In Episode 49, Samuel sits down with Ted Kriwiel — childhood friend, founder of 8 Oaks, and the person behind Honeystack.agency, a software consulting company built specifically to help nonprofits build modern tech stacks. Ted is one of those rare people who found his thing and built everything around it, and this conversation traces exactly how that happened.

Ted's path started with entrepreneurship studies at Wichita State, a school supply distribution company he was running out of a trailer while still in college, and an early conviction that he wasn't built for the normal path. But the deeper thread starts earlier, when Ted traveled to Ethiopia with his family during an international adoption and witnessed a mother place her children's hands into his parents' hands and walk away. That moment, and a month-long trip to Ghana at 21 where he met 8 boys brought out of child labor, led him and his wife Ellie to start 8 Oaks — a home for 8 girls living in the same conditions. They were 22. They had no business doing it. They did it anyway. Thirteen years later, those girls are finishing high school, enrolling in college, and building futures that would have been unimaginable without the intervention.

That sense of responsibility — of being given a lot and being expected to do something with it — is the engine underneath everything Ted has built professionally. He ran a data analytics company called Lion Graph, merged with Moonbase Labs where he spent four years doing software product and business development, and eventually left to go figure out what was actually true about him. What came out of that was a prolific writing practice, a newsletter for nonprofit leaders, seminars on what nonprofits get wrong about software, and ultimately Honeystack — a company that offers education, consulting, and custom software development, exclusively to nonprofits that are ready to stop letting software happen to them and start owning their tech stack. The name comes from the mutualistic relationship between the honey guide bird and the honey badger: two different species that team up to get something neither could get alone.

Ted is clear-eyed about what he's building and what he's not. It's a lifestyle business. It's not going to IPO. And he's completely at peace with that — because he found his people, found his lane, and learned that once you do, what you should do next becomes surprisingly obvious.

Learn more at https://killergrowth.com