Founders You Should Know - Nov 13 Showcase recap
Make our "whisper networks" work for you
In the past two and half years at Founders You Should Know, we’ve been very successful in finding and featuring breakout startups because we have deep “whisper networks” of friends who give us intel on the companies you should consider joining. If you’d joined Writer when we featured them in July 2022, you would have 10x’d your equity today. Similarly, you would also be at a 10x if you’d joined Anthropic when we featured them in February 2023. And if you’d joined Cursor when we introduced them to you in August 2023, you’d be at over 30x. You would also have seen what hypergrowth looks like from the inside. You would have turbo-charged your career, armed yourself with valuable lessons to potentially start your own company, and accumulated assets for your own financial security. If you had received a $100,000 option grant at any of these companies listed above at the time we featured them, today, you’d have between $1m and multi-millions of dollars in compensation value. And these aren’t the only examples. We’ve featured dozens of companies with similar stories. We do all this hard work of finding and featuring breakout companies because we know how meaningful joining great companies at the right time can be – and we’re certain some of the companies below are ones that we’ll be talking about a year or two from now. 🙂
As we head into Thanksgiving, we’re grateful for all the energy, enthusiasm, and generosity you’ve brought to our community this past year.
We’ll be taking a short break from shows over the holidays, but if you’d like to chat with any of the founders below, send us a short email blurb to set context and we’d be happy to suggest a connection!
Apply now to join us when we’re back on February 5th in SF. Looking forward to seeing you all next year!
Gridware
What it is: Software and hardware for utilities to monitor, manage, and troubleshoot grid failures in real-time
Founder: Hall Chen
Open roles: Software Engineers, Hardware Engineers, Operations, Product Managers
Arcade
What it is: Interactive storytelling tool to create dynamic visual demos
Founder: Caroline Clark
Open roles: Head of Engineering, Full-stack Engineer, AI Engineer, Growth Engineer, Data Scientist, Customer Success, Account Executives
LangChain
What it is: Developer tools to build applications with LLMs
Founder: Harrison Chase
Open roles: Frontend Engineer, Full-stack Engineer, Backend Engineer, Infrastructure Engineer, Solution Architect and Product Designer
Vapi
What it is: Developer platform for deploying AI voice agents
Founder: Jordan Dearsley
Open roles: Senior Frontend Engineer, Senior Backend Engineer, Senior Infrastructure Engineer, Senior Growth Engineer, Forward Deployed Engineer, Founding Designer, Founding Sales, Chief of Staff, Recruiter
Instant
What it is: Infrastructure for building real-time, collaborative apps
Founder: Joe Averbukh
Open roles: Founding Engineers
Reducto
What it is: API that provides high quality data ingestion for LLMs
Founder: Adit Abraham
Open roles: Infrastructure Engineer, ML Engineer and Full-stack Engineer
Skip
What it is: "E-bike for walking" powered by ultralight robotics
Founder: Kathryn Zealand
Open roles: Senior Software Engineer, Cloud Infrastructure Engineer, Frontend Engineer, Test Engineer and Mechanical Engineer
Advex AI
What it is: GenAI Synthetic data platform for manufacturing
Founder: Qasim Wani
Open roles: Infrastructure Engineer, Full-stack Engineer, and Researchers (Diffusion and Representation Learning)
Fireworks AI
What it is: Inference engine to build production-ready, compound AI systems
Founder: Chenyu Zhao
Open roles: Backend Engineer, Frontend Engineer, Forward Deployed Engineer and AI researcher
Ello
What it is: AI teacher for children
Founder: Catalin Moreno Voss
Open roles: ML Tech Lead/Head of ML, Senior ML Engineer, Senior Mobile Engineer, Design Engineer, and Senior Designer & Illustrator
11x
What it is: AI-powered digital workers
Founder: Hasan Sukkar
Open roles: Engineering, Product Managers, and Designers
Love it, thanks for sharing the recap!