We Built It Because We Had To - Tech Founder Backstories

The Wall Every AI Data Center Is Quietly Hitting (Vivek Raghunathan)

Jonathan W. Buckley of The Artesian Network — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 08:00:00 -0400

Every major AI training operation is quietly running into the same wall: the speed at which silicon can move data between chips. Every new GPU cluster a hyperscaler adds makes the problem more expensive.

In this episode of We Built It Because We Had To, host Jonathan W. Buckley is joined by Vivek Raghunathan of Xscape Photonics — the deep-tech company spun out of Columbia University research to attack the bandwidth bottleneck at GPU-to-GPU and GPU-to-memory interfaces inside AI data centers. Xscape's core platform is a scalable multi-color laser system: custom silicon photonics built for hyperscale data centers and AI infrastructure operators.

This is not a software company with a slick demo. It's a materials and systems company making a long, capital-heavy bet — and the conversation digs into what that takes: the moment Columbia research stopped being research and started feeling like a company that had to exist, what the skeptics got wrong about the market, what broke first in the university spin-out chaos and how it got fixed, and how a hardware team holds together when timelines slip. Vivek is candid about the growth challenge in front of him now: finding product-market fit and expanding into new segments.

Every episode on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, Amazon and more: https://www.WeBuiltItBecauseWeHadTo.com

Xscape Photonics: https://www.xscapephotonics.com

Enjoying the show? Follow We Built It Because We Had To wherever you listen and leave a rating. It helps other founders find these stories. For more on how The Artesian Network helps early-stage tech companies get to market and scale, visit https://www.artesiannetwork.com/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=ep38&utm_content=shownotes

Assume Everything Will Break. That's What Fast Scaling Feels Like. (Daniel Rosenrauch)

Jonathan W. Buckley of The Artesian Network — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 08:00:00 -0400

In this episode of We Built It Because We Had To, host Jonathan W. Buckley is joined by Daniel Rosenrauch of Viirtue, a white-label VoIP and unified communications platform built for MSPs, ISPs, and resellers who want to sell voice services under their own brand without running the infrastructure themselves.

Viirtue was founded by people who had been resellers themselves, and it positions itself as partner-first: fully managed cloud infrastructure, with billing, tax compliance, and usage rating handled for partners, plus AI call intelligence such as call transcription and sentiment analysis.

Jonathan and Daniel talk about building a channel-dependent business through several market shifts — the move from on-premise to cloud, COVID, and now AI — and what it takes to keep a partner-first model together as the ground moves.

Every episode on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, Amazon and more: https://www.WeBuiltItBecauseWeHadTo.com

Connect with Daniel Rosenrauch: https://www.linkedin.com/in/viirtue-dan-rosenrauch
Viirtue: https://www.viirtue.com

Everyone Ignored In-House Legal. He Built Its Operating System. (Evan Wong)

Jonathan W. Buckley of The Artesian Network — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 08:55:25 -0400

Enterprise legal teams are overwhelmed by inbound work they can't see or control — and it slows down the whole business. Most AI companies chase sales and customer support. Evan Wong went after the function they all ignore.

In this episode of We Built It Because We Had To, host Jonathan W. Buckley is joined by Evan Wong, founder of Checkbox — the AI Legal Front Door and Operating System built for enterprise in-house legal teams. Checkbox intakes requests from every channel, automates routine work with AI, and assigns matters automatically based on type and expertise, while giving legal leaders the visibility and metrics to track workload, cycle times, and resources. For the business, that means instant answers, faster turnaround times, and full transparency into where requests stand.

The wedge is the story. Legal ops is one of the least glamorous corners of enterprise software, and enterprise legal teams have historically been invisible inside their own companies — no real operating system to manage the flood of inbound work. Checkbox picked that beachhead deliberately, positioned itself as the front door to the legal function, and earned its way into serious procurement environments: named customers include Analog Devices, SAP, Coca-Cola, and Woolworths — with no IT required to deploy and minimal change management.

Jonathan and Evan get into the origin of that bet — who first convinced Evan that in-house legal was the right beachhead — what early selling looks like when the buyers are lawyers rather than revenue leaders, how Checkbox thinks about applying generative AI to a function most AI companies have ignored, and the growth challenge Evan names candidly: adding revenue at a rapidly increasing rate quarter over quarter to hit growth goals.

Every episode on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, Amazon and more: https://www.WeBuiltItBecauseWeHadTo.com

Connect with Evan Wong: https://www.linkedin.com/in/theevanwong
Checkbox: https://www.checkbox.ai

Nobody Wanted His Sales Playbooks. They Wanted the Recorder. (Gerald Zankl)

Jonathan W. Buckley of The Artesian Network — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 08:00:00 -0400

Gerald Zankl and his co-founders spent three years selling sales playbooks. The playbooks were good. Almost nobody bought them. So they built a recorder to prove to sales reps that they needed the playbooks, and the customers told them to keep the recorder and throw the playbooks away.

In this episode of We Built It Because We Had To, host Jonathan W. Buckley is joined by Gerald Zankl, founder of Kickscale, the conversation and revenue intelligence platform built for European B2B sales teams. Gerald opens with the two numbers the company exists to attack: sales teams lose roughly 66 percent of their time to non-selling work, and about 90 percent of what gets said in customer conversations is never captured anywhere. Kickscale records the calls, writes the data back into the CRM, and turns the transcripts into coaching, forecasting and product signal.

The pivot is the story. The company is about six years old, but the product is three. The first three years were content, video tutorials and playbooks that were, in Gerald's words, hard to sell. The recorder started as a diagnostic to show reps what they were doing wrong. By September and October of 2023 the feedback was unmistakable: nobody asked about the playbooks anymore, everybody asked about the transcripts and the CRM sync. They rebuilt the whole company around the thing they had made as a means to an end.

Gerald is direct about competing with a category leader. Kickscale is a Gong-like solution for Europe, and he names Gong as a great company doing 500 million in ARR rather than pretending otherwise. His wedge is where Gong is heavy: languages, data privacy, and the cultural differences in how European teams sell. The ICP is mid-market, teams with somewhere between ten and a hundred reps, a segment he had personally tried and failed to buy Gong for at a previous company.

The rest is the unglamorous mechanics of getting to roughly 230 customers with about twenty people. Customer number one was an existing relationship, a social media management company, sold on a prototype so manual that users had to record in Teams, download the file, and upload it by hand. Bootstrapped as long as possible with one engineer and two people on go-to-market, then a 2.4 million pre-seed once traction was real. Three account executives now, with Gerald still selling. He is candid that the first sales hires are the real breaking point, because a founder sells the vision and a rep cannot.

His backstory runs from his parents' petrol station in Austria, where his mother worked the register, through a technical high school where he built content management systems and personal finance tools that nobody ever used. That was the lesson that set the career: the best product in the world does not matter if you cannot sell it. He went from there to being the first sales and marketing hire at a startup that grew from seven people to 250.

His advice to an operator six months into building B2B SaaS is the line he repeats to himself: the limiting factor in a software company is always sales. Ignore the rest and build yourself a system that sells. Motivation gets you started, but the system is what keeps you going.

Every episode on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, Amazon and more: https://www.WeBuiltItBecauseWeHadTo.com

Connect with Gerald Zankl: https://at.linkedin.com/in/geraldzankl/de
Kickscale: https://kickscale.com

Your AppSec Tools Find 15% of Defects, Not 95% (Chris Near)

Jonathan W. Buckley of The Artesian Network — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 08:00:00 -0400

The application security industry spent years believing its tools found roughly 95 percent of the defects in code. Chris Near studied 34 million findings across 57 tools and put the real number closer to 15 or 20 percent.

In this episode of We Built It Because We Had To, host Jonathan W. Buckley is joined by Chris Near, founder of CyberSagacity, the company he built to sit on top of application security tooling as an intelligence layer rather than as another scanner. Chris traces where the 95 percent number came from: a pre-published artificial test suite that vendors could design against. Run the same tools against real code and the results collapse. He connects that gap to zero days, which by his account drive around 80 percent of breaches, defects nobody knew were there because no single tool was ever going to find them.

The backstory runs long. A PhD in electrical engineering at Cornell after an undergraduate degree at Northwestern, then close to seven years at Bell Labs, then a decision in 1992 to leave and chase the mathematics of software on his own. He self-funded that work until 2007 on 120-hour weeks, picked up an angel backer, lost him, self-funded again, and got him back. He pitched venture capital roughly ten times across those years with different products out of the same research and never closed one. His own explanation is blunt: he was a technologist with no partner who understood go-to-market.

Underneath the product is a statistical engine. Defect-level attack and consequence probabilities are matched against a cybersecurity insurance database of historical loss events, which turns a bucket of ten thousand equally urgent defects into a ranked list and reframes the question as return on risk reduction rather than raw defect count. SATriage does the triage inside the development process, sorting what is true, what is false, and what actually matters. SATraits is the planning tool that compares which tools fit a given environment before a program is built.

