The team

Jacob Fontaine

Founder

I've worked at a flooring company for over ten years as a field manager. For most of that time I watched the owner run the office from wherever he happened to be, which was almost never the office. Customer calls came in while he was on a job. Quotes got written at night. Hours got pieced together at the end of the week. There was no office manager, and there was no room in the budget for one.

I built Earl because I saw that need every day. It's the office manager a small company can't afford to hire: it picks up the follow-up, keeps the calendar straight, writes the quote, and knows where the tile saw went. It helps run the flooring company now.

The other half of my life is school. I have a bachelor's and a master's in ocean engineering from the University of Rhode Island, and I'm in the last semester of my PhD there, also in ocean engineering. My research is on the active control of floating energy devices. A lot of it is artificial intelligence models and high-fidelity modeling with computational fluid dynamics, so I spend a good amount of time getting computers to predict how water and machines will behave.

That background is why I trusted myself to build this. Earl handles people's schedules and their money, so the models behind it have to be right, and the app has to be simple enough to use with one hand in the truck. I've spent years on both sides of that.

Carson Fontaine

Head of Workplace Positivity

Carson is two months old and goes by Goob around the office. He joined the team in the summer of 2026 and has already set the tone: nobody on the crew has ever been that happy to see a morning brief.

His job is morale. He is unbothered by unpaid invoices, has never once worried about a schedule, and has a laugh that resets the room. Meetings with Goob run short, end in a nap, and leave everyone in a better mood than they arrived in.

He is not yet cleared to talk to Earl. He is, however, the reason the office needs to run itself.