Calling all Product Owners
Stakeholders and Founders
We heard you had it rough

Product Owners
Stakeholders
Founders
Your struggles,
our expertise.

  • From Building Teams
    To Delivering Product Delight
  • From Product Market Fit
    to Distributed Agents
  • From Re-Platforming
    to Re-Branding

Infinite roads, singular destination

The agony and the ecstasy of building — you’re living it.

Turning ideas into profitable businesses brings founders, owners, and stakeholders together for all the wrong reasons: suffering, pain, and failure. Few succeed. Many perish in the pursuit. If you’re reading this, you already know.

When the problem is serious — a re-platform, a rebrand, a distributed-systems mess, an AI bet that has to land — you don’t need cheerleaders. You need a team that’s already survived it. From world-class branding and design to cutting-edge AI, LLM, and agentic systems: that’s the work we do. You found us because you have serious problems. Good — those are the ones we solve.

“Figure out what can kill you, and stay away from it.” — Charlie Munger, a principle we build by
40,000+
Hours of billable services delivered
5 yrs
Average client relationship, and growing
2016
An unbroken chain of references ever since

We, the builders of Startuplandia

Building a product isn’t an assembly line. It’s an orchestration.

Our story starts in San Francisco, circa 2018, with our founder John Davison. Watching the tech industry burn cash and break teams, he set out to engineer a culture built to do one thing: ship products that survive. Cues from Bruce Lee’s adaptability, Phil Jackson’s ego management, and Quincy Jones’s ear for talent — assembled into a team that…

Things change. Things stay the same.

Enough scar tissue for an opinion. Enough humility to keep learning.

The AI stack just blew up a decade of industry norms. We’ve spent the last two years in the wreckage — engineering agentic systems, deploying an enterprise RAG product, and backing founder-built “vibe-coded” projects. Here’s what we build by.

Software is the purpose AND the enemy

More code means more entropy. LLMs make it dangerously easy to generate infinite risk — maintaining systems is where companies thrive or die. Less code is a feature.

Accept no timid timelines

The pre-AI world bred lazy engineering departments. Even with strict quality guardrails, the right workflow yields a 10× speed improvement. We expect velocity, and so should you, but don't be greedy about it.

Pragmatism beats hype

Postgres costs almost nothing and is virtually bulletproof. AI won’t outrun that truth. Tools like Claude Code make developer experience the new User Experience — Talent + UX + Distribution is the moat.

Talent, Talent, Talent

From Phil Jackson to Quincy Jones, the GOATs know that the right talent always wins. We utilize intuition to recruit, which enables us to offer you our unfair advantage.

Measure everything

LLMs transform unstructured conversations into structure-able performance data. We’re building next-gen harnesses to track the exact intersection of human hours, tokens burned, and business outcomes. Ask us for a tour.

Multiply outputs, reduce inputs

High-leverage frameworks — Ruby on Rails, Design Systems, Jobs-to-be-Done, AI Enabled systems — we build faster through smarter process and first principles decision making.

Move without perfect maps

Flawless specs? Great. If they aren’t, we don’t stall — we ask the hard questions, trust our intuition, and keep momentum alive.

Reality Alignment

The economic advantages of contractor drive, globally sourced talent, with flawless English, locked into your time zone, accountable to our CTO.

Hollywood vs Uber

No race-to-the-bottom freelance marketplaces. We assemble elite, low-volume, high-reputation crews tailored to your mission.

The endgame

From profitable operations to acquisitions — what we’ve helped founders do.

For Startuplandia to succeed, we want a lifetime working relationship — the track record below dates back to 2016 — we have more references, just ask!

“This setup is what I was looking for, without knowing what I was looking for"

Matt Lamz, Founder Medidas
Active Client since 2026
Finalizing Product, Pre Customer Traction
Fractional CTO, Vibe Coding Developer in the Loop Support

“Startuplandia brought stability and rigor to my system in ways I didn't think existed."

Coray Grove, Founder WagePath
Active Client since 2025
Onboarding Numerous Enterprise Clients
Fractional CTO, Agentic Engineering Developer in the Loop Support

“Indispensible support on the road to building & pivoting an enterprise search platform to full stack market research platform - timely, professional, and hardworking."

Jeremy Antoniuk, Founder Scalafai
Active Client since 2024
Healthy seed round waiting to close
Fractional CTO, Vibe Coding Developer in the Loop Support

“Startuplandia has been with us since day one, in the trenches, keeping the burn rate low and output high, they are jet fuel."

Tom Ruginis, Founder, Happilabs, YC S18
Active Client since 2016
Acquired by Science Exchange Spring 2025
Fullstack Product

“You all have produced beautiful work in a timely manner.”

Lindsay Guzowski, Founder, TheCrucible
Active Client since 2021
Operating profitably, growing
Fullstack Product

“Helped us clarify our vision, with a creative spark brought our ideas to life.”

M. Andreoli MD, B. Sacher MD, Founders, TeamedUp
Active 2021-2023
Went Gracefully Into the Night
Fullstack Product

“Startuplandia were a Godsend.”

Vince Cortese, Founder, Able
Active 2020-2022
Went Gracefully Into the Night
Technical Recruiting 
John Davison, Founder & CTO

30 minutes with our founder, John Davison.
Bring your hardest problem.