Justin S. Henriksen
I build solutions and tinker with things.
I co-founded GetLatest AI, where we help businesses grow. That usually means getting the systems, processes, and tools right. AI is often part of the answer and rarely where we start. We start with what's limiting your growth: not enough leads, deals that stall, customers who don't come back.
Before GetLatest I ran two companies: Blue Eye ($5M to $11M) and Crayon US ($43M to $51M, from licensing reseller to AI and managed services). Before that, nine years at Microsoft, most recently as a Sr. Director setting AI/ML strategy across thousands of partner companies, none of whom reported to me. Getting an organization to work differently is harder than picking the right model, and it's what I've spent the most time on.
What I'm building
GetLatest AI ↗AI teams that embed into your operations and handle customer inquiries, scheduling, and follow-up. Plus the marketing that brings new customers in.
Snappy Agents ↗An AI assistant that's powerful, private, and dead simple.
Ronin ↗Your AI powered job search agent.
FindTime ↗The scheduling platform built for AI agents.
Helix ↗Automated GTM - buying signals, personalized outreach, SEO, and more.
Heimdall ↗Automated intelligence - customer voice, competitor strategy, positioning map, and more.
What I've accomplished
I've been building since 2004 - as an engineer, an architect, a GM, and a founder. Here's what that looks like in numbers.
Adoption and upskilling programs I built
30+ AI enablement initiatives on $1.5M of funding. These are the named ones.
AI Accelerate
Microsoft's partner enablement program for AI: strategy briefings, envisioning sessions, solution acceleration. Scaled across multiple countries and hundreds of partners.
Data Science Partner Program
Upskilling curriculum, maturity assessments, and graduation criteria for Microsoft partners building data science practices. Deployed across the US partner ecosystem.
AI Country Plans
Country-level AI adoption playbooks. Strategic plans for AI readiness implemented across multiple geographies.
Global Partner Index
A measurement framework tracking solution and capability adoption across industries, later mirrored by other teams. It answered the question every exec sponsor eventually asks: is this investment actually working?
Cloud Center of Excellence
Cloud architecture frameworks and best practices for enterprise adoption. Reference patterns the partner ecosystem built against.
Technical Evangelist Upskilling
The framework Microsoft used to upskill its own technical field, plus the single and multi-partner hackathons that turned that training into shipped Azure workloads.
Recognition
Company and leadership awards.
Where I've been
Developer to CEO since 2004. Engineer, architect, Sr. Director, GM, founder.
- ›Building Snappy Agents, a production AI agent platform with real customers.
- ›Architect multi-agent systems with long-term memory that hold up in daily business use, where a failed step costs someone money.
- ›Our AI teams embed into a client's operations and run the work: customer inquiries, scheduling, follow-up. Law firms, clinics, contractors, financial services.
- ›GetLatest AI consulting practice focused on enterprise AI strategy and implementation.
- ›Grew P&L from $5M to $11M. Led team of 150 across two domestic and one international office.
- ›MRR from $440K to $1.2M (172%) in 8 months while lifting gross margin from 40% to 62%.
- ›EBITDA turnaround: -$250K/month to +$125K/month in 6 months.
- ›Grew revenue from $43M to $51M. 200-person org.
- ›Transformed Crayon US from licensing/cloud to AI/ML/Analytics/M365 managed services.
- ›Ran the executive operating cadence - recurring business reviews and cross-functional forums holding departments to a shared plan. Lifted services margin from -28% to +64%.
- ›200% increase in new customer acquisition. Grew headcount 121 to 176 while cutting undesired attrition from 40% to 6%. Employee survey rating 92/100.
- ›Set AI/ML and data strategy and drove its adoption across Microsoft's US partner ecosystem: thousands of independent companies, none of whom reported to me.
- ›Ran 30+ AI enablement initiatives ($1.5M funding), building upskilling frameworks, reference architectures, and the Global Partner Index. Accelerated technical adoption 15x and platform adoption velocity 63%.
- ›Grew data, analytics, and AI/ML partners, solutions, and expertise 10-20x over four years, contributing to $100M+ in customer growth.
- ›Partnered across product engineering, marketing, and sales to sequence initiatives and keep teams on a shared roadmap.
- ›Azure adoption architecture for enterprise customers and partners. Architected Cloud Center of Excellence reference patterns. Built the Azure SQL DTU Calculator early in the Azure SQL migration era.
- ›Selected to lead Microsoft's college-new-hire onboarding program, mentoring 30+ new hires over multiple years.
