We Built It Because We Had To - Tech Founder Backstories

Jonathan W. Buckley of The Artesian Network
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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.

  1. 4d ago

    Your 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 across 57 tools and put the real number closer to 15 or 20 percent. In this episode of We Built It Because We Had To, host Jonathan W. Buckley is joined by Chris Near, founder of CyberSagacity, the company he built to sit on top of application security tooling as an intelligence layer rather than as another scanner. Chris traces where the 95 percent number came from: a pre-published artificial test suite that vendors could design against. Run the same tools against real code and the results collapse. He connects that gap to zero days, which by his account drive around 80 percent of breaches, defects nobody knew were there because no single tool was ever going to find them. The backstory runs long. A PhD in electrical engineering at Cornell after an undergraduate degree at Northwestern, then close to seven years at Bell Labs, then a decision in 1992 to leave and chase the mathematics of software on his own. He self-funded that work until 2007 on 120-hour weeks, picked up an angel backer, lost him, self-funded again, and got him back. He pitched venture capital roughly ten times across those years with different products out of the same research and never closed one. His own explanation is blunt: he was a technologist with no partner who understood go-to-market. Underneath the product is a statistical engine. Defect-level attack and consequence probabilities are matched against a cybersecurity insurance database of historical loss events, which turns a bucket of ten thousand equally urgent defects into a ranked list and reframes the question as return on risk reduction rather than raw defect count. SATriage does the triage inside the development process, sorting what is true, what is false, and what actually matters. SATraits is the planning tool that compares which tools fit a given environment before a program is built. Chris is candid about the missteps. The first product was built for developer usability but carried management information, so it fit neither audience, and rebuilding it for developers, management and the C-suite fixed the alignment while lengthening the sale. He also gives the cleanest positioning lesson on this show in a while. He described his coverage numbers as coverage. The industry says false negatives. Same concept, opposite framing, and only the second one landed. His advice to a founder six months into a security startup and drowning in scope: find the one feature with the biggest business impact, not the biggest technical impact. He notes it took him decades to learn it. Every episode on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, Amazon and more: https://www.WeBuiltItBecauseWeHadTo.com Connect with Chris Near: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-near-82abb591CyberSagacity: https://cybersagacity.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=ep34&utm_content=shownotes

    Your AppSec Tools Find 15% of Defects, Not 95% (Chris Near)

  2. Aug 27

    They 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 hiring consultants to implement new technology, and what they really hired were order takers. In this episode of We Built It Because We Had To, host Jonathan W. Buckley is joined by Stephanie Taylor, CEO and founder of VFP Consulting, the firm she started in 2015 to bring management consulting discipline to Salesforce and Certinia implementations. VFP is around 40 people today, and Stephanie is candid that headcount has been flat for four or five years by choice, because she is protective about which customers her team takes on. She talks about implementing a professional services automation tool right out of school at 21, and discovering that the questions that actually mattered were about process, change and people rather than the product. She explains what VFP stands for (vision, focus, passion), why configuring a solution on top of a broken process just digitizes the problem, and what it means when a customer says they are not ready to go live even though the system is. Stephanie also walks through the split with her co-founder in 2019, the moment she considered walking away instead and found her real reason for running the company, the Big Four referral that funded her first hire six months in, and her first seven-figure project, a Muscular Dystrophy Association engagement brought to her by a CFO friend, where every dollar saved went to the cause. On private equity, she traces the relationships back to Vista Equity work at a previous employer, including telling them no on a platform evaluation and coming back a year later when the roadmap had caught up. On AI, she is direct about what it does to her own business. Hands-on-keyboard configuration is commoditizing, that work represents 30 to 40 percent of VFP's implementations today, and rather than wait for Salesforce she built the engine herself inside Campfire, the requirements and lifecycle management product VFP spun out of its own delivery process and now sells on the AppExchange. We close on the advice she gives anyone starting a services firm. The confidence that makes you start a company is the same thing that convinces you that you can do every job inside it, and you cannot. Every episode on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, Amazon and more: https://www.WeBuiltItBecauseWeHadTo.com Connect with Stephanie Taylor: https://www.linkedin.com/in/spicardiVFP Consulting: https://vfp-consulting.comCampfire: https://campfire-app.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=ep33&utm_content=shownotes

    They Hired Consultants and Got Order Takers (Stephanie Taylor)

