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ODF

ODF

Technology, Information and Internet

San Francisco, California 67,906 followers

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About us

Our mission is to help more people start better startups. ODF is a program we created over four years ago to help those at the exploration stage of starting a company. So far, we've helped over 1000 companies get started and raise over $2 billion. Starting a company is really exciting, but there are so many things you need to figure out in order to actually build one. - "Who might I start my company with?" - “What might we build?” - “Who might our initial customers be?” - “Should we raise funding soon, or should we try to bootstrap in the beginning?" These and many more questions are what we refer to as the "missing pieces"—the things you need to figure out to know if starting a company is right for you and what company you should ultimately build. With ODF, we bring together 80 to 100 people who are at the very same stage as you. They're all exceptionally talented, and they're all trying to figure it out together.

Website
https://www.joinodf.com/
Industry
Technology, Information and Internet
Company size
2-10 employees
Headquarters
San Francisco, California
Type
Privately Held
Specialties
Venture Capital, Incubation, Co-Founder Matching, Angel Investors, In-Person Cohorts, and solofounders

Locations

  • Primary

    2431 Mission Street

    San Francisco, California 94110, US

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Employees at ODF

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Updates

  • View organization page for ODF
    ODF

    67,906 followers

    Congrats Rio (OD21) and Gerry!

    View profile for Rio Atmadja
    Rio Atmadja

    bolt.new has acquired Dokai. When Gerry and I started Dokai, we took a leap of faith. Through the countless ups and downs we kept it simple: embrace ambiguity and obsess over customers’ problems. First and foremost, we’d like to thank all of our customers. We appreciate your trust, and it’s been incredibly rewarding working with you.  Our sincerest gratitude also goes out to our investors, Character Capital and Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator, as well as our angel investors, including Sam Nelson, Veni Johanna, Rachel Zhao, Becca Cai, and Alicia Caitlin. Thank you for believing in us. Thank you to our advisors for your continued support: George Kuruvilla, Damon Mclean, Damian Gona, & Othman B.. Finally, to our team: we did it. https://lnkd.in/gihP6wxq

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  • View organization page for ODF
    ODF

    67,906 followers

    Max and Alan Zhao met during ODF's second cohort and decided to co-found Warmly. 7 years later: acquisition by HubSpot. Congrats to the team!

    View profile for maximus greenwald
    maximus greenwald

    Big news: HubSpot (NYSE: HUBS) is acquiring Warmly,. Well that feels surreal to write. Today, I feel just as excited as 7 years ago when I was starting up! Back then, I was giddy. Just a guy with an idea & a few cofounders hoping to change the world of GTM forever. And then reality struck - building a company was hard! Every day we learned a little more, failed a little less and 6 pivots later advances in LLMs finally unlocked the product we’d been trying to build. In 2023 we took years of battle scars building our own GTM & put everything we had into building AI Agents that would modernize how marketing & sales teams worked together. Enter HubSpot. In 2023 we built our first integration. (It was HubSpot) In 2024 we had 20 customers integrated with HubSpot In 2025 we had 100 customers integrated with HubSpot In 2026 we now have 223 paying customers integrated with HubSpot! As Warmly has grown, HubSpot has always been there for us. - As Warmly’s AI Agents started booking meetings for customers, HubSpot’s Data Hub was a key source. - As Warmly’s Inbound Agent enticed & de-anonymized website visitors, HubSpot’s Smart CRM was where we stored chat transcripts. - As Warmly’s TAM Agent created differentiated fresh lead lists, HubSpot’s dashboards showed GTM Execs how much pipeline we got them. And today, we’re joining forces to build the future of AI-native GTM and help our customers grow their business with both Warmth and HEART (if you know, you know). So what happens next? 1/ To our customers: this is just the beginning. Thank you for taking a bet on us and making us into the business we are today. Stay tuned for more epic releases coming soon. 2/ To our Warmsters past and present: Every feature shipped, every customer won, every late night, every hard conversation, this company exists because you always exhibited our core value to always Add A Comma, in everything you do. 3/ To my cofounders new and old: Alan, Carina, Keegan, Ryan, Val. You’re my best friends, the reason I can tackle every curveball that was thrown our way. We’ve climbed mountains and persevered. Thank you. 4/ To our new teammates: Angela, Richa, Jared, Duncan, Yamini Rangan we are stepping on the shoulders of giants. Can’t wait to build amazing AI-native solutions to 10x our customers! 5/ To me: 7 years ago you would have never believed you’d be here today, be proud. I only hope for you that, 7 years from now, you will continue to surprise yourself on what you can accomplish. Signing off as we always have, but this time with more excitement than ever. Warmly, Max Ps. A few additional thank yous: 1/ Our board: James (NFX), Aydin (Felicis), Ned, Tom (RTP Global) 2/ Our first believers: Natty, Elizabeth, Hunter Walk, Erik Torenberg, Chris 3/ X Factor players: David, Mark, Brad, Rachel, Chloe Belle, Harry Stebbings And of course, Alyssa & Brandon

