The Big Tech Show How I Made It: Sean Blanchfield’s journey to the top of tech and his new AI startup, Jentic
Dec 16, 2025
Sean Blanchfield, a serial tech entrepreneur and co-founder of the AI middleware company Jentic, shares insights from his impressive tech journey. He discusses how gaming culture inspired his company Demonware and the importance of middleware in the gaming industry. Sean highlights Jentic's mission to connect AI agents with enterprise systems and the evolving role of AI in software development. He critiques Europe's regulatory landscape, cautions about automation's impact on jobs, and emphasizes the need for local innovation and pragmatic policies.
AI Snips
Chapters
Transcript
Episode notes
College Project Turned Major Business
- Sean Blanchfield and college friends built a group-texting site that evolved into Forrest salon software during early 2000s university projects.
- Spam-text campaigns for a client provided the seed capital and launched the product into salon appointment management.
Middleware Startup Landed In Call Of Duty
- Sean, Dylan and Ronan founded Demonware to sell networking middleware to video-game companies after spotting a gap similar to Havoc's physics middleware.
- Activision licensed their platform, flew them to Santa Monica, and that work led to Demonware being acquired.
Viral Moment Built PageFair
- PageFair grew from noticing one-third of users had ad blockers while running a web game, prompting an analytics product to help publishers.
- A viral blog post drove 1,500 publishers to install their code in one day, sparking rapid adoption.