The best startups hire for attitude and train for skill. You can teach someone to code, but you can’t teach them to care.
🤝 Good Morning and Welcome Back to Good People 🤝
A weekly newsletter for 36,000+ elite engineers, founders, and investors who had the day off while the internet took a smoke break.
“Oh no, this guy again?” Yep, hey there 👋
I’m Ryan, Head of Marketing here at Coastal x Good People. Last week I announced we’re building an exclusive talent network for elite engineers who are shaping the startup ecosystem.
📣 Private Slack
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🎤 Q&As with Founders and VCs
There’s still time to secure your spot as an early member. If you’re interested: Schedule a 15-minute call with me here.
Talk soon,
Ryan
P.S. – If you know another engineer who'd be perfect for this, feel free to forward this their way. Good people know good people, after all.
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📆 This Week in the Newsletter 📆
🥳 Happy Friday! We’re officially one day closer to the singularity; at least that’s what our future AI-Overlord’s dad seems to think. Find the link to Altman’s latest post below, Console’s $6.2M Seed, a website for expecting founders, and of course 8 more hot startups hiring.
💸 Notable Fundraise: Console raises $6.2M seed round led by Thrive Capital. Founded by Andrei Serban, Console is automating all of the mundane, repetitive workflows that keep enterprises running with AI agents that are deeply integrated into all business systems. Scale AI, Flock Safety, Calendly, and Bloomerang are already using them to augment their IT teams with AI. Read how help-desks will never be the same →
👨💻 Website Of The Week: BetaList is like a sneak peek into the startup world’s fever dreams, showcasing pre-launch apps and tools with bizarre premises—like AI-generated workout playlists or blockchain-based virtual cow farms. It’s a curated feed of the wildest startup ideas before they hit the mainstream. Explore cutting-edge tech and terrible ideas in their infancy →
📖 What We’re Reading: Sam Altman’s latest blog post, “The Gentle Singularity,” explores the rapid acceleration of AI and its societal impact. It’s a sweeping meditation on how humanity is crossing the threshold into an era of digital superintelligence. Jobs will change, some will disappear, and society will need to adapt. On X, Sam said it “may be the last one like this i write with no AI help at all.” Read The Gentle Singularity Here →
🎧 What We’re Listening To: Friend of Good People, David Perell, sat down with Sam Altman to discuss how writing clarifies thinking, his note-taking habits, and the impact of AI on writing. Altman and Perell dive deep into his personal writing system, the evolving relationship between humans and AI in writing, and the broader implications for creativity and productivity. Watch the full interview →
Remember to forward this email to any friends who you think have what it takes to work at a tier-1 VC Backed Startup.
👇 Alright on to the good stuff 👇
🔥 Hot Startups Hiring🔥
🇺🇸 Startup #1 🇺🇸
🏙️ Hiring Location: SF
🛠️ Industry: AI, Robotics
💸 Round/Funding: Seed, $15M
🏦 Investors: Founders Fund, Founders of Anduril and Palantir, Thrive Capital
🙏🏼 Mission/Vision: This startup is building the enterprise robotics company. Previously, at Anduril and Tesla, the team built autonomous systems that are now deployed across the globe. This startup’s mission is to make the world safer by bringing these situational awareness capabilities to American companies.
🏗️ Product: This startup’s first product is a wireless camera mesh that detects physical activity (intrusions, safety issues, vehicle movement, etc.) in real time—up to 1km from power and connectivity sources.
It enables security and operations teams to:
Instantly detect threats or anomalies
Get full situational awareness at the edge of large or remote physical environments
Customize real-time alerts via an intuitive interface
This isn't just a surveillance tool, it's the first step in autonomous response systems like drone-based deterrents and robotic logistics, already in the product pipeline.
📣 Talking Points:
Built by ex-Anduril, Tesla, and Special Forces operators - this startup is turning the defense-grade perception stack into something scalable for U.S. businesses.
This startup already has 10 Global 2000s under contract — not just “interested,” but locked in. PMF is real and the upside is massive.
From edge mesh computing to real-time autonomy - you’ll be working at the intersection of robotics, AI, and hardware—helping define a brand new category.
🧑💻 Roles: Full Stack Engineer; Back End
💸 Salary: $150-$250K
🚙 Days Required Onsite: 5
🛠️ Startup #2 🛠️
🏙️ Hiring Location: NYC
🛠️ Industry: AI, Consumer
💸 Round/Funding: Seed, $6M
🏦 Investors: Sequoia
🙏🏼 Mission/Vision: This startup is building advanced AI and optimization software for home service businesses — think plumbing, HVAC, electrical — to solve the operational and dispatching challenges these companies face daily.
🏗️ Product: Their core product helps these businesses dispatch the right technician to the right job at the right time — using AI.
Most home service companies rely on outdated software and intuition.
This startup is automating complex decisions like technician-job matching using AI/ML/LLMs — a hard technical problem with huge financial impact.
Their software already generated $10M+ incremental revenue for a single enterprise customer in just 2 months.
