There is a particular kind of pressure that comes from being right about something before anyone else agrees with you. John Taylor Garner knows this well. In late 2021, he and his co-founders shut down their first company and pivoted to a new thesis: that airlines and hotels had quietly broken their loyalty programs during COVID, and that the credit card industry would soon face a churn crisis because of it. The only problem was that nobody had noticed yet.

For roughly two years, John built what would become Odynn in near-complete stealth, selling a solution to a problem that was still invisible to the banks he was pitching. “We were a little early,” he says, with the calm of someone who has since been proven right. “But it also took a while to build out all the tech, so it ultimately didn’t matter.”

That ability to stay the course on an unconfirmed thesis, without external validation to lean on, is the through-line of John’s story as a founder.

From the Trading Desk to the Builder’s Table

John spent six years at Merrill Lynch as a volatility trader, eventually running the International National Macro Cross-Asset Volatility book on the index desk with record profitability. The role covered currencies, commodities, fixed income, high yield, and emerging and developed markets simultaneously. He describes the appeal of it plainly: “It is impossible to fully manage everything. You’re always one step behind, which sounds annoying, but it was actually what made it engaging.”

That comfort with managed chaos would prove useful later. Trading floors are finite, though. Markets close. Founders are always on. The transition required a real adjustment, and John acknowledges it. He now frames his earlier career not as preparation for pressure, but as a different category of it entirely. A senior contact at a large bank recently told him he might be the only founder they had met who had taken a less stressful job by leaving trading. He paused when he heard it. “I hadn’t thought about that,” he admits. “That is a valid point.”

Before launching Odynn, John built Card Curator, a mobile super-app for credit card management that he describes as “a fully automated version of NerdWallet.” He began working on it at the end of 2018, and the early traction was strong enough to justify building it out fully. Then COVID arrived and gutted the travel category the product depended on. He went to Wharton for his MBA, continued working on Card Curator during that time, relaunched it in January 2021, and grew it to roughly 40,000 monthly active users. The team, by his own description, knew nothing about B2C marketing. They grew anyway, largely because the product resonated.

The end came when airlines and hotels shifted from static to dynamic loyalty pricing. The recommendation engine Card Curator had built became unreliable overnight. Rather than rebuild it, the team made a sharper call: go build the dynamic pricing infrastructure itself and sell it upstream to financial institutions.

That decision became Odynn.

The Problem That Took Two Years to Become Obvious

To understand what Odynn does, it helps to understand what happened to loyalty programs during the pandemic. Airlines and hotels, which generate the majority of their profits through loyalty programs rather than core operations, needed liquidity fast. The solution was to sell points and miles in bulk to their banking partners. Amex, Chase, Citi, Capital One and others bought billions of dollars worth of them to help keep travel suppliers solvent.

The result was predictable in hindsight. Flooding a market with currency while keeping its price pegged causes rapid inflation. When the peg eventually had to float, airlines and hotels shifted to dynamic pricing for redemptions. Points that once bought a predictable flight now bought an uncertain one. Most cardholders did not notice immediately, because most cardholders were not traveling.

By late 2023, that changed. The first visible signal was Delta’s October 2023 standoff with Amex over lounge access, status earning, and point payouts. Longtime Delta loyalists left for other carriers. The underlying cause was structural: Delta, like every major airline, had sold so many miles during COVID that it could no longer honor the old terms without going backward financially.

“It turns out we were right,” John says. “And it turns out churn is at all-time highs for these cards and only increasing.”

Odynn sits at the intersection of this problem and the financial institutions trying to solve it. The company builds travel portal infrastructure for card issuers, complete with embedded loyalty solutions that help cardholders understand what their points are actually worth in real time. Customers include banks and fintech platforms that want to offer a fully branded, modernized travel experience without building the underlying tech themselves. John describes the vision as “a Shopify for travel portals.”

The competitive landscape is remarkably concentrated. John names four major players in embedded travel: Expedia, Booking, Hopper and Arrivia. Between Expedia and Booking alone, more than 80% of the market is accounted for. Every one of those companies is valued in the billions. Odynn is the sixth.

