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 Jonathan W. Buckley sits down with Hank Leber, co-founder of Stanify, the company building AI that answers a brand's social comments in the brand's own voice — "listening with humanity." Hank explains why enterprise buyers hesitate before handing an AI their public voice, how Stanify approaches toxic-content moderation at enterprise scale, why the platform launched on Facebook and Instagram first with TikTok and Twitter coming, and where the human-in-the-loop sits when one bad AI output can become a brand news story. He also shares what he'd tell any founder about to hand AI their brand's public voice.

Connect with Hank Leber: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hankleber/

Enjoying the show? Follow We Built It Because We Had To wherever you listen and leave a rating — it helps other founders find these stories. For more on how The Artesian Network helps early-stage tech companies get to market and scale, visit https://www.artesiannetwork.com/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=ep32&utm_content=shownotes

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 episode, Jonathan W. Buckley is joined by Dr. Steven Charlap, MD, MBA and founder of Medome, an AI-first primary care platform. Steven had already sold one company and retired when his older brother, a cardiologist, was misdiagnosed and lost his life. That loss, followed by a second misdiagnosis that took his wife's best friend and a third that nearly took his own life, sent him back to school for five and a half years at Stanford and Harvard to understand why doctors get it wrong so often. Misdiagnosis kills roughly 400,000 people a year in the US and permanently disables another 400,000, and the Institute of Medicine predicts nearly everyone will experience one in their lifetime. Steven explains why Medome approaches diagnosis by elimination rather than pattern matching, how it's built on Google's MedGemma model fine-tuned with over 100 million proprietary data points, and the surprisingly tricky engineering problem of stripping personal health information before anything touches a language model, including diseases that are literally named after people. He also shares the hardest lesson from selling into medical institutions first: doctors told him directly that extra patient information was unwelcome because they aren't paid to process it and could be held liable for missing something in it. We close on why he ignored classic startup advice to niche down, why he put his own phone number on Medome's website, and what he'd tell any founder about selling into an industry that actively resists changing how it works.

Watch the full episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wdcYHpPOoY

About the guest:
Dr. Steven Charlap, MD, MBA is a serial medical entrepreneur — NYU-trained physician, Harvard MBA, and Stanford Distinguished Careers Institute fellow — and the founder of Medome.

Connect with Dr. Steven Charlap:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/steven-charlap-md-mba-8911906/

Learn more about Medome:
https://medome.ai

Subscribe to We Built It Because We Had To wherever you listen, and learn more about how The Artesian Network helps early-stage tech companies get to market and scale at https://www.artesiannetwork.com/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=ep29&utm_content=shownotes

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 Built It Because We Had To, host Jonathan W. Buckley sits down with Robert Wood, founder and CEO of Sidekick Security, an AI-native cybersecurity consulting firm. Robert started out doing offensive red team work, then ran security programs at several tech companies before becoming the enterprise CISO at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, leading a team of nearly 500 across five divisions. That job exposed the problem that eventually pushed him to found Sidekick: specialist security teams that all report to the same leader still can't speak the same language, so he built an internal Snowflake-based "security data lake" to force the data together. They talk about why AI governance has become Sidekick's fastest-growing line of work as boards push AI adoption faster than security teams can keep up, how deepfakes and voice cloning are making old-school phishing dramatically more effective, and zerodayclock.com, the site Robert points to that tracks how the time between a vulnerability being discovered and weaponized has shrunk from years to minutes. Robert also breaks down why Sidekick made a hard pivot away from generic federal cyber contracting, how they built the business almost entirely on trust-based referrals instead of a sales team, and VSEC, their virtual CISO offering that blends senior human judgment with AI tooling they originally built just for themselves. He closes with advice for founders three months into building a services firm: don't rush to extract yourself from the work, and be ready to sit in the uncomfortable middle for longer than social media tells you to.

