to fill roles, but to find the people who will fundamentally shape the company’s future for the better. We figured this type of growth — where a startup needs to double its team fast, but is still small enough for every new hire to have real autonomy and influence — doesn’t happen often. That there’s a sweet spot: a perfect window in a startup’s trajectory to introduce them to our community. So, we made a rule. No refeatures, period. Once you’ve been on the FYSK stage, that’s it.
Rules, however, are made to be broken. Sometimes a founder’s growth is so impressive, it would be foolish to deprive our community the opportunity to meet them again. Such was the case for Listen Labs — when we’d pose the question “who should we feature this time around?”, Listen Labs consistently came up first among community members.
We featured Alfred Wahlforss of Listen Labs (then called Merlin AI) in November of 2023, right when he first launched. Alfred presented after making his first hire, and was on the hunt for founding engineers. A year and a half, 10x growth, a rebrand, and a $27M Series A later, it only felt right to bring him back to the FYSK stage.
Last Wednesday, we got to do just that. His energy, passion, and drive is exactly the same as it was 18 months ago — just now with a bigger team, a longer list of customers, and a lot more revenue.
As we celebrate our third anniversary, this refeature reflects what makes our community special. Our showcase has always been about capturing founders in the act of building — not after the hype, but in the messy moments where growth is unfolding real time. This refeature brings our community full-circle, and reminds us that the conversations don’t have to end when the lights go off at 9 pm. This is a long-term community you all have helped us build, and we’re just getting started.
This showcase could not have happened without the generosity and support of our wonderful cohosts at Mux and Emerson Collective. Thank you to Sarah Pinto and her entire team at Emerson Collective for sponsoring our event, and Midnight Wilkinson, Matt McClure, and the entire Mux team for their continued support of our FYSK showcases (& beautiful office space).
Not seeing the breakout startup you’ve been following at our showcases? Nominate them, and they might just be sharing their story at our next show.
Abridge
Abridge is the leading platform for AI-based ambient listening technology in healthcare.
Founder: Zachary Lipton
Open Roles: AI Science, Engineering, Data Science, Partner Experience
Superpower
Superpower is the worlds first AI doctor and health super app; centralize your health data, test your whole body, and take complete control of your health.
Founder: Jacob Peters
Open Roles: Engineering, Product, Design, Operations
David AI
David AI is an audio data research lab.
Founder: Tomer Cohen
Open Roles: Research, Product, Engineering, Operations
Dust
Dust is an enterprise AI platform that helps teams create and deploy specialized AI agents that combine leading AI models with company knowledge sources.
Founder: Gabriel Hubert
Open Roles: Engineering, Marketing, Data
Listen Labs
Listen Labs is an AI powered customer research platform.
Founder: Alfred Wahlforss
Open Roles: Engineering, Design, Customer Success, Account Executive
Juicebox
Juicebox is an AI recruiting platform that helps companies find and engage talent.
Founder: Ishan Gupta
Open Roles: Engineering, Account Executive, Design
Promise
By automating processes and integrating data-driven solutions, Promise eliminates delays, reduces costs, and ensures public programs deliver results.
Founder: Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins
Open Roles: Engineering
Cline
Cline is a developer tools company building an open-source AI agent that takes over the entire software development workflow.
Founder: Saoud Rizwan
Open Roles: Engineering, GTM, Sales, Account Executives, Product
Impulse Labs
Impulse Labs is an electrification company that designs and manufactures next-generation electric home appliances, primarily focusing on cooktops with integrated battery storage.
Founder: Sam D’Amico
Open Roles: Engineering, Engineering Management
Couldn’t make this showcase? Feeling the FYSK FOMO? Apply now to our community and subscribe to our newsletter to be the first to hear about our next show.