Product Portfolio consists of:
AI Dispatch System (core)
AI Voice Agents & CV tools (e.g., image-based diagnostics)
Optimization Solvers & Real-time reshuffling
📣 Talking Points:
$10M+ value delivered in 60 days - This startup’s AI-powered dispatching directly increased revenue by $10M for one customer in 2 months—proving real-world ROI at scale.
Top-tier engineering team and 6-day grind culture - Engineers from Roblox, Meta, and ICPC World Finals work side-by-side in a 6-day/week in-office environment designed for speed and ownership.
🧑💻 Roles: Full Stack (Back End emphasis); AI / LLM Engineer
💸 Salary: $175-$275k
🚙 Days Required Onsite: 6
📊 Startup #3 📊
🏙️ Hiring Location: SF
🛠️ Industry: AI, Advertising
💸 Round/Funding: Seed, $7.3M
🏦 Investors: Canaan, J Ventures, NEO
🙏🏼 Mission/Vision: This startup’s mission is to enable clients of all sizes to easily and efficiently execute advertising strategies that optimize return on ad spend. In little more than a year, their data-driven, tech-enabled approach has become thoroughly disruptive, displacing traditional incumbents and winning return business in the highly lucrative half-trillion dollar per year digital ads market.
Traditional agencies have been given notice: This startup is building the future of advertising.
🏗️ Product: They compete directly with traditional ad agencies who are limited to human scale. This startup automates ad buying, strategy, and creative decisions using rich data models. This tooling enables their agency to start faster, act quicker, and iterate more efficiently than traditional agency models.
📣 Talking Points:
AI-native ad agency model - This startup is doing what traditional agencies can’t: automating campaign execution and creative iteration with state-of-the-art machine learning.
Backed by legends who built the internet - Investors include Scott Banister (invented search ads, early PayPal board) and Steve Huffman (Reddit co-founder & CEO)—a high-conviction bet on the next great performance engine.
🧑💻 Roles: Senior Software Engineer; Principal Engineer
🚙 Days Required Onsite: 4
🏦 Startup #4 🏦
🏙️ Hiring Location: NYC
🛠️ Industry: AI, Fintech
💸 Round/Funding: Series A, $32.2M
🏦 Investors: Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Canapi Ventures, Curql
🙏🏼 Mission/Vision: Increase the stability and performance of US financial institutions and the communities they serve.
🏗️ Product: This startup operates a deposit network designed to modernize how financial institutions manage liquidity, extended deposit insurance, and compliance—all embedded directly into digital banking platforms.
Core Product Functions:
Extended FDIC/NCUA insurance: Automatically splits large deposits (e.g., $5M) into FDIC-insured $250K chunks across multiple partner institutions
Balance Sheet Optimization: Enables banks to "sweep" or source funds to optimize capital usage, comply with regulatory caps, and enhance lending ability
Embedded into digital banking: Unlike legacy providers, this startup integrates directly with platforms like Fiserv and Jack Henry for a seamless UX
📣 Talking Points:
Backed by the Best, Building the Future - With backing from a16z and the founder of their biggest competitor (Gene Ludwig of IntraFi), this startup is not just disrupting the system—they’re rewriting it with the blessing and brains of the legacy leaders.
Solving a Post-SVB Critical Need - This startup’s platform is designed to prevent the next banking crisis—by helping banks retain large deposits safely, compliantly, and competitively. It’s a foundational fix for systemic risk.
Massive Impact, Tiny Team - With only 26 employees, this startup is already working with over 100 banks and some of the largest credit unions in the U.S. The scale of impact relative to team size is rare—and every hire shapes the product and culture.
🧑💻 Roles: Senior Software Engineer; FDE (Forward Deplayed)
💸 Salary: $140-$200k+
🚙 Days Required Onsite: 5
🤖 Startup #5 🤖
🏙️ Hiring Location: SF, South Bay
🛠️ Industry: AI, SaaS
💸 Round/Funding: Seed, $23M
🏦 Investors: Coatue, GTM Capital, Karthik Narsimhan, Tal Shaked, The Anthology Fund, Vinod Marur
🙏🏼 Mission/Vision: This Startup is on a mission to unlock real-time, self-service data insights for enterprises by building a cutting-edge AI platform that seamlessly handles structured and unstructured data. Their vision is to make trustable, agentic data access the new normal—replacing bottlenecks with autonomy and speed across decision-making teams.
🏗️ Product: This Startup is building the agentic AI platform for enterprise data—bringing real-time, explainable insights directly to the fingertips of non-technical users like ops leaders, product managers, and execs. The system spans internal structured data (think Snowflake/BigQuery) and unstructured knowledge (Confluence, Slack, Notion, etc.).
Engineers at this startup tackle:
LLM grounding + retrieval augmentation at scale
Self-serve, low-latency querying over massive datasets
Robust infra for multi-modal enterprise data access
📣 Talking Points:
Built by AI legends – From ex-Google Search to Rubrik, Tagtile (acq. FB), AWS, Glean, and Databricks—This startup’s team has built infrastructure powering trillions of queries.
