Shows / We Built It Because We Had To - Tech Founder Backstories
We Built It Because We Had To - Tech Founder Backstories
We Built It Because We Had To is a founder-interview podcast from The Artesian Network, hosted by Jonathan Buckley. Each episode digs into the real founder journey behind B2B SaaS and tech startups — the backstories, the drama, the lessons, go-to-market, product-market fit, fundraising, enterprise sales, scaling, and how agentic AI is reshaping the bet.
Episodes
We Built It Because We Had To - Tech Founder BackstoriesCompanies Record What They Decided. Almost None Record Why. (Ashutosh Garg)
Most companies record what they decided. Almost none record why, or what they considered and ruled out. Ashutosh Garg, co-founder and CEO of Twin Cafe…
We Built It Because We Had To - Tech Founder BackstoriesEveryone Asks Who Can Access the AI. He Asks What It Just Sent. (Gidi Cohen)
Enterprises rolled out AI agents and generative tools faster than they built any way to see what those systems were doing with sensitive data. Gidi Cohen built…
We Built It Because We Had To - Tech Founder BackstoriesSoftware Ships Weekly. Pentests Still Run Once a Year. (Rejah Rehim)
Software ships every week. Most penetration tests still run once a year. Rejah Rehim built Beagle Security to close that gap. Rejah started his career as a…
We Built It Because We Had To - Tech Founder BackstoriesSeventy-Five Demos, Zero Sales. Then He Bet on Precision Over Volume. (Ashok Rajan)
Ashok Rajan ran 75 demos in two months and closed nothing. Then he took every recording, fed it to AI, and rebuilt his company around what customers actually…
We Built It Because We Had To - Tech Founder BackstoriesThe Wall Every AI Data Center Is Quietly Hitting (Vivek Raghunathan)
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…
We Built It Because We Had To - Tech Founder BackstoriesAssume Everything Will Break. That's What Fast Scaling Feels Like. (Daniel Rosenrauch)
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…
We Built It Because We Had To - Tech Founder BackstoriesEveryone Ignored In-House Legal. He Built Its Operating System. (Evan Wong)
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…
We Built It Because We Had To - Tech Founder BackstoriesNobody Wanted His Sales Playbooks. They Wanted the Recorder. (Gerald Zankl)
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…
We Built It Because We Had To - Tech Founder BackstoriesYour AppSec Tools Find 15% of Defects, Not 95% (Chris Near)
The application security industry spent years believing its tools found roughly 95 percent of the defects in code. Chris Near studied 34 million findings…
We Built It Because We Had To - Tech Founder BackstoriesThey Hired Consultants and Got Order Takers (Stephanie Taylor)
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…
We Built It Because We Had To - Tech Founder BackstoriesWhy Treating Returns as a Cost Center Is the Problem (Ricardo Morgado)
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…
We Built It Because We Had To - Tech Founder BackstoriesThe AI Worker With Her Own LinkedIn Page (Daniele Bernardi)
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…
We Built It Because We Had To - Tech Founder BackstoriesHe's Teaching AI to Answer the Internet in Your Brand's Voice (Hank Leber)
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…
We Built It Because We Had To - Tech Founder BackstoriesHe Lost His Brother To A Misdiagnosis. Then He Built Medome (Dr. Steven Charlap)
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…
We Built It Because We Had To - Tech Founder BackstoriesFrom Government CISO to AI-Native Security Founder (Robert Wood)
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…
We Built It Because We Had To - Tech Founder BackstoriesSelling "Chaos" to the Fortune 100 Almost Killed His Company (Kolton Andrus)
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…
We Built It Because We Had To - Tech Founder BackstoriesHis Data Found Carbon Monoxide Poisoning That Two Top Hospitals Missed (John Kelley)
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…
We Built It Because We Had To - Tech Founder BackstoriesHe Sold Persistent Chat to Microsoft Before Slack Existed (Nick Fera)
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…
We Built It Because We Had To - Tech Founder BackstoriesHe Skipped School Until 25 — Now He's Building AI Governance for 48% of the Economy (Callen Sapien)
