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. 5d ago

    The 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 hyperscaler adds makes the problem more expensive. In this episode of We Built It Because We Had To, host Jonathan W. Buckley is joined by Vivek Raghunathan of Xscape Photonics — the deep-tech company spun out of Columbia University research to attack the bandwidth bottleneck at GPU-to-GPU and GPU-to-memory interfaces inside AI data centers. Xscape's core platform is a scalable multi-color laser system: custom silicon photonics built for hyperscale data centers and AI infrastructure operators. This is not a software company with a slick demo. It's a materials and systems company making a long, capital-heavy bet — and the conversation digs into what that takes: the moment Columbia research stopped being research and started feeling like a company that had to exist, what the skeptics got wrong about the market, what broke first in the university spin-out chaos and how it got fixed, and how a hardware team holds together when timelines slip. Vivek is candid about the growth challenge in front of him now: finding product-market fit and expanding into new segments. Every episode on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, Amazon and more: https://www.WeBuiltItBecauseWeHadTo.com Xscape Photonics: https://www.xscapephotonics.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=ep38&utm_content=shownotes

    The Wall Every AI Data Center Is Quietly Hitting (Vivek Raghunathan)

  2. Sep 24

    Assume 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 communications platform built for MSPs, ISPs, and resellers who want to sell voice services under their own brand without running the infrastructure themselves. Viirtue was founded by people who had been resellers themselves, and it positions itself as partner-first: fully managed cloud infrastructure, with billing, tax compliance, and usage rating handled for partners, plus AI call intelligence such as call transcription and sentiment analysis. Jonathan and Daniel talk about building a channel-dependent business through several market shifts — the move from on-premise to cloud, COVID, and now AI — and what it takes to keep a partner-first model together as the ground moves. Every episode on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, Amazon and more: https://www.WeBuiltItBecauseWeHadTo.com Connect with Daniel Rosenrauch: https://www.linkedin.com/in/viirtue-dan-rosenrauchViirtue: https://www.viirtue.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=ep37&utm_content=shownotes

    Assume Everything Will Break. That's What Fast Scaling Feels Like. (Daniel Rosenrauch)

  3. Sep 17

    Everyone 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 customer support. Evan Wong went after the function they all ignore. In this episode of We Built It Because We Had To, host Jonathan W. Buckley is joined by Evan Wong, founder of Checkbox — the AI Legal Front Door and Operating System built for enterprise in-house legal teams. Checkbox intakes requests from every channel, automates routine work with AI, and assigns matters automatically based on type and expertise, while giving legal leaders the visibility and metrics to track workload, cycle times, and resources. For the business, that means instant answers, faster turnaround times, and full transparency into where requests stand. The wedge is the story. Legal ops is one of the least glamorous corners of enterprise software, and enterprise legal teams have historically been invisible inside their own companies — no real operating system to manage the flood of inbound work. Checkbox picked that beachhead deliberately, positioned itself as the front door to the legal function, and earned its way into serious procurement environments: named customers include Analog Devices, SAP, Coca-Cola, and Woolworths — with no IT required to deploy and minimal change management. Jonathan and Evan get into the origin of that bet — who first convinced Evan that in-house legal was the right beachhead — what early selling looks like when the buyers are lawyers rather than revenue leaders, how Checkbox thinks about applying generative AI to a function most AI companies have ignored, and the growth challenge Evan names candidly: adding revenue at a rapidly increasing rate quarter over quarter to hit growth goals. Every episode on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, Amazon and more: https://www.WeBuiltItBecauseWeHadTo.com Connect with Evan Wong: https://www.linkedin.com/in/theevanwongCheckbox: https://www.checkbox.ai 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=ep36&utm_content=shownotes

    Everyone Ignored In-House Legal. He Built Its Operating System. (Evan Wong)

  4. Sep 10

    Nobody 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 prove to sales reps that they needed the playbooks, and the customers told them to keep the recorder and throw the playbooks away. In this episode of We Built It Because We Had To, host Jonathan W. Buckley is joined by Gerald Zankl, founder of Kickscale, the conversation and revenue intelligence platform built for European B2B sales teams. Gerald opens with the two numbers the company exists to attack: sales teams lose roughly 66 percent of their time to non-selling work, and about 90 percent of what gets said in customer conversations is never captured anywhere. Kickscale records the calls, writes the data back into the CRM, and turns the transcripts into coaching, forecasting and product signal. The pivot is the story. The company is about six years old, but the product is three. The first three years were content, video tutorials and playbooks that were, in Gerald's words, hard to sell. The recorder started as a diagnostic to show reps what they were doing wrong. By September and October of 2023 the feedback was unmistakable: nobody asked about the playbooks anymore, everybody asked about the transcripts and the CRM sync. They rebuilt the whole company around the thing they had made as a means to an end. Gerald is direct about competing with a category leader. Kickscale is a Gong-like solution for Europe, and he names Gong as a great company doing 500 million in ARR rather than pretending otherwise. His wedge is where Gong is heavy: languages, data privacy, and the cultural differences in how European teams sell. The ICP is mid-market, teams with somewhere between ten and a hundred reps, a segment he had personally tried and failed to buy Gong for at a previous company. The rest is the unglamorous mechanics of getting to roughly 230 customers with about twenty people. Customer number one was an existing relationship, a social media management company, sold on a prototype so manual that users had to record in Teams, download the file, and upload it by hand. Bootstrapped as long as possible with one engineer and two people on go-to-market, then a 2.4 million pre-seed once traction was real. Three account executives now, with Gerald still selling. He is candid that the first sales hires are the real breaking point, because a founder sells the vision and a rep cannot. His backstory runs from his parents' petrol station in Austria, where his mother worked the register, through a technical high school where he built content management systems and personal finance tools that nobody ever used. That was the lesson that set the career: the best product in the world does not matter if you cannot sell it. He went from there to being the first sales and marketing hire at a startup that grew from seven people to 250. His advice to an operator six months into building B2B SaaS is the line he repeats to himself: the limiting factor in a software company is always sales. Ignore the rest and build yourself a system that sells. Motivation gets you started, but the system is what keeps you going. Every episode on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, Amazon and more: https://www.WeBuiltItBecauseWeHadTo.com Connect with Gerald Zankl: https://at.linkedin.com/in/geraldzankl/deKickscale: https://kickscale.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=ep35&utm_content=shownotes

    Nobody Wanted His Sales Playbooks. They Wanted the Recorder. (Gerald Zankl)

  5. Sep 3

    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)

  6. 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)

  7. 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)

  8. 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)
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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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