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

On this episode of Building People, Companies and Careers, AccruePartners host Amy Pack sits down with Todd Buelow, co-founder and principal of Dualboot Partners, a Charlotte-based business and software development firm. A four-time founder and Penn State graduate, Todd shares the through-line that connects a 25-year entrepreneurial journey: servant leadership and relationships beat quick wins every time. He also unpacks where AI is headed for businesses and jobs — and why he believes the real story isn't the technology, but the security and governance racing to catch up with it.

Key takeaways:

• Servant leadership in business means leading with "How can I help you?" — not "How can I sell you?"
• AI is "another tool in the toolkit," not a threat to fear — but security and governance are dangerously behind adoption.
• The barrier to starting a company has collapsed: a product that once cost $1M+ to build can now be built for around $150K or less.
• Relationships and experiences are what AI can't replace.
• Intentional follow-up is the networking skill most people miss.
• Todd's mantra: "Your net worth is your network."

Amy: You've been part of multiple ventures and founded several companies. Tell us a little about your journey.

Todd: I'd say there was a little bit of luck in the process. I graduated college in 1996, right at the boom of technology — if you remember, ASP was a big thing, and now it's SaaS. I got a job out of Penn State with a software company, even though I was a supply chain major who didn't know technology. A company here in Charlotte, run by a successful local entrepreneur, took a risk on me. The first client I had, the product didn't work very well, so I had to learn how to fix it — and that's how my technology journey started.

In 1999, I helped start a company called Elogex with Travis Parsons. Travis was the original founder; I was the second employee. We ended up exiting that company. In the interim, my wife and I started a baby products company called Bella Tunno — accessories that had nothing to do with technology, except I built the entire inventory management system and back end for her supply chain. An Access database, if you remember those. We also needed an e-commerce site, so I did landscaping work in exchange for a friend building it for us. Bartering at its finest — his backyard looked amazing.

Running a company as a husband-and-wife team created its own challenges, and I still loved technology, so I started another supply chain software company, Cloud Logistics, with Mark Nix and Travis Parsons again. We built that up and exited it. That rolled into what I identified with my current business partners, Ben Gilman and Daniel DelaCruz — the co-founders of Dualboot with me. We recognized the challenge of finding labor and talent in IT.

Amy: And Dualboot is a software development company — now focused on AI.

Todd: Now we use the term "focused on AI," because that's required. But when we started Dualboot, there were 16,000 open IT positions in the state of North Carolina. As entrepreneurs, we were having a hard time finding technology talent ourselves. One of the companies that acquired a previous company of mine did development all around the world, and I ended up helping run those product teams. Ben Gilman was running a lot of teams that way too, and we thought, "Wait — there's talent." There's talent in the U.S., but it's really expensive. There's also talent across the world. So why don't we bring that talent together? That was the genesis of Dualboot — solving a need we had ourselves.

I'll use the word "luck" again: COVID was probably one of the best things that happened to us as a company. If you remember, every company had to become a technology company overnight. Those 16,000 open IT positions in North Carolina boomed to 52,000 very quickly. I'd spent 20 years building a network in Charlotte, so people knew me as someone who could help on technology. They couldn't meet at coffee or go to restaurants, so there wasn't much competition — people would come to me and say, "Someone said you're a good person, and we should do work." We were closing contracts in a week or two. As much negative as COVID brought, it was the best thing to happen to us from an IT perspective, because people needed us and they trusted me. We grew from zero to about 400 people in roughly five and a half years — and all four of my companies have exited.

Amy: People clearly follow you, and you've mentioned trust. Tell us about your leadership journey.

Todd: I was fortunate coming out of college. My first boss was Manny Ohonme — the founder of Samaritan's Feet, the Charlotte-based international nonprofit — and under him I saw firsthand what it meant to be a servant leader. I also had a mother who was a nurse, and I'd hear stories not about how great she was clinically, but about the things she did for people beyond the job. We'd go to the grocery store, she'd hear the tellers had nothing to do on the Fourth of July, and the next thing I knew, their whole family was at our house. "Mom, who are these people?" "I don't know — they needed something to do." Those things shaped the kind of leader I am.

