Podcast Series

We Built It Because We Had To

Real conversations with B2B tech founders who built their go-to-market the hard way. Hosted by Jonathan W. Buckley.

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Latest Episode

S1 E33 | They Hired Consultants and Got Order Takers | Stephanie Taylor, VFP Consulting

Stephanie Taylor, CEO of VFP Consulting, discusses how she built a management consulting firm focused on Salesforce and Certinia implementations by prioritizing process and people over product configuration, and how she's adapting to AI's impact on her business through her new product Campfire. She shares insights on navigating co-founder splits, turning down private equity, and why true consulting requires discipline rather than treating implementations as order-taking.

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S1 E31 | Why Treating Returns as a Cost Center Is the Problem | Ricardo Morgado, Getloopos

Ricardo Morgado of Getloopos discusses building LoopOS to transform returns into profit centers for enterprise retail.

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S1 E30 | The AI Worker With Her Own LinkedIn Page | Daniele Bernardi, Toolhouse

Daniele Bernardi founded Toolhouse to create cost-effective AI workers for repetitive tasks across communication platforms.

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S1 E32 | 97% of Brand Comments Go Unanswered. His AI Answers Them | Hank Leber, Stanify

Hank Leber discusses how his AI platform Stanify automates social media engagement to respond to the 97% of unanswered comments on business pages.

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S1 E29 | He Lost His Brother to a Misdiagnosis. Then He Built Medome | Dr. Steven Charlap, Medome

Dr. Steven Charlap discusses his AI-first primary care platform Medome built to reduce medical misdiagnosis.

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S1 E28 | From Government CISO to AI-Native Security Founder | Robert Wood, Sidekick Security

Robert Wood, founder of Sidekick Security, discusses AI governance, cybersecurity challenges, and building a services firm on referrals.

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S1 E27 | Selling "Chaos" to the Fortune 100 Almost Killed His Company | Kolton Andrus, Gremlin

Kolton Andrus built Gremlin by rebranding failure-testing from chaos engineering to reliability to sell to Fortune 100 executives.

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S1 E26 | His Data Found Carbon Monoxide Poisoning That Two Top Hospitals Missed | John Kelley

John Kelley discusses how his CereHealth predictive analytics platform uses AI to diagnose brain health conditions that traditional medicine misses.

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S1 E25 | He Sold Persistent Chat to Microsoft Before Slack Existed | Nick Fera

Nick Fera, CEO of enosix, discusses virtualizing SAP processes to streamline enterprise workflows through modern platforms.

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S1 E24 | The MSP Channel Is Being Robbed — And AI Is the Slingshot to Fight Back | Callen Sapien

Callen Sapien discusses building Synthreo, an AI governance platform for SMBs and MSPs.

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S1 E23 | He Lost $3M on a Failed Pivot — Here's What CloudTask Does Differently | Amir Reiter

Amir Reiter discusses building CloudTask, an AI-powered talent marketplace connecting US companies with Latin American GTM operators.

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S1 E21 | From Landing Page to $12M Series A With PayPal Ventures | Geus Walder

Geus Walder built Klearly from a gamified waitlist to a 12M Series A by focusing on hospitality payments instead of generalist soft-POS.

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S1 E20 | The Customer Success Branding Gap Most SaaS Companies Miss | Arne Hurty

Arne Hurty of BayCreative discusses building a deliberately small strategy firm serving Silicon Valley tech companies for three decades.

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S1 E22 | He Fired His Freelancers and Built a 500-Person Dev Shop to Replace Them | Furqan Aziz

Furqan Aziz founded InvoZone to connect Pakistani engineers with cash-strapped Silicon Valley startups through offshore development.

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S1 E19 | 2M Autonomous Fixes Inside PayPal | Suresh Mathew, Sedai

Suresh Mathew built an autonomous remediation system at PayPal that Sedai now uses to handle production operations without humans.

