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

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

Andres Andreu sits on one of the richest datasets in cybersecurity — nearly 64 billion breached identities — and for years growth still stalled. The problem was never the data. It was who Constella was selling it to.

In this episode of We Built It Because We Had To, Andres Andreu, CEO of Constella Intelligence, walks through the breach-data lake his company has amassed over 16-plus years and how it now feeds OEM cybersecurity vendors like Norton LifeLock and intelligence agencies across Europe, including Europol. You'll hear how a single ICP mistake — pitching CISOs who had no team to operationalize the data — held the company back, and how the shift to an OEM model drove 17% revenue growth in a single year. Andres also traces his arc from building federal law enforcement wiretap systems in the 1990s, to taking Bayshore Networks from employee number three to exit in 2021, to stepping into the CEO seat at Constella just six months after joining as COO. Along the way he shares the "fail fast" moment that forced his team to scrap part of their product and build a machine learning engine that earned an internationally granted patent — and saved the company.

If you're a founder or operator wrestling with product-market fit, ICP, or when to kill what you've built, this one is for you.

Chapters

00:00 What Constella Intelligence actually does

03:09 Why passwords barely change over 15 years

04:34 Inside the 24/7 breach-hunting program

05:18 Two ICPs: OEM vendors and intelligence agencies

05:47 From 90s federal wiretap systems to founding Bayshore Networks

09:20 The ICP mistake: selling to CISOs who couldn't use the data

10:25 OEM partners: Norton LifeLock, Europol, and beyond

13:07 "My vendor has 17 billion identities." "I have 64."

15:38 The fail-fast moment that led to a patent — and saved the company

19:13 What's driving growth now: customer-driven APIs and ICP focus

About the guest

Andres Andreu is the CEO of Constella Intelligence, a cyber-intelligence company operating one of the world's largest breach-data lakes. He brings 33 years in cybersecurity, from federal law enforcement to a 2021 startup exit with Bayshore Networks, and is the author of an internationally granted machine learning patent.

Connect with Andres: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andresandreu/

Learn more about Constella Intelligence: https://constella.ai/

Subscribe to We Built It Because We Had To for new founder stories every Tuesday and Thursday. Hosted by Jonathan Buckley of The Artesian Network — fractional CMO guidance for early-stage tech founders. Learn more at https://www.artesiannetwork.com