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.
Brett Ewing is the co-founder of Axe AI, an offensive cybersecurity platform automating penetration testing and vulnerability management across complex hardware and operational technologies. In this episode, Brett breaks down how merging a 20-year-old white-hat services firm with a software team allowed one engineer to manage over $1,000,000 in testing workload. He shares why his team deliberately uses AI as little as possible to prevent compounding errors, how he enforces a mandate of two new certifications a year for every employee, and why playing the "infinite game" means turning down traditional venture capital.
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Chapters
(00:00) - Intro
(02:29) - Hacking hardware and the industrial grid
(05:32) - Shrinking six weeks of pen testing into two weeks
(08:05) - One deployed engineer doing a million dollars in work
(11:18) - Why we use AI as little as possible
(15:23) - The painful nine-month procurement process
(21:22) - Burning out and stepping off the hustle grind
(24:43) - The two certifications per year mandate
(28:32) - Getting paid to break into banks and hospitals
(34:00) - Reorganizing into a holding company model
(36:18) - Rejecting VC money to play the infinite game
(39:48) - Only losing one employee in twenty years
Links & Resources
Keywords
founders, entrepreneurship, Brett Ewing, Axe AI, cybersecurity, penetration testing, offensive security, ethical hacking, AI automation, operational technology, hardware security, white hat hacker, GIAC certification, SANS institute, infinite game, startup growth, founder burnout, enterprise sales, bootstrap funding
