First at West Point and then as an officer in the U.S. Army Rangers, Brian Elliott always sought out the hardest, highest-impact challenge.

“You can do hard things that don’t have impact, but you can’t do things that have impact that aren’t hard,” he says.

Now Elliott is taking the same approach at Blitzy, the Boston-based startup he co-founded with Harvard Business School classmate Sid Pardeshi in 2023 to overhaul and lead massive code projects for large corporations. Blitzy’s agents can understand 100 million-plus lines of code, automating away work that customers would otherwise pay millions over months to consulting firms to barely crack.

“For eons, we have been limited by how much a human context can hold in their brain,” Elliott argues. Now Blitzy can offload that context to its AI systems: “We can do changes at a size and scale that were previously impossible."

On The Upstarts Podcast, Elliott shares how he built Boston’s newest tech unicorn by becoming a CFO’s friend; why Cursor and Claude Code only see enterprise code through a straw; and what West Point and the Army Rangers taught him about operating with precision under pressure.

Plus, he shares his Upstart Moment: catching the 6am train to New York to close an early customer, with his co-founder’s visa at stake.

Chapters:

00:00 Introduction

Brian's LinkedIn

Blitzy

For more, visit https://www.upstartsmedia.com/

Season 2 of the Upstarts Podcast is presented by ⁠⁠⁠Rippling⁠⁠

Produced & edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod