# About

The story behind Jonathan Porter — from building websites at 15, to industrial engineering at Georgia Tech, to founding (and selling) PorterLogic and now building his next companies.

## Childhood

I've been a builder and creator since the beginning. Whether it was tinkering with Lincoln Logs or Legos, or building a masking tape city across the hardwood floor for my Hot Wheels (much to the chagrin of my parents, I'm sure) – I've been building worlds since I was a kid.

Of everything I encountered, I was always drawn to technology. Technology and computers are as close to magic as we have in the real world. Think about it – we zap lightning through a piece of metal a billion times per second and rocks make decisions for us. You can't tell me that's not magic. Computers and code are truly endless – pure, infinite creation – the only limitation being your ability to figure it out.

I distinctly remember the first time I got on the internet with my dad. It started with a strange screeching sound that I later learned was the dial-up modem. We were attempting to find Nickelodeon's website, nick.com, but ended up landing on a Nick Canon fan page. Typical early internet. But this idea that I could type something into this box and get an answer seemed impossible. I was enthralled.

For most of my early education, I attended a small Montessori school. I am a strong advocate for Montessori education, and largely credit the system with my getting ahead in school. Montessori stresses learning with physical materials, but more importantly, allows individual students to move at their own pace. I was good at math, and I was given the freedom to explore my interests at a very early age. I remember feeling very cool being the only kid doing 4th year math as a 2nd year (my nerdom started early).

I built my first website when I was 15. I was a sophomore in high school, and in my one elective I took a web design class. We learned Dreamweaver and HTML, and I used the semester to build my first personal website. I knew I was hooked when I stayed in the computer lab until 6pm on the last day of school before summer to finish my Flash intro. Don't judge, Flash was cool back then.

## Early career

My first professional experience was as a co-op in the industrial engineering department at the Bosch manufacturing plant in Charleston, SC. I worked at the plant for almost two years across four semesters of college. I landed on Charleston because I was chasing a girl, but the universe knew what it was doing. Bosch was heavily invested in the Toyota Production System (called "lean manufacturing"), and as a naive 19 year old kid I was exposed to continuous improvement, kaizen teian, gemba walks, 5S – things I would have never learned in school, and philosophies that would go on to shape the rest of my career. While I loved my time at Bosch, I also learned that a big multinational enterprise wasn't for me – too much red tape and bureaucracy.

So after graduating with highest honors from Georgia Tech with a BS in Industrial & Systems Engineering and a minor in Engineering & Business, I went to work for the market leader in warehouse management system – Manhattan Associates. It was a career defining move that I didn't recognize until much later in life. I would love to sit back and say it was all part of some preconceived plan, but again the universe aligned.

Within 2 months of starting, I was thrown onto one of the largest projects in the entire company, implementing Manhattan's flagship WMOS product for a $163B pharmaceutical distributor. Without really realizing it, I was learning first hand how large-scale enterprise-level software was designed, built and deployed. At 23, I was the primary point of contact for a 150-person client team, and I led a team of consultants supporting end-to-end system and integration testing. It was on this project I learned about my fascination in making system talks to each other – thanks to another Manhattan consultant who took me under her wing, I learned far more about system integration than most WMS consultants, and I loved it.

I also learned a very valuable lesson at Manhattan, thanks to my director on this first project – a company will always continue to ask more until you push back and stand up for yourself. If you keep saying yes, a company will keep asking for more. To no fault of their own, that's just the way of the business – but I did end up quite burnt out and in need of a change.

## Startups

I come from an extremely entrepreneurial family. My forefathers were all brick masons. My dad worked as a brick mason as a teenager, and right out of architecture school at GT he started a construction and development company – a company he and my mom continue to operate over 50 years later. My mom has her MBA, and ran the entire business side of the company while my dad designed and built the homes and communities. I have vivid memories of dinner table conversations about business – land deals, construction job progress, you name it.

It was from watching my parents that I developed my philosophy on what I call life balance. Too many people talk about "work-life balance" as if work and life have to be at odds with each other. My parents showed me how both professional and personal life can coexist, and how you can love your professional self without losing your person.

When I left Manhattan Associates, I knew I wanted to work at a startup. I wasn't ready to start my own company yet, but I knew I wanted to see how a smaller company operated. I joined a technology company called AnswerRocket as the ~20th or so employee. We made a business intelligence tool, and it was here that my technical abilities flourished. While I was hired as a functional consultant, I quickly developed rapport with the developers – who were so kind to volunteer their time to teach me. I quickly started taking on more and more technical challenges, culminating in my redesigning of an technical implementation process reducing required time from 3 days to less than 1 hour.

After AnswerRocket, I went to an even smaller company called SCApath (now called Spinnaker SCA). SCA put me squarely back in the supply chain sphere, working again with Manhattan's products. But as a third-party consultant, I was now free – no longer shackled by the handcuffs of the big company. In addition to leading multiple WMS implementations, I also began developing software products for our clients. I built multiple tools and apps ranging from test data automation tools to data visualization dashboards. I was clear with SCA from the start – I was good at coding, and wanted to continue growing in that area. And the beauty of a 10-person company is that you can do that.

