Glenn Gow, The Scaling Executive Coach and host of The Scaling Executive Podcast, sits down with Dan Hnatkovskyy, CEO and Co-Founder of Jome, a marketplace that uses data science and AI to match qualified buyers with new construction homes. Dan previously founded Brainify, a CRM and management platform for real estate developers, which he scaled to profitability and exited to a strategic investor in 2018. He has been building and leading tech companies since the age of sixteen.
This conversation covers why the size of a founder’s vision directly determines the quality of people and capital they can attract, how AI has shifted Jome from a matching algorithm to an agentic customer communication platform, and what serial founders learn about people, scale, and ambition that first-time founders typically discover too late.
This episode is for founders and early-stage CEOs who are deciding how big to think and want a framework for understanding why ambition is a strategic input, not just a motivational one.
Key Takeaways
- Dan Hnatkovskyy says it is generally easier to build a big company than a small one, because a bigger vision makes potential teammates, investors, partners, and customers more willing to take the risk of joining or backing the effort.
- Dan says the single non-negotiable principle he has carried across every company is to always work with the smartest people available at each stage, because that standard raises expectations for everyone including the founder.
- Glenn Gow identifies the moment Dan and his co-founder decided to stop writing about founders and start becoming one as a defining inflection point: reading about Instagram’s acquisition at eight employees and no business model made the cost of staying on the sidelines feel higher than the cost of building.
- Dan Hnatkovskyy argues that Jome’s shift from machine learning matching to LLM-powered voice and text agents represents a fundamental change in what AI can do inside a product, not just an incremental improvement.
- At Jome, Dan has moved ninety percent of customer communication to agentic AI over six months, and product managers and operations managers are now building and deploying their own agents without engineering support.
Big Vision Attracts the Resources That Make the Vision Possible
Dan Hnatkovskyy’s most counterintuitive scaling insight is also his most actionable one: it is easier to build a big company than a small one. Not easier in execution, but easier in attraction. The scale of what a founder is trying to do determines the quality of the people, capital, and partnerships available to them.
“When you’re building a company you operate in a really unpredictable environment, and a lot of things can go wrong with anything that you’re building. But if you have a bigger vision and if you have a bigger problem to solve, a lot of people like your potential teammates, your partners, your investors, potential customers, they’re maybe more willing to risk it to make it succeed.”
The logic is direct. A small problem produces a small upside, which limits the caliber of person willing to bet their time or money on it. A large problem, one where the outcome genuinely moves markets or changes industries, expands the pool of people willing to take that risk. Ambitious vision is not just motivational. It is a recruitment and fundraising strategy.
Dan applies this principle inside Jome’s operating rhythm. When the team evaluates whether to work on something, the question is not whether it is feasible. The question is what kind of impact it can produce for customers, for the market, and for the housing industry more broadly. That impact lens determines resource allocation and focus.
“Having an ambitious vision helps you to attract a lot of right people that help you to succeed. Thinking from the very beginning what kind of impact this company or this product can make in our industry or in the world in general really helps you to execute on a better level and then continuously attract needed resources, needed people, and everything else that you need to execute on this.”
The pattern Dan observes in companies that grow into large organizations is consistent: they do not reach their original ambitious goal and stop. They discover additional ambitious challenges on the way, take them on, deliver on them, and use those wins to build further momentum. Growth compounds when ambition compounds.
Serial Founders Who Never Compromise on People Build the Talent Standard That Scales
The principle Dan Hnatkovskyy has carried from his earliest companies through to Jome is a refusal to compromise on working with the smartest available people at each stage of his career. He is precise about what this means: not the smartest people in the world in absolute terms, but the smartest people accessible to him at each point in his journey.
“When you’re just at the beginning of your career, you know a much smaller amount of really smart people. But still there are some people in the room that you consider the smartest and that are beyond everything that you’ve experienced before. What’s really important from the very beginning is to strive to work with those people.”
The reason this compounds over time is both relational and behavioral. Working alongside high-caliber people builds trust and establishes a visible bar. When those people bring their own expectations, the founder is held to a standard they might not have held themselves to. The dynamic creates continuous upward pressure on performance.