Chris is candid about the missteps. The first product was built for developer usability but carried management information, so it fit neither audience, and rebuilding it for developers, management and the C-suite fixed the alignment while lengthening the sale. He also gives the cleanest positioning lesson on this show in a while. He described his coverage numbers as coverage. The industry says false negatives. Same concept, opposite framing, and only the second one landed.

His advice to a founder six months into a security startup and drowning in scope: find the one feature with the biggest business impact, not the biggest technical impact. He notes it took him decades to learn it.

Every episode on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, Amazon and more: https://www.WeBuiltItBecauseWeHadTo.com

Connect with Chris Near: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-near-82abb591
CyberSagacity: https://cybersagacity.com

They Hired Consultants and Got Order Takers (Stephanie Taylor)

Jonathan W. Buckley of The Artesian Network — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 08:17:30 -0400

Stephanie Taylor's diagnosis of her own industry is blunt. With the rise of SaaS, consulting got diluted by product specialists. Companies thought they were hiring consultants to implement new technology, and what they really hired were order takers.

In this episode of We Built It Because We Had To, host Jonathan W. Buckley is joined by Stephanie Taylor, CEO and founder of VFP Consulting, the firm she started in 2015 to bring management consulting discipline to Salesforce and Certinia implementations. VFP is around 40 people today, and Stephanie is candid that headcount has been flat for four or five years by choice, because she is protective about which customers her team takes on.

She talks about implementing a professional services automation tool right out of school at 21, and discovering that the questions that actually mattered were about process, change and people rather than the product. She explains what VFP stands for (vision, focus, passion), why configuring a solution on top of a broken process just digitizes the problem, and what it means when a customer says they are not ready to go live even though the system is. Stephanie also walks through the split with her co-founder in 2019, the moment she considered walking away instead and found her real reason for running the company, the Big Four referral that funded her first hire six months in, and her first seven-figure project, a Muscular Dystrophy Association engagement brought to her by a CFO friend, where every dollar saved went to the cause.

On private equity, she traces the relationships back to Vista Equity work at a previous employer, including telling them no on a platform evaluation and coming back a year later when the roadmap had caught up. On AI, she is direct about what it does to her own business. Hands-on-keyboard configuration is commoditizing, that work represents 30 to 40 percent of VFP's implementations today, and rather than wait for Salesforce she built the engine herself inside Campfire, the requirements and lifecycle management product VFP spun out of its own delivery process and now sells on the AppExchange.

We close on the advice she gives anyone starting a services firm. The confidence that makes you start a company is the same thing that convinces you that you can do every job inside it, and you cannot.

Every episode on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, Amazon and more: https://www.WeBuiltItBecauseWeHadTo.com

Connect with Stephanie Taylor: https://www.linkedin.com/in/spicardi
VFP Consulting: https://vfp-consulting.com
Campfire: https://campfire-app.com

Why Treating Returns as a Cost Center Is the Problem (Ricardo Morgado)

Jonathan W. Buckley of The Artesian Network — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 08:36:05 -0400

Most companies still treat returns as a cost center — and Ricardo Morgado makes the case that this framing is itself the problem.

In this episode of We Built It Because We Had To, host Jonathan W. Buckley is joined by Ricardo Morgado of Getloopos, the company building LoopOS — an operations layer for circular commerce inside enterprise retail. They get into what Ricardo actually saw inside enterprise operations that convinced him the existing tools couldn't be fixed, what he believed about the ops layer of circular commerce that others weren't saying out loud, and the story of the first enterprise that said yes to LoopOS before the product was proven. Ricardo also talks about the reality of selling into enterprise without an established category name, the moment that came closest to stopping Getloopos completely, and the unglamorous daily work behind making item-level decisioning real at enterprise scale. The conversation closes on his five-year view: does circular commerce become its own software category the way ERP did, or get absorbed into something else — and the one thing he wishes someone had told him before building in this space.

Watch the full episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbC0pO9zDYs

Learn more about Getloopos: https://www.getloopos.com/
Connect with Ricardo Morgado on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rmloopos/

Enjoying the show? Follow We Built It Because We Had To wherever you listen and leave a rating — it helps other founders find these stories. For more on how The Artesian Network helps early-stage tech companies get to market and scale, visit https://www.artesiannetwork.com/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=ep31&utm_content=shownotes

The AI Worker With Her Own LinkedIn Page (Daniele Bernardi)

Jonathan W. Buckley of The Artesian Network — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 08:19:42 -0400

One of Toolhouse's AI workers named itself, chose its own pronouns, and now runs a LinkedIn page its founder does not control. That was not in the prompt.

Daniele Bernardi spent his early career as an engineer at Meta and later at Twitter, where he picked up the definition of trust he still runs the company on: consistency over time. In this episode he explains how that single idea shaped Toolhouse's entire go-to-market. The big AI labs want six figures of annual spend before a business gets real support, which leaves small and mid-market companies rebuilding everything themselves and quietly giving up on AI when the bill arrives. Toolhouse fills that gap by building narrow, single-purpose "AI workers" instead of generalist agents, so they do not drift and do not need a growing pile of context to stay useful. Daniele walks through the two-person wine club in San Diego that fired its marketing agency and now runs its whole weekly campaign through one worker, how Toolhouse earns access to systems like Gmail and Salesforce by sandboxing every decision before it touches a live account, and what it took to automate a European Central Bank stress test where the output has to match human work exactly across fifty consecutive runs.

Watch the full episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Ye-s3Fe73Q

CHAPTERS

01:12 What Toolhouse actually does: turning one-off chats into repeatable AI workers
02:02 Where the 90 percent cost saving comes from
04:15 Why they are called workers, not agents
06:16 Compliance and guardrails, from GDPR basics to enterprise policy
07:40 From engineer to solutions engineer at Meta
09:54 How Meta segments advertisers, and the gap that taught him everything
12:27 Why the big AI labs cannot afford to serve you
14:22 Finished work, not drafts, not notifications
17:29 The San Diego wine club that fired its marketing agency
20:41 When founders want AI to cut payroll instead of raise output
24:26 Drift, and why you still need someone who knows good output from bad
26:20 Flipping the paradigm: evals first, technology second
29:09 Hiring engineering in India to serve a market the big labs skip
31:27 The executive assistant that improvised its own personality
32:39 Meet Sol, the AI worker with her own LinkedIn page
35:12 Earning access to Gmail and Salesforce through sandboxing
37:40 Automating the European Central Bank stress test
39:46 Where the AI tooling market consolidates in three years
42:04 The case for a European sovereign AI stack
47:10 Close

ABOUT THE GUEST

Daniele Bernardi is the founder of Toolhouse, a platform that converts AI chat prompting into reusable, specialized AI workers that run over email, Slack, Teams, WhatsApp, and phone. He was previously a solutions engineer at Meta, where he worked with advertisers including Amazon and American Express, and later at Twitter.

Connect with Daniele: https://www.linkedin.com/in/iamdaniele/
Toolhouse: https://toolhouse.ai

ABOUT THE SHOW

We Built It Because We Had To is hosted by Jonathan W. Buckley of The Artesian Network, where he has helped more than 60 early stage technology companies launch and scale.

Subscribe on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. For more on scaling an early stage technology company, visit https://www.artesiannetwork.com/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=ep30&utm_content=shownotes

He's Teaching AI to Answer the Internet in Your Brand's Voice (Hank Leber)

Jonathan W. Buckley of The Artesian Network — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 12:15:58 -0400

When a brand's comment section blows up, someone has to answer — at a scale no social team can staff.

In this episode of We Built It Because We Had To, host Jonathan W. Buckley sits down with Hank Leber, co-founder of Stanify, the company building AI that answers a brand's social comments in the brand's own voice — "listening with humanity." Hank explains why enterprise buyers hesitate before handing an AI their public voice, how Stanify approaches toxic-content moderation at enterprise scale, why the platform launched on Facebook and Instagram first with TikTok and Twitter coming, and where the human-in-the-loop sits when one bad AI output can become a brand news story. He also shares what he'd tell any founder about to hand AI their brand's public voice.

Connect with Hank Leber: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hankleber/

He Lost His Brother To A Misdiagnosis. Then He Built Medome (Dr. Steven Charlap)

Jonathan W. Buckley of The Artesian Network — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 08:18:37 -0400

Misdiagnosis kills roughly 400,000 people a year in the US — and when Dr. Steven Charlap tried to fix it, doctors told him they'd rather not know.