The Investor Search in a Niche Within a Niche

Finding the right investors for a company this specialized required recalibrating what “relevant experience” even meant. John was direct about his criteria. Financial capital was the baseline. What he actually screened for was domain expertise.

“There are really only five major players,” he explains. “So if you’re taking a step back, there’s only a limited set of individuals that can really provide that insight for us.” A pure embedded travel background was nearly impossible to find in a VC. So the team expanded the filter to include loyalty experience, fintech experience, or adjacent travel verticals, and looked for any meaningful combination of those.

Bonfire Ventures led the round, with Fiat Ventures co-leading. Odynn raised $9.5 million in a seed round that was completed at the end of 2025 and announced in February 2026. John’s confidence in Bonfire came partly from watching their work with Wildfire, a portfolio company on the retail loyalty side. Fiat’s roots were in embedded fintech, which mapped directly onto what Odynn was building. “It’s kind of a perfect match,” John says.

His broader point to founders thinking about investor relationships is worth noting. He does not distinguish between financial and non-financial value as though one is primary. For him, a check without relevant knowledge attached to it is a diminished asset in a vertical this narrow.

Staying Grounded When the Market Hasn’t Caught Up

John runs a team of 28 people, 19 of whom are engineers. His co-founder and CTO Anuj Patel, who he met at Wharton, leads the technical side. John focuses on fundraising, investor relations, sales, go-to-market, and overall strategic direction. He also taught himself Python to build the core algorithm behind Card Curator and Odynn, and vibe-coded the company’s agentic AI travel concierge during the summer of 2025 because he had a specific vision for how it should work.

He is candid about what keeps him level during the harder stretches. Going for a run is his most reliable reset. “If I’m working on a problem and I can’t get over it, removing yourself and clearing your head a little bit, you’ll come back with new ideas or a new approach.” He travels extensively, often taking calls from beaches, ski mountains, or wherever he happens to be, because the flexibility of not being office-bound is something he protects deliberately. He also credits his wife, a PhD in clinical psychology, as what he calls his “secret sauce.” “I kind of have an in-house therapist,” he says. “Very few people can take advantage of that though.”

The motivation underneath all of it is structural. The loyalty industry has always wrestled with whether a loyalty program is a cost center or a revenue driver. John’s view is that it is always both, but only the companies that treat it as a long-term investment get the return. “Every dollar invested into a successful loyalty program should be paying between five and 10x back,” he says. “Not immediately. This is a multi-year long investment.”

The Roadmap Ahead

By mid-2026, Odynn expects to have transferable loyalty live, with select partners already lined up. Luxury hotel offerings comparable to Amex’s Fine Hotels & Resorts program are in the pipeline, along with the full rollout of car rentals. The agentic AI travel concierge, currently in beta with active customer testing, is expected to move to production before year end.

The most significant milestone on the horizon is a fully self-managed version of Odynn’s modular infrastructure. The current version is already live for customers in production. The self-managed release would allow clients to build their own travel portal independently, using modular SDKs, APIs, and model context protocol access so that large language models can handle the build process directly.

The company that John describes is one still assembling its final form. But the thesis it was built on, that cardholders would eventually notice their points were worth less than expected, that churn would follow, and that financial institutions would need better tools to respond, has held up. Being early, it turns out, was not the same as being wrong.

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It all started with conversations. A lot of them. The salespeople Steve Ancheta called didn’t know each other and they worked at different companies, in different cities, at different stages of growth, from Fortune 10 corporations to early startups. He asked each of them to walk him through their ideal week in sales: what they should be doing, what they actually do, and how those two things differ.

Every single answer was different, until it wasn’t.

No matter when it fell in the week, Monday morning or Thursday afternoon, each salesperson described a block of time they had to set aside for tasks that had nothing to do with selling. CRM updates. Follow-up notes. Lead research. The details varied, but the pattern held across seven conversations with people who had never met.

“They all had that commonality,” Steve says. “At some point, I have to stop generating revenue to focus on things that don’t generate revenue.”

That informal research exercise, conducted with his two co-founders to help them understand what sales really feels like from the inside, became the organizing principle behind zig.ai. The company’s premise is straightforward: identify every step in the sales process where a human is doing something a machine could handle, then build the infrastructure to handle it.