I'm a big believer in servant leadership. The way I define it, especially in business development, is this: when you walk into a room, it's not "How can I sell you?" — it's "How can I help you?" If you help people and don't expect anything in return, you'd be shocked by the capital you build up over time. It's actually strange to a lot of people — they're trained to assume you want something, so they'll call my friends and ask, "Is this guy real? What does he want?" I don't want anything.

The hardest part of networking this way is that it takes time. In a sales-driven culture — and services companies don't survive without selling — people want quick wins. But those wins take time. Think about how many staffing companies or software development companies there are. At the end of the day, the relationship is what drives the outcome. You still need a great execution team behind you — but the relationship is what builds the trust that lets you execute for people in the first place.

Amy: The world is moving toward all things AI. Where do you see it going — on the data governance side and the IT infrastructure side?

Todd: It's a fascinating time, and honestly a scary one. At an event recently, someone said he tells his 14-year-old, "There aren't going to be any jobs — just work on your relationships." I hope that kid gets some serious therapy, because that's a scary world to hand someone.

The way I view AI: it's another tool in the toolkit. You need to learn it. There are really two types — business use of AI, and, on the software side, developers using AI tools to become more efficient. For a developer, it can feel scary because you're learning a new tool, but it's no different from learning another language — Java, not French. The developers who accept and learn these tools are scaling in ways that are unbelievable. To build 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 — if not less — and do it by yourself, in a shorter timeframe.

What I find most fascinating is governance and security. I was at an event where a banker said, "For any product we bring to market, we have to run a six-to-12-month audit before it can even get there." I think those timelines are going to get disrupted very quickly. But here's what worries me: I think there will be some event — a security or governance failure — that throws this whole thing to another level. Maybe banking data gets corrupted, maybe networks go down. Right now a lot of people are saying security and governance matter, but I'm watching people build products with AI coding tools and not actually do it. They're just trying to get to market as fast as possible to make revenue. That's the space I find most fascinating — and most concerning, when you think about these tools being used in areas like military and satellite systems.

Amy: If a company spends six to 12 months on security and governance, won't the technology change so much during that window that they're starting over?

Todd: Exactly. Two years ago we were talking about AI — and in just the last three months it's changing so fast. It might be the fastest transformation I've seen. I'm 51, and I've watched client-server models, ASP, SaaS, blockchain — but this is happening at a completely different pace. Someone in fintech or banking is going to take the leap and say, "We're condensing that audit to two months" — then one month. My real question is: how far does it get pushed before someone gets caught? Someone's going to push it too far and get hacked or expose their data. It's like email — you never think about it until it's down, and then suddenly you're asking who's been running it. AI will be the same: everything's going great and productive, and then, "Oh no, we just exposed all our data in health tech or fintech." Then everyone cares about security and governance.

Amy: Everyone has a different perspective on AI's impact on jobs. One person at our table compared it to the abacus, then the calculator, then Excel — each step sparked fear, but the tools kept evolving and work continued.

Todd: I think it's the best time ever to start a company — in the U.S. or anywhere. The moat that used to exist, where technology was an inhibitor, is gone. Launching a company used to mean spending $250,000 to a million just to stand up the technology. You don't have that anymore, so the point of entry is far easier.

With that shift, you'll have to retrain employees on the skills they're genuinely good at and enjoy. And I think relationships are going to be a key driver. A lot of kids lost that muscle during COVID — the 22-to-28-year-olds we're now asking to build relationships came up through cell phones and social media during those formative years.