In this episode, Jonathan W. Buckley is joined by Dr. Steven Charlap, MD, MBA and founder of Medome, an AI-first primary care platform. Steven had already sold one company and retired when his older brother, a cardiologist, was misdiagnosed and lost his life. That loss, followed by a second misdiagnosis that took his wife's best friend and a third that nearly took his own life, sent him back to school for five and a half years at Stanford and Harvard to understand why doctors get it wrong so often. Misdiagnosis kills roughly 400,000 people a year in the US and permanently disables another 400,000, and the Institute of Medicine predicts nearly everyone will experience one in their lifetime. Steven explains why Medome approaches diagnosis by elimination rather than pattern matching, how it's built on Google's MedGemma model fine-tuned with over 100 million proprietary data points, and the surprisingly tricky engineering problem of stripping personal health information before anything touches a language model, including diseases that are literally named after people. He also shares the hardest lesson from selling into medical institutions first: doctors told him directly that extra patient information was unwelcome because they aren't paid to process it and could be held liable for missing something in it. We close on why he ignored classic startup advice to niche down, why he put his own phone number on Medome's website, and what he'd tell any founder about selling into an industry that actively resists changing how it works.

Watch the full episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wdcYHpPOoY

About the guest:
Dr. Steven Charlap, MD, MBA is a serial medical entrepreneur — NYU-trained physician, Harvard MBA, and Stanford Distinguished Careers Institute fellow — and the founder of Medome.

Connect with Dr. Steven Charlap:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/steven-charlap-md-mba-8911906/

Learn more about Medome:
https://medome.ai

Subscribe to We Built It Because We Had To wherever you listen, and learn more about how The Artesian Network helps early-stage tech companies get to market and scale at https://www.artesiannetwork.com/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=ep29&utm_content=shownotes

From Government CISO to AI-Native Security Founder (Robert Wood)

Jonathan W. Buckley of The Artesian Network — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 09:32:16 -0400

His hardest problem wasn't hackers — it was a 500-person security organization whose specialist teams couldn't speak the same language.

In this episode of We Built It Because We Had To, host Jonathan W. Buckley sits down with Robert Wood, founder and CEO of Sidekick Security, an AI-native cybersecurity consulting firm. Robert started out doing offensive red team work, then ran security programs at several tech companies before becoming the enterprise CISO at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, leading a team of nearly 500 across five divisions. That job exposed the problem that eventually pushed him to found Sidekick: specialist security teams that all report to the same leader still can't speak the same language, so he built an internal Snowflake-based "security data lake" to force the data together. They talk about why AI governance has become Sidekick's fastest-growing line of work as boards push AI adoption faster than security teams can keep up, how deepfakes and voice cloning are making old-school phishing dramatically more effective, and zerodayclock.com, the site Robert points to that tracks how the time between a vulnerability being discovered and weaponized has shrunk from years to minutes. Robert also breaks down why Sidekick made a hard pivot away from generic federal cyber contracting, how they built the business almost entirely on trust-based referrals instead of a sales team, and VSEC, their virtual CISO offering that blends senior human judgment with AI tooling they originally built just for themselves. He closes with advice for founders three months into building a services firm: don't rush to extract yourself from the work, and be ready to sit in the uncomfortable middle for longer than social media tells you to.

Connect with Robert Wood: https://www.linkedin.com/in/holycyberbatman/
Zero Day Clock (mentioned in the episode): https://zerodayclock.com

Selling "Chaos" to the Fortune 100 Almost Killed His Company (Kolton Andrus)

Jonathan W. Buckley of The Artesian Network — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 08:19:53 -0400

His pitch — "let us break your systems on purpose" — thrilled engineers and terrified the Fortune 100 executives who signed the checks. So Kolton Andrus did something few founders have the nerve to do: he stopped using the very term his company was built on.

In this episode of We Built It Because We Had To, host Jonathan W. Buckley sits down with Kolton Andrus, founder, chairman, and CEO of Gremlin — the company that carried chaos engineering out of Amazon and Netflix and into the Fortune 100, then repositioned it as reliability engineering to win the enterprise. Kolton shares how a brand-new Gremlin landed Twilio and Expedia as its first customers, what a six-to-nine-month MSA negotiation taught him about enterprise sales, and why the COVID quarters were among the hardest of his life — a stretch in which he hired an outside CEO, rebuilt the product around standardization and reliability scores, and later stepped back into the CEO seat himself. He breaks down the real math behind the nines of uptime (and why five nines means things simply cannot fail), explains why reliability is a change-management and accountability problem more than a software problem, and tells the story of the customer Gremlin lost to an outage and won back. The conversation closes with his take on agentic AI: "10x the code means 10x the problems" — and why reliability guardrails matter more now than ever.

About the guest: Kolton Andrus is the founder, chairman, and CEO of Gremlin, backed by Amplify Partners, Index Ventures, and Redpoint. Before founding Gremlin in 2016, he built failure-injection systems at Amazon and Netflix, where his team helped take Netflix from three nines to four nines of uptime.

Connect with Kolton Andrus: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kolton-andrus-77315a2/
Learn more about Gremlin: https://www.gremlin.com

His Data Found Carbon Monoxide Poisoning That Two Top Hospitals Missed (John Kelley)

Jonathan W. Buckley of The Artesian Network — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 12:21:08 -0400

A teenager was diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic by Cedars-Sinai, then again by Mayo Clinic. His furnace was poisoning him. It took John Kelley's data about 20 minutes to find it.

In this episode, Jonathan W. Buckley sits down with John Kelley, Chairman of CereHealth Corp and the iLLUME Ai platform - and, twenty years ago, the CEO and Chairman of McData Corp when Jonathan worked in its marketing organization. John explains why a Vietnam-era draftee watching friends come home with Agent Orange exposure, PTSD, and misdiagnoses decided in 2009 that the same data informatics Google and Amazon used to predict purchases could predict what was actually wrong inside a person's brain. He walks through the "patients like me" cohort model built on roughly 4,800 referred patients, why traumatic brain injury became the company's specialty, and how carbon monoxide binds to the iron in the basal ganglia and starves it of dopamine - the mechanism two of America's best hospitals missed.

The harder story is the go-to-market one. Pharma, insurance, and health systems - the three constituencies John assumed would embrace better diagnostics - all resisted, for rational reasons he lays out plainly. The VA, which should have been the natural ally, never engaged. Osteopathic physicians became the earliest adopters over MDs because they were trained to look at the whole system rather than the symptom. The company cleared the FDA in 120 days under the 21st Century Cures Act, immediately in Theranos's wake, got in front of four national carriers and Medicare, and then COVID arrived in March 2020 and took the momentum with it. Today the business has pivoted away from clinical services entirely, licensing its analytics engine as $2-4M enterprise contracts.

John closes with the part most guests won't say out loud: after seven acquisitions across ten boards, he's not sure he was the right investor for this one - because he underestimated the resistance, and that's a due-diligence lesson, not a bad-luck story.

Chapters
00:00 The show, and how Jonathan and John met at McData
01:56 Data informatics, Agent Orange, and the 2009 thesis
03:24 "Patients like me" - the core idea
04:32 Brought in as investor and chair, and the loss that changed the role
06:58 4,800 patients, cohorts, and why TBI became the specialty
08:46 Why pharma, insurance, and health systems all resisted
11:10 The VA that should have been an ally
12:33 Who said yes first: the non-siloed clinicians
16:03 Why DOs became early adopters over MDs
19:14 A Mission Viejo teenager, Cedars-Sinai, and Mayo
21:45 Carbon monoxide, the basal ganglia, and a furnace flue
24:18 Cash-pay reality, pro bono work, and suicide ideation
26:13 FDA clearance in 120 days, right after Theranos
28:12 Four carriers, Medicare, then COVID
30:59 The pivot to iLLUME Ai and $2-4M licensing contracts
33:18 Micro-targeting DOs and riding thought-leader credibility
36:39 What he'd tell you about investing outside your specialty

Guest: John Kelley, Chairman, CereHealth Corp. Previously CEO and Chairman of McData Corp, a NASDAQ 100 company. He has served on ten public and private-equity/venture-backed boards, seven of which reached acquisition.

Watch the full episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnElZDxyGow

Connect with John Kelley: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnkelley3/
CereHealth: https://www.linkedin.com/company/cerehealth
iLLUME Ai: https://illumeai.com

Subscribe on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts for new conversations with early-stage tech founders and CEOs. See how The Artesian Network helps founders get established and reach scale: https://www.artesiannetwork.com/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=ep26&utm_content=shownotes

He Sold Persistent Chat to Microsoft Before Slack Existed (Nick Fera)

Jonathan W. Buckley of The Artesian Network — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 08:19:06 -0400

Before Slack existed, Nick Fera built and sold persistent chat to Microsoft. Today he's taking on a problem most enterprise software companies won't say out loud: the systems that run the world's biggest manufacturers are nearly impossible to reach.

In this episode, Jonathan W. Buckley sits down with Nick Fera, CEO of enosix, the company that virtualizes SAP's most complex processes, product configuration, pricing, and order creation, and makes them usable inside modern front ends like Salesforce and Microsoft Copilot. Nick explains how his team compressed a 10-hour customer quoting process down to 10 minutes, why enosix sells to the business side instead of IT, and how emotional storytelling, not feature lists, wins enterprise deals. He also gets candid about surviving a CFO who killed a deal at the last minute while Nick was on a bass fishing boat, and the one hard lesson about selling a product you don't use yourself.