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S1 E18 | Why AI Data Centers Could Break the U.S. Power Grid | Michael Parrella

Michael Parrella discusses how AI data centers strain electricity grids and how ennrgy pivoted its product to help energy operators manage demand.

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S1 E17 | Inside the 64 Billion Identity Breach Data Lake | Andres Andreu

Constella Intelligence CEO Andres Andreu discusses his 64 billion identity breach data lake and pivot to OEM sales model.

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S1 E16 | Paying Customers Before Series A | Karen Nguyen, OFFENSAI CEO

Karen Nguyen bootstraps OFFENSAI, an autonomous cybersecurity platform validating real attack chains without inflated Series A funding.

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S1 E15 | The 272-Day B2B Sales Cycle | Nick Turner, CEO of Dreamdata

Nick Turner, CEO of Dreamdata, discusses how B2B sales cycles have stretched to 272 days and shares strategies for closing a $55M Series B.

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S1 E14 | $1.2M in 90 Days: The Claims Providers Wrote Off | Michael Riley

Michael Riley's Gabio.ai uses AI agents to recover hospital write-offs instead of chasing claim denials like competitors.

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S1 E13 | AGE: The 4th Axis the AGI Conversation Is Missing | Rana Gujral

Rana Gujral discusses Artificial General Experience as missing from AGI conversation and Behavioral Signals' deepfake audio detection technology.

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S1 E12 | 50 Customers, 1 US Patent, AI That Plays Nice | Stephen Franklin

Stephen Franklin discusses how Netwatch.AI integrates existing cybersecurity tools instead of replacing them.

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S1 E11 | Laid Off by the DoE — Then He Built an AI Startup | David Blumenthal

David Blumenthal built Eddy, an AI tool using peer-reviewed research to help teachers cut through jargon and distrust of both academia and AI.

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S1 E10 | Fighting Financial Aid Fraud With Agentic AI | Preeti Tanwar

Preeti Tanwar built AI tools to fight financial aid fraud and help college students while bootstrapping her education tech firm.

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S1 E9 | Don't Hire That Full-Time CMO Yet — Here's Why | Eyal Dror

Eyal Dror shares his 18-month fractional CMO playbook for B2B startups, emphasizing messaging over ad optimization.

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S1 E8 | Nick Mehta on Why AI Customer Success Is Failing | Inbound vs Outbound

Nick Mehta discusses creating the customer success category, scaling Gainsight to $235M, and why AI excels at inbound support but struggles with outbound CS.

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S1 E7 | The Fintech CEO Taking on Bloomberg TOMS | Ashok Mittal

Ashok Mittal, CEO of FinTech Global Center, discusses building trading systems over 30 years and competing with Bloomberg in fixed-income markets.

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S1 E6 | Your Water Plant Is Running 30-Year-Old SCADA | Patrick Miller

Patrick Miller discusses OT cybersecurity threats and building Ampyx Cyber as a lean bootstrapped firm.

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S1 E5 | The 3am LinkedIn Slip That Started Metadata.io | Gil Allouche

Gil Allouche discusses building Metadata.io from a side project into a successful revenue marketing platform using classical ML and AI agents.

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S1 E4 | The 4-Time Exited Founder Going for the Fifth | Peter Pezaris

Peter Pezaris discusses his startup experience and Vortex Software, a plugin optimizing team-invite conversion for freemium products.

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S1 E3 | Replacing the $30K Legal Marketing Agency With AI | John Fly

John Fly discusses how FirmPilot uses AI to automate law firm marketing at a fraction of traditional agency costs.

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S1 E2 | Why Every AI Agent Needs a Kill Switch | Rohan Pinto

Rohan Pinto discusses 1Kosmos' evolution from identity management to biometric authentication and AI agent security.

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S1 E1 | From Coca-Cola & Unilever to AI Startup at 60 | Stan Sthanunathan

Stan Sthanunathan left his 30-year career at Unilever and Coca-Cola to launch his AI startup i-Genie.ai.

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