He Built an 8-Figure Software Company AI Still Can't Replace with Dean Guida

**Dean Guida** (0:00)
37 years ago, when I was 23, we founded the company in building UI components for software developers in Windows 2.0. And we have over 2 million developers using our components. We're in Schwab's trading app, we're in Fidelity's trading app, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America. We're in all these different commercial apps that you probably use all the time.

**Brad Weimert** (0:18)
If you look at any of the AI tools out there, that will generate a lot of this stuff automatically. As these code generation platforms get better and better and better, what will the motes be and where will we be in five years?

**Dean Guida** (0:30)
In the beginning, we were scared like everyone else because everyone was like, oh, the whole workforce is going to go away. But they did too good of a job on PR, and quite frankly, it backfired. Everyone hates AI because they don't want to lose their job, and so they oversold it. I love AI. It's unbelievable what you can do with intelligence, but the opportunities are so great. When you get below the hype, you still need architects, you still need engineering, you still need product management. Software is the key to stitch everything together. They say, oh, software is going away. Are you kidding me? It's just a silly statement.

**Brad Weimert** (1:04)
Congrats on getting Beyond A Million. What got you here won't always get you there. This is a podcast for entrepreneurs who want to reach beyond their seven-figure business and scale to eight, nine and even 10 figures. I'm Brad Weimert, and as the founder of Easy Pay Direct, I have had the privilege to work with more than 30,000 businesses, allowing me to see the data behind some of the most successful companies on the planet are doing differently. Join me each week as I dig in with experts in sales, marketing, operations, technology and wealth building, and you'll learn some of the specific tools, tactics and strategies that are working today in those multi-million, eight, nine and 10 figure businesses. Life can get exciting beyond a million.
Dean, you have bootstrapped your first company, Infragistics, from 25 grand to multi-eight figures. You sell to predominately Fortune 500 companies. But since then, you've gone through this whiny road of launching new products, new companies, all through that lens. You also are the author of When Grit Is Not Enough.
Welcome to the show. Thanks for joining me, man.

**Dean Guida** (2:10)
Yeah, thanks. I mean, I think some of the unique things that the path we followed is we never took money and to this day we've never taken money. And today we have three companies, our user interface, UI components, working in agentic code generation for building out really data intensive applications that we saw actually mainly our biggest audience or customers or other software companies. But we sell to all the Fortune 500 and so a lot of commercial apps, Intuit and others.
And then we have two other big brands, Slingshot, which is a AI agentic go to market platform. And we have Reveal BI, which is an AI analytics component SDK that we sell to mainly other SaaS software companies so that they can embed AI and embed analytics right into their applications.

**Brad Weimert** (3:01)
Well, I want to talk about that windy road. So you have adjusted course a number of times from creating this UI component library 25 years ago to SaaS products to kind of an internal fund to grow things. How do you think about when you should just close something and start a new company or iterate?

**Dean Guida** (3:24)
Yeah, I mean, I think it comes way before closing down a product line and your team needs to know it that you're going to start investing in a different product line because you're kind of seeing around the corner and seeing the future. But yeah, a lot of your revenue and your R&D is going into the product that is bringing in all your revenue.
But you have to start shifting talent and resources and investment in future technologies. And so that's what's kept us around for 37 years, is that ability. But it's never easy and we made wrong bets. And in a good and a bad way, we're really passionate about software. That's good and bad, where we love software and we love building software, which is good and it's bad.

**Brad Weimert** (4:08)
It's an interesting time to love software.

**Dean Guida** (4:11)
So it's a double edged sword. But it's me and a number of others just, since we love software, just staying connected with what everyone's doing and where technology is going and trying to figure out the opportunity where we can compete, add value and have a competitive advantage, which is the hard part.