If you build, buy, or sell enterprise software, this conversation reframes how you think about integration, value, and the buyer who won't admit they have a problem.

Guest: Nick Fera, CEO of enosix
Connect with Nick: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nickfera/
Learn more about enosix: https://enosix.com

Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZlKiCR9AwA

Subscribe for new conversations with early-stage tech founders, and see how The Artesian Network helps founders scale: https://www.artesiannetwork.com/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=ep25&utm_content=shownotes

He Skipped School Until 25 — Now He's Building AI Governance for 48% of the Economy (Callen Sapien)

Jonathan W. Buckley of The Artesian Network — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 08:34:55 -0400

In this episode, I'm joined by Callen Sapien, CEO and Co-Founder of Synthreo. We talk about how he and his co-founders built a multi-tenant, model-agnostic AI governance and consumption platform specifically for SMBs and the managed service providers that serve them — the 48% of the global economy that every enterprise AI company walks right past.

Callen shares the origin story behind Synthreo: a Montessori farm school education that ended at age 10, years of poverty and homelessness, running a mattress store at 16, and eventually landing a 4.0 GPA at community college after a motorcycle accident forced a reset. He breaks down why the MSP channel is being systematically devalued — fighting over 1.8% margins when they built the trillion-dollar Microsoft 365 ecosystem — and why AI as a service is the way to restore what was lost.

We also get into his open-source Sapien Framework for AI behavioral governance, nine responsible disclosures submitted to major AI providers, and the Blade Runner-inspired CLI he built to test it all.

Guest & Resources
Connect with Callen Sapien: https://www.linkedin.com/in/callensapien/
Sapien Framework (open AI governance protocol): https://sapientframework.org

More episodes: https://www.WeBuiltItBecauseWeHadTo.com

Hosted by Jonathan W. Buckley of The Artesian Network.

He Lost $3M on a Failed Pivot — Here's What CloudTask Does Differently (Amir Reiter)

Jonathan W. Buckley of The Artesian Network — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 10:59:30 -0400

He put nearly $3 million of his own money into a SaaS pivot that failed — because he tried to sell customers the help they needed instead of the help they wanted.

In this episode of We Built It Because We Had To, host Jonathan W. Buckley sits down with Amir Reiter, Founder & CEO of CloudTask, the global talent marketplace connecting US companies with GTM operators across Latin America and the Caribbean. Amir breaks down the AI-powered matching system behind CloudTask's 24-month average placement LTV — including the seven-point candidate rubric and the internal "mechanical match object" framework that zippers a hiring company to the right operator. He gets refreshingly candid about the bootstrapped $3M pivot that didn't work and the brutal lesson underneath it: customers often want to hear what they want to hear, not what will actually help them. And he makes the case that AI isn't killing sales jobs — it's quietly replacing reps with operators, and reshaping what companies actually need to hire.

If you're a founder weighing bootstrapping against raising, rethinking remote hiring, or trying to figure out where AI fits in your go-to-market team, this one is full of hard-won pattern recognition.

Guest: Amir Reiter, Founder & CEO of CloudTask. Based in Medellin, Colombia, Amir has helped over 10,500 people get hired over the past decade across SaaS and non-SaaS companies including RingCentral, Vonage, Apollo, Grammarly, and Expensify.

Connect with Amir on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amirreiter/
Learn more about CloudTask: https://www.cloudtask.com

Watch the full episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21RwbhsKwoM

Subscribe so you never miss a founder backstory. We Built It Because We Had To is produced by The Artesian Network, a band of experts helping early-stage tech founders and CEOs get established and reach scale. Learn more at https://www.artesiannetwork.com and explore every episode at https://www.WeBuiltItBecauseWeHadTo.com

He Fired His Freelancers and Built a 500-Person Dev Shop to Replace Them — Furqan Aziz, InvoZone

Jonathan W. Buckley of The Artesian Network — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 18:30:13 -0400

Most founders spend year one chasing product-market fit. Furqan Aziz spent his chasing something harder to build than any product: trust.

In this episode of We Built It Because We Had To, host Jonathan W. Buckley sits down with Furqan Aziz, CEO and Founder of InvoZone. As a CTO in San Francisco, Furqan was burned by unreliable freelance developers who ghosted mid-project and missed deadlines on tight financial-services SLAs. So he built the team he wished he'd had: a dedicated, trained software organization in Lahore that has since grown to more than 500 engineers across five global offices.

You'll hear how Furqan turned the offshore category's biggest liability — buyers who had been burned before — into his opening, using Clutch-verified reviews, client reference calls, and a free trial that takes price off the table. He explains why the cheapest offshore team is usually the most expensive mistake, and makes a contrarian bet that AI will create more demand for engineers, not less, as the number of startups explodes. He also gets candid about the two startups he failed before InvoZone, the co-founder lesson he learned the hard way, and the 3 a.m. call when an engineer wiped the production database — and the leadership mindset that saved it.

Guest: Furqan Aziz, CEO and Founder, InvoZone
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/itsfurqanaziz/
Company: https://invozone.com/

If you like the real stories behind building technology companies, subscribe and join us for the next conversation. Learn more about The Artesian Network at https://www.artesiannetwork.com and find every episode at https://www.WeBuiltItBecauseWeHadTo.com

Tags: Furqan Aziz, InvoZone, Invo Zone, offshore software development, dedicated development team, Pakistan software engineers, Lahore developers, offshore development trust, Clutch reviews, co-founder lessons, production database disaster, AI and software engineering jobs, We Built It Because We Had To, Jonathan W. Buckley, The Artesian Network

How Klearly Pivoted to Dominate Hospitality Payments (Geus Walder)

Jonathan W. Buckley of The Artesian Network — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 10:00:51 -0400

What if going narrower is what makes you fundable?

Geus Walder co-founded Klearly as a generalist soft-POS app — download an app, turn any phone into a payment terminal, no hardware required. It gained traction across taxis, retail, and more. But a year of staying close to customers kept pointing to one place: hospitality had the deepest payment pain and the worst-fitting tools. So Klearly cut everything else and became a hospitality-only specialist — and that focus is what unlocked the growth, including a $12M Series A led by PayPal Ventures and a jump to 53 people.

In this episode, Geus walks through the lean-startup path behind it: validating demand with a gamified landing page that drew 600+ businesses before the product existed, raising a pre-seed with Antler to actually build it, and the operating principle the team still runs on — "speed over perfection." He also explains why in-person payments were the overlooked 80% of the market, how Klearly onboards merchants in three days instead of three weeks, and why hiring salespeople from inside hospitality (not from payments) became an unfair advantage.

If you've ever been told to widen your market to grow, this conversation argues the opposite.

Chapters

00:00 Klearly and the hospitality-payments thesis

01:06 From consulting to founding Klearly

02:00 23 hires in a quarter and a $12M Series A led by PayPal Ventures

03:00 SMB generalist vs. hospitality specialist

03:51 The pivot to horeca-only

05:56 Selling before building: the 600+ business landing page

07:41 "Speed over perfection"

08:56 The overlooked 80%: in-person payments

11:31 Go-to-market: direct sales plus ordering-system partnerships

14:19 Hiring hospitality insiders, not payments people

16:38 De-risking the leap to full-time

19:29 Lessons from the lean-startup path

Guest: Geus Walder, Co-founder, Klearly

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/geuswalder/

Klearly: https://klearly.nl

Subscribe to We Built It Because We Had To for founder stories on building and scaling B2B tech. More at https://www.WeBuiltItBecauseWeHadTo.com and https://artesiannetwork.com

The Customer Success Branding Gap Most SaaS Companies Miss (Arne Hurty)

Jonathan W. Buckley of The Artesian Network — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 14:49:06 -0400

Most SaaS companies spend heavily to win the deal — then go silent the moment the contract is signed. Arne Hurty has spent three decades watching that gap widen, and building a firm to help close it.In this episode, I'm joined by Arne Hurty, founder of BayCreative, a strategic branding and marketing firm that has supported Silicon Valley tech companies since 1997. Arne walks me through three decades of building a deliberately small strategy shop — peak headcount of about 10 — that has worked with roughly 200 customers, 90% of them right here in the Valley. He shares the desktop publishing origin story (an early Mac SE in 1986, ten years at IDG before launching the firm), how the early customer base came together through Google and AltaVista paid search plus word of mouth, and the founder lesson that has stuck the longest: walk before you run with a new client.We dig into his "small rock" metaphor for why staying lean became his durability advantage, and the harder conversations around scoping, pricing, and clarification up front. The bigger thesis we land on is the gap between pre-sale and post-sale brand experience — Arne argues customer success teams are starved for branding and messaging support, despite renewals being where loyalty is actually built. A candid conversation about resilience, adaptability, and where Arne sees the next chapter of BayCreative going.Guest & ResourcesConnect with Arne Hurty:https://www.linkedin.com/in/arnehurty/BayCreative: https://www.baycreative.comWe Built It Because We Had To is the founder-backstory podcast from The Artesian Network. New episodes every Tuesday and Thursday. Subscribe so you never miss a conversation.Visit us at: https://www.WeBuiltItBecauseWeHadTo.com

2 Million Autonomous Fixes In PayPal Production — Then He Spun It Out (Suresh Mathew)

Jonathan W. Buckley of The Artesian Network — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 11:55:37 -0400

What happens when cloud deployment outpaces the humans managing it? At PayPal, Suresh Mathew's team built the answer — an autonomous system that ran 2 million production remediations before he spun it out as Sedai.

