Strictly From Nowhere: A Podcast Experiment by Cause of a Kind
Five shows. One mission. Uncover wisdom and share it with all of you. Strictly From Nowhere is a podcast experiment by Cause of a Kind. We are Justin Abrams and Mike Rispoli. Co-founders. Bootstrappers. Builders. We interview founders, break down what is happening in tech and business, go deep on engineering and AI, and document our own journey of building from nothing every single day. Stand up. Show up. Build.
Episodes
When did a CTO last worry about the underwriter's rate table? Forest Mars thinks that is where the security apocalypse lands.
In this episode of CTO Confidential, Mike Rispoli sits down with Forest Mars, the CTO's CTO. Forest runs CTO Lunch NYC, the monthly lunch and newsletter for working CTOs and engineering leaders, and builds infrastructure that contains AI agents when they go off the rails.
We get into:
* Why AI raises a CTO's st...
A full stack slice of software used to cost $2,500. Today Adam Dymitruk's team produces one for 25 cents.
In this episode of CTO Confidential, Mike Rispoli sits down with Adam Dymitruk, founder and CEO of Adaptech Group and the creator of Event Modeling. Adam has spent more than 30 years in software, the last 20 focused on event sourcing, and for eleven years his company has sold fixed cost slices with no known bugs allowed.
We get i...
The day after he got laid off, Toys R Us offered him a full time job.
In this episode of Forward to Extraordinary, Justin Abrams sits down with Carlos Spallarossa, VP Client Partner at Cosmo5, the global agency formerly known as Labelium. He started in web hosting around 2000, spent a decade on a help desk teaching himself to code, then built SEO practices at Toys R Us and L’Oréal. He is also the client who put Justin in front...
Where does the next dollar go? Josh Krafchick asks it of every client, and of himself.
Josh trained in actuarial science, worked inside big financial firms, then walked away to build custom money plans for real people. Today he advises tech professionals holding company stock through 369 Financial, and he runs a public strategy on Dub that anyone can copy.
The conversation also goes to the stretch where Josh sold his house near the b...
Every customer gets their own bay in the garage. The agent lives in it, authenticated only to their repositories, and cannot get out.
Mike has been building that. Justin hit record to find out what it actually means.
In this episode, the two of them unpack the software factory: what the term covers, why it is loaded, and why Mike thinks the machine that built your software is as much your property as the software itself.
We get into:
<...Mike's front stoop is held together with liquid nails until he can afford a real mason. He would never sell that as a professional service.
That is the exact state most vibe coded software is in right now, and both of these guys are getting paid to fix it.
In this episode of CTO Confidential, Mike Rispoli sits down with Brian Jenney, owner of Parsity and host of the Develop Yourself podcast. Two engineers who came up through HTML and...
He gave his personal life savings to the company to make payroll. There were about forty people left and the cash had run out.
That company was Art Technology Group. It went public in 1999 and Oracle bought it in 2011.
In this episode of CTO Confidential, Mike Rispoli sits down with Bob Mason, cofounder and managing partner of Argon Ventures. Before investing, he went zero to IPO twice as a founder and CTO, first at ATG and then at B...
Two designers who became engineers, comparing notes on what engineering even is now.In this episode of CTO Confidential, Mike Rispoli sits down with Nick Haroldsen, founder of Nth Powered and a twenty year veteran of UI design and development. They met arguing about AI on LinkedIn.Both started in design. Both moved to code because they hated being removed from the building of the thing. Both now spend their days getting agents to p...
Every piece of career advice you learned was written before November 30, 2022.That is the day ChatGPT launched. Gregg Schoenberg's position is that most of the advice conceived before it should go in a drawer, and the biggest casualty is the one everybody repeated for generations. Focus. Do one thing really well.In this episode of Forward to Extraordinary, Justin Abrams sits down with Gregg Schoenberg, executive coach and founder o...
A snowboarder overheard his sponsor complaining about a $25,000 website quote and said he'd do it for five grand. He had never built a website. He went to the library, checked out books, and figured it out.
