🎧 FYSK is launching a podcast!

We’re bringing you stories from our favorite new founders working through the early innings of company and team building – when things are fragile, messy, and uncertain.

Sep 19, 2023

At Founders You Should Know we host a monthly IRL startup showcase in San Francisco to help job-seekers connect with breakout startups. We meet a lot of interesting people building their vision – often before they’ve even started a company. And after meeting hundreds of new founders, we feature our favorites on stage.

But our events just scratch the surface. There are so many deeper stories from brilliant founders shaping the future of technology who haven’t yet become household names. So we’re launching a podcast to dive into the most interesting stories we hear. In our first few episodes we’ll hear from the following:

Douwe Kiela, who raised $20m to build new AI foundation models for enterprises
Afshawn Lotfi, who hasn’t even technically started a company yet — but has been designing and simulating AI generated jet engines to discover new approaches to automating aerospace design
Mike Gao, who is fixing a $100 billion dollar problem in hospital billing.

We’re sharing their untold stories.

We know what great looks like because we’ve seen it from the earliest days. Over the last decades, we’ve met thousands of founders and invested in hundreds of them — often when they were only 2 people “in a garage”. Dozens of these have now grown up to become household names, publicly traded companies, or gigantic private companies worth billions of dollars. Now we’re sharing our earliest conversations to give you a behind-the-scenes look.

We’ll touch on how dramatic shifts in our world today create opportunities for these new ideas to come to life. Ultimately we hope the stories of these founders inspire you to connect with them, to join their waitlists, to try an early version of their products, or ultimately to join them in building their vision of the future. These are the stories of the Founders You Should Know.

E1: Unlocking the Power of Generative AI in Enterprises with Douwe Kiela (Founder of Contextual AI)

Meet Douwe Kiela, the founder of Contextual AI. He shares his experiences from his time at Facebook AI Research (FAIR) in New York, where he got to work with AI legends like Yann LeCun and Jason Weston. Notably, the team also made a significant contribution to the AI community by developing PyTorch, an open-source deep learning framework.

During his time at FAIR, Douwe and his team developed Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), a system that separates a model's memory from its response generation, significantly reducing AI 'hallucinations' and boasts speeds 25 times faster than other comparable language models. In our conversation, we discussed: