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 one question: what do energy operators actually need? The answer — give them the decision first, the supporting data second — became the foundation of a rebuilt company. By December they had reacquired his old firm SoftSmiths and folded it in. What started as a near-death experience became the product strategy.Michael also breaks down what he calls the five-gigawatt toaster problem: AI data centers are plugging enormous, uncurtailable demand into a grid that was never built for it. He explains the fragmented reality of U.S. energy markets, why some jurisdictions are already requiring data centers to build their own power supply, why AI demand is fundamentally different from Bitcoin demand, and what it will take to prevent AI growth from crushing the energy infrastructure it runs on.Timestamps:00:01 — Welcome and intro01:01 — Career arc: from energy CEO to Chief Strategy Officer and back02:59 — The moment they learned they were losing their largest customer03:55 — How the team rebuilt the product around decision-first thinking05:11 — What ennrgy AI does: forecasting, pricing, settlements06:36 — Inverting the pyramid: decision at the top, data underneath10:05 — AI data centers and the electricity demand surge12:07 — The five-gigawatt toaster problem explained13:06 — Why AI demand cannot be curtailed the way Bitcoin demand can14:06 — Can we physically build enough power supply fast enough?15:28 — Being an ostrich doesn't work: what must be done16:19 — Parting words: existential moments create your best momentsConnect with Michael Parrella:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikeparrella/Company: https://www.ennrgy.aiSubscribe to We Built It Because We Had To on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube. Follow Artesian Network for more conversations with the founders and operators who built their companies the hard way.

https://www.webuiltitbecausewehadto.com

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 to operationalize the data — held the company back, and how the shift to an OEM model drove 17% revenue growth in a single year. Andres also traces his arc from building federal law enforcement wiretap systems in the 1990s, to taking Bayshore Networks from employee number three to exit in 2021, to stepping into the CEO seat at Constella just six months after joining as COO. Along the way he shares the "fail fast" moment that forced his team to scrap part of their product and build a machine learning engine that earned an internationally granted patent — and saved the company.

If you're a founder or operator wrestling with product-market fit, ICP, or when to kill what you've built, this one is for you.

Chapters

00:00 What Constella Intelligence actually does

03:09 Why passwords barely change over 15 years

04:34 Inside the 24/7 breach-hunting program

05:18 Two ICPs: OEM vendors and intelligence agencies

05:47 From 90s federal wiretap systems to founding Bayshore Networks

09:20 The ICP mistake: selling to CISOs who couldn't use the data

10:25 OEM partners: Norton LifeLock, Europol, and beyond

13:07 "My vendor has 17 billion identities." "I have 64."

15:38 The fail-fast moment that led to a patent — and saved the company

19:13 What's driving growth now: customer-driven APIs and ICP focus

About the guest

Andres Andreu is the CEO of Constella Intelligence, a cyber-intelligence company operating one of the world's largest breach-data lakes. He brings 33 years in cybersecurity, from federal law enforcement to a 2021 startup exit with Bayshore Networks, and is the author of an internationally granted machine learning patent.

Connect with Andres: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andresandreu/

Learn more about Constella Intelligence: https://constella.ai/

Subscribe to We Built It Because We Had To for new founder stories every Tuesday and Thursday. Hosted by Jonathan Buckley of The Artesian Network — fractional CMO guidance for early-stage tech founders. Learn more at https://www.artesiannetwork.com

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 show: undershoot or overshoot, and nobody wins — land exactly where you said you would. It's a candid conversation about building lean, selling to skeptical CISOs, and the discipline of capacity planning in a market drunk on nine-figure rounds.What you'll learn:- Why "blinking red dots everywhere" is a noise problem, and how attack-chain validation cuts through it- How to run product-led growth in a category where CISOs say no to PLG by default- The case for paying customers over a giant Series A, and when institutional money actually helps- How an over-hire cycle right before the bubble burst reshaped how Karen plans capacity- What 15 years in startup go-to-market taught her about handling fundraising rejectionTimestamps:(00:00) Meet Karen Nguyen and OFFENSAI's v2 launch day(01:55) From immigrant kid to 15 years in startup go-to-market(03:29) Female founders, fundraising, and not taking "no" personally(06:47) Pre-seed angels and the trust behind early funding(07:51) Bootstrapping vs. a Series A market gone inflationary(09:51) Building a lean go-to-market system(12:00) PLG for CISOs: getting to value in the first 15 minutes(14:35) Exploitation validation and the "front door of glass"(16:38) Defying the odds: the first-generation immigrant arc(20:06) The over-hire failure right before the bubble burst(24:11) Capacity planning and "Build It. Test It. Prove It."(26:41) Why a nine-figure Series A sets a trapAbout the guest:Karen Nguyen is co-founder and CEO of OFFENSAI, an AI-powered cloud security testing platform built around autonomous red teaming and continuous exploitation validation. She spent 15 years in startup go-to-market and eight years selling cybersecurity to CISOs before co-founding the company.Connect with Karen Nguyen: https://www.linkedin.com/in/knguyen4/OFFENSAI: https://www.offensai.comWe Built It Because We Had To is hosted by Jonathan Buckley, fractional CMO at The Artesian Network. New founder stories every Tuesday and Thursday — subscribe so you never miss one. Learn more at https://www.artesiannetwork.com