My daughter is a perfect case. She's a junior at UNC. Two years ago, one of her professors was all-in on AI at a time when the education world still treated it as cheating. He said, "No — this is how the business world is going to work, and you need to understand how to use it well," and had his whole class use it. During an internship last summer, she ran circles around existing employees — not because they weren't great, but because she was building presentations and social media in one-eighth of the time. The students in colleges that embrace AI are going to leapfrog people like me who are still building PowerPoints by hand when a tool like Gamma could just create it.

Here's what people miss, though: experiences make your life, and you experience things through relationships. A lot of the most interesting things I've done happened because of relationships I'd built. This year I got to go to the Super Bowl for free — people said, "You're so lucky." No; I built a relationship through nonprofit work, long before I knew that person had tickets, and it opened a door. Experiences are what drive people to wake up every day — wanting to be an entrepreneur, wanting to be a great parent. AI can't replace that. What it can do is give you more time — maybe you don't clean the house or do laundry anymore — so you can focus on the experiences you actually enjoy.

Amy: What advice would you give leaders who are struggling to get comfortable with AI and use it to move their business forward?

Todd: It's a time to be humble. You can't know everything — it's moving too fast — so surround yourself with people in that space. Even at that AI event the other night, I learned something just by sitting there and listening.

The other thing about the entrepreneur journey: you don't always know the real story. An entrepreneur — or anyone selling something — is going to tell you the rosy side. So it's important to build meaningful relationships with people who'll tell you the real side of what's happening. It's like watching college on social media: one kid at a big football school posts nothing but highlights, and a friend at Johns Hopkins feels like their own experience is miserable — when in reality that Hopkins student is learning to change the world through medicine. We compare ourselves to something that isn't reality. True mentors tell you what reality is, including the hardships behind it.

Amy: We did an engagement recently that was all about relationships — without strong internal, cross-functional relationships, that organization couldn't advance.

Todd: People use the word "relationships" without always understanding it. The key is listening — and then the follow-up. If I know you're passionate about, say, golf, then when I'm at a golf event I'll text, "Amy, I'm at the Masters, thinking about you — how are you?" You may never respond, but you'll remember I reached out. More often, you respond, we reconnect, and it turns out you need help finding software development. A follow-up about something completely non-business becomes business. The follow-up is what people miss all the time, because they treat it as transactional. A good networker can walk into any room and find something real to connect on — and then use that connection to follow up down the line. Even social media, which gets a bad rap, can help. Tony Hsieh at Zappos famously wanted his people on Facebook so they'd see each other's lives — we might struggle in a business context but discover we both love rock climbing, and suddenly we work better together. That intentionality is what moves things forward.

Amy: Who has been your best boss or mentor?

Todd: I don't have just one. In every season of life I've had a good mentor — sometimes a pastor, sometimes a business person when I was raising money, sometimes a family member. That's why it's important to keep your mind open to the people you surround yourself with. One of the biggest things that shaped me was being a late bloomer — I was 5'2", 110 pounds in high school and got picked on for being the smallest kid. I grew fast in college and even walked on to Penn State football for a brief season (they quickly realized I wasn't very good — I moved to rugby). Suddenly people who wanted nothing to do with me treated me differently. Nothing about me had changed, but now I had status. Getting to see both sides — being undervalued, then being appreciated for the wrong reasons — was some of the most formative years of my life. A lot of us don't realize, in the moment, how much those transitions are forming us.

Amy: What's one saying you're known for?

Todd: Your net worth is your network. I stole it from someone else, but I'll take it.

Amy: And a favorite Charlotte spot?

Todd: Chipotle, honestly — but for the experience, I love Alexander Michael's uptown. It feels like you're taken back in time, like an old tavern. I'm all about the experience and the people. It's the same at Red Rocks Cafe, where John Love just gets it — the whole menu is named after local Charlotte figures. For me, restaurants are about how the person makes you feel when you walk in.

Amy: It's been an absolute pleasure learning about your journey and the impact of technology — and I always love hearing you talk about relationships.

Todd: Thank you for having me..