Software Development When Budget and Velocity Fade Away with Tyler Wells

From Portfolios to Planning: Proving Advisor Value in a Self-Directed World with Bennett Free

Join Bennett Free, Founder and Technical Lead of Fiscor, for a critical look at the shifting foundations of wealth management. For decades, a financial advisor's primary value driver was portfolio construction and asset allocation. Today, with the market flooded with self-directed trading apps, automated robo-platforms, and low-cost digital tools, investment management has become a commoditized baseline. In this episode, Bennett draws on his evolution from wealth management professional to software architect to map the industry's real future: transforming comprehensive, interactive financial planning into an advisor's core value proposition. 🎯 Insights You’ll Learn: The Commoditization of the Portfolio: Why relying solely on asset management is a losing strategy in a world of automated, low-cost digital tools. The Planning Shift: How moving the focus to cash-flow tracking, net worth forecasting, and personalized choice architecture changes the client relationship. Demystifying Complex Math: Bringing institutional-grade tools like Monte Carlo analysis and complex asset-liability matching into clear, accessible client conversations. The "What-If" Decision Lab: Helping clients model major life transitions—like buying a house or navigating career pivots—long before they occur. Capturing Younger Wealth: How to build high-engagement, white-labeled digital workspaces that meet the interface expectations of tech-native households. Behavioral Guidance: Utilizing structured simulation to visually calm investor anxiety and prevent knee-jerk decisions during market volatility. Building AI-Native Financial Systems: The tech reality of translating messy, fragmented banking data via Plaid into clean, predictive long-term models. 🌍 Why This Matters: In 2026, clients do not want a quarterly spreadsheet or a static 80-page PDF financial plan that gathers dust on a shelf. They want a living, breathing digital command center that reflects their real-world assets, liabilities, and immediate choices. Bennett Free is building the modern infrastructure that helps advisors step into this role as life-centric strategists. Fiscor transforms the planning process into an ongoing, collaborative workspace. By pairing advanced logic with intuitive product design, Bennett is showing the wealth management sector how to prove its worth—not by beating the market, but by giving families complete clarity and confidence over their entire financial lives. 👤 Expert Background: Founder & Technical Lead of Fiscor, a financial planning technology platform modernizing client-advisor collaboration. Wealth Management Alumnus who transitioned deep field experience in advisory services into building fintech systems. Fintech Systems Architect specializing in the implementation of white-label client portals, live account tracking, and automated cash-flow projection engines. Product Strategist focused on replacing legacy financial software with modern, data-driven decision labs. 🎙️ Hosted by Gary Fowler, CEO of GSD Venture Studios — global AI entrepreneur, investor, and innovation leader spotlighting founders navigating the realities of building in the AI era. 💡 Perfect For: Registered Investment Advisors (RIAs), certified financial planners, wealth-tech founders, broker-dealer executives, and digital-forward wealth managers looking to double their client retention and capture generational wealth transfers. 🚀 Timely Topic: The advisory business model is undergoing a massive transformation. The firms winning the market in 2026 are those using technology to build deep, behavioral partnerships with their clients. Bennett Free is delivering the platform and the technical playbook to make that scale. Subscribe for more global founder conversations from GSD Venture Studios: https://gsdvs.com #WealthTech #FinancialPlanning #Fiscor #Fintech #Advisors #WealthManagement #BennettFree #GaryFowler #GSDVentureStudios

The Holy Grail of Protein: How FUDI Is Unlocking RuBisCO at Scale with Udi Lazimy