Meet Steve, Founder of zig.ai

He grew up in Boyle Heights, a working-class neighborhood in East Los Angeles where he lived with his great-grandmother in the Estrada Courts housing projects. Raised by parents he describes as young and blue collar. What they gave him wasn’t a pep talk. It was something more durable.

“It wasn’t in an encouraging way like in the movies,” he says. “It was more like, go try it, figure it out. If you screw it up, it’s on you. Take accountability and move on.”

He left college after one semester, decided he wanted a career in sales, and called everyone he knew to find a way in. An organization took a chance on him, and he spent the next 16 years climbing through roles as a sales rep, sales engineer, and eventually the head of sales organizations. That accumulated experience, not a whiteboard hypothesis, is what zig is built on.

zig is an intelligence and execution platform for sales teams. Organizations plug in their existing data, including email threads, ongoing conversations, and CRM records, and zig assembles what Steve calls a “compounding context layer.” Think of it as a shared memory bank that every workflow, every AI agent, and every automated process inside the platform draws from. It learns what has worked historically, adjusts based on new behavior, and uses that evolving picture to make better decisions over time.

The goal is to give salespeople back the hours they currently spend doing things that feel like work but don’t move deals forward.

The Problem Generalists Kept Missing

Steve raised zig’s initial funding from Superset, a venture firm made up entirely of former founders. Getting there required convincing investors who hadn’t spent careers in sales that the problem was real and worth solving.

That turned out to be harder than he expected.

“Explaining sales to non-sales folks is very difficult,” he says. When talking to investors who came from product and engineering backgrounds, he found that some saw sales as a profession where likability and product strength were the primary variables. The operational weight, the quota clocks, the cognitive load of managing a funnel across multiple disconnected tools, didn’t register as structural problems worth solving. They registered as noise.

His advice to founders who hit the same wall is direct. “If you spend your time wondering why a VC said no and why they don’t see your vision,” he says, “you’re going to drive yourself crazy.” The better use of energy is to find the investor who already understands the vertical deeply enough to recognize what the founder is describing. For Steve, that was Superset.

One thing that made the Superset relationship work: all the general partners have built companies themselves. That background, Steve says, produces a different kind of engagement. When he is working through a decision, he walks across the shared office, pulls a GP into a quick conversation, and uses the exchange to organize his thinking. They don’t decide for him. They ask the questions that help him decide faster.

“It speeds up the decision making process,” he says, “much faster than them not being there.”

For early founders trying to evaluate investors, Steve offers a practical filter: find out whether the people writing the check have built something from zero to one before. The intangible value of that experience, he says, becomes clear in the first 30 to 60 days of building.

The Longer View on Sales and AI

Steve has a clear perspective on where AI agents fit inside a sales organization, and where they don’t. The rapid rise of AI sales development representatives, or AI SDRs, producing high-volume cold outreach has already started to desensitize buyers to cold email. When every company targeting the same prospect is sending automated sequences, the volume stops being an advantage. Messaging quality becomes the only differentiator, and most AI SDR tools, Steve argues, operate with too little context to improve their messaging over time.

zig’s outbound functionality takes a different approach. Rather than maximizing volume, it layers context onto outreach, adjusting tone, content, and timing based on industry, team size, and the profile of deals that have closed before. The bet is that precise, well-informed outreach will outperform broad, generic outreach as buyers get better at ignoring the latter.

As for the longer-term question of whether AI replaces salespeople entirely, Steve draws a comparison to what has happened in software engineering. AI has given strong engineers the ability to produce significantly more output without additional effort. He expects the same pattern to play out in sales: the best performers get a meaningful productivity lift, while the gap between top and bottom performers becomes harder to ignore. AI doesn’t directly eliminate roles, in his view, but it reduces an organization’s tolerance for underperformance.

What Steve Would Tell a Founder Starting Today

zig’s thesis was not built on research reports or market surveys. It was built on 16 years inside the profession, a series of direct phone calls, and a willingness to be told no by investors until the right one said yes.

