By: Héctor C. Moncada DÃaz
The businesses that keep things running rarely get attention. A data layer, a compliance system, a supply chain, a public health framework – nobody notices until it breaks. The four people below are building in that unglamorous middle layer, across AI, cybersecurity, sanitation, and public health.
Yasser Elsaid spent his university years in Canada chasing the same goal as most of his computer science classmates: landing a FAANG internship in California, something he calls “Cali or Bust.” He got there, working stints at Tesla and Meta, but came away with a different lesson than the one he was supposed to learn.
“I don’t think I used any of the things that I learned at those bigger companies,” he says, “but I used a lot of the things that I learned when building those smaller projects” he worked on outside of class. When ChatGPT launched in late 2022, one of those side projects became the basis for something bigger – a way for businesses to feed their own documents into a language model and ask it questions directly, a fairly obvious idea in hindsight that nobody had yet built as its own product.
That product became Chatbase, Elsaid built it in public but was careful about what he actually shipped, wary that a half-working feature could leave a bad first impression that’s hard to undo. He’s also said that scaling the company meant unlearning some of the habits that got it off the ground in the first place.
“The most common mistake bootstrap founders make is having the mindset of a bootstrap founder,” he says. “Being extremely cost-efficient with everything, always trying to make sure you’re ROI positive, being risk-averse. But if you want to build something huge, the biggest mistake is not being aggressive enough.” Chatbase has reached $10 million in annual recurring revenue without outside funding.
Angelo Huang is working on a related problem in cybersecurity. As founder of Swif.ai, he built a device management platform aimed at a specific blind spot: the laptops, phones, and tablets touching company data that IT departments often don’t even know about. Swif.ai handles compliance and mobile device management, with the pitch that as companies adopt AI tools faster than their security policies can keep up, the devices running those tools become the actual point of exposure, not the AI systems themselves.
Noah Manders runs a different kind of infrastructure business. Porta Potties For Sale is one of several sites under the Porta Potty World umbrella, alongside Porta Potty World, Porta Potty Rental Quotes, and Porta Potty Supplies – separate properties built around purchase, rental, and supply rather than one combined storefront. The site serves contractors, event organizers, rental companies, municipalities, schools, and faith-based organizations, with nationwide delivery and financing on a catalog that ranges from standard construction units to ADA-compliant restrooms, shower trailers, and fleet packages. It’s a category people generally don’t think about until they’re planning an event or running a job site and suddenly need several dozen units by a specific date.
Edward Garcia works on a less tangible kind of infrastructure: the relationships and networks that determine whether people have a path to economic mobility and health. Garcia spent ten years in the federal government – in the U.S. Census, at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and on the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s health subcommittee, where he worked on parts of the Affordable Care Act. He later moved to CareSource, a nonprofit Medicaid managed care plan, where he built a mentoring model called Life Services and helped secure federal funding behind it.
His argument, in short, is that social disconnection isn’t a personal failing – it’s a product of how systems are designed. He calls the work of redesigning those systems “Social Connection Architecture,” covering relational infrastructure, incentive design, and civic participation. The numbers he cites are not small: social disconnection has been linked to a 26 to 28% higher risk of chronic disease and up to a 30% increase in mortality risk, and Medicare spends an estimated $7 billion a year on costs tied to isolation. Garcia helped author the U.S. Surgeon General’s 2023 Advisory on Loneliness and Isolation and built the SILC Coordinating Council, which includes the OECD, WHO, and the EU. Through the Global Initiative on Loneliness and Connection (GILC), he’s now focused on building coordination across a field he describes as crowded with apps and wellness products that treat disconnection as an individual problem rather than a structural one.
These four people aren’t in the same industry and didn’t set out to solve the same problem. But each one is working on the part of their field that most people only notice when it stops working – which is, generally, a sign they’re building something that matters.
