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BUILDERS

BUILDERS

Front Lines Media 895 Episodes Sep 4, 2026

BUILDERS is a podcast that explores how founders get new technology adopted. Each episode features a founder sharing their journey of breaking into an industry, earning early believers, building credibility, and achieving real technology adoption. The show is part of a network of 20 industry-specific shows with over 1,200 founder interviews. It is produced by Front Lines Media.

Episodes

Founder-led roadshows: how Pennylane built trust inside local accounting communities across Germany and France | Tobias Janiesch
Founder-led roadshows: how Pennylane built trust inside local accounting communities across Germany and France | Tobias Janiesch Sep 4, 2026 00:25:55 Pennylane spent its first two years operating an accounting firm to experience the workflows it intended to fix. It then sold the profitable business, removed the channel conflict, and went all-in on software. After three years of deliberate customer development, growth accelerated to more than one million SMEs on the platform. In this episode of BUILDERS, Tobias Janiesch, Managing Director - Germ
Finding the buyer who was already on the hook | Ria Shah
Finding the buyer who was already on the hook | Ria Shah Aug 24, 2026 00:15:09 Handl Health is building an AI platform that aggregates and analyzes publicly available healthcare pricing data, helping brokers and benefits consultants design, evaluate, and personalize health plans for self-insured employers. In a recent episode of BUILDERS, we sat down with Ria Shah, Co-founder & Chief Product Officer of Handl Health, to learn how the company turned newly mandated price tr
AI visibility is not SEO 2.0 | Imri Marcus
AI visibility is not SEO 2.0 | Imri Marcus Aug 24, 2026 00:23:55 Brandlight is building an AI visibility platform that helps enterprise brands, most of them Fortune 500 companies, monitor and influence how they show up in AI engines across AI search, AI ads, and agentic commerce.In a recent episode of BUILDERS, we sat down with Imri Marcus, CEO & Co-Founder of Brandlight, to learn how the company won Fortune 500 customers from day zero and turned AI visibil
Selling into 95% market concentration | John Taylor Garner
Selling into 95% market concentration | John Taylor Garner Aug 24, 2026 00:29:33 Odynn is an AI-powered, fully modular platform that helps fintechs, banks, card issuers, and travel companies launch embedded travel, loyalty, and rewards programs. The company's flagship product, Awayz, gives financial institutions a white-label travel portal where cardholders can search, plan, and book hotels and flights with side-by-side points, miles, and cash pricing.In a recent episode o
The market nobody wanted | Alex Jekowsky
The market nobody wanted | Alex Jekowsky Aug 20, 2026 00:23:46 Cents builds software, payments, and hardware for the laundry industry, serving laundromat operators and other commercial laundry businesses. The company is the only venture-backed company operating at scale in a market that most technology companies had overlooked, and has reached approximately one in six U.S. laundromats.In a recent episode of BUILDERS, we sat down with Alexander Jekowsky, CEO &
The friends-of-friends GTM model in cybersecurity | Elad Ben Meir
The friends-of-friends GTM model in cybersecurity | Elad Ben Meir Aug 20, 2026 00:18:23 Onit Security builds AI agents for exposure management, helping security teams cut through the noise of tens of millions of vulnerability scanner findings to identify and prioritize the ones that can actually be exploited. The company is built from the ground up on agentic infrastructure, positioning itself as the fifth generation of exposure management tooling in a category that has evolved from
The growth engine hiding in a 28-week order set | Andrea Ippolito
The growth engine hiding in a 28-week order set | Andrea Ippolito Aug 20, 2026 00:22:40 SimpliFed is a maternal care at home platform focused on virtual breastfeeding and baby feeding support, delivering insurance-covered care from pregnancy through the first year postpartum.In a recent episode of BUILDERS, we sat down with Andrea Ippolito, CEO and Founder of SimpliFed, to learn how the company built a referral engine that is on track to receive referrals representing about five perc
The head of AI who had never heard of an ontology | Rob Buller
The head of AI who had never heard of an ontology | Rob Buller Aug 20, 2026 00:19:10 Cyberhill Partners builds and deploys enterprise AI solutions, including Cerebro, an enterprise AI platform Rob describes as AI in a box, and Wolverine, a digital twin product, drawing on eight years of AI work inside the intelligence community.In a recent episode of BUILDERS, we sat down with Rob Buller, Chief Executive Officer of Cyberhill Partners, to learn how the company is bringing intellige
Breaking into the twenty-year startup graveyard of mortgage lending | Naren Krishna
Breaking into the twenty-year startup graveyard of mortgage lending | Naren Krishna Aug 18, 2026 00:22:26 Balerion AI is an agentic AI platform for mortgage loan manufacturing, automating origination work like document analysis, income review, and underwriting for lenders. The company came out of stealth this spring and is backed by a $6M seed round led by Kleiner Perkins, with its platform in production at FM Home Loans, a lender originating two billion dollars in annual loan volume.In a recent episo
The 90% trust artifact that opened OPAQUE's market | Aaron Fulkerson
The 90% trust artifact that opened OPAQUE's market | Aaron Fulkerson Aug 17, 2026 00:19:07 In a recent episode of BUILDERS, we sat down with Aaron Fulkerson, CEO of OPAQUE, to learn how the company found its market in sovereign AI deployments after discovering that customers would accept 90% verifiability with known gaps rather than waiting for perfect end-to-end confidential computation.Topics Discussed:Why Aaron joined OPAQUE from ServiceNow only after the founders agreed to apply the
You don't evangelize the product, you evangelize the category | Gerardo A. Dada
You don't evangelize the product, you evangelize the category | Gerardo A. Dada Aug 17, 2026 00:32:05 In a recent episode of BUILDERS, we sat down with Gerardo A. Dada, former CMO of Catchpoint, to learn how the company created the internet performance monitoring category and got customers, press, and analysts to adopt its language. Topics Discussed:Why category creation only matters when it actually grows the businessHow Gerardo found the category by studying what Catchpoint did better than anybo
What it actually means to build AI-enabled services | David DeWolf
What it actually means to build AI-enabled services | David DeWolf Aug 11, 2026 00:23:22 2X is a go-to-market services company that has grown 50% YoY for seven straight years, scaling to roughly 1,200 people, with new investment from Insight Partners last year. On BUILDERS, CEO David DeWolf explains why his prior company, 17-person agentic platform Knownwell, combined with 2X, why he ended up leading the merged entity, and how he is rethinking pricing and AI enablement as services and

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