Fevered determination: Building Zalos from zero to enterprise in 5 weeks. Hg's Jonathan Wulkan speaks to founder, William Fairbairn
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How did William Fairbairn’s background lead to founding Zalos.ai?
It's one of the kind of conceptions as well that's like changed a lot in the valley. Is there was this view of like the GPT wrapper? Yeah. Like if you just build a thin wrapper on top of an LLM, then you're gonna get wiped out by the next model release. Yeah. And it turns out that view is now basically in a lot of situations, 180 degrees reversed. Really? There's a huge amount of value in that wrapper. Yeah. Because for vertically AI, the last mile. As long.
Welcome to Orbit, the HG podcast series where we talk to successful leaders of technology businesses and hear how they built some of the most successful software companies in the world. I'm Jonathan Wolken, a partner here in HG's San Francisco office. And in this special episode of Orbit, I'm delighted to be joined by William Fairbairn, who's the co-founder of Zalos.ai, a company that just received backing by Y Combinator. While we usually interview established leaders on the pod, William represents a fascinating new breed of AI native founders building at the absolute frontier of what's possible. As a serial entrepreneur now focused on transforming the office of the CFO, he's navigating challenges that didn't even exist as recently as a few months ago, building strategy when foundational capabilities are evolving monthly, and competing against.
Established SaaS incumbents while the rules of software are being rewritten in real time. He's defining what businesses mean when AI agents can actively execute tasks rather than simply displaying information. His Y Combinator backing signals the quality of what he's building, and his perspectives from the frontier of software are going to offer really valuable insights for everyone in trying to understand where software's heading. So without further ado, William, thank you for being here. So William, I'd love to hear a little bit about your your kind of background. Um, you're obviously a serial entrepreneur. It's your first time living in the Bay Area. Um, maybe maybe just kick us off with a little bit on you.
Yeah. Um so moved to the Bay Area a couple months ago. Absolutely love it here. Was before in the UK. Um and took a long path to get here from various explorations of technology. Uh straight after university I built and then sold my first B2B SaaS business. Um uh not enough to retire, but you know, great experience. Uh then was working with a variety of companies um in consulting. Consulting, uh, really enjoyed my time in the tech practice with McKinsey. That was like helping some of Europe's unicorns build new businesses or big tech as well grow quicker, and then spent a couple years as a general manager of an office of the CFO Unicorn in Europe, and then have been building Xalos this year. Okay.
Yeah. And and maybe tell me a little bit about how you got the entrepreneurial bug. When was the moment that it sort of hit you?
feel like it was always what I'd wanted to do. I'd always seen a few entrepreneurs in my family from previous generations. Um and I tried the consulting path for a while. Um but once you've tried, yeah, building something, seeing it in the real world, uh trying to scale something and fix some problems, it's
uh
addictive.
Yeah. Well thank you. I'm I'm so glad that entrepreneurs like you exist because uh I certainly couldn't do what you do and they just have a lot of admiration for people that are sort of striking out on their own and really going after a vision and building something. Um, I'd love to hear a little bit about Xalos and maybe before we kind of jump into everything else, tell us a little bit about your latest venture and and what you're building.
Yeah. We're building computer use agents for finance operations. So we can log into any finance system like ERP, CRM, or other point solutions from the finance system. And then our agents can start taking actions like uh downloading reports, categorizing, reconciling information as well. Then we can point these agents to a huge number of CFO workflows. So to give like an example from billing, you know, maybe today uh enterprise accountant executive gives a customer a bunch of custom terms, probably pretty much every customer they give custom terms to.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
How did William Fairbairn’s background lead to founding Zalos.ai?
0:01–6:07
2
What problem does Zalos solve for CFOs and how do its computer‑use agents work?
6:07–11:09
3
Why did the team choose the Office of the CFO as their target vertical?
11:09–15:14
4
How does Zalos combine deterministic finance workflows with probabilistic AI?
15:14–19:53
5
What is “forward‑deployed engineering” and why is it a new YC playbook?
19:53–25:08
6
How are growth benchmarks changing for AI‑native startups (e.g., $2M ARR in 12 months)?
25:08–29:52
7
What sacrifices and cultural shifts are required to build at Silicon Valley velocity?
29:52–34:24
8
What’s the long‑term vision for AI agents in finance and the next steps for Zalos?
34:24–38:45
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