AI – Donald Landwirth

Product development with Claude AI, lessons learned

Posted on February 19, 2026February 19, 2026 admin-donlLeave a commentPosted in Business, business advice, Hiring Consultants, Marketing, Outsourcing IT

For the past five years I have been an angle investor and Board observer to a startup company. The company has been doing well developing and marketing its B2B services. However, I’ve been advocating for a B2C product, as well. After several conversations with the Board and founders, I offered to take the lead on developing the B2C site as a sort of skunk-works operation, thereby allowing the founders and the company to stay on task while we explored this opportunity. In short, I’ve taken on the role of acting Product Manager for a new product line. This will be the first of my posts on the project.

In order to minimize impact on the company’s day-to-day operations, my plan was to gather specifications and hire outside developers to build an MVP site, launch it, drive traffic to it and see if it proved my thesis right. If you are a follower of my site and show, you’ll know that I have a background of over 25 years of software development experience on large-scale enterprise projects, as well as experience being the COO of several successful B2C companies (and a few not so successful, too). I’ve learned that you need to get something out to market quickly, see if it gets traction, and use the data to determine whether to keep it going or kill the project.

Flow Chart Visio document uploaded to Claude

So, I set out to develop specifications that I could hand off to a couple developers to get a quote for building an MVP site. To do so, I created a detailed Visio diagram showing the entire logical process flow (sorry, the attached figure is low-res to maintain confidentiality). Along the way I had to create documents to explain the Visio diagram and produce the ancillary text, define lookup tables, determine what elements we’d build from scratch and decide what services we would offload to 3rd party vendors via APIs (i.e. credit card processing, sales tax processing, persistent storage, analytics, A/B testing, etc.). As I got to the point of seeking bids, I thought to myself, I wonder if an AI tool might be able to build the site for me? I’ve heard good things about Claude, so I thought, let’s give it a try…

Special follow-up edition Part 2 with Martin Plaehn of Control 4 and Mark Chung of Verdigris Technology

Posted on May 28, 2017February 12, 2023 admin-donlLeave a commentPosted in Business, business advice

Part two of my special two-part follow-up edition of Bay Area Ventures, featuring interviews with guests from the first three seasons of the show, is now available for streaming or download here and on iTunes, Spreaker and Facebook.

In this episode I speak with Martin Plaehn, CEO of Control 4 and Mark Chung Co-Founder and CEO of Verdigris Technologies.

Martin Plaehn is a seasoned CEO who has been leading Control 4 since 2011 (NASDAQ: CTRL). Martin first appeared on Bay Area Ventures back in August of 2015. At the time, Control 4’s annual revenue was $160 Million. For the first quarter of 2017, the company’s revenues were over $50 Million and Control 4’s stock has more than doubled since his last appearance on our show.

Control 4 is a leader or, perhaps “The” leader in the home automation space. They manufacture automation systems and software for smart homes and offices. Martin brings us up to date on the latest in IoT devices for the home as well as steps they are taking to prevent hacking of these systems.

Martin has lectured on leadership and has been at the helm of some of the early and most famous technology companies such as RealNetworks, Viewpoint Digital and Bungee Labs. He discusses the challenges of scaling his organization and how he manages his time to address Control 4’s technology, customer and shareholder needs. We also learn about his current reading list for when he’s traveling around the world.

________________________________________

In the second half of the show we’ll check in with Mark Chung, Co-Founder and CEO of Verdigris Technologies (www.verdigris.co). Mark’s first appearance on Bay Area Ventures was in April of 2016 when Verdigris was still a seed funded company but already shipping product and generating revenue. Verdigris raised a $7M Series A financing in the second half of 2016 with backers such as Verizon and Jabil Manufacturing giving them the headroom to grow and capture more markets.

Mark started Verdigris with his brother after an incident in their home where their electricity bill spiked for some unknown reason. They developed a monitoring system that can automatically detect every type of device on an electrical circuit and track and monitory its electric usage.

Today, they are an AI or artificial intelligence company using machine learning to solve tough problems facing the operators of hotels, factories and other commercial facilities. Verdigris technology sends a customer’s energy usage data up to a cloud based dashboard and applies AI to the data to help those customers track energy usage and anomalies in their facilities. This knowledge allows customers to cut their energy usage by as much as 50%.

Mark talks about many of the challenges he has faced since his last appearance due to rapid growth and both internal and external factors. The company’s headcount has more than doubled in the past year and they encountered some surprises doing business in the European Union and Great Britain since the UK passed Brexit. They are also still struggling to build up a world class sales team to keep up with growth.

Verdigris is a real success story and Mark shares his philosophy of how to handle the stresses and challenges of being the leader of a fast company. He is a brilliant engineer who has worked at top technology companies such as AMD, PA Semiconductor and Netlogic. PA semiconductor was acquired by Apple while Mark was an employee and Netlogic was acquired by Broadcom, as well. Like these great companies that hired Mark you can benefit from his knowledge and skills by listening in and following his company’s progress.

This jam-packed show is sure to be a good use of your time.

Recorded on April 24, 2017, on SiriusXM Channel 111, Business Radio Powered by the Wharton School. Bay Area Ventures airs live on Mondays at 4:00pm Pacific Time, 7:00pm Eastern Time.

For a list of upcoming and past guest information click on the Show link above.