Connect with Robert Wood: https://www.linkedin.com/in/holycyberbatman/
Zero Day Clock (mentioned in the episode): https://zerodayclock.com

Enjoying the show? Follow We Built It Because We Had To wherever you listen and leave a rating — it helps other founders find these stories. For more on how The Artesian Network helps early-stage tech companies get to market and scale, visit https://www.artesiannetwork.com/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=ep28&utm_content=shownotes

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 something few founders have the nerve to do: he stopped using the very term his company was built on.

In this episode of We Built It Because We Had To, host Jonathan W. Buckley sits down with Kolton Andrus, founder, chairman, and CEO of Gremlin — the company that carried chaos engineering out of Amazon and Netflix and into the Fortune 100, then repositioned it as reliability engineering to win the enterprise. Kolton shares how a brand-new Gremlin landed Twilio and Expedia as its first customers, what a six-to-nine-month MSA negotiation taught him about enterprise sales, and why the COVID quarters were among the hardest of his life — a stretch in which he hired an outside CEO, rebuilt the product around standardization and reliability scores, and later stepped back into the CEO seat himself. He breaks down the real math behind the nines of uptime (and why five nines means things simply cannot fail), explains why reliability is a change-management and accountability problem more than a software problem, and tells the story of the customer Gremlin lost to an outage and won back. The conversation closes with his take on agentic AI: "10x the code means 10x the problems" — and why reliability guardrails matter more now than ever.

About the guest: Kolton Andrus is the founder, chairman, and CEO of Gremlin, backed by Amplify Partners, Index Ventures, and Redpoint. Before founding Gremlin in 2016, he built failure-injection systems at Amazon and Netflix, where his team helped take Netflix from three nines to four nines of uptime.

Connect with Kolton Andrus: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kolton-andrus-77315a2/
Learn more about Gremlin: https://www.gremlin.com

Enjoying the show? Follow We Built It Because We Had To wherever you listen and leave a rating — it helps other founders find these stories. For more on how The Artesian Network helps early-stage tech companies get to market and scale, visit https://www.artesiannetwork.com/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=ep27&utm_content=shownotes

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 20 minutes to find it.

In this episode, Jonathan W. Buckley sits down with John Kelley, Chairman of CereHealth Corp and the iLLUME Ai platform - and, twenty years ago, the CEO and Chairman of McData Corp when Jonathan worked in its marketing organization. John explains why a Vietnam-era draftee watching friends come home with Agent Orange exposure, PTSD, and misdiagnoses decided in 2009 that the same data informatics Google and Amazon used to predict purchases could predict what was actually wrong inside a person's brain. He walks through the "patients like me" cohort model built on roughly 4,800 referred patients, why traumatic brain injury became the company's specialty, and how carbon monoxide binds to the iron in the basal ganglia and starves it of dopamine - the mechanism two of America's best hospitals missed.

The harder story is the go-to-market one. Pharma, insurance, and health systems - the three constituencies John assumed would embrace better diagnostics - all resisted, for rational reasons he lays out plainly. The VA, which should have been the natural ally, never engaged. Osteopathic physicians became the earliest adopters over MDs because they were trained to look at the whole system rather than the symptom. The company cleared the FDA in 120 days under the 21st Century Cures Act, immediately in Theranos's wake, got in front of four national carriers and Medicare, and then COVID arrived in March 2020 and took the momentum with it. Today the business has pivoted away from clinical services entirely, licensing its analytics engine as $2-4M enterprise contracts.

John closes with the part most guests won't say out loud: after seven acquisitions across ten boards, he's not sure he was the right investor for this one - because he underestimated the resistance, and that's a due-diligence lesson, not a bad-luck story.