Join Udi Lazimy, Founder & CEO of FUDI Protein, for a conversation on what may be the most important protein opportunity hiding in plain sight — and why the food industry has been routing it through a cow instead of putting it on your plate. After leading Sourcing and Sustainability at Eat Just — makers of Just Mayo and Just Egg — Udi saw firsthand how fragile and opaque alternative protein supply chains had become. His answer was FUDI: a food and agtech startup built on regenerative American-grown alfalfa, near-field mobile processing, and a circular model that returns byproducts to farmers as premium feed. The result is RuBisCO — the most abundant protein on Earth — unlocked for human food for the first time at commercial scale. In this episode, we get into the science, the supply chain logic, the crowdfunding strategy, and what it really takes to build a protein company that can rival egg white and whey on performance, price, and sustainability. 🎯 Insights You'll Learn: What Is RuBisCO?: RuBisCO — short for ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase — is the most abundant protein on Earth, driving photosynthesis in plants, and has attracted repeated scientific interest for its amino acid profile and functional performance. So why has no one commercialized it — until now? Why the Market Wants It Badly: A severe U.S. whey protein shortage has some suppliers sold out through the end of 2026, with prices up more than 50% since January — and roughly 70% of Americans say they want more protein in their diets. RuBisCO is a supply-side answer to a supply-side crisis. The FUDI Difference: FUDI's proprietary alfalfa extraction process uses a localized and mobile processing model — plants are harvested and processed near the fields, and the high-value alfalfa byproduct is returned to local farmers, eliminating the byproduct commercialization challenge that constrains profitability for conventional protein crops like yellow peas and rice. Performance That Competes With Egg White: RuBisCO extracted from alfalfa leaves is a white, neutral-tasting, complete protein with a PDCAAS of up to 1.0, with functional properties comparable to egg white in foaming, gelling, and binding applications. The GLP-1 Tailwind: People using drugs like Ozempic experience a 25–40% decrease in muscle mass — far more than non-medicated weight loss — making high-quality, complete protein intake critical for the roughly 12% of U.S. adults now on GLP-1 medications. RuBisCO is positioned directly in that demand wave. The Dual Fundraising Model: FUDI is running an equity crowdfunding campaign on WeFunder alongside an institutional round led by Green Boy Group, funding the transition from lab-scale extraction to pilot production, customer sampling, IP filings, and the start of regulatory approval for human food use. The Infrastructure Ambition: "We're not inventing a new crop or asking farmers to change what they do," says Lazimy — alfalfa already grows on 17 million American acres. FUDI isn't a science project; it's a new layer of protein infrastructure built on what already exists. 🌍 Why This Matters: The protein in alfalfa leaves — some of the highest-quality protein on the planet — is essentially being routed through a cow before it reaches a human plate, and most of it never does. FUDI is reversing that inefficiency at the infrastructure level. 👤 Expert Background: Founder & CEO of FUDI Protein — a Madison, Wisconsin-based food and agtech startup extracting RuBisCO from American-grown alfalfa for B2B food ingredient markets. Former Head of Sourcing & Sustainability at Eat Just (Just Egg, Just Mayo) — with over 25 years of experience in alternative proteins and agrifood systems. Backed by Green Boy Group, a global B2B supplier of plant-based ingredients with offices across LA, Chicago, Amsterdam, Hong Kong, and Sydney.

AI Didn't Just Make Software Better It Made New Software Possible with Todd Rogers

Join Todd Rogers, Co-founder and CEO of Moddy AI, for a paradigm-shifting exploration into the true nature of the artificial intelligence boom. For the past decade, building a production-ready predictive sports modeling business required millions of dollars in capital, an elite army of data scientists, and bespoke backend architectures—culminating in complex tools that only other data scientists could decipher. In this episode, Todd maps out how advanced LLMs and automated engineering workflows have completely rewritten this equation, moving past basic software optimization to open up entirely new categories of consumer and business software that were previously impossible to build. 🎯 Insights You’ll Learn: The Paradigm Leap: Why AI’s greatest contribution isn’t making legacy coding processes faster, but rendering complex data science entirely invisible to the end user. Democratizing the Theory: How Moddy allows anyone to type a sports betting thesis in plain English and automatically spin up a verified, high-performance predictive model. The Invisible Engine: What happens under the hood when a user-described concept is instantly cross-referenced against 126 million historical NBA, NFL, and MLB data points. The No-Code Accountability Era: Why Moddy enforces transparent, immutable public performance tracking and timestamping to eliminate the "hype-and-lock" tipster economy. Scaling Mass Personalization: Lessons from Todd's first venture, Seed Labs, where he scaled custom mobile apps across 5 million users for giants like Lollapalooza and the ESPN X Games. The Enterprise Translation: How decades spent managing complex text, labor, and content analytics at SPSS and Amazon shaped Todd's product approach to consumer sports prediction. The New Founder Playbook: Why modern founders should stop trying to build marginally better software utilities and instead focus on what AI has newly enabled from scratch. 🌍 Why This Matters: In 2026, the global sports wagering industry is a multi-hundred-billion-dollar juggernaut, yet the consumer tools powering it are fundamentally broken. Casual fans are forced to rely on talking-head media pundits, while sophisticated bettors spend endless weekend hours fighting complex Excel spreadsheets. Todd Rogers is breaking this divide. By turning the natural language of a user into structured algorithmic instructions, Moddy eliminates the steep data science barrier. This isn't about giving users an AI black box that dictates what to do; it's about providing the computational infrastructure that listens to a human theory, checks it against decades of real performance history, and gives the user back their own mathematical edge. 👤 Expert Background: Co-founder & CEO of Moddy AI, the premier platform transforming sports betting theories into transparent, data-driven prediction models. Co-founder of Seed Labs, a pioneering mobile CMS company acquired by event-tech titan Cvent, where he successfully scaled production to over 1,000 corporate applications. Analytics & Data Alumnus with a professional footprint optimizing complex data extraction at enterprise landmarks like SPSS and Amazon. Product Innovator dedicated to applying deep data infrastructure to the creator economy and individual retail prediction spaces. 🎙️ Hosted by Gary Fowler, CEO of GSD Venture Studios — global AI entrepreneur, investor, and innovation leader spotlighting founders navigating the realities of building in the AI era. 💡 Perfect For: Tech founders exploring category creation, predictive analytics engineers, sports-tech investors, data-driven creators, and entrepreneurs tracking the convergence of consumer AI and complex data modeling. 🚀 Timely Topic: The software victories of 2026 are going to the teams that realize code generation is just a baseline utility. Todd Rogers is providing the exact blueprint for how founders can capture this moment—turning unstructured human imagination into high-precision corporate systems.