Tech with purpose – Solving real-world data pain for CDOs and CIOs. The AI actually works—and doesn’t hallucinate.
Your fingerprints will be everywhere – You’ll help define the product roadmap, ship core systems, and scale to Fortune 100 usage—while the company is still lean and early.
🧑💻 Roles: Full Stack Engineer; Front End; Back End; Machine Learning
💸 Salary: $170-$250k
🚙 Days Required Onsite: 5
⛑️ Startup #6 ⛑️
🏙️ Hiring Location: NYC
🛠️ Industry: AI, Healthcare
💸 Round/Funding: Seed, $11M
🏦 Investors: A*, Box, Epic Ventures, Liquid2, Maverick, SV Angel
🙏🏼 Mission/Vision: Increase America’s health span and provide 100M+ American employees and their families with an affordable, accessible, high quality, and aligned advanced primary-care experience.
🏗️ Product: A B2B2C healthcare platform that connects large employers and health insurers with high-quality, cost-effective advanced primary care providers. It operates as a marketplace that helps employers choose, contract with, and offer access to top-tier clinics and care organizations like One Medical, Galileo, Marathon, and others.
Here’s how it works, simplified:
Employers (like 7-Eleven) join the platform to provide better healthcare benefits for their employees.
Advanced primary care providers list their services on the marketplace.
This startup facilitates the contracting, onboarding, and employee engagement process — making it easier for employers to offer accessible, quality healthcare without the usual friction.
It’s like a matchmaking + infrastructure layer between modern care providers and the employers who want to offer them as benefits.
📣 Talking Points:
$11M raised from top investors like A*, SV Angel, Liquid2, and Box — building the next-gen health benefits platform for large employers.
Early traction with major customers like 7-Eleven and large employer groups (HTA, Cincinnati Employers Group), with 2–10x industry engagement rates from employees.
B2B2C marketplace model that connects employers to high-quality advanced primary care groups (e.g. One Medical, Galileo), already scaling nationally.
🧑💻 Roles: Staff Software Engineer
💸 Salary: $175k-$200k
🚙 Days Required Onsite: 2
🪄 Startup #7 🪄
🏙️ Hiring Location: SF
🛠️ Industry: AI, DevTooling
💸 Round/Funding: Series A, $20M
🏦 Investors: First Round, YC
🙏🏼 Mission/Vision: This startup is an AI-powered workflow automation platform that enables users to automate digital tasks through a no-code, drag-and-drop interface. The platform connects various integrations like Google Sheets, Slack, YouTube, websites, and emails to automate mundane digital workflows.
🏗️ Product: Platform for automating complex work with AI and a simple drag and drop interface.
Drag-and-Drop Builder: Visual workflow builder requiring no coding skills
Modular Design: Pre-built modules for common automation tasksNo-Code Interface
Scalability: Handles enterprise-level automation workflows
AI Integration: Native AI capabilities vs. traditional rule-based automation
📣 Talking Points:
Build really powerful workflow automations - use AI without needing to hire an engineering team or be an engineer yourself.
Customers are incredible - include Instacart, Webflow, Samsara, Rippling, Triptease, etc (to name a few)
Building a 10 person, billions dollar company. There are only a few spots left.
🧑💻 Roles: Senior Full Stack; Senior Back End; Full Stack Engineer; Backend Engineer
💸 Salary: $150 - 300K
🚙 Days Required Onsite: 5
☁️ Startup #8 ☁️
🏙️ Hiring Location: NYC
🛠️ Industry: AI, DevTooling
💸 Round/Funding: Series A, $24.3M
🏦 Investors: Aaron Levie, Anton Troynikov, Buckley Ventures, Daniel Gross, Framework Ventures, Nat Friedman, Naval, Sound Ventures
🙏🏼 Mission/Vision: This startup is on a mission to eliminate cloud complexity. By combining deep infrastructure insight with powerful AI agents, the company automates configuration, optimization, and incident response—freeing engineers to focus on building, not debugging.
Vision: Infrastructure that configures, optimizes, and heals itself with minimal human intervention.
🏗️ Product: This startup’s current product automates cloud cost optimization by delivering personalized recommendations tailored to each customer’s infrastructure profile.
The upcoming product evolves this into an AI-driven infrastructure agent that:
Understands infrastructure deeply
Optimizes configurations
Automatically detects and resolves issues
Launches infrastructure in its best state from day one
Operates under outcome-based instructions (e.g., “keep this fast and reliable”)
📣 Talking Points:
From Monitoring to Autonomy - This startup isn’t building another DevOps tool—it’s building self-operating infrastructure that acts on your behalf, not just reports issues.
Proactive, Not Reactive - The AI agent prevents problems before they happen, optimizes configurations upfront, and handles outages without human input.
Deep Stack Automation - Competing with players like DataDog, This startup goes deeper—not just observing infra, but managing and evolving it in real time.
🧑💻 Roles: Product Engineer; Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning; Infrastructure Engineer; Senior Back End
💸 Salary: $200 - 300K
🚙 Days Required Onsite: 5
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