Stephanie Song had a modest proposal for her old colleagues at Coinbase: perhaps the company she was leaving to build could take over some of her work. She had been on the corporate development and ventures team, where evaluating a deal meant moving through documents, gathering information and turning it into something useful. In June 2023, announcing Dili’s acceptance into Y Combinator, she joked that she hoped to build her replacement quickly enough.
It was a good resignation joke because it contained a business plan. Song knew the task from the inside. The person who had been responsible for reading the room, in the data-room sense, was now proposing software that could help read it. Her starting point was the analyst’s working day, with its administrative demands and its stubborn ability to expand into the night.
The career that followed has kept returning to that working day. Dili, Invictus, F2 and Linkup occupy different places in the AI business. Song’s route through them offers a view of someone moving from using information to organizing it, then helping other people put it to work. The recurring question is practical: where does a promising tool actually save somebody trouble?
The resignation with a replacement plan
Song co-founded Dili with Brian Fernandez and Anand Chaturvedi, both former Coinbase colleagues. At its 2023 launch she was CEO. The team’s opening description put her prior investment banking, corporate development and venture work at more than $500 million in deal volume. That figure described transactions she had worked on; it was a measure of exposure to the job the founders wanted to change.
There is a distinction between knowing that paperwork is irritating and knowing precisely which part of it becomes expensive. Song had worked on both sides of transactions, including mergers and acquisitions and capital raises. Her proposed customer was recognizable to her: a team trying to make a consequential decision while someone junior gathered, read and reconciled the material needed to support it.
Chaturvedi announced his own departure from Coinbase that June. The three founders would spend several months in San Francisco with Y Combinator, working with Garry Tan. His account of the move was full of thanks to former colleagues. Song’s announcement also named mentors and teammates. The new company began with relationships formed at an existing one, and both founders were careful to acknowledge the people behind the leap.
A deal has more than one hiding place
Dili’s original pitch connected three kinds of information: the company’s deal documents, the investment firm’s own accumulated knowledge, and external data. The attraction was easy to understand. A useful fact might live in the current transaction’s files. A comparison might be tucked into an earlier investment. A missing piece might sit somewhere outside the firm altogether. Reading one document would only take the analyst so far.
The founders proposed helping teams examine those materials and prepare investment work. Their target included the investors considering a purchase and the teams raising capital or selling a business. Song was trying to shorten a process she had helped carry out. The product’s scope reflected that experience: due diligence involved finding information, understanding it and getting it into a form another person could use.
documents
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By February 2024, Song was announcing a $3.5 million seed round. The backers she thanked included Allianz, Y Combinator, Rebel Fund, Rocketship.vc, Decacorn and Pioneer Fund. She described possible workflows such as screening prospective deals, finding warning signs, comparing companies and summarizing expert material. These were the chores from which the company had begun, now expressed as things a customer could ask software to do.
Her announcement ended with thanks to the team and a return to work. It was an appropriate ending for a company whose promise depended on what happened after the announcement. A financing round could support the effort. The daily test would still take place at a desk, with a real collection of files and a person who needed an answer.
The particular eloquence of “pls fixes”
Song’s most vivid explanation of her approach came while building Invictus. In a July 2024 post, she argued that experience in finance mattered when making products for finance professionals. She described late waits for diligence responses, repeated slide revisions and challenges to the numbers. Her examples had the small, abrasive specificity of work remembered by someone who had done it.
Then came the phrase “pls fixes”. Two words, very little punctuation, a considerable capacity to spoil an evening. It supplied the texture that a phrase such as workflow optimization never quite manages. Song’s argument was that the industry had its own working language, and that useful software required understanding the demands behind that language. She was describing an advantage she believed her team possessed.
“Nothing replaces the years of doing the job yourself”
Stephanie Song, on building for finance professionals
Invictus approached deal execution through the communications surrounding it. In her Slice of Finance interview, Song discussed a product that integrated with email to help teams see transaction progress. The ambition was to give investment teams a shared operational view. Finding a fact and getting a group of people to act on it are related problems; each can leave the other waiting.
The comparison she made was to Jira’s role for software engineers. It is a revealing choice. She wanted a familiar professional process to have a clearer place to live, with its moving parts visible to the people responsible for them. The interview also compared AI’s potential influence in finance with Excel’s arrival. Those were ambitions for the product, and they show the scale of change she hoped everyday tools could bring.
There were friends in the batch, too
The public version of Song is often enthusiastic, crowded with names and generous with acknowledgments. Her post about the 2024 Y Combinator alumni reunion described seeing batchmates, partners and other founders in San Francisco. She said some of her closest friendships had come through YC. The list of people she tagged was long enough that she joked about the post becoming too long.
It is a useful detail in a career usually summarized by company names. The accelerator gave her a cohort she wanted to see again. She wrote about the importance of people who understood the experience of building a company, and about carrying what she had learned into Invictus. The institution’s value, in her telling, included the possibility of being understood without having to explain the whole job first.
Other commitments extended beyond startups. Her professional profile records mentoring with Apex for Youth from January 2021 to June 2023. The organization works with underserved Asian and immigrant young people in New York. Her listed languages include English and Chinese at native or bilingual proficiency and Spanish at professional working proficiency. These details add a little breadth to a public career otherwise dominated by transactions and technology.
In 2025, United Women in Business listed her among speakers for a panel about setbacks and resilience, representing Invictus. The event’s subjects included learning from mistakes, collaboration and definitions of success. It placed her alongside founders and operators from other businesses, with the conversation organized around the experience of a career rather than a product demonstration.
From the product to the people using it
By the June 2026 Women in Private Markets Summit North America agenda, Song was listed as head of client success at F2. A public recruitment post from F2’s leadership also named her as someone a new AI deployment strategist would work with. The advertised work joined engineering and client delivery, helping private-market firms adopt AI in their existing operations.
That setting matters in understanding her next move. Client success makes adoption part of the job description. A tool may have a persuasive demonstration and still require careful work to fit into an organization. In Song’s case, the audience remained close to the investment teams she had previously served as a founder. The vantage point changed while the professional territory stayed familiar.
She subsequently announced that she was joining Linkup’s founding go-to-market sales team, working across Paris and New York. Her explanation referred to having led AI deployment at F2 and to her own experience as a founder. The attraction was infrastructure: helping teams obtain what they needed to build their AI products. She thanked Linkup’s Phil Mizrahi, Boris Toledano and Denis Charrier.
Mizrahi’s reply supplied a detail that a list of job titles would miss. Their first conversation, he wrote, had taken place a year and a half earlier. The relationship had developed over time. For a career concerned with speeding up work, the move came with an acknowledgment that some useful things take a while.
The task keeps moving
Dili now describes a construction compliance business, and its current YC founder listing names Chaturvedi and Fernandez. Song’s place in its story is as an original co-founder and launch-era CEO. Her own path has continued through Invictus and F2 to Linkup. Following that path makes the founding chapter more interesting: the person and the company each kept developing.
The thread running through her work is a recurring interest in the unglamorous requirements beneath a consequential decision. A deal needs documents made intelligible. A transaction needs its communications organized. An AI product needs infrastructure its builders can use. Song has pursued those requirements from several positions, carrying the memory of the original desk job with her.
That early joke about building her replacement still works. It captures a particular kind of professional ambition: learning a job thoroughly enough to imagine how some of its burdens might be removed. The phrase “pls fixes” has already done its part in the education. Song has been trying to give the people receiving it a better set of tools.