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 the user persona instead of broadening it — and what Dreamdata's latest LinkedIn benchmark data is telling us about how B2B buying actually works in 2026.You will learn why the average B2B sales cycle stretched from roughly 205 days a year ago to 272 days today, why finance teams are reasserting veto power inside the buyer, why roughly eight different people are active in every account every week, and why Nick cut the Dreamdata product roadmap to six months in an Anthropic-funded world where assumptions expire fast. Nick explains why his North Star metric is the tenure of the CMO who uses the platform, and why you should never ask a marketer to manufacture demand for a deal that has to close this quarter. He closes with three lessons that shaped his path: you are a product of your failures more than your successes, all you need is one yes (he pitched 74 investors to close the round), and know yourself — he once joined a pre-revenue company and fell flat because scaling, not zero-to-one, was his game.If you run revenue, sit in the CMO chair, or own a number that depends on a buying committee saying yes, this one is for you.GuestNick Turner — Chief Executive Officer, DreamdataLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cnickturner/Company: https://dreamdata.ioAbout the showWe Built It Because We Had To is a podcast about early-stage tech founders, the spark behind what they built, and the journey to make it exist. Hosted by Jonathan Buckley of The Artesian Network, where we have helped founders scale companies and have seen more than half of our clients reach an IPO or acquisition.Subscribe wherever you listen, follow the show on YouTube for the full video, and learn more at https://artesiannetwork.com.— Jonathan Buckley, The Artesian Network

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 Gabeo (Zoey for fee-for-service, Aria for value-based care), and why value-based care flips the economic incentives of US healthcare. Michael walks through how their AI agents cut through hundreds of pages of contract language that "you'd need a team of lawyers and months to decode."Then they rewind to his arc — learning to program at seven, co-founding Simple Post, surviving a year of failure-after-failure at Funnl before landing on an analytics product that got acquired. Michael gets candid about a 45x-ROI pilot he renegotiated DOWN to a fairer 5-10x, why his entire GTM at Gabeo is warm intros (no paid ads, no sales team), and the single biggest tell that you've actually hit product-market fit: the body language in the room.What you'll hear:- Why Gabeo abandoned denials and chased write-offs instead- How agentic AI cuts through 100s of pages of contract language in minutes- The pricing lesson behind the 45x ROI pilot they renegotiated- 12 product pivots, one acquisition — and what Michael learned about MVPs- Why "selling is asking questions" beats pitching, every time- What he wishes he'd known 15 years agoConnect with Michael Riley: https://www.linkedin.com/in/themichaelriley/Learn more about Gabeo.ai: https://gabeo.aiSubscribe to We Built It Because We Had To for new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday. More from Jonathan W. Buckley and The Artesian Network: https://artesiannetwork.comIf this episode hit, share it with a founder who's still trying to brute-force product-market fit with a bigger sales team.#FounderStory #HealthcareAI #B2BSaaS #ProductMarketFit #AgenticAI

