He Fired His Freelancers and Built a 500-Person Dev Shop to Replace Them — Furqan Aziz, InvoZone

He Fired His Freelancers and Built a 500-Person Dev Shop to Replace Them — Furqan Aziz, InvoZone

Most founders spend year one chasing product-market fit. Furqan Aziz spent his chasing something harder to build than any product: trust. In this episode of We Built It Because We Had To, host Jonathan W. Buckley sits down with Furqan Aziz, CEO and Founder of InvoZone. As a CTO in San Francisco, Furqan was burned by unreliable freelance developers who ghosted mid-project and missed deadlines on tight financial-services SLAs. So he built the team he wished he'd had: a dedicated, trained software organization in Lahore that has since grown to more than 500 engineers across five global offices. You'll hear how Furqan turned the offshore category's biggest liability — buyers who had been burned before — into his opening, using Clutch-verified reviews, client reference calls, and a free trial that takes price off the table. He explains why the cheapest offshore team is usually the most expensive mistake, and makes a contrarian bet that AI will create more demand for engineers, not less, as the number of startups explodes. He also gets candid about the two startups he failed before InvoZone, the co-founder lesson he learned the hard way, and the 3 a.m. call when an engineer wiped the production database — and the leadership mindset that saved it. Guest: Furqan Aziz, CEO and Founder, InvoZone LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/itsfurqanaziz/ Company: https://invozone.com/ If you like the real stories behind building technology companies, subscribe and join us for the next conversation. Learn more about The Artesian Network at https://www.artesiannetwork.com and find every episode at https://www.WeBuiltItBecauseWeHadTo.com Tags:  Furqan Aziz, InvoZone, Invo Zone, offshore software development, dedicated development team, Pakistan software engineers, Lahore developers, offshore development trust, Clutch reviews, co-founder lessons, production database disaster, AI and software engineering jobs, We Built It Because We Had To, Jonathan W. Buckley, The Artesian Network

How Klearly Pivoted to Dominate Hospitality Payments (Geus Walder) (S1 E21)

What if going narrower is what makes you fundable? Geus Walder co-founded Klearly as a generalist soft-POS app — download an app, turn any phone into a payment terminal, no hardware required. It gained traction across taxis, retail, and more. But a year of staying close to customers kept pointing to one place: hospitality had the deepest payment pain and the worst-fitting tools. So Klearly cut everything else and became a hospitality-only specialist — and that focus is what unlocked the growth, including a $12M Series A led by PayPal Ventures and a jump to 53 people. In this episode, Geus walks through the lean-startup path behind it: validating demand with a gamified landing page that drew 600+ businesses before the product existed, raising a pre-seed with Antler to actually build it, and the operating principle the team still runs on — "speed over perfection." He also explains why in-person payments were the overlooked 80% of the market, how Klearly onboards merchants in three days instead of three weeks, and why hiring salespeople from inside hospitality (not from payments) became an unfair advantage. If you've ever been told to widen your market to grow, this conversation argues the opposite. Chapters 00:00 Klearly and the hospitality-payments thesis 01:06 From consulting to founding Klearly 02:00 23 hires in a quarter and a $12M Series A led by PayPal Ventures 03:00 SMB generalist vs. hospitality specialist 03:51 The pivot to horeca-only 05:56 Selling before building: the 600+ business landing page 07:41 "Speed over perfection" 08:56 The overlooked 80%: in-person payments 11:31 Go-to-market: direct sales plus ordering-system partnerships 14:19 Hiring hospitality insiders, not payments people 16:38 De-risking the leap to full-time 19:29 Lessons from the lean-startup path Guest: Geus Walder, Co-founder, Klearly LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/geuswalder/ Klearly: https://klearly.nl Subscribe to We Built It Because We Had To for founder stories on building and scaling B2B tech. More at https://www.WeBuiltItBecauseWeHadTo.com and https://artesiannetwork.com

The Customer Success Branding Gap Most SaaS Companies Miss (Arne Hurty)

