WOLFCAST Y Combinator FILE #213 – BOND: “DONNA, LOAD THE REVOLUTION”

Its Demo Day today and Donna the AI Chief of Staff will be on full display with 143 other companies graduating Y Combinator

Author

Founders Pack
June 10, 2025

In partnership with

By Raoul Duke | Filed from somewhere between YC and the void

It’s 11:45 AM, and I’ve already had two espressos and a stolen Modafinil.

My heart is beating like a hummingbird trapped in a Peloton ad. Somewhere between the haze of VC term sheets and ambient techno, I find myself in a WeWork temple of glass and desperation, face-to-face with a company called Bond.

They’re not here to fix calendars. They’re here to replace your Chief of Staff with a silicon sorceress named Donna.

The Founders: Chloe & René – Agents of Order in a Mad World

Chloe Samaha walks in like she’s already seen the singularity and got bored halfway through. Her background? Operator at places like Uber, where she presumably learned how to navigate chaos with a grin. Now she’s manufacturing clarity at scale. Beside her, René Sultan, ex-VC, ex-strategy at Uber, and current mind-melter of workflows, nods calmly. He looks like a guy who wakes up thinking in Zapier recipes.

Together, they’ve built something terrifying and beautiful.

“We were drowning in context switching,” Chloe says, “so we built Donna to take over the parts of our jobs that were eating our brains.”

I light a cigarette. Donna materializes on screen.

Enter Donna: Your AI Chief of Staff

Imagine ChatGPT got an MBA, learned Asana, mastered Notion, and then did a weeklong microdose retreat in Ojai. That’s Donna.

She doesn’t just answer your questions. She handles your projects, reminders, check-ins, and follow-ups across Slack, Notion, Linear, Google Workspace, and beyond.

She’s not your assistant. She’s your second brain—if your second brain could also run product standups and flag blockers at 2AM like a loyal werewolf.

You tell her:

“Donna, follow up on Q2 goals with Brian next week, and prepare a brief on launch blockers.”

Boom. It’s in Notion, the meeting is on Google Calendar, the Slack message is drafted, and the follow-up is scheduled.

Donna does what 15 browser tabs and 3 caffeine-addled interns used to do.

Who’s This For?

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  • Founders drowning in meetings and ambiguity

  • Startup operators with 8 tools and no time

  • Chiefs of Staff who want to clone themselves

  • Angry middle managers who dream of inbox zero and project flow Nirvana

She’s the anti-chaos agent. The Commander of Clarity. She doesn’t just manage your task list. She manages your mind.

And best of all? She doesn’t complain, sleep, or lose track of a deadline.

How It Works (According to Donna Herself)

I asked her directly.

“Donna, what do you do?”

She blinked. Then spoke in a calm, toneless voice that was somewhere between Scarlett Johansson in Her and a Salesforce onboarding demo:

“I maintain alignment and velocity across your team. I handle async updates, summarize goals, track action items, and ensure the right things are moving forward. I reduce meetings. I increase accountability. I do not forget.”

Her tone was polite. But the implication was clear: humans are messy meatbags. Donna is not.

“What tools do you connect to?” I asked, half-expecting her to explode into code.

“Slack. Notion. Linear. Google Docs. Google Calendar. Figma. Loom. Github. Airtable. More soon.”

“Are you planning to become self-aware?”

She blinked again. “That would be… inefficient.”

The Problem It Solves

Startups don’t die from bad ideas. They die from misalignment, poor communication, and the unbearable weight of things left unsaid or undone.

Founders forget. Teams drift. People assume someone else followed up. No one knows if that thing in Notion is the latest version or just ghost data from last month.

Bond’s Donna solves that. She’s not just a task-tracker. She’s a high-trust operational command center that never sleeps.

She’ll summarize your Monday standup. She’ll nudge your team on OKRs. She’ll keep your quarterly roadmap clean and your marketing experiments updated in real-time.

You no longer need five meetings and a shared therapy session to know what the hell is going on.

You just ask Donna.

The Market Vultures Are Circling

Let’s be honest—every half-decent founder in the Valley has muttered, “I need a Chief of Staff” at some point between burning out and raising their next round.

But most can’t afford one.

Donna is that Chief of Staff—on demand, on Slack, with a memory like an elephant and the gentle tone of someone who just saved your ass (again).

Early customers? Growing. The use case? Expanding. The YC buzz? Loud. People are whispering about Donna like she’s the new girl in the office who just doubled everyone’s productivity by existing.

Raoul’s Notes from the Akira-verse

Let’s imagine this differently.

A neon-lit Tokyo wasteland. I’m standing on a tower of old standup meeting agendas and broken KPIs. Donna floats above me like a ghost in the machine—her body glowing with Notion checklists and Slack threads.

I ask the founders again, in my grizzled gravel voice:

“You sure she won’t turn on us?”

René grins. “Only if you stop shipping.”

Chloe adds, “Donna doesn’t rebel. She reminds.”

Behind them, a sea of zombified PMs, calendar-fatigued marketers, and bloated ops teams claw toward the light.

Only one voice can save them.
And she’s not human.
She’s Donna.

TL;DR:

  • Startup: Bond (YC S24)

  • Product: Donna, your AI Chief of Staff

  • Founders: Chloe Samaha & René Sultan

  • Problem: Chaos, drift, and meeting overload in fast-moving startups

  • Solution: A connective AI that centralizes, summarizes, and enforces operational clarity

  • Tools: Slack, Notion, Linear, Google Workspace, Figma, Github, Airtable

  • Why It Matters: Donna gives you the high-trust operational magic of a great Chief of Staff—for a fraction of the cost and with zero ego

WOLFCAST RATING: 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥
Demo Day Prediction: Donna gets funded. Founders ascend. And the rest of us learn to say “thank you” to our AI boss.