Your Network Is Your Net Worth: Todd Buelow on AI, Entrepreneurship & Servant Leadership

Episode Guests & Host

Host: Amy Pack — AccruePartners

Guest: Todd Buelow — Co-Founder, Dualboot Partners

Introduction

Amy Pack: Welcome back to Building People, Companies, and Careers. I'm your host, Amy Pack. At AccruePartners, we are passionate about bringing together clients, candidates, consultants, and thought leaders across Charlotte, the Carolinas, and beyond. Today, I'm thrilled to have with me Todd Buelow, co-founder of Dualboot Partners, founder of multiple companies, and one of Charlotte's most well-connected technology entrepreneurs. Todd, you have been part of multiple ventures across your career and have built and exited four companies. Tell us a little about your journey.

Todd Buelow: Sure. I like to say there was a little luck involved. I graduated from Penn State in 1996, right at the peak of the technology boom. I was a supply chain major who did not know technology, but a Charlotte entrepreneur named Patrick Tien took a chance on me at a software company called Medisys. My first client's product did not work very well, so I had to learn how to fix it. That is genuinely how my technology career started. In 1999, I joined a company called ELogix as the second employee alongside founder Travis Parsons, and we eventually exited that. In parallel, my wife and I launched a baby products company called Bella Tunno. I ended up building the entire inventory management system and backend for her supply chain, and we even bartered landscaping work in exchange for our e-commerce site. After that, I started a supply chain software company called Cloud Logistics with Mark Nix and Travis Parsons, built that up, and exited again. Then my current co-founders, Ben Gilman and Daniel De La Cruz, and I identified a clear gap: there were 16,000 open IT positions in North Carolina alone, and as entrepreneurs, we could not find affordable development talent. We knew global talent existed. So we built DualBoot around the idea of connecting that talent to the organizations that needed it. COVID turned out to be an unexpected accelerator. Overnight, every company had to become a technology company, and that open position count in North Carolina shot from 16,000 to 52,000. People trusted me from 20 years of relationship-building in Charlotte, and we were closing contracts in a week or two. We grew from zero to 400 people in about five and a half years.

Amy Pack: Four companies, all exited. That is a remarkable run.

Todd Buelow: Yes, and I am grateful for every season of it.

Servant Leadership, Relationships, and the Philosophy Behind Todd Buelow's Success

Amy Pack: You have built a significant network over 20 years, and people clearly follow you and trust you. Tell us a little about how your leadership philosophy developed.

Todd Buelow: I was very fortunate coming out of college. My first boss was Manny Ohonme, founder of Samaritan's Feet, an international nonprofit based here in Charlotte. Watching him lead as a servant leader shaped me early. And then there was my mother, who was a nurse. We would go to the grocery store, and she would hear that a checkout clerk had nothing to do on the Fourth of July, and the next thing I knew, their entire family was at our house. That is genuinely who she was. Those two influences built the foundation of how I lead. When I walk into a room, the question is never how can I sell you. It is always how can I help you. If you help people consistently and do not expect anything in return, you build an extraordinary amount of relational capital over time. People want to help you back. The challenge is that it takes time, and in a sales-driven culture where everyone wants quick wins, that is a hard message to deliver. But the relationship is what ultimately drives the outcome, in staffing, in software development, in any service business. The execution team matters enormously, but the relationship is what creates the opportunity to execute in the first place.

AI, Data Governance, and the Security Risk Most Organizations Are Not Taking Seriously

Amy Pack: You have always had a technology component running through every organization you have built. Now the whole world is being reshaped by AI. Where do you see things heading, particularly on the data governance and IT infrastructure side?

Todd Buelow: It is a fascinating and genuinely unsettling time simultaneously. I think about AI as another tool in the toolkit. You need to learn it, and there are two distinct dimensions to that. There is the business use of AI, and then there is developers using AI tools to make their work dramatically more efficient. For a developer, it is really just another language to learn. The developers who are embracing these tools are scaling their output in ways that were not possible before. Building a minimum viable product for a startup used to cost a million to a million and a half dollars. Now you can build the same product for 150,000 or less, and do it faster. That is a profound shift in the barrier to entry for entrepreneurship. What I find most fascinating right now, though, is the governance and security side. Most companies are racing to ship AI-powered products as fast as possible. Some sectors, like banking, require a six to twelve-month audit before anything reaches market, and I think that pressure is going to get compressed very quickly. But here is what concerns me: a lot of organizations are building with tools like Copilot and Cloud Code and getting products to market without real security or governance frameworks underneath them. They are focused on revenue, and the infrastructure is an afterthought. My prediction is that there will be a significant breach event in fintech or health tech, most likely, that forces the entire industry to confront what was skipped. It is similar to email. Nobody thinks about their email infrastructure until it goes down after seven years of working perfectly. AI is going to hit that same wall, and when it does, governance is going to take precedence over everything else.

Amy Pack: And the challenge is that by the time a six-to-twelve-month governance review is complete, the technology underneath it has already changed substantially.

Todd Buelow: Exactly. AI was a completely different conversation two years ago, and it has changed dramatically even in the last three months. It is the fastest technology transformation I have witnessed in 30 years, and I have seen client-server, ASP, SaaS, and blockchain. This is real, and it is moving at a pace that makes all of those look gradual by comparison. The pressure in fintech, especially, is going to push people to compress that governance timeline from twelve months to two months to one. What I am curious to see is how far someone pushes it before something breaks in a very public way.

