We Built It Because We Had To - Tech Founder Backstories

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 bran...

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...

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...

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 do...

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 hi...

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.<...

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.

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...

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 quie...

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 on...

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 t...

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 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 th...

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 G...

🎙 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...

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...

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...

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...

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 me...

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 cu...

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 w...

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...

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 t...

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 st...

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...

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 Re...

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...