10 companies. 0 exits. A lot of first meetings.

I've started 10 companies. None of them exited. What I did get unusually good at was the thing that comes first: walking into rooms where I knew almost nobody, finding the person who mattered, figuring out what mattered to them, and earning the next conversation.

What I was never disciplined about was everything after: what I'd promised, what needed to be sent, who owned the next step. I'm building Herkly to fix that.

It started at a conference. I asked an executive I'd never met if I could photograph his badge, ran it through an AI prompt with our materials, and pitched him what came back. He asked to take it to his team. Most people I tried it on wanted the tool more than the pitch.

Why it's called Herkly [CONFIRM: historical details before publishing]

My grandfather flew C-47s in World War II. Those airplanes weren't built for airshows. They were built to carry essential cargo into difficult places and bring people home. When we started building a system to carry an encounter from the convention floor into everything that has to happen afterward, I didn't want to name it after eloquence or charisma. I wanted to name it after the workhorse. The C-130 Hercules, the Herk, carried that same mission a generation later. We called it Herkly.

We're not building Herkly because people need another AI-generated pitch. We're building it because even an extraordinary pitch can leave its freight stranded on the tarmac.

Grainger McKoy Jr., founder
Product leadership: [PLACEHOLDER: partner name, pending approval]