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…
We Built It Because We Had To - Tech Founder BackstoriesHe Lost $3M on a Failed Pivot — Here's What CloudTask Does Differently (Amir Reiter)
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…
We Built It Because We Had To - Tech Founder BackstoriesHe Fired His Freelancers and Built a 500-Person Dev Shop to Replace Them — Furqan Aziz, InvoZone
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…
We Built It Because We Had To - Tech Founder BackstoriesHow Klearly Pivoted to Dominate Hospitality Payments (Geus Walder)
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…
We Built It Because We Had To - Tech Founder BackstoriesThe Customer Success Branding Gap Most SaaS Companies Miss (Arne Hurty)
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…
We Built It Because We Had To - Tech Founder Backstories2 Million Autonomous Fixes In PayPal Production — Then He Spun It Out (Suresh Mathew)
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…
We Built It Because We Had To - Tech Founder BackstoriesWhy AI Data Centers Could Break the U.S. Power Grid | Michael Parrella
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…
We Built It Because We Had To - Tech Founder BackstoriesInside the 64 Billion Identity Breach Data Lake — Andres Andreu, CEO of Constella Intelligence
Andres Andreu sits on one of the richest datasets in cybersecurity — nearly 64 billion breached identities — and for years growth still stalled. The problem…
We Built It Because We Had To - Tech Founder BackstoriesExploitation Validation: Beyond Blinking Red Dots (Karen Nguyen)
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…
We Built It Because We Had To - Tech Founder BackstoriesThe 272-Day B2B Sales Cycle (Nick Turner)
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…
We Built It Because We Had To - Tech Founder BackstoriesThe AI Pushing Back on Insurance Denials (Michael Riley of Gabeo.ai)
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…
We Built It Because We Had To - Tech Founder BackstoriesAGE: The 4th Axis the AGI Conversation Is Missing | Rana Gujral
🎙 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…
We Built It Because We Had To - Tech Founder Backstories50 Customers, One US Patent, and a Tool That Plays Nice (Stephen Franklin)
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…
We Built It Because We Had To - Tech Founder BackstoriesLaid Off by the DoE — Then He Built an AI Startup | David Blumenthal
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…
We Built It Because We Had To - Tech Founder BackstoriesThe EdTech Founder Bootstrapping AI for Higher Ed (Preeti Tanwar)
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…
We Built It Because We Had To - Tech Founder BackstoriesDon't Hire That Full-Time CMO Yet — Here's Why (Eyal Dror)
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…
We Built It Because We Had To - Tech Founder BackstoriesBuilding a $235M SaaS Business by Being Human First (Nick Mehta)
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…
We Built It Because We Had To - Tech Founder Backstories"Be Afraid Every Day": 30 Years of Disruption in Capital Markets (Ashok Mittal)
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…
We Built It Because We Had To - Tech Founder BackstoriesPodcastFrom Phone Hacking in the 80s to OT Cybersecurity (Patrick Miller)
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…
We Built It Because We Had To - Tech Founder BackstoriesFrom Coca-Cola & Unilever to an AI Startup at 60 (Stan Sthanunathan)
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…
We Built It Because We Had To - Tech Founder BackstoriesThe $57M Bet on Blockchain Identity (Rohan Pinto)
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…
We Built It Because We Had To - Tech Founder Backstories300% Year-Over-Year: The AI Content Machine for Law Firms (John Fly)
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…
We Built It Because We Had To - Tech Founder BackstoriesThe 4-Time Exited Founder Going for the Fifth (Peter Pezaris)
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…
We Built It Because We Had To - Tech Founder BackstoriesThe 3am LinkedIn Slip That Started Metadata.io (Gil Allouche)
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…