Fevered determination: Building Zalos from zero to enterprise in 5 weeks. Hg's Jonathan Wulkan speaks to founder, William Fairbairn

Fevered determination: Building Zalos from zero to enterprise in 5 weeks. Hg's Jonathan Wulkan speaks to founder, William Fairbairn

In this illuminating conversation from the frontier of AI-native startups, William Fairbairn, founder of Zalos.ai and part of Y Combinator's class of 2025, reveals what it takes to build at Silicon Valley velocity. Just five weeks after launch, Zalos is already deployed with major enterprise customers, automating finance workflows through computer-use agents that execute tasks like humans—extracting contract terms, initiating billing, and reconciling cash. Fairbairn's insights into Y Combinator's evolved wisdom for the AI era, particularly "forward-deployed engineering", demonstrate how the startup playbook has been fundamentally rewritten. With funding bars rising to $2 million ARR in 12 months just to reach Series A, and "supernovas" scaling from $1 million to $100 million in 18 months, this postcard from the edge of software leadership captures the intensity and opportunity of building in an era where the rules change weekly.

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Episoder(63)

The rogue agent problem: A conversation with Gil Elbaz at the Hg Digital Summit

The rogue agent problem: A conversation with Gil Elbaz at the Hg Digital Summit

In this episode, John Cranmer is joined by Gil Elbaz, Co-Founder and Chief AI Officer at Onyx Security, the company building the secure AI control plane for the agentic era. Gil, formerly in the CTO o...

10 Jun 34min

Patrick Debois on why context is the new code: A conversation from the Hg Digital Summit

Patrick Debois on why context is the new code: A conversation from the Hg Digital Summit

The inventor of DevOps explains why AI needs engineering rigour and human collaboration. The engineer who coined "DevOps" in 2009 thinks he is watching the same pattern play out again, only faster. I...

28 Mai 30min

Jonathan Sanders, CEO of Light: fear is not a strategy

Jonathan Sanders, CEO of Light: fear is not a strategy

When Jonathan Sanders pitched Light to investors, the reaction was unanimous: rebuilding ERP would take a decade and a hundred million dollars. He did it in two years, with AI at the core. Today Light...

15 Mai 54min

Evan Goldberg of NetSuite: 3 decades and 2 platform shifts

Evan Goldberg of NetSuite: 3 decades and 2 platform shifts

Evan Goldberg co-founded NetSuite in 1998 with a five-minute phone call to Larry Ellison when his "graphics stuff" wasn't going great. He pioneered cloud computing before SaaS existed, sold to Oracle ...

23 Apr 31min

Marjorie Janiewicz of Mistral AI: flipping the adoption curve - why SaaS with data can win in an AI world

Marjorie Janiewicz of Mistral AI: flipping the adoption curve - why SaaS with data can win in an AI world

Marjorie Janiewicz has sold enterprise software through every platform shift for three decades: Oracle, MySQL, SAP, MongoDB, HackerOne. Now as Chief Revenue Officer at Mistral AI, she's taking a Frenc...

17 Mar 51min

The race for alpha: Varun Anand of Clay on inventing a new role and why GTM needs a new AI strategy

The race for alpha: Varun Anand of Clay on inventing a new role and why GTM needs a new AI strategy

Most B2B software founders don't spend four years working on presidential campaigns. Varun Anand did - on Hillary Clinton's 2016 run - and he argues that startups and political campaigns share the sam...

3 Mar 22min

Everything, everywhere, but not all at once: Hg’s Matthew Brockman on what's really happening in software right now

Everything, everywhere, but not all at once: Hg’s Matthew Brockman on what's really happening in software right now

In this rare internal conversation, Matthew Brockman, Hg's Chief Investment Officer, offers an insider's view on what's actually working versus what's still hype. Far beyond speculation, this is priva...

20 Feb 38min

A certain level of chaos is healthy: Franz Faerber on fighting bureaucracy and the importance of deep domain knowledge in AI

A certain level of chaos is healthy: Franz Faerber on fighting bureaucracy and the importance of deep domain knowledge in AI

Franz Faerber, co-founder and CEO of Everest Systems and former architect of SAP HANA, challenges Sam Altman's vision of throwaway software, arguing humans crave stability, while making the case for w...

17 Feb 52min

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