Twenty seven years later that's Ocupop.
In this episode of Forward to Extraordinary, Justin Abrams sits down with Michael Nieling, founder and creative director of Ocupop. Pre med turned zoology major turned competitive snowboarde...
As of this recording, all three AI providers went down. So we recorded a podcast instead.
Mike Rispoli sits back down with John Crickett, founder of Coding Challenges, for his second appearance. No origin story this time. Just two people who run their own businesses talking honestly about what building software actually feels like right now.
John built apps in C++, Rust, Zig, Go and Swift in the last month. He had never written a lin...
Two guys who got tired of paying for software they could just build.
Justin and Mike push play on The Stand Up after a long break and demo everything they have shipped over the last stretch. They estimate they have killed two to three thousand dollars a month in subscriptions over six months by rebuilding tools in their own likeness.
This one is technical and unedited. Real screen shares, real bottlenecks, real diagnosing a server mi...
Ask a plumber if he needs AI and he will tell you he puts pipes together.
Now imagine software that reads his schedule, tells him what to load in the truck before he leaves, predicts what each job will need, and reorders the day so the quick ones clear early. Same guy. Same pipes. Completely different business.
In this episode of Forward to Extraordinary, Justin Abrams sits down with Dr. Jerry Balentine, fifth president of New York I...
She saw a man praying in an airport and thought, that looks like downward dog. That thought became a company.In this episode of Forward to Extraordinary, Justin Abrams sits down with Youmie Jean Francois, founder and CEO of Flex-N-Fly, The Flex Bags, and The Flex-N-Fly Foundation. Former professional backup dancer. Private pilot. Speaks four languages. Haitian born and New York City raised.She was set to launch inside JFK in April ...
Public relations used to mean one shot at one placement in one publication and hoping it landed.In this episode of Forward to Extraordinary, Justin Abrams sits down with Steph Porter, founder of ink&iron PR. Steph started as a theater major, pivoted to communications on the advice of a campus counselor, and built a career running campaigns for brands like Walmart and Tim Hortons before leaving corporate to build her own shop in...
Before software as a service had a name, Jeremy Suriel was burning customer service software onto CDs and mailing it to enterprises.In this episode of CTO Confidential, Mike Rispoli sits down with Jeremy Suriel, cofounder and CTO of Kustomer. Jeremy has been building in this space since 1997, starting with chat servers for GeoCities and Lycos, then a widget company Mark Cuban backed and AOL acquired, then Assistly, which Salesforce...
What does it take to build one of the largest channels on YouTube without ever raising a dollar?In this episode of Forward to Extraordinary, Justin Abrams sits down with Ashkan Karbasfrooshan, Founder and CEO of WatchMojo. Ashkan bet on YouTube in 2006 when people at conferences thought he was out of his mind. He bootstrapped through a lawsuit, a cash crunch, and years of quiet building before the business ever broke even.This one ...
Mike sits down with Bart Lewin, a four decade technology veteran, serial entrepreneur with seven startup exits, and a consultant who helps small tech companies grow. Bart is building a practice around a model most founders have never considered. Non equity financing.The idea is simple and powerful. Instead of chasing tiny subscriptions while diluting your equity to raise venture capital, license the know how you already built to en...
Mike sits down with TJ Pitre, Product Architect for Design Systems and AI at Figma and the founder of Southleft, a design systems consultancy trusted by teams at NASDAQ, Caterpillar, Indeed, and IBM.TJ explains why sprinkling AI into a design system without proper context creates chaos rather than speed. His framing sticks with you. You are safe while you are walking the AI. The moment it gets ahead of you, you have lost the thread...
Mike sits down with Pete Sacco, founder and CEO of PTS Data Center Solutions, author of The Bridge and Living in Bliss, and an investor in frontier technology including Extropic and Lemurian Labs. Pete is an ex theoretical physicist turned electrical engineer who has spent nearly three decades designing and building data centers.Pete makes the case that two technologies will define this century. Artificial intelligence, and us. Mac...
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