In this episode, I'm joined by Suresh Mathew, founder and CEO of Sedai. We talk about the problem DevOps created: developers deploying directly to production faster than any SRE team could keep up. The instinct was to hire more engineers. Suresh's team built smarter — an autonomous system that handled 80% of production operations without human intervention. No 2 AM pages. Just 2 million remediations quietly running in the background. PayPal eventually mandated it: if your app wasn't compatible with the tool, you needed an approval to deploy. Then Suresh took the idea and made it work for the rest of the world.

We get into the hard stuff: raising a seed in May 2020, growing to ~100 employees, closing a $20M Series B, and the Lambda market mistake that forced an early ICP pivot. Suresh shares his formula for hiring — strength over perfect fit — and the one signal he uses to know you have product-market fit: when your team stops dreading customer meetings and starts racing to get into them.

He also explains why autonomous systems must run at zero tolerance for production failure. Not five nines. Zero.

Guest & Resources

Suresh Mathew, Founder & CEO, Sedai

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sureshmathew/

Sedai: https://www.sedai.io

We Built It Because We Had To is the founder-backstory podcast from The Artesian Network. New episodes every Tuesday and Thursday. Subscribe so you never miss a conversation.

Visit us at: https://www.WeBuiltItBecauseWeHadTo.com

Why AI Data Centers Could Break the U.S. Power Grid | Michael Parrella

Jonathan W. Buckley of The Artesian Network — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 08:01:47 -0400

AI data centers are hitting the U.S. power grid like five-gigawatt toasters — and unlike Bitcoin, that demand can never be switched off.In this episode, I sit down with Michael Parrella, CEO of ennrgy.com, about an existential moment most founders recognize but few talk about honestly: learning your largest customer is walking out the door. Michael returned as CEO of ennrgy in late 2024, and within weeks he learned they were about to lose their biggest account to a cheaper, more modern competitor. He didn't discount his way out. His team stopped defending the old product and asked one question: what do energy operators actually need? The answer — give them the decision first, the supporting data second — became the foundation of a rebuilt company. By December they had reacquired his old firm SoftSmiths and folded it in. What started as a near-death experience became the product strategy.Michael also breaks down what he calls the five-gigawatt toaster problem: AI data centers are plugging enormous, uncurtailable demand into a grid that was never built for it. He explains the fragmented reality of U.S. energy markets, why some jurisdictions are already requiring data centers to build their own power supply, why AI demand is fundamentally different from Bitcoin demand, and what it will take to prevent AI growth from crushing the energy infrastructure it runs on.Timestamps:00:01 — Welcome and intro01:01 — Career arc: from energy CEO to Chief Strategy Officer and back02:59 — The moment they learned they were losing their largest customer03:55 — How the team rebuilt the product around decision-first thinking05:11 — What ennrgy AI does: forecasting, pricing, settlements06:36 — Inverting the pyramid: decision at the top, data underneath10:05 — AI data centers and the electricity demand surge12:07 — The five-gigawatt toaster problem explained13:06 — Why AI demand cannot be curtailed the way Bitcoin demand can14:06 — Can we physically build enough power supply fast enough?15:28 — Being an ostrich doesn't work: what must be done16:19 — Parting words: existential moments create your best momentsConnect with Michael Parrella:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikeparrella/Company: https://www.ennrgy.aiSubscribe to We Built It Because We Had To on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube. Follow Artesian Network for more conversations with the founders and operators who built their companies the hard way.

https://www.webuiltitbecausewehadto.com

Inside the 64 Billion Identity Breach Data Lake — Andres Andreu, CEO of Constella Intelligence

Jonathan W. Buckley of The Artesian Network — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 09:05:47 -0400

Andres Andreu sits on one of the richest datasets in cybersecurity — nearly 64 billion breached identities — and for years growth still stalled. The problem was never the data. It was who Constella was selling it to.

In this episode of We Built It Because We Had To, Andres Andreu, CEO of Constella Intelligence, walks through the breach-data lake his company has amassed over 16-plus years and how it now feeds OEM cybersecurity vendors like Norton LifeLock and intelligence agencies across Europe, including Europol. You'll hear how a single ICP mistake — pitching CISOs who had no team to operationalize the data — held the company back, and how the shift to an OEM model drove 17% revenue growth in a single year. Andres also traces his arc from building federal law enforcement wiretap systems in the 1990s, to taking Bayshore Networks from employee number three to exit in 2021, to stepping into the CEO seat at Constella just six months after joining as COO. Along the way he shares the "fail fast" moment that forced his team to scrap part of their product and build a machine learning engine that earned an internationally granted patent — and saved the company.

If you're a founder or operator wrestling with product-market fit, ICP, or when to kill what you've built, this one is for you.

Chapters

00:00 What Constella Intelligence actually does

03:09 Why passwords barely change over 15 years

04:34 Inside the 24/7 breach-hunting program

05:18 Two ICPs: OEM vendors and intelligence agencies

05:47 From 90s federal wiretap systems to founding Bayshore Networks

09:20 The ICP mistake: selling to CISOs who couldn't use the data

10:25 OEM partners: Norton LifeLock, Europol, and beyond

13:07 "My vendor has 17 billion identities." "I have 64."

15:38 The fail-fast moment that led to a patent — and saved the company

19:13 What's driving growth now: customer-driven APIs and ICP focus

About the guest

Andres Andreu is the CEO of Constella Intelligence, a cyber-intelligence company operating one of the world's largest breach-data lakes. He brings 33 years in cybersecurity, from federal law enforcement to a 2021 startup exit with Bayshore Networks, and is the author of an internationally granted machine learning patent.

Connect with Andres: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andresandreu/

Learn more about Constella Intelligence: https://constella.ai/

Subscribe to We Built It Because We Had To for new founder stories every Tuesday and Thursday. Hosted by Jonathan Buckley of The Artesian Network — fractional CMO guidance for early-stage tech founders. Learn more at https://www.artesiannetwork.com

Exploitation Validation: Beyond Blinking Red Dots (Karen Nguyen)

Jonathan W. Buckley of The Artesian Network — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 11:58:10 -0400

Most companies build their front door out of glass — and the guard dog is asleep all day.That's how Karen Nguyen describes the security gap her company exists to close. In this episode, Karen — co-founder and CEO of OFFENSAI — joins Jonathan Buckley on the morning she launched v2 of her autonomous cybersecurity platform. We get into what "exploitation validation" actually means and why it's not just another vulnerability scanner, how she's funding the company with paying customers and pre-seed angels instead of chasing a bloated Series A, and the over-hiring failure that taught her the most honest lesson we've had on the show: undershoot or overshoot, and nobody wins — land exactly where you said you would. It's a candid conversation about building lean, selling to skeptical CISOs, and the discipline of capacity planning in a market drunk on nine-figure rounds.What you'll learn:- Why "blinking red dots everywhere" is a noise problem, and how attack-chain validation cuts through it- How to run product-led growth in a category where CISOs say no to PLG by default- The case for paying customers over a giant Series A, and when institutional money actually helps- How an over-hire cycle right before the bubble burst reshaped how Karen plans capacity- What 15 years in startup go-to-market taught her about handling fundraising rejectionTimestamps:(00:00) Meet Karen Nguyen and OFFENSAI's v2 launch day(01:55) From immigrant kid to 15 years in startup go-to-market(03:29) Female founders, fundraising, and not taking "no" personally(06:47) Pre-seed angels and the trust behind early funding(07:51) Bootstrapping vs. a Series A market gone inflationary(09:51) Building a lean go-to-market system(12:00) PLG for CISOs: getting to value in the first 15 minutes(14:35) Exploitation validation and the "front door of glass"(16:38) Defying the odds: the first-generation immigrant arc(20:06) The over-hire failure right before the bubble burst(24:11) Capacity planning and "Build It. Test It. Prove It."(26:41) Why a nine-figure Series A sets a trapAbout the guest:Karen Nguyen is co-founder and CEO of OFFENSAI, an AI-powered cloud security testing platform built around autonomous red teaming and continuous exploitation validation. She spent 15 years in startup go-to-market and eight years selling cybersecurity to CISOs before co-founding the company.Connect with Karen Nguyen: https://www.linkedin.com/in/knguyen4/OFFENSAI: https://www.offensai.comWe Built It Because We Had To is hosted by Jonathan Buckley, fractional CMO at The Artesian Network. New founder stories every Tuesday and Thursday — subscribe so you never miss one. Learn more at https://www.artesiannetwork.com