Modernizing Web Application Defense with Agentic Control with Itai Gafni

Join Itai Gafni, Co-Founder and CEO of Huskeys, for an unvarnished evaluation of why web application firewalls (WAF) have remained functionally stuck in the 1990s. While modern application traffic has evolved from human browsers to a complex matrix of APIs, automated microservices, and autonomous AI agents, legacy WAF solutions still rely on brittle, static rule sets. An alumnus of Israel's elite Unit 8200 where he engineered advanced intelligence and cyber platforms, Itai is leading a massive paradigm shift. In this episode, we discover why security teams are terrified of updating their firewall rules—and how introducing an agentic control plane allows enterprises to optimize threat detection without breaking production or driving away legitimate customer revenue. 🎯 Insights You’ll Learn: The Dark Side of AI: How automated traffic, malicious LLM scripts, and hostile autonomous agents are weaponizing requests to overwhelm 30-year-old WAF logic. The "Don't Touch It" Paradox: Why security teams choose to leave outdated, fragile WAF rules intact rather than risk blocking real users and destroying transaction revenue. Defining Edge Security Management (ESM): How Huskeys is defining an entirely new category—functioning as an abstraction layer on top of existing infrastructure (Cloudflare, Akamai, AWS WAF) instead of forcing a costly hardware rip-and-replace. Revenue as a Game Changer: Shifting the narrative of security from a cost center to a growth protector by cutting false positives, reducing blocked users, and stopping unnecessary spend. Context-Aware Protection: How Huskeys enriches core firewall logs with ambient business logic to distinguish between genuine malicious intent and non-standard user actions. Automated Simulation & Rollout: Replacing manual, high-risk rule configurations with a closed-loop system that validates, simulates, and deploys configurations in minutes. Unit 8200 Architecture Patterns: Applying military-grade AI optimization and offensive bypass research to defensive enterprise perimeter architecture. 🌍 Why This Matters: Every week, global enterprises balance on a razor's edge: configure their firewalls too tightly and they accidentally block thousands of paying customers; loosen them up and they invite massive API abuse and zero-day exploits. In 2026, web security can no longer be handled as a series of manual, static filters. Itai Gafni and the team at Huskeys are transforming edge firewalls into an organic, adaptive digital boundary. Backed by $8M in seed funding and deployed across massive, high-volume networks like TikTok, Merlin Entertainments, and Hugging Face, Huskeys proves that edge protection doesn't have to function as a business bottleneck. By translating vendor-specific syntax into automated, risk-adjusted decisions, Itai is giving engineering teams the confidence to finally optimize their defenses. 👤 Expert Background: Co-Founder & CEO of Huskeys, the industry’s first patent-pending Edge Security Management platform. Former AI Innovation Lead within Unit 8200, architecting cutting-edge infrastructure across cybersecurity and intelligence networks. Enterprise Infrastructure Veteran with a proven track record of aligning web app protection alongside core corporate revenue operations. Tech Pioneer backed by an $8 million seed round from prominent VCs including 10D, SV Angel, and toDay Ventures. 🎙 Lent by Gary Fowler, CEO of GSD Venture Studios — global AI entrepreneur, investor, and innovation leader spotlighting founders navigating the realities of building in the AI era. 💡 Perfect For: CISOs, AppSec engineers, VPs of Infrastructure, Cloud Architects, and e-commerce technology executives who want to maximize their existing WAF investments while completely eliminating false-positive blocks. 🚀 Timely Topic: The shift from static web filtering to real-time, context-driven traffic orchestration is the defining security challenge of 2026.