  3. Aug 20

    Why 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 It Because We Had To, host Jonathan W. Buckley is joined by Ricardo Morgado of Getloopos, the company building LoopOS — an operations layer for circular commerce inside enterprise retail. They get into what Ricardo actually saw inside enterprise operations that convinced him the existing tools couldn't be fixed, what he believed about the ops layer of circular commerce that others weren't saying out loud, and the story of the first enterprise that said yes to LoopOS before the product was proven. Ricardo also talks about the reality of selling into enterprise without an established category name, the moment that came closest to stopping Getloopos completely, and the unglamorous daily work behind making item-level decisioning real at enterprise scale. The conversation closes on his five-year view: does circular commerce become its own software category the way ERP did, or get absorbed into something else — and the one thing he wishes someone had told him before building in this space. Watch the full episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbC0pO9zDYs Learn more about Getloopos: https://www.getloopos.com/Connect with Ricardo Morgado on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rmloopos/ 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=ep31&utm_content=shownotes

    Why Treating Returns as a Cost Center Is the Problem (Ricardo Morgado)

  4. Aug 13

    The 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. Daniele Bernardi spent his early career as an engineer at Meta and later at Twitter, where he picked up the definition of trust he still runs the company on: consistency over time. In this episode he explains how that single idea shaped Toolhouse's entire go-to-market. The big AI labs want six figures of annual spend before a business gets real support, which leaves small and mid-market companies rebuilding everything themselves and quietly giving up on AI when the bill arrives. Toolhouse fills that gap by building narrow, single-purpose "AI workers" instead of generalist agents, so they do not drift and do not need a growing pile of context to stay useful. Daniele walks through the two-person wine club in San Diego that fired its marketing agency and now runs its whole weekly campaign through one worker, how Toolhouse earns access to systems like Gmail and Salesforce by sandboxing every decision before it touches a live account, and what it took to automate a European Central Bank stress test where the output has to match human work exactly across fifty consecutive runs. Watch the full episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Ye-s3Fe73Q CHAPTERS 01:12 What Toolhouse actually does: turning one-off chats into repeatable AI workers02:02 Where the 90 percent cost saving comes from04:15 Why they are called workers, not agents06:16 Compliance and guardrails, from GDPR basics to enterprise policy07:40 From engineer to solutions engineer at Meta09:54 How Meta segments advertisers, and the gap that taught him everything12:27 Why the big AI labs cannot afford to serve you14:22 Finished work, not drafts, not notifications17:29 The San Diego wine club that fired its marketing agency20:41 When founders want AI to cut payroll instead of raise output24:26 Drift, and why you still need someone who knows good output from bad26:20 Flipping the paradigm: evals first, technology second29:09 Hiring engineering in India to serve a market the big labs skip31:27 The executive assistant that improvised its own personality32:39 Meet Sol, the AI worker with her own LinkedIn page35:12 Earning access to Gmail and Salesforce through sandboxing37:40 Automating the European Central Bank stress test39:46 Where the AI tooling market consolidates in three years42:04 The case for a European sovereign AI stack47:10 Close ABOUT THE GUEST Daniele Bernardi is the founder of Toolhouse, a platform that converts AI chat prompting into reusable, specialized AI workers that run over email, Slack, Teams, WhatsApp, and phone. He was previously a solutions engineer at Meta, where he worked with advertisers including Amazon and American Express, and later at Twitter. Connect with Daniele: https://www.linkedin.com/in/iamdaniele/Toolhouse: https://toolhouse.ai ABOUT THE SHOW We Built It Because We Had To is hosted by Jonathan W. Buckley of The Artesian Network, where he has helped more than 60 early stage technology companies launch and scale. Subscribe on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. For more on scaling an early stage technology company, visit https://www.artesiannetwork.com/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=ep30&utm_content=shownotes

    The AI Worker With Her Own LinkedIn Page (Daniele Bernardi)

  5. Aug 7

    He'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 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

    He's Teaching AI to Answer the Internet in Your Brand's Voice (Hank Leber)

  6. Aug 6

    He 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 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

    He Lost His Brother To A Misdiagnosis. Then He Built Medome (Dr. Steven Charlap)

  7. Jul 30

    From 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 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

    From Government CISO to AI-Native Security Founder (Robert Wood)

  8. Jul 23

    Selling "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 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

    Selling "Chaos" to the Fortune 100 Almost Killed His Company (Kolton Andrus)
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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.

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