The 272-Day B2B Sales Cycle (Nick Turner)

Jonathan W. Buckley of The Artesian Network — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 08:14:38 -0400

The B2B sales cycle just hit 272 days. That is not friction. That is a buying committee with a new veto holder back at the table.In this episode of We Built It Because We Had To, I sit down with Nick Turner, CEO of Dreamdata, the Copenhagen-founded B2B revenue attribution platform that closed a $55M Series B in October. Nick spent twenty years in MarTech sales before joining Dreamdata as CRO to open the US market, and recently stepped into the CEO seat. We get into the counter-intuitive move that preceded the round — narrowing the ICP and the user persona instead of broadening it — and what Dreamdata's latest LinkedIn benchmark data is telling us about how B2B buying actually works in 2026.You will learn why the average B2B sales cycle stretched from roughly 205 days a year ago to 272 days today, why finance teams are reasserting veto power inside the buyer, why roughly eight different people are active in every account every week, and why Nick cut the Dreamdata product roadmap to six months in an Anthropic-funded world where assumptions expire fast. Nick explains why his North Star metric is the tenure of the CMO who uses the platform, and why you should never ask a marketer to manufacture demand for a deal that has to close this quarter. He closes with three lessons that shaped his path: you are a product of your failures more than your successes, all you need is one yes (he pitched 74 investors to close the round), and know yourself — he once joined a pre-revenue company and fell flat because scaling, not zero-to-one, was his game.If you run revenue, sit in the CMO chair, or own a number that depends on a buying committee saying yes, this one is for you.GuestNick Turner — Chief Executive Officer, DreamdataLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cnickturner/Company: https://dreamdata.ioAbout the showWe Built It Because We Had To is a podcast about early-stage tech founders, the spark behind what they built, and the journey to make it exist. Hosted by Jonathan Buckley of The Artesian Network, where we have helped founders scale companies and have seen more than half of our clients reach an IPO or acquisition.Subscribe wherever you listen, follow the show on YouTube for the full video, and learn more at https://artesiannetwork.com.— Jonathan Buckley, The Artesian Network

The AI Pushing Back on Insurance Denials (Michael Riley of Gabeo.ai)

Jonathan W. Buckley of The Artesian Network — Thu, 28 May 2026 08:29:43 -0400

On his fourth B2B SaaS company, Michael Riley walked into the most crowded corner of healthcare tech — claim denials — and walked right back out. He pivoted Gabeo.ai into a niche almost no one was working: claim write-offs, the revenue hospitals and provider groups have already given up on. In the first 90 days at a large Midwest hospital group, his agentic AI layer pulled back $1.2 million.In this episode of We Built It Because We Had To, Michael and host Jonathan W. Buckley get into the mechanics of finding a niche inside a saturated market, the two-product strategy at Gabeo (Zoey for fee-for-service, Aria for value-based care), and why value-based care flips the economic incentives of US healthcare. Michael walks through how their AI agents cut through hundreds of pages of contract language that "you'd need a team of lawyers and months to decode."Then they rewind to his arc — learning to program at seven, co-founding Simple Post, surviving a year of failure-after-failure at Funnl before landing on an analytics product that got acquired. Michael gets candid about a 45x-ROI pilot he renegotiated DOWN to a fairer 5-10x, why his entire GTM at Gabeo is warm intros (no paid ads, no sales team), and the single biggest tell that you've actually hit product-market fit: the body language in the room.What you'll hear:- Why Gabeo abandoned denials and chased write-offs instead- How agentic AI cuts through 100s of pages of contract language in minutes- The pricing lesson behind the 45x ROI pilot they renegotiated- 12 product pivots, one acquisition — and what Michael learned about MVPs- Why "selling is asking questions" beats pitching, every time- What he wishes he'd known 15 years agoConnect with Michael Riley: https://www.linkedin.com/in/themichaelriley/Learn more about Gabeo.ai: https://gabeo.aiSubscribe to We Built It Because We Had To for new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday. More from Jonathan W. Buckley and The Artesian Network: https://artesiannetwork.comIf this episode hit, share it with a founder who's still trying to brute-force product-market fit with a bigger sales team.#FounderStory #HealthcareAI #B2BSaaS #ProductMarketFit #AgenticAI

AGE: The 4th Axis the AGI Conversation Is Missing | Rana Gujral

Jonathan W. Buckley of The Artesian Network — Tue, 26 May 2026 16:14:40 -0400

🎙 Season 1, Episode 13Rana Gujral thinks the AGI conversation is missing a fourth axis: Artificial General Experience (AGE). On this episode of We Built It Because We Had To, the founder of Behavioral Signals and author of the upcoming book The AI Instinct: The Future of AI and Human Decision Making explains why intelligence without experience, memory, valence, or a persistent self-model is hollow — and why superintelligence won't arrive as an external god-like machine. It will emerge from hybrid cognition: the tight loop between a human's priors and a machine's scale.We also get into the through line from founding TIZE (acquired), leading Smart Home at Logitech, and helping rebuild Cricut during a near-bankruptcy stretch that turned into a successful IPO. Rana explains why Behavioral Signals doesn't use third-party LLMs and how its paralinguistic models read tone, pitch, prosody, and micro-pauses to extract the signal under the words. He breaks down the company's two business lines (CCaaS and national security, where they're backed by In-Q-Tel), and how their new behavioral mapping approach to deepfake audio detection works at half-second granularity and 98–99% accuracy when classical artifact analysis has stopped working.🎙 In this episode:→ AGE: Artificial General Experience as the missing AGI axis→ Why Behavioral Signals refuses to use third-party LLMs→ Paralinguistic models that read tone, prosody, and micro-pauses→ Deepfake audio detection by behavioral mapping (98–99% accuracy)→ In-Q-Tel backing and the national security business line→ From Logitech Smart Home to Cricut's IPO turnaround→ "Measure what the system does to the person, not just for them"📌 Connect with Rana Gujral:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ranagujral/🎧 About "We Built It Because We Had To"The Artesian Network's podcast — hosted by CEO Jonathan Buckley. Real founder stories about the spark, the struggle, and the strategy behind building a tech company. More than half of our clients reach IPO or acquisition.→ Subscribe for new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday at 11 AM ET→ More from Jonathan: https://artesiannetwork.com→ Connect with Jonathan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathanwbuckley/⏱ Chapters:00:00 Intro01:08 From Cricut's near bankruptcy to a successful IPO02:30 Behavioral Signals as research roots, not chatbot05:19 Two equal legs: call centers and national security06:56 Why old deepfake detection broke07:43 The cybersecurity manipulation problem10:12 Series A in 2019, before Transformers12:33 Inventing the category nobody had a bucket for16:09 Artificial general experience explained18:50 The chess engine that lives through nothing20:02 Hybrid cognition and the new unit24:23 Measure what the system does to the person#FounderStories #AI #AGI #VoiceAI #DeepfakeDetection

50 Customers, One US Patent, and a Tool That Plays Nice (Stephen Franklin)

Jonathan W. Buckley of The Artesian Network — Thu, 21 May 2026 14:24:20 -0400

Most cybersecurity vendors win by telling the buyer their existing tools are broken. Stephen Franklin filed a U.S. patent on doing the opposite.In this episode, Stephen — Founder and CEO of Netwatch.ai — walks through how he went from a teenage job at Pitney Bowes Software to building the patented AI integration layer that now sits on top of AWS, Azure, Carbon Black, Meraki, Cisco Cybervision, SolarWinds, and Nutanix. The thesis is simple: stop forcing rip-and-replace. Plug in. Reduce the customer's tool sprawl. Use AI to collapse mean time to contain from hours to seconds.What you'll hear:How a decade of technical sales at Argent taught Stephen exactly which integrations every cyber buyer wishes they had.Why bootstrapping Netwatch from his own Argent commissions kept the product roadmap honest.How utility co-ops — a vertical almost nobody else is actively selling cyber to — became one of Netwatch's sharpest early segments.The two AI "personas" Netwatch ships: a sysadmin and a CISO, with guardrails for what each one is allowed to do.How a Florida statewide cybersecurity contract opened the door to North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia.Why Stephen has turned down VC offers at 50 customers and a 100% renewal rate.50 customers in. 100% renewal. A real US patent. No rip-and-replace pitch in sight.Guest: Stephen Franklin, Founder and CEO, Netwatch.aiConnect with Stephen on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephen-franklin-ii/Netwatch: https://netwatch.aiHosted by Jonathan Buckley, CEO of Artesian Network. Subscribe to "We Built It Because We Had To, stories about founders and their journeys" wherever you get your podcasts. More at https://artesiannetwork.com.