Most SaaS companies spend heavily to win the deal — then go silent the moment the contract is signed. Arne Hurty has spent three decades watching that gap widen, and building a firm to help close it.In this episode, I'm joined by Arne Hurty, founder of BayCreative, a strategic branding and marketing firm that has supported Silicon Valley tech companies since 1997. Arne walks me through three decades of building a deliberately small strategy shop — peak headcount of about 10 — that has worked with roughly 200 customers, 90% of them right here in the Valley. He shares the desktop publishing origin story (an early Mac SE in 1986, ten years at IDG before launching the firm), how the early customer base came together through Google and AltaVista paid search plus word of mouth, and the founder lesson that has stuck the longest: walk before you run with a new client.We dig into his "small rock" metaphor for why staying lean became his durability advantage, and the harder conversations around scoping, pricing, and clarification up front. The bigger thesis we land on is the gap between pre-sale and post-sale brand experience — Arne argues customer success teams are starved for branding and messaging support, despite renewals being where loyalty is actually built. A candid conversation about resilience, adaptability, and where Arne sees the next chapter of BayCreative going.Guest & ResourcesConnect with Arne Hurty:https://www.linkedin.com/in/arnehurty/BayCreative: https://www.baycreative.comWe Built It Because We Had To is the founder-backstory podcast from The Artesian Network. New episodes every Tuesday and Thursday. Subscribe so you never miss a conversation.Visit us at: https://www.WeBuiltItBecauseWeHadTo.com

2 Million Autonomous Fixes In PayPal Production — Then He Spun It Out (Suresh Mathew)

What happens when cloud deployment outpaces the humans managing it? At PayPal, Suresh Mathew's team built the answer — an autonomous system that ran 2 million production remediations before he spun it out as Sedai. In this episode, I'm joined by Suresh Mathew, founder and CEO of Sedai. We talk about the problem DevOps created: developers deploying directly to production faster than any SRE team could keep up. The instinct was to hire more engineers. Suresh's team built smarter — an autonomous system that handled 80% of production operations without human intervention. No 2 AM pages. Just 2 million remediations quietly running in the background. PayPal eventually mandated it: if your app wasn't compatible with the tool, you needed an approval to deploy. Then Suresh took the idea and made it work for the rest of the world. We get into the hard stuff: raising a seed in May 2020, growing to ~100 employees, closing a $20M Series B, and the Lambda market mistake that forced an early ICP pivot. Suresh shares his formula for hiring — strength over perfect fit — and the one signal he uses to know you have product-market fit: when your team stops dreading customer meetings and starts racing to get into them. He also explains why autonomous systems must run at zero tolerance for production failure. Not five nines. Zero. Guest & Resources Suresh Mathew, Founder & CEO, Sedai LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sureshmathew/ Sedai: https://www.sedai.io We Built It Because We Had To is the founder-backstory podcast from The Artesian Network. New episodes every Tuesday and Thursday. Subscribe so you never miss a conversation. Visit us at: https://www.WeBuiltItBecauseWeHadTo.com

Why AI Data Centers Could Break the U.S. Power Grid | Michael Parrella

AI data centers are hitting the U.S. power grid like five-gigawatt toasters — and unlike Bitcoin, that demand can never be switched off.In this episode, I sit down with Michael Parrella, CEO of ennrgy.com, about an existential moment most founders recognize but few talk about honestly: learning your largest customer is walking out the door. Michael returned as CEO of ennrgy in late 2024, and within weeks he learned they were about to lose their biggest account to a cheaper, more modern competitor. He didn't discount his way out. His team stopped defending the old product and asked one question: what do energy operators actually need? The answer — give them the decision first, the supporting data second — became the foundation of a rebuilt company. By December they had reacquired his old firm SoftSmiths and folded it in. What started as a near-death experience became the product strategy.Michael also breaks down what he calls the five-gigawatt toaster problem: AI data centers are plugging enormous, uncurtailable demand into a grid that was never built for it. He explains the fragmented reality of U.S. energy markets, why some jurisdictions are already requiring data centers to build their own power supply, why AI demand is fundamentally different from Bitcoin demand, and what it will take to prevent AI growth from crushing the energy infrastructure it runs on.Timestamps:00:01 — Welcome and intro01:01 — Career arc: from energy CEO to Chief Strategy Officer and back02:59 — The moment they learned they were losing their largest customer03:55 — How the team rebuilt the product around decision-first thinking05:11 — What ennrgy AI does: forecasting, pricing, settlements06:36 — Inverting the pyramid: decision at the top, data underneath10:05 — AI data centers and the electricity demand surge12:07 — The five-gigawatt toaster problem explained13:06 — Why AI demand cannot be curtailed the way Bitcoin demand can14:06 — Can we physically build enough power supply fast enough?15:28 — Being an ostrich doesn't work: what must be done16:19 — Parting words: existential moments create your best momentsConnect with Michael Parrella:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikeparrella/Company: https://www.ennrgy.aiSubscribe to We Built It Because We Had To on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube. Follow Artesian Network for more conversations with the founders and operators who built their companies the hard way. https://www.webuiltitbecausewehadto.com