For founders navigating the same early stages, Steve closes with a framing he uses internally: if you are a non-technical founder, be able to explain the micro as clearly as the macro. If you are a technical founder, make the inverse your discipline. Build the skill in whichever direction is harder for you.

“It allows everyone around you to move fast, but with intention,” he says,“Meaning you don’t sacrifice direction for speed. Forward is all that matters.”

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Sam Gibson left a stable engineering job in Kansas City with $10,000 in his bank account and a plan to build a miniaturized nuclear power plant. Two and a half years later, his company is merging with a publicly traded entity at a $1.2 billion valuation. The story between those two facts is the one worth telling.

A Cold DM and a Calculated Leap

The first move Sam Gibson made toward building Hadron Energy was sending a direct message to a founder he had never met. He was living in Kansas City, working a steady engineering job, and describing a business idea that even his eventual mentor, podcast host Kevin Jurovich, privately filed under “crazy or genius.” Kevin, a founder himself who makes a point of responding to early-stage builders, got on a phone call with Sam. Then another. Then several more.

“I thought you were partly crazy,” Kevin admitted during their recent sit-down on the Founder Uncovered podcast. That was in 2023. Sam was 22 years old.

By July 2024, Sam had packed his car and driven to what he thought was the Bay Area’s promised land. He landed in East San Jose, a neighborhood Kevin described diplomatically as “the opposite of quintessential San Francisco,” and signed an Airbnb lease that doubled as his founding office. He officially incorporated Hadron Energy there, with roughly $10,000 to his name and no investors yet on the cap table. The first check he received was $2,000. He took it.

What Hadron Actually Builds

Hadron Energy is developing what Sam calls Lightwater Micromodular Reactors, a compact nuclear power system that produces 10 megawatts of electric output, enough to power 10,000 homes simultaneously. The company is targeting data centers, critical infrastructure, and remote communities as its first customers, positioning clean nuclear energy as the most direct answer to what Sam describes as the defining constraint of the AI era.

“Power is the limiting factor for AI,” Sam said. “When you’re talking to hyperscalers and data centers, that’s the most important thing.”

The company’s engineering headquarters remains in the Bay Area, where Sam draws from a hiring pipeline anchored at Berkeley and other regional universities. Sam himself now lives in New York City, where he leads the capital markets work for the company’s pending NASDAQ listing.

To date, Hadron has raised just over $8 million across pre-seed, seed, and a small Series A. The company is currently merging with GigCapital7, a Special Purpose Acquisition Company (SPAC) with $212 million in trust. Bankers have valued Hadron at $1.2 billion. Sam expects net proceeds of approximately $200 million after what he anticipates will be a low redemption rate, plus an additional private investment in public equity (PIPE) raise he is actively leading.

The Builder Behind the Company

Sam’s background is in mechanical engineering and engineering leadership, which explains both how he got here and how he thinks. He does not describe himself as someone who woke up one morning with a billion-dollar idea. He describes himself as someone who always knew he would start a company and spent years building toward the moment when it made sense to stop preparing and simply move.

“There always comes a day when you have to stop studying and just make the jump,” Sam said. “There’s always the analysis paralysis where you get stuck in a loop of doing constant research. There’s something to be said about trusting your instincts.”

At 24, Sam leads a team that includes engineers and professionals significantly older than he is. He addresses the age dynamic with a straightforwardness that reflects how he approaches most things. “If you surround yourself with the right people, age doesn’t matter,” he said. “There shouldn’t be an age requirement for success. I don’t subscribe to that mentality.”

His personal routine reflects someone who treats operational consistency as a professional edge. He goes to bed early, wakes up early, and keeps regular dinner hours. He called himself “an old soul” with a laugh, but the point underneath the joke is a genuine one: he structures his days to protect his capacity to work.

Two books he returns to are Robert Greene’s “The Laws of Human Nature,” which he recommends for any founder navigating investor and team relationships, and “Meditations” by Marcus Aurelius, which he credits with shaping his long-term mindset. “If you have the right mindset, you can do basically anything,” he said.

How Survival Became Scale

The hardest stretch of the Hadron story is not the merger or the regulatory meetings in Washington. It is the months between Sam’s first $2,000 check and the point when checks started arriving fast enough to keep the company alive.