“When you demand a lot from each other, you continuously grow. While you’re selling your company to other smart people, you set certain expectations not only for them but also for yourself. And that makes you execute harder.”
Dan’s second company, Jome, was founded with Sophia, his co-founder and COO, who had served as COO at Brainify. The continuity was not coincidental. It was an application of the same principle: when you find people who meet the standard, you build with them again.
The Instagram Moment That Turned Two Teenagers From Writers Into Founders
Dan Hnatkovskyy and his co-founder launched what became BiSparkle at the age of sixteen, initially as a content platform that they expected other people to populate. When no one showed up to write, they started writing themselves, covering technology and startups. What began as a curated media experiment became a daily discipline of absorbing and compressing the most important stories from the startup world.
The moment that changed everything was reading about Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram for one billion dollars. Instagram had eight employees and no business model.
“I remember that we were talking after this and just saying, we can either write about that or we can become a part of it. And that was kind of probably a really big boost of the motivation.”
Glenn Gow identified this as a clean articulation of the founder’s inflection point: the moment the cost of watching from the sidelines begins to feel higher than the cost of building. Dan’s media background did not go to waste. Hundreds of hours reading about how founders approached problems, structured campaigns, and navigated failures became a learning library he drew on when building his own companies.
The lesson Dan took from those years is one that carries into how he runs Jome today: watching companies that take on ambitious challenges and succeed is not passive learning. It is preparation for doing the same thing yourself, and the preparation works precisely because it exposes you to the full range of what is possible, not just what feels safe.
Jome Moved Ninety Percent of Customer Communication to AI Agents in Six Months
Dan Hnatkovskyy built Jome’s original AI capability on machine learning: a matching algorithm that analyzed millions of listings and predicted which buyers were most likely to purchase which homes. That system worked. Then LLMs arrived, and the frame changed entirely.
“With LLMs, everything changed completely. The biggest turning moment was GPT-4.0, when models started doing reasoning. It was obvious that they can handle customer communication in a certain way. And that was the experiment that we started internally.”
The experiment moved faster than Dan expected. Over six months, Jome shifted roughly ninety percent of its customer communication to agentic AI: voice agents and text agents that handle buyer inquiries across geographies and product types. The speed of that shift reflects how ready the underlying customer communication problem was for an AI-native solution.
The internal transformation tracked the product transformation. Cursor and Claude Code changed Jome’s engineering delivery cycle, compressing timelines from months to days. But the change Dan found most significant was not in the engineering team.
“Some of the people that previously heavily depended on engineering teams in order to deliver any sort of outcome, now they’re able to do that themselves. It’s been incredibly inspiring to see product managers or operations managers in our team building their own agents and solving their own problems in a better way than it’s been happening before.”
Dan frames AI as a great equalizer inside tech companies: people who previously lacked technical ability can now ship products and agents independently. The competitive implication is one Dan takes seriously. The capability that Jome and its competitors are building today represents only the beginning of what will be possible in one to two years. The cycle of capability discovery is early, and the companies that move fastest through it will hold structural advantages that compound.
“We are still kind of at the beginning of the cycle. The things that we will be able to do with AI in a year or two from now is going to be a lot more advanced than what most companies are doing today.”
