Laid Off by the DoE — Then He Built an AI Startup | David Blumenthal

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When the U.S. Department of Education was dismantled, David Blumenthal lost his 13-year career as an education researcher in a single March 2025 Zoom call. Three weeks later, his daughter was born. Somewhere between 2 AM and 3 AM bottle feeds, he started plotting his next chapter. The result is Eddy — a RAG-based AI tool for teachers built on 400,000+ peer-reviewed journal articles that cuts through academic jargon and cites every recommendation back to its source.In this episode of We Built It Because We Had To, David walks through the twin trust problem educators face (distrust of academic research and fear of AI hallucinations), why contextual matching and social proof matter more than raw accuracy, how they're validating their MVP by paying arms-length teacher-testers $50 for honest feedback, and why the path from bootstrap to pre-seed raise looks completely different now thanks to Claude Code, Lovable, and Replit. He also previews the Eddy Pro launch.🎙 In this episode:→ Losing a 13-year research career to a single Zoom call→ Building Eddy on 400K+ peer-reviewed studies→ The teacher trust problem (research distrust + AI hallucinations)→ Contextual matching beats raw accuracy→ Paying arms-length testers $50 for honest MVP feedback→ How Claude Code, Lovable, and Replit changed the bootstrap-to-seed path📌 Connect with David Blumenthal:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/blumenthaldavid/📌 Connect with Jonathan W Buckley:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathanwbuckley/🎧 About "We Built It Because We Had To"The Artesian Network's podcast — hosted by CEO Jonathan Buckley. Real founder stories about the spark, the struggle, and the strategy behind building a tech company. More than half of our clients reach IPO or acquisition.→ Subscribe for new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday at 11 AM ET→ More from Jonathan: https://artesiannetwork.com→ Connect with Jonathan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathanwbuckley/⏱ Chapters:00:00 Intro01:00 A tech CEO with no tech or business degree02:00 13 years at AIR and the March 2025 layoff04:21 The 2 AM idea that became Eddy06:45 400,000 journal articles inside a RAG09:45 Launching into an anti-evidence climate11:55 Context matching and the trust problem14:52 Paying teachers $50 for arms-length feedback17:56 Bootstrapping toward the pre-seed20:46 Saving Sunday night for teachers22:22 The billion-dollar two-person company#FounderStories #EdTech #RAG #FirstTimeFounder #AIForTeachers