- ›Massively distributed software systems for real-time processing of large data streams across global data center infrastructure. C#, .NET, MVC, SQL Server.
- ›Drove DevOps across the org: continuous integration, automated testing, and deployment automation. Promoted to Engineering Manager in two months and a level again within a year.
- ›Defined technical strategy and architecture roadmaps for teams working across .Net, Java, PHP, SQL Server, Oracle, AWS, and Azure.
- ›Designed the architecture for multi-million dollar projects connecting organizations whose systems had never been built to talk to each other. Improved reliability and performance in the process.
- ›Migrated 5,000+ web pages from classic ASP to ASP.NET so the product could be sold as SaaS. Cut $350K in annual maintenance cost and opened $700K in new revenue.
- ›Led an org-wide move to a common .NET architecture: reusable components, documented best practices, and a shared development methodology.
- ›Shipped under SAS 70, PCI, and FFIEC compliance for federal and state income tax processing.
What people say
From LinkedIn - direct reports, peers, and leaders across the career.
His technical depth and thought leadership in Artificial Intelligence enables him to work with the technical talent on his teams in a capacity that is highly effective and impactful. I could not recommend Justin more highly as an incredible asset to any organization.
Lauren Tran
Chief Architect @ Microsoft, Office of the CTO
Reported directly to Justin
Justin knows and understands the details of how to apply technology in ways others just don't comprehend. Beyond all his technical and business skills, Justin is an amazing person - reliable, loyal, considerate and generous. He is the kind of person you would want as a business partner and a friend.
Marian Watkins
Marketing Executive | GTM Advisor
Reported directly to Justin
In a year, he brought our attrition down over 20%, grew our GP by 20% and increased revenue by 18%. This was all possible because Justin leads with a collaborative, people-first approach. He is thoughtful, strategic, transparent and wickedly smart. Any company or board would be lucky to have his expertise on their team.
Jason Skinner
VP at Long View Systems
Justin was senior
People work harder for Justin because of how he curates performance and career success. His leadership style is thoughtful, prescriptive, direct, and relatable to both buyers and employees to drive momentum, loyalty, and big results. I would work for him for the rest of my career if the privilege presented itself because he's earned it.
Tara DarConte
AI & Cloud Acceleration
Reported directly to Justin
Justin is an innovator, visionary, and highly technical leader who was an honor to work with in multiple capacities. He was one of the most influential career and technical mentors I've had in my career. Justin is an outstanding people-first leader who creates an empowering environment where everyone can do their best work.
Karen Trubisky
Advisor | Former AWS, Microsoft, VMware
Justin was senior
Justin is one of the most brilliant business minds I have ever met. He has a knack for knowing how to maximize business opportunities that come his way. In addition to his business acumen, he also has incredible knowledge of technology, software, artificial intelligence and machine learning. Having spent time as a talented software engineer, Justin knows and understands the details of how to apply technology in ways others just don't comprehend.
Tony Spencer
C# Cowboy | Software Engineer
Worked on the same team
How they are built
The architecture behind four of the products above. Live systems with real users.
Snappy Agents
Multi-tenant AI agent platform. Three-layer architecture: Next.js application layer, Python worker services, Docker-based tenant isolation with fleet ops. Human-in-the-loop approval boundaries by design. Live customers.
snappyagents.ai ↗Helix - GTM Agent
Go-to-market agent. Monitors hiring signals, funding rounds, job posts, and intent data continuously. Signal detection, prospect research, lead scoring, and personalized outreach - running without human intervention.
helixagency.ai ↗Heimdall - Market Intelligence
Competitive intelligence agent. 95 structured intel files per target: pricing, positioning, messaging, tech stack, hiring. Monthly refresh cycle. Knows what competitors are doing before they announce it.
heimdall.getlatest.ai ↗Ronin - Career Agent
Job search agent that discovers opportunities, qualifies them against the user's criteria, and handles applications autonomously. Continuous scanning of job boards, company sites, and hidden listings.
myronin.ai ↗What I've shipped
Earlier engineering work, all of it used in production by someone other than me.
Azure SQL DTU Calculator
ASP.NET web application for sizing Azure SQL Database workloads. Translated on-prem SQL Server performance benchmarks into Azure DTU recommendations. Used by Microsoft field sellers and partners during the early Azure SQL migration era. Stack: C#, ASP.NET, Azure SQL, JavaScript.
Bot Framework Training Labs
Hands-on curriculum for the Microsoft Bot Framework, built as part of the Microsoft Data Science Degree (DAT211x) program. Working code samples in C# and Node.js covering conversational AI before "agent" was a category.