“I started the company when I had like $10,000 in my bank account,” Sam said. “Many months later, I had $20,000 and I’m like, I’m going to be patient. We’re going to keep pushing. There were many times where I felt if I don’t receive this investor check, this is going to put me in a really hard spot.”

He does not frame those months as a crisis he survived. He frames them as the natural cost of operating at the idea stage in a capital-intensive industry during a difficult fundraising environment. What kept him moving was a belief that persistence in the right direction compounds over time. The first round target was $500,000. It took longer than he expected, but he closed it through friends, family, and former colleagues. Then the checks grew. A $100,000 investment. Then $200,000. Then several at $500,000. Then the first million-dollar check arrived.

“It’s a lot of work and legwork to get from the early day angel checks to the more institutional, sophisticated investors,” Sam said. “Those are the folks we’re talking to now.”

The regulatory side presents its own sustained challenge. Nuclear energy requires ongoing engagement with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Department of Energy, and other federal bodies. Sam travels to Washington frequently, describing the process as one that rewards consistency and direct contact. “It’s about showing up and having boots on the ground, face to face interaction,” he said. “That is really what drives the ball forward.”

He described the diligence process behind the SPAC merger as something he will never forget, and not because of the valuation number. “I cannot believe how much diligence went into that merger and going through the process,” he said. “It was obviously very exciting.”

What the Next Chapter Looks Like

Sam’s goals for 2026 center on completing the NASDAQ listing, scaling the engineering team, and making measurable progress on the licensing work that will eventually allow Hadron’s reactors to connect to the grid. He also wants to build the brand into something recognizable beyond the capital markets audience currently paying attention.

“I really want to make Hadron a name brand so that when people think of clean energy, they think Hadron,” he said. “A nuclear reactor is pretty complex, but what we’re doing is trying to make it as simple as we possibly can for the average person to understand.”

The mission framing is consistent and specific. Sam has repeated throughout this journey that the valuation and the capital story are tools, not the destination. Putting reactors on the grid is the destination. Everything else is infrastructure toward that goal.

When Kevin asked Sam what personal quality he credits most for how far Hadron has come in under three years, Sam did not hesitate. “I am very stubborn and very persistent,” he said. “If you truly believe this is the right way, you stick to your guns. Naturally, people will follow that the longer you do it. I know for a fact where I’m going. It’s a matter of if this person wants to join.”

That is not the language of someone chasing a valuation. That is the language of someone who once sent a cold DM from Kansas City with a nuclear energy idea and a very clear sense of what came next.

This season is supported by Perkins Coie. Perkins Coie is a leading international law firm known for providing high-value, strategic solutions. The Emerging Companies and Venture Capital team counsels startups and the investors who back them, supporting clients from formation to exit. In the past three years, clients have raised more than $23 billion in private markets between the pre-seed and growth stages. Perkins Coie combines tailored counsel with sector experience, so when it’s time to accelerate, whether for the next financing round, a strategic deal, or going public, your team is ready. To learn more, visit perkinscoie.com

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Back in 2019, I used to walk around SoMa in San Francisco listening to founder podcasts, trying to figure out if what I was feeling was failure…or just the process.

How I Built This, Masters of Scale, then later Lenny’s Podcast and My First Million.

That was my founder education.

I was obsessed with learning from people who came before me.

Because when you’re in the desert as a founder...trying everything, hitting dead end after dead end, it helps to hear that the people you admire went through the exact same thing.

Behind every “overnight success” are years of doubt, false starts, and almost quitting.

That’s why I’m excited to announce the launch of Founders Uncovered.

I’ve teamed up with Drew Glover and Nick Madrid at Uncovered Media to host a podcast focused on the real stories behind building companies...the good, the bad, and the uncomfortable parts we usually skip.

There are so many incredible founders out there quietly changing the world. Their stories deserve to be told.

Season 1 drops next month. Our hope is that you walk away feeling educated, inspired, and a little more optimistic that you can get it done too.

One conversation can change everything.

Can’t wait to see more founders win. 🚀

-Kevin

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