We Built It Because We Had To - Tech Founder Backstories

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 & ResourcesConnect 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. Buckleyhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathanwbuckley/🔑 Keywordsedtech, 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

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 & ResourcesConnect with Eyal Dror:https://www.linkedin.com/in/eyaldror1/🔑 Keywordseyal 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

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

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 & ResourcesConnect with Ashok Mittal:https://www.linkedin.com/in/ahmittal/FinTech Global Center:https://fintechglobal.center/Jonathan W. Buckley: https:www.jonathanwbuckley.comThe Artesian Network: https://www.artesiannetwork.com 🔑 Keywordsfintech 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

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

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.comi-Genie.ai: https://i-genie.aiMy LinkedIn: https://lnkd.in/ew8vxzAXStan’s LinkedIn: https://lnkd.in/e3SfVbse

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 & ResourcesConnect 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

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 & ResourcesConnect with John Fly:https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnfly/FirmPilot:https://www.firmpilot.comlegal 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

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 & ResourcesConnect 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

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 & ResourcesConnect 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