From Smart Homes to Smart Environments: How AI Agents Are Transforming Consumer Technology with Mark Westlake

Join Mark Westlake, Founder and CEO of GearBrain, for an essential look at the architecture of our connected future. With over 25 years of digital media and product strategy leadership at foundational platforms like AutoTrader.com and About.com, Mark has built a career helping people navigate complex digital shifts. Today, as the creator of GearBrain’s patented IoT Compatibility Find Engine, he is tackling the industry's ultimate bottleneck: fragmentation. In this episode, we move past the era of isolated smart gadgets controlled by disjointed phone apps to explore the rise of GearBrain Assistant—and how autonomous AI agents are quietly turning fragmented smart homes into fully unified, contextual environments. 🎯 Insights You’ll Learn: The Smart Home Illusion: Why a house filled with multi-brand connected devices often creates more app-fatigue and cognitive overhead than actual convenience. The Agentic Evolution: Shifting from reactive "smart assistants" that wait for voice commands to proactive "AI agents" that autonomously adapt environments based on user behavior. Solving Interoperability at Scale: How GearBrain uses over 10 years of real product data and machine learning to map compatibility across disjointed protocols and ecosystems. The Dawn of Building Intelligence: Scaling tech logic from individual single-family smart homes to massive, commercial multifamily real estate portfolios. The "Zero-Guesswork" Consumer Loop: Utilizing advanced AI-driven discovery engines to predict whether a consumer product will work with existing hardware before a purchase is made. Lessons from Digital Media Pioneers: How running product divisions at AutoTrader.com and Gartner-owned networks shaped Mark's perspective on content-to-commerce infrastructure. The Invisible Smart Layer: Moving toward ambient computing where technology disappears into the background of daily human life. 🌍 Why This Matters: For years, the Internet of Things promised a seamless, automated life. Instead, consumers in 2026 are often left acting as their own IT departments—toggling between separate ecosystems, dealing with dropped integrations, and returning expensive devices that refuse to communicate with one another. Mark Westlake is rewriting that dynamic. By treating device integration as a data normalization problem, GearBrain Assistant acts as a horizontal intelligence layer sitting above your hardware stack. It transforms static gadgets into a cohesive, context-aware environment that handles its own troubleshooting, energy optimization, and device onboarding. For Mark, the true smart home isn't the one with the most dashboards; it's the one that requires the least attention to operate perfectly. 👤 Expert Background: Founder & CEO of GearBrain, the definitive resource and platform for building connected product intelligence. Inventor of the Patented IoT Compatibility Find Engine, an advanced discovery framework helping millions map device interoperability. 25+ Year Tech & Digital Media Executive with previous leadership tenures at AutoTrader.com, About.com, and Purch. Platform Architect of GearBrain Assistant, a pioneering AI agent designed to help users discover, source, configure, and optimize connected ecosystems. 🎙️ Hosted by Gary Fowler, CEO of GSD Venture Studios — global AI entrepreneur, investor, and innovation leader spotlighting founders navigating the realities of building in the AI era. 💡 Perfect For: Consumer electronics innovators, real estate developers looking at PropTech, IoT systems engineers, smart home enthusiasts, and tech investors tracking the practical deployment of multi-agent AI. 🚀 Timely Topic: As consumer technology transitions away from explicit app interfaces toward automated background execution, compatibility is no longer just a feature—it is the prerequisite for adoption. Mark Westlake is delivering the operating fabric that ensures your home finally understands exactly how you live.