Welcome to Founder Real Talk, a podcast for founders, by founders.
We explore the real journey of building and growing a company. Each episode, we go beyond the highlight reel to unpack the strategies, decisions, and hard lessons that shaped successful businesses, revealing the good, the bad, and the ugly behind the growth.
This week, Josh sits down with Shane Parreco, founder and CEO of Aktïga, a software development and product studio based in Asheville, North Carolina. Shane never set out to run a client services agency — but when Hurricane Helene hit, leaving his team without power for a month and water for six weeks, it forced a scrappy pivot that accidentally became the company's whole model. He opens up about becoming the go-to technical partner for an underserved region, why he once told a client to buy a $20 CRM instead of building custom software, the homeless day center still tracking everything on paper, and the toxic hire — a friend — that cost him two team members and a friendship.
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Chapters
(00:00) - Intro
(02:33) - Being a tech founder in Asheville, not the Bay Area
(06:50) - What Aktiga actually does (and the accidental pivot into a dev shop)
(17:52) - The unsexy win: bringing a homeless day center out of pen and paper
(19:23) - Local, human access to software development
(24:00) - "We're not here to sell you software" — the client who just needed a CRM
(28:57) - The hardest lesson: the toxic hire who was a friend
(37:30) - Why he refuses to put a time box on creative people
(40:38) - The believer-hater AI spectrum: where Josh and Shane land
(46:30) - Why you can't fake a face-to-face in the AI era
(48:21) - Closing thoughts
Links & Resources
Keywords
founders, entrepreneurship, software development, dev shop, product studio, Aktiga, Shane Parreco, Asheville, Hurricane Helene, regional startup ecosystem, accidental pivot, client services, custom software, unsexy customers, nonprofits, hiring mistakes, toxic hire, remote work, AI and jobs, human connection, bootstrappin