AI and the Future of Work: Why This Is the Best Time to Start a Company

Amy Pack: There is such a wide range of perspectives on what AI means for jobs. Some people are genuinely alarmed. Others see it as just the next evolution, the same way we went from the abacus to the calculator to Lotus Notes to Excel. What is your read?

Todd Buelow: I think this is the best time in history to start a company. The technology moat that used to be a genuine barrier for entrepreneurs, the fact that launching a new product required 250,000 to a million dollars just in development, is essentially gone. The point of entry has never been lower. What that means is that the scarce resources are no longer technical in nature. They are human. Relationships, judgment, curiosity, and the ability to create real experiences for people. Those are the things that AI cannot replicate. A lot of the people who experienced the pandemic during their high school and college years missed the formative relationship-building experiences that shape how professionals operate in the workplace. Those are the skills we need to be actively rebuilding. My daughter is a junior at UNC, and two years ago, her professor, Professor Mumford, required the entire class to use AI tools rather than treating it as cheating. She did a summer internship and ran circles around full-time employees, not because they were not capable, but because she was completing in one-eighth of the time what they were doing manually. The students who are being trained to embrace AI now are going to leapfrog the generation ahead of them. But the ones who also invest in their relationships and their ability to create genuine human connections will have the complete package.

Amy Pack: The two things converging together are critical. AI fluency and relationship depth.

Todd Buelow: Completely. And what people underestimate about relationships is that experiences are what make life worth living, and experiences are built through relationships. I went to the Super Bowl this year. People say I was lucky. I was not lucky. I built a relationship through nonprofit work over the years with someone who happened to have access. That opportunity came entirely from a relationship I had built without any transactional expectation. AI cannot create that. What it can do is give you more time by handling the work you used to do manually, which frees you up to invest in the experiences and relationships that actually matter.

The Art of Intentional Networking: Listening, Following Up, and Making It Personal

Amy Pack: You keep coming back to relationships. What do you think most people get wrong about networking and relationship-building?

Todd Buelow: The follow-up. Most people view follow-up as transactional, so they make it transactional. They reach out when they need something, and people feel that immediately. What actually builds a relationship is listening carefully when you first meet someone, finding the things they genuinely care about outside of work, and then following up around those things specifically. If I know you are passionate about golf and I am at the Masters, I send you a note thinking about you. You may not respond, but you will remember it. And more often than not, what happens is you respond, and somewhere in that conversation, you mention that you have been looking for a software development partner. That is not luck. That is the long-term return on intentional relationship-building. The people who are genuinely skilled at networking can walk into any room and find something real to connect with someone about, and then they have a reason to follow up that feels personal rather than opportunistic. Otherwise, you meet someone at a dinner, have a great conversation, and never speak again. That is the default outcome for most people. The intentionality is what changes it.

Amy Pack: I think the younger generation struggles with that because instant access to information has made curiosity feel less necessary. You have to genuinely be curious about people to do what you are describing.

Todd Buelow: Yes, and ironically, AI might actually help with that. Because to get useful output from AI, you have to be precise and curious in how you prompt it. That same muscle, asking better questions, peeling back the layers, is exactly what great relationship-builders do with people. The companies that figure out how to teach both together will have a real edge.

Rapid Fire Questions

Amy Pack: You mentioned Manny Ohonme as your first influential boss. Has there been one mentor above all others across your career?

Todd Buelow: Honestly, I have been fortunate to have a different mentor in each season of life, and I think that is the point. In one season, it was a pastor. In another, it was a business leader who had been through fundraising. In another, it was a family member. I do not think there is one person. What I think is important is keeping your mind open to who is meant to be in your life at each stage. Actually, one of the things that shaped me most was not a mentor at all. I was a late bloomer physically. I was 5 foot 2 and 110 pounds in high school. I grew rapidly in college, walked on briefly with the Penn State football team, and I got to experience firsthand how people treat you differently when you have status versus when you do not. That experience of feeling undervalued and then suddenly valued purely because of an external label was eye-opening in a way that still informs how I treat people. Nothing changed about who I was. The label changed. That lesson has stuck with me for 30 years.

Amy Pack: What is one saying you are known for?

Todd Buelow: Your net worth is your network. I stole it from someone, but I have made it mine.

Amy Pack: I love it. I may steal it from you. Favorite restaurant in Charlotte?

Todd Buelow: Chipotle for the everyday, but for a real experience, Alexander Michael's uptown is a classic. It feels like an old tavern and takes you back in time. Elias Noches is excellent too, but what makes it is Stratos, the owner, and how he makes you feel when you walk in the door. John Love at Red Rocks is the same way. The menu is named after Charlotte legends, it is deeply personal, and John just gets it. For me, it has always been about the experience and the person welcoming you, not just the food.

Amy Pack: Todd, this has been a fantastic conversation. Your perspective on servant leadership, AI governance, and the irreplaceable value of genuine relationships is exactly the kind of thinking our listeners need right now. And before we close, tell everyone about the upcoming IT panel you will be moderating.

Todd Buelow: Yes, on April 30th, I will be moderating an IT panel for AccruePartners that anyone in senior IT should plan to attend. We have a remarkable lineup representing a range of perspectives from high-growth to legacy enterprise: John Stewart from one of the fastest growing technology companies in the country, Scout Motors representing a brand new presence in our city, Duke Energy, Sunbelt Rentals, and USAA. We will be covering security, governance, AI strategy, and what the landscape looks like from startup to established enterprise. Great networking and a lot of candid conversation. I promise I will talk as little as possible.

Amy Pack: Your questions will set the tone perfectly. Thank you, Todd.

Todd Buelow: Thank you for having me. Always a pleasure.