"All In" - What Building StrategyBridgeAI Really Looks Like

Deniz Schütz, Co-Founder & CEO of StrategyBridgeAI, joins the Finance | Data | People podcast to talk about the unfiltered reality of building an AI company from scratch.

The Episode

In episode #36 of Finance | Data | People, hosted by Dr. Sascha Haggenmueller, our Co-Founder and CEO Deniz Schütz sat down for one of the more honest conversations you'll find in the startup podcast space. No rehearsed founder story. No polished narrative. Just a candid look at what building StrategyBridgeAI has actually looked like — the momentum, the doubt, and everything in between.

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From Investment Banking to "Why Doesn't This Exist Yet?"

Deniz started his career in equity markets and later joined UniCredit as an investment banker - not because the traditional path excited him, but because it was the fastest way to learn the craft. His mentor there was a world-class mind who believed deeply that companies had to be analysed by hand. When Deniz and his co-founder Louis showed him their first prototype, it was one of the few times he showed any openness to revising his thinking. That moment, Deniz says, was one of the biggest motivational boosts of his early founder journey.

The origin story of StrategyBridgeAI is deceptively simple: Deniz loved the craft of business and market analysis. He hated the repetitive, manual execution of it. Louis, who was doing M&A project management in the same bank, had the same problem - just from a different angle. When they looked at each other's work, the conclusion was obvious. The process was automatable. They just had to build it.

"The art of analysis is worth loving. The number crunching - because it's repetitive - I hated like a plague. Both things led to us founding this company.", Deniz Schütz

Selling Before the Product Existed

One of the most striking decisions StrategyBridgeAI made early on: sell first, automate later. The team spent weeks - sometimes months - producing analyses largely by hand, just to make sure they weren't building the wrong thing. The customer feedback from those early proof-of-concepts was extraordinary. One M&A advisory firm won the largest mandate in their company's history off the back of their very first project with StrategyBridgeAI, because they delivered the best pitch and understood the target market better than any competitor.

That experience shaped a core belief the company still holds today: quality is non-negotiable. Even when the technical co-founder left after the first year - one of the hardest moments in the company's history - they refused to lower the bar on product quality. They held to plan A, even when the company's existence was on the line.

The ChatGPT Moment - and the Long Road Before It

StrategyBridgeAI was doing AI-powered analysis long before it was fashionable. When they explained what they were building to an advisor friend in the early days, his response was: "AI? Why aren't you doing blockchain?" That's how far ahead of the market they were.

The ChatGPT wave validated the technology publicly - but it also accelerated a market that was already moving fast. Building an AI-based product in a space that changes faster than any business plan can anticipate requires a different kind of discipline. In the podcast, Deniz talks about what that looks like in practice: staying close to the product, resisting shortcuts, and scaling without compromising on the core.

An Unusually Honest Episode

Deniz recorded this episode in February - by his own admission, one of his most overloaded periods. Sales, hiring, internationalisation, onboarding new team members, and several personal challenges all landed at once. He wrote to Sascha after the recording to say he felt he hadn't done StrategyBridgeAI justice in his role as a founder.

Sascha's response: the episode was going out anyway.

"I don't know whether or how much I can recommend this episode. But if you want a look into the reality of my founder life - and not from the perspective of the unconditional optimist I usually am - then go ahead and watch.", Deniz Schütz

That honesty is precisely what makes it worth watching.

What You'll Hear

The episode covers Deniz's conscious break from the traditional career path, the bootstrapping journey without a safety net, how the team navigated losing their technical co-founder early on, what product-market fit actually felt like when it arrived, and why product quality remains the one thing Deniz will never compromise on - even as StrategyBridgeAI scales.

If you want the polished version of the startup story, this isn't it. If you want the real one, it's below.

🎧 Finance | Data | People, Episode #36 — Spotify ▶️ YouTube