START: Nora Xiao & J Yim, Co-Founders, Rollup: "Years of user context, in minutes."
Your phone has years of context about you.
Yet most new apps still start from zero.
Where you go. What you eat. What you wear. How your interests change over time.
J Yim and Nora Xiao saw an opportunity in all that information sitting in people's camera rolls.
So they built Rollup.
An SDK that turns photos into personal context, helping apps understand users without starting from scratch
Photos stay on the phone, while apps gain insights into users' interests, habits, and preferences
For example, screenshot six bomber jackets from different brands, and a shopping app could recognize what you're looking for without asking.
But the real breakthrough came when other founders started asking to buy the technology powering Rollup's original shopping app.
So J and Nora pivoted from building an app to selling the underlying SDK.
Just nine days later, they reported six figures in contracted ARR and seven figures in pipeline revenue.
Some customers even skipped the free trial and asked to pay immediately.
Their vision? A future where every consumer app becomes a personal AI, powered by a deeper understanding of its users.
They started by building one personalized shopping app.
Now they're building the technology that could make every consumer app personal.
🎙️ Nora Xiao (https://www.linkedin.com/in/noramxiao/) & J Yim (https://www.linkedin.com/in/j-jw-yim/), Co-Founders, Rollup (https://www.tryrollup.com/), with Guest Host: Maanav Agrawal (https://www.linkedin.com/in/maanav-agrawal/), CEO & Co-Founder, Memoir on Fondo (https://www.linkedin.com/company/fondohq) START
01:08 Meet Rollup Co-Founders J Yim and Nora Xiao
02:13 Turning camera rolls into personal context
03:17 From shopping app to SDK
04:22 Unlocking the value of personal photos
05:11 Identifying moments, trends, and shopping intent
06:18 Six figures in contracted ARR after nine days
07:14 Finding product-market fit
08:16 The strategy behind Rollup's pivot
09:12 Building a strong co-founder relationship
10:21 What inspired J and Nora to become entrepreneurs
12:14 The future of personal AI
13:19 Expanding beyond photos
14:08 Privacy, on-device AI, and user trust
Check it out at tryrollup.com (https://www.tryrollup.com/)
26 Oct 2026
START: Alex Kolchinski, Founder & CEO, ThunderPhone "Voice AI that nails the calls others fumble"
AI coding agents learned how to build voice AI from the internet. That might be the problem.
The standard approach is simple. Transcribe the caller. Send the text to a model. Turn the answer back into speech.
Three steps. Countless posts and repositories. Repeated so often that coding agents tend to reproduce the same architecture.
Alex Kolchinski's bet at ThunderPhone is that the default is already becoming obsolete.
Instead of one fixed pipeline, his team mixes and matches models. Sometimes several cheaper ones instead of one expensive one. Sometimes audio goes straight to the LLM, skipping transcription entirely.
Every decision comes down to three competing priorities: quality, speed, and cost.
Alex calls it the Ferrari approach. While other teams have good reasons to build systems that work well enough to scale, ThunderPhone focuses on squeezing more performance out of every component.
And there's a catch. Alex doesn't expect that technical advantage to last forever. Foundation models keep improving, and coding agents are beginning to figure out better architectures themselves.
Until then, the edge is knowing what to build differently.
ThunderPhone: "Voice AI that nails the calls others fumble"
🎙️ Alex Kolchinski, (https://www.linkedin.com/in/kolchinski/) Founder & CEO, ThunderPhone (https://www.linkedin.com/company/thunderphone)on Fondo (https://www.linkedin.com/company/fondohq/) START
01:07 Why ThunderPhone moves beyond the standard voice AI pipeline
01:42 Navigating the tradeoff between quality, latency, and price
02:35 Why Storm prioritizes getting real customer calls right
03:45 How software and B2B changed Alex's founder playbook
04:45 Why the traditional three-step voice AI pipeline is becoming obsolete
05:00 How voice AI is outperforming humans on transactional calls
06:32 Why ThunderPhone isn't training its own foundation model
08:15 How two founders built the platform in 6–12 months and where coding agents fall short
09:30 The Model T versus Ferrari approach to building voice AI
10:15 Spark at 2¢, Bolt at 5¢, and Storm at 9¢ per minute
Check out thunderphone.com (https://thunderphone.com/)
20 Oct 2026
START: George Rose, CEO & Co-Founder, Rise Reforming "Unlocking resilience for the chemical industry"
The US produces enough biogas to make over $20 billion worth of chemicals a year
60% of it is wasted or flared in low-margin applications
It comes off wastewater plants, farms and landfills
Gas a large-scale chemical plant can't capture
So Rise Reforming goes to the gas
Its modular technology fits inside a shipping container and runs on-site
The result is the cheapest feedstock and no fossil fuels as raw material
Out come chemicals like dimethyl ether, methanol and dimethyl carbonate
That last one has no domestic manufacturer in the US
The three founders met studying molecular engineering at UChicago
They got close over late-night problem sets
Environmentalists turned engineers, drawn in by the chemical industry's 5% share of global emissions
Then Y Combinator, to learn how to sell chemicals
1,800+ hours of stable syngas production
First in the Americas to produce syngas from wastewater biogas
A binding biogas supply agreement and a conditional DME offtake for its first commercial unit
DME is first, targeting aerosol and propane starting in 2027
Rise Reforming sums it up in six words:
"Unlocking resilience for the chemical industry"
🎙️ George Rose (https://www.linkedin.com/in/george-rose25/), Founder & CEO, Rise Reforming (https://www.linkedin.com/company/risereforming/) on Fondo (https://www.linkedin.com/company/fondohq/) START
00:45 Supply-secure chemicals from waste gases
01:45 Why centralized plants are exposed to conflicts and natural disasters
02:00 Making the chemicals where the waste is actually generated
02:32 Dimethyl carbonate and the lack of a single domestic manufacturer
03:04 DME, methanol, and the markets Rise Reforming is targeting
04:48 Environmentalists turned engineers
05:32 Green premium?
05:57 Price parity with the natural gas alternative
06:27 A new methanol process and the cheapest feedstock
07:05 Meeting cofounder at UChicago over late-night problem sets
08:25 Doing YC to learn how to sell chemicals
Check out www.rise-reforming.com (https://www.rise-reforming.com/)
Who has been a guest on Startup Growth Podcast
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