Podcast Series

We Built It Because We Had To

This podcast is designed to go deeper than a standard startup interview. The goal is not to collect polished success stories or surface-level growth tips. The goal is to document how founders actually build: where the idea came from, what forced a leap from curiosity to commitment, how they determined what counted as a true MVP, how the first money and first customers happened, and what it took to stay in the fight through the inevitable highs and lows.

From Coca-Cola & Unilever to AI Startup at 60 — Stan Sthanunathan of i-Genie.ai

Episode 1

We talk to the founder of tech startup, i-Genie.ai about his founding story. Stan Sthanunathan is a rare guest for this show — someone who spent decades at the very top of enterprise consumer insights (most notably a long, senior tenure at Unilever and significant work at Coca-Cola) before stepping into the CEO seat at an AI startup. That arc is the story. This is not a lifelong founder who bet everything at 28. This is someone who accumulated 30-plus years of pattern recognition inside massive global organizations, watched technology accelerate past what those organizations could absorb, and apparently decided the right response was to go build something about it. That decision — and what it took to make it — is the emotional core of this episode.