Chapters
00:00 The show, and how Jonathan and John met at McData
01:56 Data informatics, Agent Orange, and the 2009 thesis
03:24 "Patients like me" - the core idea
04:32 Brought in as investor and chair, and the loss that changed the role
06:58 4,800 patients, cohorts, and why TBI became the specialty
08:46 Why pharma, insurance, and health systems all resisted
11:10 The VA that should have been an ally
12:33 Who said yes first: the non-siloed clinicians
16:03 Why DOs became early adopters over MDs
19:14 A Mission Viejo teenager, Cedars-Sinai, and Mayo
21:45 Carbon monoxide, the basal ganglia, and a furnace flue
24:18 Cash-pay reality, pro bono work, and suicide ideation
26:13 FDA clearance in 120 days, right after Theranos
28:12 Four carriers, Medicare, then COVID
30:59 The pivot to iLLUME Ai and $2-4M licensing contracts
33:18 Micro-targeting DOs and riding thought-leader credibility
36:39 What he'd tell you about investing outside your specialty

Guest: John Kelley, Chairman, CereHealth Corp. Previously CEO and Chairman of McData Corp, a NASDAQ 100 company. He has served on ten public and private-equity/venture-backed boards, seven of which reached acquisition.

Watch the full episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnElZDxyGow

Connect with John Kelley: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnkelley3/
CereHealth: https://www.linkedin.com/company/cerehealth
iLLUME Ai: https://illumeai.com

Subscribe on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts for new conversations with early-stage tech founders and CEOs. See how The Artesian Network helps founders get established and reach scale: https://www.artesiannetwork.com/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=ep26&utm_content=shownotes

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 loud: the systems that run the world's biggest manufacturers are nearly impossible to reach.

In this episode, Jonathan W. Buckley sits down with Nick Fera, CEO of enosix, the company that virtualizes SAP's most complex processes, product configuration, pricing, and order creation, and makes them usable inside modern front ends like Salesforce and Microsoft Copilot. Nick explains how his team compressed a 10-hour customer quoting process down to 10 minutes, why enosix sells to the business side instead of IT, and how emotional storytelling, not feature lists, wins enterprise deals. He also gets candid about surviving a CFO who killed a deal at the last minute while Nick was on a bass fishing boat, and the one hard lesson about selling a product you don't use yourself.

If you build, buy, or sell enterprise software, this conversation reframes how you think about integration, value, and the buyer who won't admit they have a problem.

Guest: Nick Fera, CEO of enosix
Connect with Nick: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nickfera/
Learn more about enosix: https://enosix.com

Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZlKiCR9AwA

Subscribe for new conversations with early-stage tech founders, and see how The Artesian Network helps founders scale: https://www.artesiannetwork.com/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=ep25&utm_content=shownotes

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 governance and consumption platform specifically for SMBs and the managed service providers that serve them — the 48% of the global economy that every enterprise AI company walks right past.

Callen shares the origin story behind Synthreo: a Montessori farm school education that ended at age 10, years of poverty and homelessness, running a mattress store at 16, and eventually landing a 4.0 GPA at community college after a motorcycle accident forced a reset. He breaks down why the MSP channel is being systematically devalued — fighting over 1.8% margins when they built the trillion-dollar Microsoft 365 ecosystem — and why AI as a service is the way to restore what was lost.

We also get into his open-source Sapien Framework for AI behavioral governance, nine responsible disclosures submitted to major AI providers, and the Blade Runner-inspired CLI he built to test it all.

Guest & Resources
Connect with Callen Sapien: https://www.linkedin.com/in/callensapien/
Sapien Framework (open AI governance protocol): https://sapientframework.org

More episodes: https://www.WeBuiltItBecauseWeHadTo.com

Hosted by Jonathan W. Buckley of The Artesian Network.

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 wanted.

In this episode of We Built It Because We Had To, host Jonathan W. Buckley sits down with Amir Reiter, Founder & CEO of CloudTask, the global talent marketplace connecting US companies with GTM operators across Latin America and the Caribbean. Amir breaks down the AI-powered matching system behind CloudTask's 24-month average placement LTV — including the seven-point candidate rubric and the internal "mechanical match object" framework that zippers a hiring company to the right operator. He gets refreshingly candid about the bootstrapped $3M pivot that didn't work and the brutal lesson underneath it: customers often want to hear what they want to hear, not what will actually help them. And he makes the case that AI isn't killing sales jobs — it's quietly replacing reps with operators, and reshaping what companies actually need to hire.

If you're a founder weighing bootstrapping against raising, rethinking remote hiring, or trying to figure out where AI fits in your go-to-market team, this one is full of hard-won pattern recognition.