## Founder

I left SCA in 2019, finally ready to venture out on my own. I saved up six months of personal runway, quit my job and joined a startup incubator called ATDC. ATDC is connected with Georgia Tech, and is a state-funded, non-dilutive incubator and accelerator program. Initially, I just started taking classes about entrepreneurship. It was here that I was introduced to Steve Blank and Eric Reis, and learned about Lean Startup. My time at Bosch was coming full circle. Blank, Reis and others are considered the fathers of the "lean startup" movement, which applied the same lean manufacturing principles I had learned at Bosch to company building. It made so much sense – it all seemed so logical, and I finally had a blueprint to build a company.

I started by just getting experience with customer discovery. I didn't have a product or a company, but I just started talking to people and learning about their business problems. As a founder just starting out, you have to have zero ego. Case in point, I talked to literally anyone that would take my call. My mom's hairdresser, the owners of the mechanic shop down the street, old college professors, my physician – literally anyone that would take my call. I was getting experience conducting customer discovery interviews, and learning to get unbiased feedback.

I quickly realized my runway was not going to last, and I needed to get some revenue coming in the door. I began offering custom software development services to clients. I poured through my network and was able to secure a few clients in February 2020 (thank goodness, just before the pandemic really set in). I was writing code for other companies, and it was during this time my software development skills really professionalized. All the while though, I was still doing customer discovery for the product I would eventually build.

I had what I called my "idea matrix" – a spreadsheet of all my product ideas, the vast majority of which were horrible. I would write down every idea, and then try to as quickly as possible disqualify them. A few ideas got to the customer discovery stage, including (embarrassingly enough) a wedding dress boutique booking app that thankfully only took two customer discovery conversations for me to realize was not the product I was destined to build. One of the most serious product ideas was a gamified job board – I got stuck on the idea that finding a job was hard from both sides of the equation, and I've always been fascinated with how the human mind responds to gamification. I had probably 20 conversations with folks around the idea of hiring and finding jobs.

Soon enough, I realized my supply chain experience was an unfair advantage. I started exploring problems in the warehousing and inventory space, conducting over 35 interviews across my network starting with the simple question "what is the biggest problem you see in supply chain software right now?" I meticulously tracked the results of these conversations, and over time, a trend started to emerge. People were talking about a similar set of problems – problems that I was intimately familiar with.

Problem statement formed, I did the initial design of the product that would become PorterLogic in January 2021. That March, through my network I got connected to a VC firm that specialized in supply chain. Not exaggerating, a friend I went to college with introduced me to her dad, who introduced me to a colleague of his, who had previously been on a board of directors with the managing director of this VC firm. The firm is called TitletownTech, based in Green Bay. In 2021, it was far too early for an investment, but I will never forget Craig's advice – "I hear over 1,600 pitches per year and yours is in the top 1% I've ever heard. Don't get distracted, build it."

And so I did. A few hundred thousand lines of code later, the PorterLogic platform came to life. And TitletownTech became our first investors in early 2023. Over the next few years, we grew to a team of almost a dozen, implementing our solution across numerous customers.

And in early 2025, PorterLogic was acquired!

## Serial entrepreneur

I sold PorterLogic in early 2025. It was the culmination of years of hard work, and was an absolutely incredible accomplishment to successfully sell my first venture-backed company. The acquiring company absorbed our entire product and all of our customers, and the entire team had the opportunity to come work at the new company. It was definitely an adjustment for me to go from founder to employee, but it was a welcome refresher – I needed some time to recuperate. I became the head of the product team at Lucasys, leading a team of 15 onshore and offshore developers, working as the primary interface between the business SMEs and the technical team.

While my full-time commitment was with Lucasys, the entrepreneur in me couldn't help but continue to build new products. And with the acceleration of AI, the pace at which I was able to build ramped up exponentially. What previously would have taken months could now be built in just a few hours. There had never been a better time to be both technical and business savvy.

The next product I built was Kumquat, a B2C travel product aimed to help consolidate the fragmented array of tools consumers use during the travel planning and execution process. I am an avid traveler, but when planning trips I found myself manually copy/pasting between docs, notes, spreadsheets, maps, and emails – just to still end up digging through my phone looking for confirmation or finding activities when actually on a trip. Kumquat combined all of this into a simple-to-use app – a spreadsheet-style planning interface with a mobile app for in-trip experiences, backed by an AI-enabled personalized recommendations engine and geographic clustering algorithm.

As my experience with AI blossomed, I built out Parakeet and Blocks ADK. Parakeet is my autonomous AI agent. It build it's own workflows and skills, and proactively accomplishes tasks for me. It connects to my Notion, Slack, GitHub, email and calendar, all in a safe and controlled way using the permission-based framework I designed. Parakeet takes AI automation to the next level. Blocks ADK is my agentic development kit – as I continued to build more and more with AI coding agents, I built a reusable set of primitives that my agents can use as building blocks to even further streamline the development lifecycle. Products that previously took months, with AI can take hours, with Blocks ADK I can spin up in minutes. This is truly a proliferation of what's possible in a way we've never seen before.

And I've got multiple new products in the works. Stay tuned to my LinkedIn and Substack to see what's next.