NYCFC: August 2026 Updates
Khaled Kteily of Legacy's unconventional fundraising tips, our next event with Databricks, + learn how you can get paid for product demos
Welcome!
News from NYCFC:
Round 1 pricing for the Great Founder River Float ends in <1 week Monday, Aug 3rd!
Health & Life Sciences founders and investors: on Sept 24th, we will be bringing together the NYC H&LS community at our next event with Databricks - Building in AI × Life Sciences! Read more here.
This edition:
Founder spotlight with Khaled Kteily, Co-founder and CEO of Legacy
Highlights from July
Founder opportunities (get paid to take calls/demos 👇)
New events and job openings
Let’s get started! 🚀
Founder Spotlight: Khaled Kteily, Co-founder and CEO of Legacy
Khaled Kteily is the Founder and CEO of Legacy, a startup that helps men test and freeze their sperm from home through a mail-in kit and clinic-grade semen analysis. He founded Legacy in 2018, later going through Y Combinator's Summer 2019 batch and raising roughly $50 million from investors including Bain Capital, First Mark, and Section 32.
Fundraising and the Power of a Hook
Khaled: “So at [YC] demo day — this is at the time, I think there were about 180 companies in our batch, Summer 19. And I'm sitting there thinking, all right, we all have either two or three minutes to present. If I'm an investor, right, I'm seeing aerospace, agriculture, biotech, B2B stuff. How are you keeping any of it straight in your head? It's all just going to be one big blur. And so I did something that the YC partners do not recommend, and for a good reason. I got up there and I made a masturbation joke… And everyone erupted in laughter. Paul Graham himself was like, oh my God, did one of my companies just say that? But what happened is, at the end of Demo Day, there was a circle of investors who came around me. I think we raised three and a half million bucks, which was actually a pretty healthy seed round at the time. And I really attribute a big chunk of that to being bold and putting ourselves out there and grabbing investors by the attention.”
What’s your biggest ask right now? How can others help?
Khaled: If you are a person with sperm, you should be thinking about testing it. I think it's really valuable to understand where you're at. We just launched a really cool product called Sperm Insights. It's included in many of our packages, otherwise it's a $95 upgrade. You'll get a sperm score, you'll get sperm insights, you'll get rankings and percentiles, and all these interesting lifestyle insights that come from your semen analysis. If you ever want to have children, and you think there's a million things that could go wrong, consider freezing your sperm. We've done that for tens and tens of thousands of men, and at the very least, you want some interesting sperm content — follow us at givelegacyinc on Instagram, or you can find me at spermking.com. It will take you to my LinkedIn.
Read our full interview with Khaled here.
July Highlights
YC Alumni Monthly Happy Hour: Live Jazz 🎷 (7/8)
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On July 8th, we hosted our monthly YC happy hour with Rho in K-town with a live jazz band. Check out one of our conversations with a founder here:
Coming Up 🔥
Events:
🗽 NYCFC Founders Dinner: Tues, July 28th (members only)
🗽 NYCFC Founders Dinner: Wed, Aug 5th (members only)
Brex Social Club NYC - Private Sailing Edition: Wed, Aug 5th
So You Want To Get Physical? A Founder Night on Physical Intelligence: Sat, Aug 8th (member-hosted)
🗽 YC Alumni + Friends Happy Hour: Wed, Aug 12th
🗽 NYCFC Founders Dinner: Wed, Aug 19th (members only)
🗽 The Great Founder River Float of 2026: Sat, Aug 22nd
Round 1 pricing ends on Monday, Aug 3rd!
🗽 NYCFC Founders Dinner: Tues, Aug 25th (members only)
🗽‼️ NYC Founders Club x Databricks: Building in AI × Life Sciences: Thurs, Sept 24th
🗽 = NYCFC Event
‼️ = new event
Subscribe to our Luma calendar here.
Founder Opportunities 🤝
Accelerators/Bootcamps:
Elbow Grease Accelerator by Gutter Capital, applications due July 31st
AI Camp: The New Agent Economy by Betaworks, applications due July 31st
Calls/Intros (Paid):
A few companies in our network are looking to be connected with founders in our community. If you fit the profile, you take a 30-minute call, hear the pitch, and you get paid. That's the whole thing - no obligation to buy, no follow-up sequence.
If you're a founder or a senior-level operator, you likely qualify. Here are some opportunities:
Numeral ($180+) - AI for sales tax and compliance across states and countries.
Highbeam ($160) - AI-powered financial command center for consumer brands.
Stanify ($120+) - Stanify works with Fortune 500 companies and a wide range of other businesses (CPG, ecomm, media, etc.) using AI to help teams with safety / engagement / insights on social at scale.
Pylon ($100+) - Pylon is the Agentic B2B support platform, across every channel and serves as the hub for modern day support teams. Aggregating all context from where you interact with your customers to ensure support is enabled to make the most efficient/effective responses to issues.
North.Cloud ($250) - All-in-one FinOps platform that helps companies reduce cloud costs and get better visibility across AWS and GCP.
Oceans Talent ($200) - Oceans places AI-fluent executive assistants to scale your operations — the EAs behind founders at Hampton, Sauz, Morning Brew, and top VC-backed startups.
Secure Cloud Innovations ($250) - Secure Cloud Innovations is an embedded cybersecurity consulting / consulting team for B2B SaaS companies, helping them design, implement, and maintain security programs for frameworks like SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, and GDPR.
Roles at NYCFC Companies 👩🏻💻
Neptune is hiring a Founding Growth Marketer and Founding Engineer. ‼️
Ghosteye is hiring a Chief of Staff and a Security Researcher. ‼️
Kickoff is hiring a Provider Growth Manager and other roles across growth and engineering.
Cobalt ID is hiring a Staff Software Engineer.
Zingage is hiring a Head of Talent Engineering, a Founding GTM Engineer, Founding Engineers, and SWEs.
Invoice Butler is hiring a Founding Engineer.
‼️ = new role
See you next edition!
You made it to the end - thanks for reading! If you're interested in sponsoring an upcoming edition, we'd love to hear from you. Drop us a line at team@nycfounders.club.
– Aakash, Adam, Mike, and Jordan
P.S.