Stephen Talley.
Operator first, hype last. Building from Philadelphia.
An operations engineer who architected and ran mission-critical systems moving roughly $17M of inventory every week — across the entire state of Pennsylvania. He's spent his career on the systems that can't fail, from the distribution floor to enterprise-scale logistics, and now brings that same standard to AI and operations work. Not an AI influencer — an engineer with the receipts.
Engineering grounded in business outcomes
Stephen's career began on the commercial side — building digital strategies measured against real results, not vanity metrics. It instilled the discipline that still defines his work: technology only matters when it moves a number the business actually cares about.
Became an engineer to solve it at the root
Rather than work around the limits of off-the-shelf tools, he learned to build past them — teaching himself to engineer production software end to end. The result is a rare pairing: an engineer's rigor with a sharp, commercial sense of what a system is actually for.
Operations engineering at global scale — DHL
He took that engineering into one of the largest logistics operations in the world. Starting on the distribution floor at DHL, he earned the ground truth most software never sees: the exact gap between what a system reports and what is physically moving through the building.
Trusted with the highest-stakes accounts
His command of both the floor and the code moved him into systems and earned rapid promotion. He was entrusted with the operation's largest customer — 7-Eleven, at their biggest distribution center in the country — where a systems error isn't a bug ticket, it's empty shelves across a region.
Mission-critical systems at state scale
He architected and ran the operations systems behind the PLCP — roughly $846M of inventory a year, about $17M of throughput every week, across the entire state of Pennsylvania. Systems that cannot quietly fail, held to a standard where accuracy is non-negotiable. He left to build Stride.
Stride Techworks
He founded Stride to bring that same enterprise-grade discipline to operators, founders, and growing businesses — engineering AI and operations systems that get from “mostly works” to “running in production.” Hard-won expertise, applied. Operator first, hype last, building from Philadelphia.
PJ DiDonato.
Software engineer and MSP founder — the one businesses called when it mattered.
PJ built and ran a successful managed service provider — a business whose entire purpose was keeping other companies' technology running. Owning an MSP is a rare seat: you carry the P&L, the SLAs, and the responsibility for uptime across a roster of clients who simply can't afford to go dark.
His clients spanned the Philadelphia region and nearly every kind of operation — restaurants that can't take an order with the POS down, law offices where confidentiality and uptime are non-negotiable, distribution centers where a network outage stops freight. He's a full-stack software engineer who also spent years in the field: architecting networks, hardening servers, and writing the software to tie it all together. He knows exactly what breaks at 2am, because for years he was the one who fixed it.
A software engineer's foundation
PJ trained as a software engineer — fluent in the systems, networks, and code that modern businesses quietly run on. It's the technical bedrock under everything that came after: not just configuring tools, but understanding how they're built and exactly where they break.
Built and ran a successful MSP
He founded and grew a managed service provider — a real business carrying real responsibility for other companies' technology. Owning an MSP means owning uptime: the P&L, the SLAs, and the phone that rings the moment something goes down. He didn't just do the work; he built the operation that delivered it, reliably, at scale.
Trusted across high-stakes industries
His clients spanned the Philadelphia region and nearly every kind of operation — restaurants that can't take an order with the POS down, law offices where confidentiality and uptime are non-negotiable, distribution centers where a network outage stops freight. Different industries, one constant: the technology had to work.
Full-stack, from code to cable
Running an MSP meant doing all of it — architecting networks, hardening servers, securing endpoints, and writing the software to tie it together. He earned the ground truth most engineers never touch: what actually fails in the field, at 2am, in someone else's building, with a business waiting on the fix.
Reliability as the entire product
Years of being the person businesses called when it mattered built a hard discipline around resilience — systems designed to stay up, recover fast, and never surprise the people who depend on them. For an MSP owner, reliability isn't a feature you add later. It's the whole reputation.
Co-founding Stride Techworks
PJ brings that operator-grade reliability and full-stack range to Stride, paired with Stephen's operations-systems depth — building AI and infrastructure that businesses can actually trust in production. Two engineers who've carried the pager, building from Philadelphia.
- ▸Production hardening — auth, RLS, deploy config, observability, the last 10%
- ▸Agent deployment — guardrails, retries, cost controls, human-in-the-loop
- ▸Operator workspaces — knowledge systems and agent stacks with one source of truth
- ▸Local AI voice — on-device Whisper/Piper transcription and TTS, no cloud
- ▸Workflow automation — hybrid pipelines: code for the predictable, AI for the judgment
- ▸IT & infrastructure — networks, servers, uptime, and the systems businesses actually run on
- ▸Operations-first product design — tools the floor will actually use
Have a system that should be running itself?
30-minute screen, no obligation. You'll get an honest read on whether we're a fit and what the engagement would look like.