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  • ODF reposted this

    View profile for Vince Jeong
    Vince Jeong

    📣 News: Sandra Loughlin and I are writing a book with 𝐇𝐁𝐑 𝐏𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐬! It's about the hardest unsolved problem in AI: how do you *actually* get your entire org to work differently using AI and adapt as fast as the tech changes? Companies are notoriously bad at change. They push it through mandates, town halls, surveys, and a pile of training… then act surprised when people don't budge. And the advice out there doesn't help much. The usual playbook names the big strategic moves: rewire the workflows, redefine the roles, reskill the workforce, build proprietary intelligence. All true. But none of it answers the real question of execution: how do you get 1000s of people to do distinctive work, on top of AI, day to day? That "how" is our book. At the core is the SCIENCE OF PEOPLE: what actually gets humans to do hard things they wouldn’t otherwise do… like adopting the new, higher-order behaviors AI transformation demands of them. By now, everyone acknowledges AI transformation is an op model problem. But too many are treating the people part as a side workstream. We think the science of people has to sit at the *center* of the model, not on the periphery. What the book will cover: - What an AI operating model actually takes, and the competitive edge it creates - 4 distinctive behaviors that compound your human+AI advantage - The 3 science-backed engines that make those behaviors the rational choice for every employee - The data, knowledge, and talent systems required to scale and sustain it - How to begin this transformation piece by piece, with lessons from AI pioneers across industries Why us? B/c we're both nerds about this stuff. Sandra has a PhD in psychology and is the Chief Learning Scientist at EPAM, one of the most genuinely AI-fluent enterprises I've come across. And she's absolutely brilliant. I studied Ops Research at Princeton and have spent my career on transformation across 100s of enterprises, at McKinsey and now Sparkwise, because I find it fascinating to figure out what makes people and orgs tick. Harvard Business Review shapes executive thinking like no one else and is a trusted partner of Sparkwise, so it's the right home for this. The book ships Fall 2027. It’s a while from now because HBR's peer review process is rigorous. At the same time, we know AI transformation is happening now and is urgent. So we're not going to wait until then to share our perspectives. We’ll build this book in public. The ideas we're wrestling with, the places we change our minds, the messy (and fun!) parts of the writing. We'll share it as we go. Come watch two people work this problem in the open, and help us shape it. Follow me and Sandra to get our latest thinking as it happens, and reach out with your thoughts. More to come. 🚀 P.S. How did this whole thing start? A LinkedIn post from Sandra, which led to an in-person brainstorming. Story for another day, but my takeaway: posting here works.

  • ODF reposted this

    View profile for Namanyay Goel
    Namanyay Goel

    Do you want to know what the SaaSpocalypse is? (You can already feel it, can't you?) It's when SaaS companies lose sales and customers churn to AI-first products Or when you see your customers "vibe coding" their own software Maybe AI is just a bubble... Because if not, you need to find some way to beat the SaaSpocalypse So, what will it be? Will you take the blue pill, or the red pill? 👇 ʇuǝɯɯoɔ ǝɥʇ uᴉ sᴉ llᴉd pǝɹ👇

  • ODF reposted this

    View profile for Julian Weisser
    Julian Weisser

    They wisely stayed under the radar to anyone other than their customers. Now they are sharing what few knew: Lassie had quietly become one of the most incredible high growth-startups in Silicon Valley. Frédéric Renken and Steijn Pelle started Lassie years ago after ODF. They went heads-down with early customers (shout out to Dr Kwon!) immersing themselves in the manual work until they could abstract themselves from it. Congrats on the reveal!