🎙 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 (acquired), leading Smart Home at Logitech, and helping rebuild Cricut during a near-bankruptcy stretch that turned into a successful IPO. Rana explains why Behavioral Signals doesn't use third-party LLMs and how its paralinguistic models read tone, pitch, prosody, and micro-pauses to extract the signal under the words. He breaks down the company's two business lines (CCaaS and national security, where they're backed by In-Q-Tel), and how their new behavioral mapping approach to deepfake audio detection works at half-second granularity and 98–99% accuracy when classical artifact analysis has stopped working.🎙 In this episode:→ AGE: Artificial General Experience as the missing AGI axis→ Why Behavioral Signals refuses to use third-party LLMs→ Paralinguistic models that read tone, prosody, and micro-pauses→ Deepfake audio detection by behavioral mapping (98–99% accuracy)→ In-Q-Tel backing and the national security business line→ From Logitech Smart Home to Cricut's IPO turnaround→ "Measure what the system does to the person, not just for them"📌 Connect with Rana Gujral:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ranagujral/🎧 About "We Built It Because We Had To"The Artesian Network's podcast — hosted by CEO Jonathan Buckley. Real founder stories about the spark, the struggle, and the strategy behind building a tech company. More than half of our clients reach IPO or acquisition.→ Subscribe for new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday at 11 AM ET→ More from Jonathan: https://artesiannetwork.com→ Connect with Jonathan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathanwbuckley/⏱ Chapters:00:00 Intro01:08 From Cricut's near bankruptcy to a successful IPO02:30 Behavioral Signals as research roots, not chatbot05:19 Two equal legs: call centers and national security06:56 Why old deepfake detection broke07:43 The cybersecurity manipulation problem10:12 Series A in 2019, before Transformers12:33 Inventing the category nobody had a bucket for16:09 Artificial general experience explained18:50 The chess engine that lives through nothing20:02 Hybrid cognition and the new unit24:23 Measure what the system does to the person#FounderStories #AI #AGI #VoiceAI #DeepfakeDetection

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 a decade of technical sales at Argent taught Stephen exactly which integrations every cyber buyer wishes they had.Why bootstrapping Netwatch from his own Argent commissions kept the product roadmap honest.How utility co-ops — a vertical almost nobody else is actively selling cyber to — became one of Netwatch's sharpest early segments.The two AI "personas" Netwatch ships: a sysadmin and a CISO, with guardrails for what each one is allowed to do.How a Florida statewide cybersecurity contract opened the door to North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia.Why Stephen has turned down VC offers at 50 customers and a 100% renewal rate.50 customers in. 100% renewal. A real US patent. No rip-and-replace pitch in sight.Guest: Stephen Franklin, Founder and CEO, Netwatch.aiConnect with Stephen on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephen-franklin-ii/Netwatch: https://netwatch.aiHosted by Jonathan Buckley, CEO of Artesian Network. Subscribe to "We Built It Because We Had To, stories about founders and their journeys" wherever you get your podcasts. More at https://artesiannetwork.com.

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 AI hallucinations), why contextual matching and social proof matter more than raw accuracy, how they're validating their MVP by paying arms-length teacher-testers $50 for honest feedback, and why the path from bootstrap to pre-seed raise looks completely different now thanks to Claude Code, Lovable, and Replit. He also previews the Eddy Pro launch.🎙 In this episode:→ Losing a 13-year research career to a single Zoom call→ Building Eddy on 400K+ peer-reviewed studies→ The teacher trust problem (research distrust + AI hallucinations)→ Contextual matching beats raw accuracy→ Paying arms-length testers $50 for honest MVP feedback→ How Claude Code, Lovable, and Replit changed the bootstrap-to-seed path📌 Connect with David Blumenthal:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/blumenthaldavid/📌 Connect with Jonathan W Buckley:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathanwbuckley/🎧 About "We Built It Because We Had To"The Artesian Network's podcast — hosted by CEO Jonathan Buckley. Real founder stories about the spark, the struggle, and the strategy behind building a tech company. More than half of our clients reach IPO or acquisition.→ Subscribe for new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday at 11 AM ET→ More from Jonathan: https://artesiannetwork.com→ Connect with Jonathan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathanwbuckley/⏱ Chapters:00:00 Intro01:00 A tech CEO with no tech or business degree02:00 13 years at AIR and the March 2025 layoff04:21 The 2 AM idea that became Eddy06:45 400,000 journal articles inside a RAG09:45 Launching into an anti-evidence climate11:55 Context matching and the trust problem14:52 Paying teachers $50 for arms-length feedback17:56 Bootstrapping toward the pre-seed20:46 Saving Sunday night for teachers22:22 The billion-dollar two-person company#FounderStories #EdTech #RAG #FirstTimeFounder #AIForTeachers

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 & Resources

Connect 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. Buckley

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathanwbuckley/

🔑 Keywords

edtech, 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 & Resources

Connect with Eyal Dror:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/eyaldror1/

🔑 Keywords

eyal 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