Guest: Amir Reiter, Founder & CEO of CloudTask. Based in Medellin, Colombia, Amir has helped over 10,500 people get hired over the past decade across SaaS and non-SaaS companies including RingCentral, Vonage, Apollo, Grammarly, and Expensify.

Connect with Amir on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amirreiter/
Learn more about CloudTask: https://www.cloudtask.com

Watch the full episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21RwbhsKwoM

Subscribe so you never miss a founder backstory. We Built It Because We Had To is produced by The Artesian Network, a band of experts helping early-stage tech founders and CEOs get established and reach scale. Learn more at https://www.artesiannetwork.com and explore every episode at https://www.WeBuiltItBecauseWeHadTo.com

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 Built It Because We Had To, host Jonathan W. Buckley sits down with Furqan Aziz, CEO and Founder of InvoZone. As a CTO in San Francisco, Furqan was burned by unreliable freelance developers who ghosted mid-project and missed deadlines on tight financial-services SLAs. So he built the team he wished he'd had: a dedicated, trained software organization in Lahore that has since grown to more than 500 engineers across five global offices.

You'll hear how Furqan turned the offshore category's biggest liability — buyers who had been burned before — into his opening, using Clutch-verified reviews, client reference calls, and a free trial that takes price off the table. He explains why the cheapest offshore team is usually the most expensive mistake, and makes a contrarian bet that AI will create more demand for engineers, not less, as the number of startups explodes. He also gets candid about the two startups he failed before InvoZone, the co-founder lesson he learned the hard way, and the 3 a.m. call when an engineer wiped the production database — and the leadership mindset that saved it.

Guest: Furqan Aziz, CEO and Founder, InvoZone
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/itsfurqanaziz/
Company: https://invozone.com/

If you like the real stories behind building technology companies, subscribe and join us for the next conversation. Learn more about The Artesian Network at https://www.artesiannetwork.com and find every episode at https://www.WeBuiltItBecauseWeHadTo.com

Tags:  Furqan Aziz, InvoZone, Invo Zone, offshore software development, dedicated development team, Pakistan software engineers, Lahore developers, offshore development trust, Clutch reviews, co-founder lessons, production database disaster, AI and software engineering jobs, We Built It Because We Had To, Jonathan W. Buckley, The Artesian Network

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 terminal, no hardware required. It gained traction across taxis, retail, and more. But a year of staying close to customers kept pointing to one place: hospitality had the deepest payment pain and the worst-fitting tools. So Klearly cut everything else and became a hospitality-only specialist — and that focus is what unlocked the growth, including a $12M Series A led by PayPal Ventures and a jump to 53 people.

In this episode, Geus walks through the lean-startup path behind it: validating demand with a gamified landing page that drew 600+ businesses before the product existed, raising a pre-seed with Antler to actually build it, and the operating principle the team still runs on — "speed over perfection." He also explains why in-person payments were the overlooked 80% of the market, how Klearly onboards merchants in three days instead of three weeks, and why hiring salespeople from inside hospitality (not from payments) became an unfair advantage.

If you've ever been told to widen your market to grow, this conversation argues the opposite.

Chapters

00:00 Klearly and the hospitality-payments thesis

01:06 From consulting to founding Klearly

02:00 23 hires in a quarter and a $12M Series A led by PayPal Ventures

03:00 SMB generalist vs. hospitality specialist

03:51 The pivot to horeca-only

05:56 Selling before building: the 600+ business landing page

07:41 "Speed over perfection"

08:56 The overlooked 80%: in-person payments

11:31 Go-to-market: direct sales plus ordering-system partnerships

14:19 Hiring hospitality insiders, not payments people

16:38 De-risking the leap to full-time

19:29 Lessons from the lean-startup path

Guest: Geus Walder, Co-founder, Klearly

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/geuswalder/

Klearly: https://klearly.nl

Subscribe to We Built It Because We Had To for founder stories on building and scaling B2B tech. More at https://www.WeBuiltItBecauseWeHadTo.com and https://artesiannetwork.com