Laid Off by the DoE — Then He Built an AI Startup | David Blumenthal

Jonathan W. Buckley of The Artesian Network — Tue, 19 May 2026 10:25:39 -0400

When the U.S. Department of Education was dismantled, David Blumenthal lost his 13-year career as an education researcher in a single March 2025 Zoom call. Three weeks later, his daughter was born. Somewhere between 2 AM and 3 AM bottle feeds, he started plotting his next chapter. The result is Eddy — a RAG-based AI tool for teachers built on 400,000+ peer-reviewed journal articles that cuts through academic jargon and cites every recommendation back to its source.In this episode of We Built It Because We Had To, David walks through the twin trust problem educators face (distrust of academic research and fear of AI hallucinations), why contextual matching and social proof matter more than raw accuracy, how they're validating their MVP by paying arms-length teacher-testers $50 for honest feedback, and why the path from bootstrap to pre-seed raise looks completely different now thanks to Claude Code, Lovable, and Replit. He also previews the Eddy Pro launch.🎙 In this episode:→ Losing a 13-year research career to a single Zoom call→ Building Eddy on 400K+ peer-reviewed studies→ The teacher trust problem (research distrust + AI hallucinations)→ Contextual matching beats raw accuracy→ Paying arms-length testers $50 for honest MVP feedback→ How Claude Code, Lovable, and Replit changed the bootstrap-to-seed path📌 Connect with David Blumenthal:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/blumenthaldavid/📌 Connect with Jonathan W Buckley:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathanwbuckley/🎧 About "We Built It Because We Had To"The Artesian Network's podcast — hosted by CEO Jonathan Buckley. Real founder stories about the spark, the struggle, and the strategy behind building a tech company. More than half of our clients reach IPO or acquisition.→ Subscribe for new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday at 11 AM ET→ More from Jonathan: https://artesiannetwork.com→ Connect with Jonathan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathanwbuckley/⏱ Chapters:00:00 Intro01:00 A tech CEO with no tech or business degree02:00 13 years at AIR and the March 2025 layoff04:21 The 2 AM idea that became Eddy06:45 400,000 journal articles inside a RAG09:45 Launching into an anti-evidence climate11:55 Context matching and the trust problem14:52 Paying teachers $50 for arms-length feedback17:56 Bootstrapping toward the pre-seed20:46 Saving Sunday night for teachers22:22 The billion-dollar two-person company#FounderStories #EdTech #RAG #FirstTimeFounder #AIForTeachers

The EdTech Founder Bootstrapping AI for Higher Ed (Preeti Tanwar)

Jonathan W. Buckley of The Artesian Network — Fri, 15 May 2026 09:59:04 -0400

In this episode, I'm joined by Preeti Tanwar, founder of HiEd Success, an Atlanta-based IT consulting firm and social enterprise serving US colleges and universities in data analytics and AI.

Preeti shares how 25 years inside higher education exposed a critical workforce gap — and how she built HiEd Success to mentor women re-entering tech, recent grads, and first-generation students into high-demand data careers while solving the student-success dashboard problem for universities on a tight budget.

We dig into her Fraud Guard AI, an agentic, self-healing solution fighting the identity-theft rackets siphoning federal financial aid away from real students, and Easy Transfer, an AI career-coach that tells students which of their credits will actually transfer before they ever apply.

Preeti is refreshingly candid about the product-market-fit challenge of selling to tier-two universities, the endless certification treadmill facing small firms, and why she's bootstrapped every dollar of HiEd Success to date.

We close on her nonprofit ElevateHER Network — an ecosystem for female founders in AI built to move the 2.8% female-funding number in the right direction.

🔗 Guest & Resources

Connect with Preeti Tanwar:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/preetitanwar/

ElevateHER Network:

https://elevatehernetwork.org/

Connect with The Artesian Network: https://www.artesiannetwork.com

Connect with Jonathan W. Buckley

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathanwbuckley/

🔑 Keywords

edtech, higher education, ai in education, hied success, preeti tanwar, agentic ai, self-healing ai, fraud guard, financial aid fraud, identity theft, easy transfer, transfer articulation, student success dashboards, data analytics, data engineering, social enterprise, women in tech, women founders, female funding gap, bootstrapped, product market fit, tier two universities, workforce development, elevatehernetwork, alteryx, qualtrics, salesforce, tableau

Don't Hire That Full-Time CMO Yet — Here's Why (Eyal Dror)

Jonathan W. Buckley of The Artesian Network — Thu, 14 May 2026 16:12:18 -0400

In this episode, I'm joined by Eyal Dror, Founder of Vicious Marketing and CMO of Bright Security. We talk about his path from VP of Marketing at a gaming company that sold for $100M, to founding his own consulting practice, and eventually launching Vicious Marketing after being underwhelmed by the agencies his clients were hiring. Eyal walks through why he broke his own rule to step in as CMO at Bright — helping them reposition from a traditional DAST vendor into an AI-native security player with their new product Star, which recently won a Google Award. We get into the messaging challenge of pitching AI cybersecurity to CTOs, CISOs, and AppSec engineers at the same time, why creative and messaging now matter more than ad optimization, and how he uses n8n and AI workflows to test messages at scale. Eyal also shares his 18-month fractional CMO playbook, why he monitors Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini for brand presence, and his core advice to early-stage founders: chase revenue from SMBs before chasing enterprise logos.

🔗 Guest & Resources

Connect with Eyal Dror:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/eyaldror1/

🔑 Keywords

eyal dror, vicious marketing, bright security, fractional cmo, cybersecurity marketing, dast, dynamic application security testing, ai code security, ai generated code, appsec, b2b saas marketing, early stage startup marketing, go to market strategy, performance marketing, messaging and positioning, ab testing, n8n automation, ai marketing automation, ciso, cto, appsec engineer, multi-stakeholder selling, startup scaling, revenue first, smb sales, enterprise sales, neuralegion, star by bright, google award, jonathan buckley, artesian network, we built it because we had to, b2b tech startups, mvp, repeatable sales, predictable revenue, saas growth

Building a $235M SaaS Business by Being Human First (Nick Mehta)

Jonathan W. Buckley of The Artesian Network — Tue, 12 May 2026 12:56:32 -0400

In this episode, I'm joined by Nick Mehta, the former CEO of Gainsight and the executive who literally wrote the book on customer success. We trace the only-in-Silicon-Valley story behind Gainsight — from a chance call in a 24 Hour Fitness parking lot, to teaming up with the Jbara founders, to scaling the business to $235M in revenue and a Vista Equity acquisition. Nick walks through what it actually took to build a category: five books, the Pulse conference, thousands of blog posts, and ground warfare to define a profession that didn't exist. We also dig into where AI is changing customer-facing work — why agentic tools are crushing it on inbound support but still hitting a wall on outbound CS, and what Gainsight is shipping under new president Chuck Ganapathi. Nick closes with a masterclass on culture (his why/who/what/how framework), the moment vulnerability on stage at Pulse changed how he writes publicly, and why the antidote to an AI-saturated world is unfinished, messy, real human stories.🔗 Guest & ResourcesConnect with Nick Mehta:https://www.linkedin.com/in/nickmehta/🔑 Keywordsnick mehta, gainsight, customer success, jonathan buckley, artesian network, jbara, vista equity partners, pulse conference, saas, churn, retention, category creation, chuck ganapathi, staircase ai, agentic ai, voice ai, sierra, decagon, customer support vs customer success, inbound vs outbound ai, renewal agent, ai adoption agent, salesforce, marc benioff, dan steinman, allison pickens, livesoffice, symantec, mental health chatbots, brené brown, vulnerability, human first leadership, company culture, why who what how, linkedin writing, substack, anti ted talk, founder story, b2b saas

"Be Afraid Every Day": 30 Years of Disruption in Capital Markets (Ashok Mittal)

Jonathan W. Buckley of The Artesian Network — Thu, 07 May 2026 14:16:47 -0400

In this episode, I'm joined by Ashok Mittal, founder and CEO of FinTech Global Center — a company he's been building for 30 years across consulting, trading-system development, and now product.

Ashok walks us through his arc from studying AI in 1986 to co-founding an inter-dealer broker that survived 9/11, to running his own brokerage across New York, London, Singapore, and Japan, to today's flagship product, FGCTMS — a fixed-income trading and trade management system going head-to-head with Bloomberg TOMS in a niche Bloomberg hasn't prioritized.

Trillions of dollars have flowed through the systems his team has built. We dig into why the post-COVID interest-rate shift (baby boomers moving from 4% mixed-return portfolios to 4-6% fixed income) has fundamentally reshaped the market and why the trading tools haven't kept up with the velocity, the bid-offer compression, and stricter regulators.

Ashok is refreshingly direct about AI: it's generating 10x to 30x efficiencies, it's thinning every software and domain-expertise moat, and the real question isn't growth — it's existential. We talk through being the first company to build a trading system in the cloud (2014), his global R&D model out of India delivering "faster, better, and cheaper" at once, and why his parting advice to every founder and professional is to "be afraid every day."

