We Built It Because We Had To - Tech Founder Backstories

50 Customers, One US Patent, and a Tool That Plays Nice (Stephen Franklin)

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.

Laid Off by the DoE — Then He Built an AI Startup | David Blumenthal

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

The EdTech Founder Bootstrapping AI for Higher Ed (Preeti Tanwar)

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

Don't Hire That Full-Time CMO Yet — Here's Why (Eyal Dror)

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

Building a $235M SaaS Business by Being Human First (Nick Mehta)

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 actually took to build a category: five books, the Pulse conference, thousands of blog posts, and ground warfare to define a profession that didn't exist. We also dig into where AI is changing customer-facing work — why agentic tools are crushing it on inbound support but still hitting a wall on outbound CS, and what Gainsight is shipping under new president Chuck Ganapathi. Nick closes with a masterclass on culture (his why/who/what/how framework), the moment vulnerability on stage at Pulse changed how he writes publicly, and why the antidote to an AI-saturated world is unfinished, messy, real human stories.🔗 Guest & ResourcesConnect with Nick Mehta:https://www.linkedin.com/in/nickmehta/🔑 Keywordsnick mehta, gainsight, customer success, jonathan buckley, artesian network, jbara, vista equity partners, pulse conference, saas, churn, retention, category creation, chuck ganapathi, staircase ai, agentic ai, voice ai, sierra, decagon, customer support vs customer success, inbound vs outbound ai, renewal agent, ai adoption agent, salesforce, marc benioff, dan steinman, allison pickens, livesoffice, symantec, mental health chatbots, brené brown, vulnerability, human first leadership, company culture, why who what how, linkedin writing, substack, anti ted talk, founder story, b2b saas