As an officer in the Army Rangers, Brian Elliott always sought out the hardest, highest-impact challenge 💪
“You can do hard things that don’t have impact, but you can’t do things that have impact that aren’t hard,” he says.
Now Elliott is taking the same approach at @blitzyai, the Boston-based startup he co-founded in 2023, and recently valued at $1.4B 📈
Blitzy's agents can understand 100 million-plus lines of code, helping corporate customers overhaul and automate massive code projects that would otherwise take months, and millions of dollars, to crack.
“For eons, we have been limited by how much a human context can hold in their brain,” Elliott argues. “We can do changes at a size and scale that were previously impossible."
On The Upstarts Podcast, Elliott shares how he built Boston’s newest tech unicorn by becoming a CFO’s friend; why Cursor and Claude Code only see enterprise code "through a straw"; and what West Point and the Rangers taught him about operating with precision under pressure.
Plus, he shares his Upstart Moment: catching the 6am train to New York to close an early six-figure customer, with his co-founder’s visa at stake.
This season of the podcast is presented by @Rippling.
TIME STAMPS 00:00 Introduction 1:59 What Blitzy does 7:12 An F-15 of 'pure technology risk' 10:43 West Point, the Army Rangers, and Harvard 18:34 Why OpenAI's models can't do it alone 21:20 Building in Boston, not Silicon Valley 23:50 A visa-saving Upstart Moment 27:23 Proving value across millions of lines of code 31:07 Why token maxing won't work 34:41 A CFO's best friend 38:20 Moving to 'proactive' autonomy next