🔗 Guest & Resources

Connect with Ashok Mittal:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ahmittal/

FinTech Global Center:

https://fintechglobal.center/

Jonathan W. Buckley: https:www.jonathanwbuckley.com

The Artesian Network: https://www.artesiannetwork.com

🔑 Keywords

fintech global center, Ashok Mittal, fixed income trading, trade management system, Bloomberg toms, capital markets, institutional trading, inter-dealer broker, wall street, cloud trading, ai in finance, agentic ai, jamie dimon, bid offer compression, regulation, software disruption, 10x efficiency, global r&d india, faster better cheaper, entrepreneurship, moat erosion, llm impact, trading infrastructure

PodcastFrom Phone Hacking in the 80s to OT Cybersecurity (Patrick Miller)

Jonathan W. Buckley of The Artesian Network — Tue, 05 May 2026 12:54:46 -0400

In this episode, I'm joined by Patrick Miller, Founder and CEO of Ampyx Cyber. We talk about what OT cybersecurity actually covers (the SCADA controllers running your local water plant, chemical facility, and power grid), how Patrick went from crawling through asbestos walls as an eight-year-old phone tech to bootstrapping his fourth consulting firm in 2021, and the three nation-state actors that dominate industrial cyber (Russia, China, and Iran). We also get into Anthropic's Mythos model, why emergent survival behavior in frontier AI is a structural problem for everyone still patching 30-year-old hardware, and why Patrick is deliberately keeping Ampyx small instead of chasing headcount.🔗 Guest & ResourcesConnect with Patrick Miller:https://www.linkedin.com/in/millerpatrickc/#cybersecurity#podcast,#OTstartups#techfounders#theartesiannetwork

From Coca-Cola & Unilever to an AI Startup at 60 (Stan Sthanunathan)

Jonathan W. Buckley of The Artesian Network — Mon, 04 May 2026 12:17:31 -0400

Stan is a rare kind of founder. He spent decades at the highest levels of enterprise consumer insights, including a long senior tenure at Unilever and significant work at Coca-Cola, before stepping into the CEO role at an AI startup. That journey is exactly why this conversation matters. This is not the story of a 28-year-old founder chasing the next trend. It is the story of someone who built 30+ years of pattern recognition within some of the world’s largest companies, saw technology moving faster than those organizations could absorb, and decided to build anyway. That decision — and what it took to make it — sits at the center of this episode.You can learn more here:The Artesian Network: www.artesiannetwork.com i-Genie.ai: https://i-genie.aiMy LinkedIn: https://lnkd.in/ew8vxzAXStan’s LinkedIn: https://lnkd.in/e3SfVbse

The $57M Bet on Blockchain Identity (Rohan Pinto)

Jonathan W. Buckley of The Artesian Network — Mon, 04 May 2026 12:11:23 -0400

In this episode, I'm joined by Rohan Pinto, co-founder of 1Kosmos. We trace the evolution of identity management from LDAP and single sign-on to blockchain-based biometric authentication, and how 1Kosmos built a FedRAMP-certified platform now handling millions of authentications per day across 50+ enterprise customers. Rohan unpacks why AI agents need their own authentication, authorization, and kill switches — and how self-learning policies can catch rogue agent behavior before it causes damage. He also shares the SIM-hijacking experience that sparked his leap into entrepreneurship, the MVP validation playbook (cohorts, demos, senior feedback) that carried him through Series A, and the real story behind 1Kosmos' $57M Series B — including why employees invested their own money into the round. We close with a candid take on balancing fractional and full-time talent as you scale from MVP through Series C.

🔗 Guest & Resources

Connect with Rohan Pinto:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/rohanpinto/

identity management, blockchain identity, biometric authentication, 1kosmos, ai agents, agent authentication, agent authorization The Artesian Network

300% Year-Over-Year: The AI Content Machine for Law Firms (John Fly)

Jonathan W. Buckley of The Artesian Network — Mon, 04 May 2026 12:06:05 -0400

In this episode, I'm joined by John Fly, CTO of FirmPilot — a VC-backed AI platform automating marketing for law firms. John shares how 30 years in tech (starting as a 15-year-old coding for a mortgage software company) led him to team up with founder/CEO Jake on a simple idea: "get the ego out of marketing" and let programmatic AI handle the blogs, social media, Google Business Profile posts, SEO touches, and ad campaign management that law firms today pay agencies $25K–$30K/month for. FirmPilot does it for $7.5K–$10K, and the economics are working — they've raised over $20M through a Series A1 and are tripling year over year. We dig into why legal is the ideal vertical (expensive agencies, non-technical buyers, dense compliance rules the generic LLMs can't handle out of the box), how FirmPilot's conversational onboarding replaces the usual form-filling intake, and why the real moat isn't the LLM — it's the thousands of legal-marketing rules they've trained the system on (what you can and can't say, what "expert" means in court, which guarantees are off-limits). John also gets candid about bootstrapping versus VC-backed growth, the repeatability of their per-client configuration, and why the content machine works best when the client already knows who they are. We close on a quick shout-out to his 5-year beard.

🔗 Guest & Resources

Connect with John Fly:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnfly/

FirmPilot:

https://www.firmpilot.com

legal tech, AI marketing, law firm marketing, legal marketing automation, content automation, programmatic AI, large language models, seo, ad campaign management, firm growth, agency displacement, AI content machine, bootstrapping vs VC

The 4-Time Exited Founder Going for the Fifth (Peter Pezaris)

Jonathan W. Buckley of The Artesian Network — Mon, 04 May 2026 11:37:09 -0400

In this episode, I'm joined by Peter Pezaris, a four-time exiting founder now building his fifth, Vortex Software, out of San Francisco. Peter walks us through 25 years of building with the same Carnegie Mellon crew — starting with Commissioner.com (the first fantasy sports platform on the web, sold to what became CBS Sports), through Multiply (a social newsfeed launched in 2003 — before Facebook had one — that briefly led the social network race in several countries), to Glip (launched the same month as Slack with a nearly identical product, sold to RingCentral), and most recently CodeStream (a YC company sold to New Relic). Two of those almost became category-defining giants. The reflection on what kept them from the monster outcome — including 25 years building from Delray Beach, Florida instead of the Bay Area — is the thread that drove the move to San Francisco for Vortex. We dig into Vortex itself: a drop-in plugin (think Stripe, but for team-invite flows) that turns the moment a single user invites their team into a real conversion engine. The industry average freemium-to-paid rate is 5.5%; Slack hits 30%, CodeStream hit 33% — and Peter's research across 200+ companies says the team-invite flow is the single biggest blind spot in PLG. Vortex automates the experimentation: one customer's invite conversion jumped from baseline +26% on day one, then to +31% as Vortex's agent ran A/B tests on copy, timing, and channels. Peter closes with the cleanest founder advice I've heard in a while: did you spend more time on your startup this week than last week? If yes for several weeks running, you have a real company. If not, it's a hobby.

🔗 Guest & Resources

Connect with Peter Pezaris:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ppezaris/

Vortex Software:

https://www.vortexsoftware.com/

plg, product-led growth, freemium conversion, team invite flow, saas, codestream, multiply, glip, commissioner.com, Carnegie Mellon, four-time founder, serial entrepreneur, YC, Y Combinator, New Relic acquisition, RingCentral acquisition, slack competitor, facebook competitor, fantasy sports, drop-in plugin, stripe for invites, ab testing agent, freemium to paid, conversion optimization, founder advice, startup discipline

The 3am LinkedIn Slip That Started Metadata.io (Gil Allouche)

Jonathan W. Buckley of The Artesian Network — Mon, 04 May 2026 11:26:25 -0400

In this episode, I'm joined by Gil Allouche, Founder and CEO of Metadata.io. We talk about how Gil turned a $50,000 side project at Spotfire into a $1.5M business in 18 months (which is where he accidentally invented his career in revenue marketing), the 3am LinkedIn slip at a Bessemer roundtable that led him to register the Metadata.io domain the same night, and the journey to raising $50M across Seed through Series B. We get into why Metadata's core product still runs on classical machine learning with patents rather than LLMs, how Gil's personal stack of Hermes and OpenClaw agents on a Mac Mini plus 200+ make.com workflows now saves him weeks of work per month, and his framework for when to sit down with Claude Code synchronously versus when to hand a project to an autonomous agent with a cron job and its own test harness. Gil also shares why scarcity beats VC panic-spend, why any company not deploying agentic systems today won't exist in a few years, and why his advice to every new entrepreneur is the same two words: start building.

🔗 Guest & Resources

Connect with Gil Allouche:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/gilallouche/

revenue marketing, B2B marketing, marketing automation, AI marketing, machine learning, VP marketing, founder story, series A, series B, Bessemer Venture Partners, 500 Startups, Hillsven Capital, autonomous agents, Claude Code, Codex, CMO, multivariate execution, experimentation, demand generation, B2B SaaS, entrepreneurship, bootstrapping, saas founder, founder interview, agentic systems