What Dan Hnatkovskyy Builds and Applies at Jome
| Principle | What it means in practice | Named evidence from this interview |
| Build big because big is easier to attract resources to | A larger vision expands the pool of people and capital willing to take the risk of joining or backing the effort. Small vision limits the quality of what you can attract even before you begin building. | Dan applies this as an internal filter at Jome: before working on anything, the team asks what impact it can make on customers, the market, or the housing industry, not just whether it is feasible |
| Never compromise on working with the smartest people available | The talent standard you set from the earliest stage creates the expectation dynamic that holds you and everyone around you to a higher level of execution. Compromising on this early makes the standard harder to restore later. | Dan co-founded Jome with Sophia, his COO from Brainify, applying the same principle of building again with people who already met the standard |
| Recognize your inflection point and act on it | Every founder faces the moment when continuing to observe others feels more costly than building something yourself. Recognizing that moment and acting on it, rather than deferring, is what separates founders from commentators. | Dan and his co-founder read about Instagram’s billion-dollar acquisition at eight employees and no business model, and decided the same day that they were going to build rather than write |
| Move your highest-volume workflows to AI agents first | The workflows that consume the most human hours and scale predictably are the highest-value candidates for agentic AI. Shifting them first produces the fastest and most measurable operational leverage. | Jome moved ninety percent of customer communication to voice and text agents within six months of beginning the experiment, after recognizing that LLM reasoning capability had crossed the threshold needed to handle buyer inquiries reliably |
| Treat AI as an equalizer, not just an efficiency tool | When non-technical team members can build and deploy their own agents, the entire organization gains delivery speed that previously required engineering resources. This is a structural change in who can create value, not just how fast existing roles execute. | Jome’s product managers and operations managers are building and shipping their own agents independently, delivering outcomes that previously required engineering support |
Quotes from This Episode
- “The other thing that I’ve learned over time is that it’s probably easier to work on big things rather than small things. If you have a bigger vision and if you have a bigger problem to solve, a lot of people like your potential teammates, your partners, your investors, potential customers, they’re maybe more willing to risk it to make it succeed.” — Dan Hnatkovskyy, CEO and Co-Founder, Jome
- “What’s really important from the very beginning is to strive to work with the smartest people you can find. When you demand a lot from each other, you continuously grow. And that makes you execute harder.” — Dan Hnatkovskyy, CEO and Co-Founder, Jome
- “I remember that we were talking after this and just saying, we can either write about that or we can become a part of it.” — Dan Hnatkovskyy, CEO and Co-Founder, Jome
- “Over the past six months, we’ve probably moved ninety percent of the customer communication towards agentic AI. Basically that’s voice agents, texting agents that are supporting people in a really nice way in any geography where they can be or with any product they may have questions about.” — Dan Hnatkovskyy, CEO and Co-Founder, Jome
- “AI became sort of like this great equalizer in tech companies. Even people that didn’t have a technical ability before are now able to deliver products much faster than ever before.” — Dan Hnatkovskyy, CEO and Co-Founder, Jome
Frequently Asked Questions
Why do investors and top talent say yes more readily to founders with bigger visions?
Dan Hnatkovskyy’s answer is that the size of the vision determines the upside available to everyone who joins the effort, and upside is what makes risk worth taking. A small problem produces a small potential outcome, which limits who is willing to bet their time, capital, or career on it. A large problem, one that could genuinely change an industry or create significant value at scale, expands the pool of people willing to take that risk because the potential return justifies it. Dan applies this as an operating principle at Jome: before committing resources to any internal initiative, the team evaluates the potential market or customer impact, not just feasibility, because the impact assessment determines whether the effort can attract and sustain the people needed to succeed.
What should serial founders carry forward from one company to the next?
Dan Hnatkovskyy identifies two non-negotiables he has carried across every company he has built. The first is the commitment to always work with the smartest people accessible at each stage, because that standard creates mutual expectations that drive higher execution from everyone, including the founder. The second is to pursue the biggest version of the problem available, because ambition in the vision attracts the resources that make the vision achievable. Dan built Jome with Sophia, his co-founder and COO from Brainify, as a direct application of the first principle: when you find people who meet the standard, you build with them again rather than starting the search over.
How should a startup CEO think about the pace of AI adoption inside their company?
Dan Hnatkovskyy argues that most companies are still at the beginning of the capability discovery cycle, meaning the AI tools available today represent only a fraction of what will be possible in one to two years. At Jome, he moved ninety percent of customer communication to voice and text agents within six months, and his product managers and operations managers are now building and shipping their own agents without engineering support. His framework for where to start is straightforward: identify the highest-volume workflows that scale predictably and move those to agentic AI first, because that is where the operational leverage is highest and the results are most measurable. The companies that move through the capability discovery cycle fastest will hold structural advantages that compound as AI capability continues to advance.
CEOs Work with Glenn Gow to Scale Their Companies by Scaling Themselves First
Glenn Gow is The Scaling Executive Coach — he coaches ambitious executives into the CEO seat and CEOs into successful exits. With 25 years as a CEO and 5 years in venture capital, Glenn helps leaders scale their companies by scaling themselves first. If this conversation was useful, you can apply for executive coaching with Glenn Gow or apply to be a guest on The Scaling Executive Podcast.
