# One builder. One platform. Many swings. Founding Studio is not a fund, not an incubator, and not a team of twenty. It is one engineer with thirty years of production experience and a platform that makes building cheap enough to take real swings.  ## Dathan Wilde Founder Thirty years building production software at enterprise scale. A decade at Amazon, Netflix, and Yahoo — ad platforms serving millions, targeting systems processing billions of events, personalization engines that defined the category. Before that, mission-critical systems at Northrop Grumman during Desert Storm, building tools for Navy meteorologists on supercomputer clusters with a security clearance. Two CTO roles: co‑founded a contextual ad targeting company and led six parallel product lines at a hardware startup — embedded Android, cloud, mobile, games, and the firmware underneath. Managed engineering organizations at Overstock and Taulia across order processing, marketplace integrations, and monolith‑to‑microservices migrations. Built the Full Stack Seed platform that powers every studio venture: 126 production patterns across authentication, billing, admin, real‑time, AI, deployment, and testing. The platform is not a pitch — it is a codebase, and every venture ships on top of it. CS degree, UC Santa Cruz. Mentor at Connect/Springboard accelerator. Based in Santa Cruz County, California. ## By the numbers 30+ Years in production 2x CTO roles 126 Platform patterns 7 Enterprise orgs ## Philosophy You talk to the architect, not an account manager. There is no bench of junior developers learning on your dime and no handoff to a delivery team you have never met. The person who designed the system is the person who builds it. The studio exists to make building cheap enough that we can take many real swings at disruptable markets instead of one careful bet. Every venture begins with a concrete, testable thesis — not a deck — and the company is real only when customers pay and retention holds without heroics. Investors, founders, and operators — start a conversation. [Get in touch →](/contact)