We Built It Because We Had To - Tech Founder Backstories

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 th...

🎙 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...

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, So...

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 throu...

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-de...

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...

In this episode, I'm joined by Nick Mehta, the former CEO of Gainsight and the executive who literally wrote the book on customer success. We trace the only-in-Silicon-Valley story behind Gainsight — from a chance call in a 24 Hour Fitness parking lot, to teaming up with the Jbara founders, to scaling the business to $235M in revenue and a Vista Equity acquisition. Nick walks through what it actua...

In this episode, I'm joined by Ashok Mittal, founder and CEO of FinTech Global Center — a company he's been building for 30 years across consulting, trading-system development, and now product.  Ashok walks us through his arc from studying AI in 1986 to co-founding an inter-dealer broker that survived 9/11, to running his own brokerage across New York, London, Singapore, and Japan, to today's flag...

In this episode, I'm joined by Patrick Miller, Founder and CEO of Ampyx Cyber. We talk about what OT cybersecurity actually covers (the SCADA controllers running your local water plant, chemical facility, and power grid), how Patrick went from crawling through asbestos walls as an eight-year-old phone tech to bootstrapping his fourth consulting firm in 2021, and the three nation-state actors that...

Stan is a rare kind of founder. He spent decades at the highest levels of enterprise consumer insights, including a long senior tenure at Unilever and significant work at Coca-Cola, before stepping into the CEO role at an AI startup. That journey is exactly why this conversation matters. This is not the story of a 28-year-old founder chasing the next trend. It is the story of someone who built 30+...

In this episode, I'm joined by Rohan Pinto, co-founder of 1Kosmos. We trace the evolution of identity management from LDAP and single sign-on to blockchain-based biometric authentication, and how 1Kosmos built a FedRAMP-certified platform now handling millions of authentications per day across 50+ enterprise customers. Rohan unpacks why AI agents need their own authentication, authorization, and k...

In this episode, I'm joined by John Fly, CTO of FirmPilot — a VC-backed AI platform automating marketing for law firms. John shares how 30 years in tech (starting as a 15-year-old coding for a mortgage software company) led him to team up with founder/CEO Jake on a simple idea: "get the ego out of marketing" and let programmatic AI handle the blogs, social media, Google Business Profile posts, SEO...

In this episode, I'm joined by Peter Pezaris, a four-time exiting founder now building his fifth, Vortex Software, out of San Francisco. Peter walks us through 25 years of building with the same Carnegie Mellon crew — starting with Commissioner.com (the first fantasy sports platform on the web, sold to what became CBS Sports), through Multiply (a social newsfeed launched in 2003 — before Facebook...

In this episode, I'm joined by Gil Allouche, Founder and CEO of Metadata.io. We talk about how Gil turned a $50,000 side project at Spotfire into a $1.5M business in 18 months (which is where he accidentally invented his career in revenue marketing), the 3am LinkedIn slip at a Bessemer roundtable that led him to register the Metadata.io domain the same night, and the journey to raising $50M across...