# sanscourier.ai > Let's build AI that stays. Gonzalo (Glo) Maldonado is a principal engineer and engineering-leadership advisor who gets AI past the demo and into production that lasts — without burning the people who run it. A billion events a day at Yammer, Nextdoor through an IPO, a16z Speedrun SR005, Kubernetes contributor. ## About sanscourier.ai is the home of Gonzalo (Glo) Maldonado — a principal engineer who has spent fifteen years shipping systems that survive growth, and who provides senior engineering leadership to teams adopting AI at scale. Most AI dies at the demo. A slick pilot, a round of applause, and then nothing ships. Six months later the roadmap is a graveyard of proofs-of-concept and a team that flinches at the word "AI." After Microsoft acquired Yammer, Glo rebuilt the infrastructure that kept it standing as it scaled to a billion events a day. They kept Nextdoor running through a pandemic and an IPO. They took their own company, Mocksi, into a16z Speedrun (SR005). They have also watched AI hype torch good teams. So they build the durable kind: AI that reaches production, stays there, and leaves your team stronger than it found them. ## Three things Glo does - **Pilot to production that stays** — AI past the demo and into the systems your customers actually touch, built to survive the next year, not the next sprint. - **Adoption your team keeps** — tools stick when the people who maintain them helped shape them. Speed that does not cost you your engineers. - **Judgment that has been there** — five exits, a billion events a day. The expensive mistakes, already made, on someone else's clock. ## Who Glo works with - **VP of Engineering / Head of Engineering at a Series B+ company** whose AI adoption has stalled: pilots that never reached durable production, skeptical or burned-out engineers, a board asking why velocity has not changed. - **Funded Seed/Series A founders** who need an adult in the room on engineering and AI. Glo works with a few teams at a time, at the principal level. If you need a contractor to burn down a ticket backlog, Glo is the wrong call. If your AI strategy is one demo away from a board meeting and you cannot afford for it to be theater, talk to Glo. ## LTNT — proof Glo still ships **LTNT** (https://ltnt.sanscourier.ai) is ambient competitive intelligence for founders. It reads the signals around a company and shows where it has real leverage: - **Market timing** — when the window is opening or closing - **Competitive gaps** — where rivals are exposed - **The moves only you can make** — leverage specific to your position LTNT is a product Glo builds and runs in production today. It is proof they are still in the code, not their day job — durable AI, shipped and running. ## How engagements work 1. Tell Glo what you're working on. 30 minutes, free, no pitch. 2. A scoped first engagement against the one thing that matters most. 3. On-call or retained, for as long as it earns its place. Book: https://tidycal.com/glo-maldonado/speedrun-founder-session ## Is this coaching? No. This is engineering leadership for teams adopting AI at scale. Founder coaching still exists; it is a separate door. ## How Glo leads - Adoption is a people problem wearing a technical costume. - Speed that burns the team is not speed. It is debt with a deadline. - Glo says the hard thing early, in private, with care. That is most of the job. - The goal is a team that keeps shipping after Glo leaves, not one that depends on them. ## Why teams trust Glo - Rebuilt Yammer's infrastructure after the Microsoft acquisition, scaling it to a billion events a day - Kept Nextdoor running through a pandemic and its IPO - Took their own company, Mocksi, into a16z Speedrun (SR005) - Five exits. Kubernetes contributor, author of the first Terraform provider for Oracle Cloud - Speaker at QCon SF and other engineering conferences ## What founders say - "Glo helped us sharpen our pitch and our strategy before we raised. Six months later we raised our seed from 500 Global." — Soledad Alborno, Co-Founder, Diagnovet (Seed — 500 Global) - "We walked in needing fundraising help. Glo tore our pitch apart, rebuilt it, and made the intros. We got into Character Labs." — Azul Garza, Co-CEO, Timecopilot (Accepted — Character Labs) ## Key Pages - [Home](https://sanscourier.ai/): Positioning, origin, the method, and how to talk to Glo - [About](https://sanscourier.ai/about): Full background, experience, and philosophy - [Knowledge Base](https://sanscourier.ai/knowledge-base): Articles on AI, founding, and engineering leadership - [LTNT](https://ltnt.sanscourier.ai): Ambient competitive intelligence for founders - [Videos](https://sanscourier.ai/videos): Conference talks and presentations - [Shop](https://sanscourier.ai/shop): Values-driven apparel ## Knowledge Base Topics - Using AI to build as a founder - Competitive intelligence and market timing - AI and machine learning operations - Engineering leadership and team scaling - Fundraising, pitch, and strategy for overlooked founders - Recommended reading for technical founders ## Conference Talks & Presentations - QCon SF — Staff+ platform engineering at an a16z-backed founder - Datadog Dash 2020 — Monitoring and observability - Conf42 SRE 2023 — Site reliability engineering - RailsConf 2015 — Web development - Additional talks on Speaker Deck and O'Reilly platforms ## Social Presence - Substack: Newsletter on AI, founding, and engineering leadership - Twitter/X: @elg0nz - LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/elg0nz - Bluesky: @elg0nz - GitHub: github.com/elg0nz - YouTube: Conference talks and presentations ## Contact - Talk to Glo: https://tidycal.com/glo-maldonado/speedrun-founder-session - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/elg0nz - Twitter/X: https://x.com/elg0nz