YC Demo Day Week made us miss the conversations the hosts had with the founders who went through the popular Accelerate program. In each episode of Found, hosts Darrell Etherington and Jordan Crook dig into a founder’s background, the peaks and pits of starting and running a company, and the connections and mentors who helped along the way. And, unsurprisingly, when a YC founder comes up, the conversation often turns to how their time at an accelerator has been a formative experience for their company and for them as a leader. So, if you want to hear the YC founders break down their three months, their best lessons and overall lessons.
Here are some of our favorite conversations with these founders, in no particular order. Enjoy!
1. Hana Mohan from Magic Bell
In this episode, Darrell and Jordan talk to the founder and CEO of Magigbell, a startup that’s doing a great job of solving notifications for other software products. Enter Hanna’s path to entrepreneurship, a self-proclaimed ‘high maintenance worker’, participating in Y Combinator and her experience transitioning through the startup world.
We caught up with Hannah recently to see how MagicBell is growing. Look at the part here.
2. Elizabeth Ruzo from Adin
We’re in the business of talking to some really amazing people who are working to solve incredibly difficult problems—but Addin’s founder and CEO, Elizabeth Ruzzo, might be one of the most amazing founders we’ve ever talked to. Not only did she advocate for women to be prescribed birth control, not just birth control that can cause harm, but she founded the organization and raised funds as the sole employee of the company. She talks to Darrell and Jordan about the challenges she faced as a sole founder/employee while raising money for a birth control solution, why she decided to leave academia, and the complex regulatory hurdles it took to get Aden off the ground.
3. Vivian Wang from Landed
In this episode, Vivian Wang, founder and CEO of Landed, talks about her mission to connect blue collar workers with high-quality career opportunities. From recruiting to screening to arranging interviews and facilitating feedback observations for CEOs, Landed makes their workplaces more desirable. They are also improving the financial security of employees by helping them grow after they leave the job. Darrell, Jordan, and Vivian Covid showed us how important all blue-collar workers are and how lean their workers are, and she plans to improve her experience at these jobs by helping them get paid, build loans, and pay off faster. Price reduction.
4. Laura Crabtree from Epsilon3
Laura Crabtree, founder of Space Enterprise, spoke with Darrell and Jordan about the launch of Epsilon 3 and how it’s helping companies in the space industry (and beyond) plan, track and document their biggest projects and missions. In their growing market, they discuss the benefits of building relationships with your investors and three founders.
5. Yusuf Sherwani from Kit Genius
Yusuf Sherwani CEO and one of the three doctor/founders of Quit Genius, an app that uses CBT therapy and other proven methods to help patients overcome addiction issues. He spoke with Dirrell and Jordan about the regulatory hurdles they had to navigate and create a telehealth company before Covid, and how they convinced investors that being research-driven was critical to building a patient-focused product.
6. Carolyn Mooney from Nextmv
Carolyn Mooney is the co-founder and CEO of Nextmv, which helps companies make effective decisions at scale—whether it’s packing Amazon’s distribution or planning Uber’s pool route. In this episode, she talks to Darrell and Jordan about how Nextmv software improves decision-making and roadmap planning, as well as enabling engineers to work across different types of teams. They also discuss how coaching high school volleyball made her a better leader and forced her to prioritize work-life balance.
7. Leigh Honeywell from Tall Poppy
Leigh Honeywell has dedicated her career to preventing bad things from happening to people on the Internet. She’s spent time at Slack, Heroku, and Microsoft, and is well versed in the technical and human side of online harassment, and has seen firsthand how it can escalate into hacking or worse. That’s how public-facing HR organizations like media orgs developed Tall Poppy, a platform to help prevent this kind of spread. The Tall Poppy model turns an unscalable business into a fast-growing startup.
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