We Built It Because We Had To - Tech Founder Backstories

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) (S1 E21)

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