Azure Data & AI Workshops
End-to-end hands-on workshops covering Azure Machine Learning, Azure Data Factory, Apache Spark, and Python ML pipelines. Delivered to Microsoft partners as part of the AI Accelerate and Data Science Partner Program enablement track.
Distributed Data Center Infrastructure
Massively distributed software systems for global Microsoft data center infrastructure. Engineering at the hardware/software boundary - distributed state management, fault tolerance, and scale patterns across tens of thousands of nodes. Stack: C#, distributed systems, Windows Server.
Multi-Org Integration Platform
Architecture and technical leadership for multi-million dollar projects connecting disparate organizations that had never shared data. Service contracts, reliability, and performance across systems nobody had designed to talk to each other. Stack: C#, .NET, Java, MVC, web services, SQL Server, Oracle, with early AWS and Azure workloads.
ASP to ASP.NET SaaS Migration
Migrated 5,000+ web pages from classic ASP to ASP.NET so a desktop tax product could be sold as SaaS. Cut $350K in annual maintenance cost and opened $700K in new revenue. Built to hold up under SAS 70, PCI, and FFIEC audit for federal and state tax processing.
What I've written
Technical takes on agent architecture, AI systems design, and what actually works in production.
The Platform the Taxonomy Demands
Why most "agent" products aren't actually agentic - and how Snappy Agents's three-layer architecture (persistent per-person memory, shared business knowledge, agent-to-agent coordination) solves the problem that model capability improvements alone cannot.
getlatest.ai/blog/snappyclaw-platform-truly-agentic-architecture ↗Why Most AI Systems Aren't Actually Agents
A research-backed taxonomy of what qualifies as an agent vs. a session assistant. The math is brutal: a ten-step pipeline at 90% per-step accuracy has a 35% end-to-end success rate. Reliability is an architectural property, not a model quality issue.
getlatest.ai/blog/why-most-ai-systems-arent-actually-agents ↗Why AI Agents Still Disappoint
The gap between automation and intelligence: why organizations actually need deterministic systems that reason at decision points - not pure autonomous agents. Compares n8n, MAF, Claude Cowork, and developer frameworks on real criteria.
getlatest.ai/blog/why-ai-agents-still-disappoint ↗Why Your AI Forgets You Every Time
Maps five memory architectures (semantic/vector, graph, episodic, observational, validated knowledge base) and explains why persistent agent memory is infrastructure, not a feature. The difference between an assistant and an agent that actually knows you.
getlatest.ai/blog/why-ai-forgets-you-persistent-memory-explained ↗What I've spoken about
Active in the community, not just building in private.
AI Collective - Founder Panel
"Why We Built This: 3 Founders and Their Raw Decisions" - 90-minute virtual panel for The AI Collective, 200,000+ members across 100+ global forums. Problem identification, product scope, and building methodology for early-stage AI products.
lu.ma/0cv4j9ba ↗AI for Sales & Marketing
"What's real, what's hard, and who's solving it" - practical AI applications for sales and marketing teams, cutting through the hype to what enterprises are actually deploying.
getlatest.ai/sales-and-marketing-deck ↗MasterClaw Workshop
"I Just Shipped Myself: Build and Deploy Your Personal Portfolio with AI" - live workshop teaching practitioners to build and deploy real AI-powered products.
getlatest.ai/masterclaw-deck ↗AI Collective - Live Build
"Digital Contact Cards: Build and ship a contact card with an AI agent, live" - hands-on session with the AI Collective community.
getlatest.ai/ai-agents-deck ↗Where I invest
I'm the founder of Fenix Venture, my personal investment vehicle. I invest directly and work closely with leadership teams on strategy, structure, and execution when that involvement is useful. The form varies. The goal is measurable progress, not activity.
Education and credentials
What I build with
Languages and platforms I have actually shipped on, oldest to most recent.
Personal & how we give
Beyond the companies and the code, there’s family, a foundation, and a long list of places I’ve been lucky enough to see. The part of the story that has nothing to do with a P&L.
Outside of business, my wife and I run a private foundation, the Henriksen Family Giving Fund, focused on giving back in ways that are thoughtful, practical, and impactful. We believe success carries responsibility, and that strong communities are built when people invest in one another, not just financially, but with time, care, and attention.
At the core of everything I do is a simple belief: people should be encouraged to chase meaningful dreams, and those dreams should pull others forward with them. Build things that matter. Learn constantly. Share success. And leave whatever you touch better than you found it.
I work with people who are fun to be around, passionate about their purpose, and like to build cool things. If there's overlap, let's talk.