    View profile for Steijn Pelle
    Steijn Pelle

    Today, we're introducing Lassie and $47M in funding led by a16z. We're building AI that runs small businesses, starting with doctors' offices. Lassie is already trusted by 700+ practices across the country, working autonomously to provide them with 30 hours of labor per month. To get here, we first had to leave Robinhood and Superhuman to work in offices ourselves. Here's how that went.

  • ODF reposted this

    View profile for Vlad Serban
    Vlad Serban

    You learn a lot about a founder during a 40-second pitch. You learn even more hiking the SF Crosstown trail with them. I just wrapped up Onboarding Week for the On Deck Fellowship (ODF27), and I am completely re-energized and inspired. The top themes dominating conversations last week: ✅ The pivot from basic AI to deep autonomous agents (and Openclaw) ✅ Obsessing over early customer feedback loops ✅ Establishing a GTM motion that actually cuts through the noise ✅ Navigating a completely new fundraising and bootstrapping environment Building a startup is hard, but doing it with a community built on a true spirit of service is a massive unfair advantage. Special thanks to Julian Weisser, Noémie Federico, Guglielmo Fonda, and Ari Dutilh for the community.

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  • View organization page for ODF
    ODF

    67,906 followers

    In ODF22, Ajith and Avinash were considered two of the most generous and thoughtful people in the cohort. Love seeing them make continual progress. Go Cactus!

    View profile for Ajith Govind Satheesh
    Ajith Govind Satheesh

    Today we’re excited to announce we’ve raised a $7M seed round led by Wellington Management, with participation from Y Combinator, Rebel Fund, Pelion Venture Partners and multiple incredible investors and angels who share our vision for the future of customer experience. A huge thank you to Sofia Chesnokova and Tech Funding News for the exclusive feature. Check out the pinned comment for the exclusive! A few years ago, my cofounder Avinash and I were working in the home services industry and saw the same problem again and again: great businesses losing customers because they couldn’t answer the phone fast enough or follow up to retain business. These weren’t customer service issues, they were capacity issues. No amount of staffing or existing software integrations could fix that. So we built Cactus, the AI platform for Home Services. Cactus connects to the tools businesses already use and gives them an always-on AI assistant that can answer calls, book jobs, follow up with leads, and personalize every interaction all while learning from real customer data. Our mission is to make world-class customer experience infrastructure accessible to every home service business from local HVAC companies to national brands. We’re just getting started, but the results have been incredible. Businesses using Cactus are capturing more leads, responding 24/7, and scaling faster than ever. Thank you to our customers, partners, advisors, and our remarkable team. We wouldn’t be here without you. - thank you for trusting us to build this. And to the trades and service pros we’re building for: this one’s for you. Big things are coming in 2026. Onward and upward with 🌵. Wellington Management | Y Combinator | Rebel Fund | Pelion Venture Partners | Liquid 2 Ventures | Blume Ventures | Pioneer Fund | Taurus Ventures | Stellaris Venture Partners | RTP Global Tom Blomfield | Garry Tan | Pete Koomen | Sasha McKenzie | Frederik Groce | tyler hogge | Kristy Muir | Alexandra Espinal Fernández | Jared Heyman | Robin Choy Sanjay Nath | Sumangal V. | Taro Fukuyama | Julian Weisser | David J. Phillips | Neel Murthy | James Fong | Dom Pusateri | Madhur Makkar | Shunyam Gupta | I. (Zac) Choi | Sharran | Theo Browne |

  • View organization page for ODF
    ODF

    67,906 followers

    Most people shouldn't start companies. Yet too few people explore the possibility. Our goal with ODF is not for every participant to start a startup, but to explore what's next and have confidence in their decision. Exploring? Apply for ODF27.

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