As an officer in the Army Rangers, Brian Elliott always sought out the hardest, highest-impact challenge 💪 “You can do hard things that don’t have impact, but you can’t do things that have impact that aren’t hard,” he says. Now Elliott is taking the same approach at @blitzyai, the Boston-based startup he co-founded in 2023, and recently valued at $1.4B 📈 Blitzy's agents can understand 100 million-plus lines of code, helping corporate customers overhaul and automate massive code projects that would otherwise take months, and millions of dollars, to crack. “For eons, we have been limited by how much a human context can hold in their brain,” Elliott argues. “We can do changes at a size and scale that were previously impossible." On The Upstarts Podcast, Elliott shares how he built Boston’s newest tech unicorn by becoming a CFO’s friend; why Cursor and Claude Code only see enterprise code "through a straw"; and what West Point and the Rangers taught him about operating with precision under pressure. Plus, he shares his Upstart Moment: catching the 6am train to New York to close an early six-figure customer, with his co-founder’s visa at stake. This season of the podcast is presented by @Rippling. TIME STAMPS 00:00 Introduction 1:59 What Blitzy does 7:12 An F-15 of 'pure technology risk' 10:43 West Point, the Army Rangers, and Harvard 18:34 Why OpenAI's models can't do it alone 21:20 Building in Boston, not Silicon Valley 23:50 A visa-saving Upstart Moment 27:23 Proving value across millions of lines of code 31:07 Why token maxing won't work 34:41 A CFO's best friend 38:20 Moving to 'proactive' autonomy next

As an officer in the Army Rangers, Brian Elliott always sought out the hardest, highest-impact challenge 💪 “You can do hard things that don’t have impact, but you can’t do things that have impact that aren’t hard,” he says. Now Elliott is taking the same approach at @blitzyai, the Boston-based startup he co-founded in 2023, and recently valued at $1.4B 📈 Blitzy's agents can understand 100 million-plus lines of code, helping corporate customers overhaul and automate massive code projects that would otherwise take months, and millions of dollars, to crack. “For eons, we have been limited by how much a human context can hold in their brain,” Elliott argues. “We can do changes at a size and scale that were previously impossible." On The Upstarts Podcast, Elliott shares how he built Boston’s newest tech unicorn by becoming a CFO’s friend; why Cursor and Claude Code only see enterprise code "through a straw"; and what West Point and the Rangers taught him about operating with precision under pressure. Plus, he shares his Upstart Moment: catching the 6am train to New York to close an early six-figure customer, with his co-founder’s visa at stake. This season of the podcast is presented by @Rippling. TIME STAMPS 00:00 Introduction 1:59 What Blitzy does 7:12 An F-15 of 'pure technology risk' 10:43 West Point, the Army Rangers, and Harvard 18:34 Why OpenAI's models can't do it alone 21:20 Building in Boston, not Silicon Valley 23:50 A visa-saving Upstart Moment 27:23 Proving value across millions of lines of code 31:07 Why token maxing won't work 34:41 A CFO's best friend 38:20 Moving to 'proactive' autonomy next

As an officer in the Army Rangers, Brian Elliott always sought out the hardest, highest-impact challenge 💪 “You can do hard things that don’t have impact, but you can’t do things that have impact that aren’t hard,” he says. Now Elliott is taking the same approach at @blitzyai, the Boston-based startup he co-founded in 2023, and recently valued at $1.4B 📈 Blitzy's agents can understand 100 million-plus lines of code, helping corporate customers overhaul and automate massive code projects that would otherwise take months, and millions of dollars, to crack. “For eons, we have been limited by how much a human context can hold in their brain,” Elliott argues. “We can do changes at a size and scale that were previously impossible." On The Upstarts Podcast, Elliott shares how he built Boston’s newest tech unicorn by becoming a CFO’s friend; why Cursor and Claude Code only see enterprise code "through a straw"; and what West Point and the Rangers taught him about operating with precision under pressure. Plus, he shares his Upstart Moment: catching the 6am train to New York to close an early six-figure customer, with his co-founder’s visa at stake. This season of the podcast is presented by @Rippling. TIME STAMPS 00:00 Introduction 1:59 What Blitzy does 7:12 An F-15 of 'pure technology risk' 10:43 West Point, the Army Rangers, and Harvard 18:34 Why OpenAI's models can't do it alone 21:20 Building in Boston, not Silicon Valley 23:50 A visa-saving Upstart Moment 27:23 Proving value across millions of lines of code 31:07 Why token maxing won't work 34:41 A CFO's best friend 38:20 Moving to 'proactive' autonomy next

"Survive. Don't sell. Don't quit." @Get_Writer CEO May Habib (@may_habib) has lived this mantra through a pivot, casual VC bias, and living in the shadow of the buzzier, brasher AI labs. "Anthropic and OpenAI salespeople walk in like heroes, get a contract, and leave to literally never be seen again,” she says. She's built Writer into a $1.9B valued business with customers like Accenture, Cigna and Vanguard anyway, by focusing on old-fashioned ROI, and AI tools built for "normal" people: non-coders who she argues are otherwise in danger of getting left behind. On this can't-miss episode of The Upstarts Podcast, Habib isn't pulling any punches 🥊 We talk tokenomics "insanity," and why she believes more accountability is needed In AI spending: "People should be getting f***ing fired." We also cover her pivot from Qordoba to Writer, and why Writer trains its own models, but doesn't want to be a lab. And she calls out as venture capital's ongoing gender bias -- including one famous firm that wrote that her mom status was "inspiring" while they passed 👀 This season is presented by @Rippling 🫡 TIME STAMPS: 00:00 Introduction 1:55 How Writer helps ‘normal’ people 9:31 The temperature in the C-suite around AI 16:56 The killer use case for Writer’s tools 21:16 Pivoting from Qordoba to Writer 22:31 Vinod Khosla, Sequoia, and bias in VC 27:43 ‘Survive, don’t sell, don’t quit’ 30:33 Why Writer trains models, but isn’t a lab 33:38 Anthropic, OpenAI and how Writer can compete 40:52 Why people should be fired for buying AI badly Enjoy!

"Vinod also fell asleep in my partner meeting at Khosla [Ventures]" 👀 The interactions with @vkhosla were "great" up until that point, though, remembers Writer CEO May Habib. Still, Habib (@may_habib) says that in hindsight, it might have been easier for @Get_Writer to raise its Series A if she'd had her male co-founder, CTO Waseem AlShikh (@waseem_s_), lead the pitches. "If you're a woman pitching VCs, we're all fooling ourselves to think that in the back of their minds, they think you'll work as hard," Habib says. "Have the technical man pitch." If that sounds cynical, Habib says she only cares about the outcome for her startup. Would Waseem have welcomed that? "I guess we'll find out when he hears this," she says. Catch the full episode on The Upstarts Podcast, presented by @Rippling.