Access Granted

The Dilbert comic strip first emerged as a cultural phenomenon in 1989. The bumbling title character and his overbearing boss quickly became stand-ins for the IT professional archetype: gratingly bureaucratic, more concerned with processes than outcomes. This was a representation rooted, at least in part, in the realities of the job in the evolving corporate workplace, which necessitated repetitive ticket-taking, form-filling, and access-granting. 

Despite tech’s increasing prominence in the global economy and the step changes in technology and the workplace, this stereotype remains remarkably enduring. This could be because despite these shifts, the nature of IT work has remained largely the same since Dilbert first compared his workplace to a Mary Shelley novel: tickets continue to be filed, and forms continue to need filling. 

While Jake Stauch never set out to remedy this particular cultural perception, there's a chance that his company, Serval, and its automated service management platform might do exactly that, transitioning IT people from ticket-takers to builders of tools and protectors of essential data—doers, rather than responders. Driven by AI's new capabilities, the vision for Serval stems from Stauch's actual raison d'être: helping others achieve their full potential. It's a motivation rooted in his upbringing, and in an intimate understanding of its opposite. Before Stauch built a company with industry-changing potential, he learned what it felt like not just to have unrealized potential. He learned what it felt like to fail.

Despite it being the middle of the work week, Jake Stauch was splayed on his couch in his living room. Short on funding, he’d opted to forgo office space and work from home with his four remaining employees. The home office he shared with his wife was reserved for important calls, and the one he was waiting on that day certainly qualified. 

Stauch had been laboring to get his neuroscience startup off the ground for seven years. For a year or two it looked like he might be onto something designing games to improve focus in kids with ADHD. Parents were buying, kids were playing, monthly subscriptions were up. But then, “our acquisition costs were skyrocketing and our marketing channels were not scaling and I didn’t know why,” remembers Stauch. “Very suddenly it went from ‘This is finally going to make it’ to ‘Oh, this was our last bet, and it's not working.’” 

The reason gradually became clear: The market for his product was narrower than he’d originally thought—“basically, parents with disposable income who also had children with adverse reactions to ADHD meds,” he says. Hoping to save face, Stauch sought out an acquihire from the very short list of sufficiently sizable companies with interest in hardware and neuroscience. Sitting on his couch that day, Stauch was waiting on a call from his final prospect. 

“The day I got the no from Bose, I had to go upstairs and just put my head in my hands and spend an hour recovering knowing that was the end of a seven-year journey that I'd dragged all these people through,” says Stauch. But more than the disappointment of letting his team down (and taking on a mountain of personal debt), this failure felt more fundamental. All Stauch’s life, he had been shown, and had internalized, that with enough practice and perseverance, anything was possible. For the first time, he’d found something he couldn’t work or think or pivot his way through. “I was devastated, and I let myself sit with that for a bit,” he says. “And then within a couple weeks, I was like, ‘Okay, it's time to get to work.’" 

Stauch can trace his single-mindedness to his mother, Shari. She was one of the top billiards players in the world, as well as the founder, editorial director and lead contributor for a popular billiards magazine. Stauch remembers accompanying her to a tournament when he was young and seeing his mother lose. Asking her afterwards how it had happened, she offered simply, "She practiced more than I did.” 

The idea that one decides what one wants, and with enough effort, makes it happen, governed much of Stauch’s childhood. When he was eight years old, Stauch’s parents, charmed by a trip to South Carolina, decided to relocate from their Chicago suburb to a 70-acre property in Charleston (with a home designed largely by Stauch’s mother) with just a few weeks' notice. Only briefly unmoored, Stauch quickly fell in love with the freedom he felt in his new home’s expanse. 

Stauch also saw this in his father’s career as a salesperson, where income relied on relationships, perseverance, and hustle. The Stauch home was filled with a rotating cast of characters from his parents’ circles, including many of the top pool players in the world. “I thought it was so cool that she and her peers were just people that decided they were going to be the best in the world at something, and then they did it. So being the best in the world at something always felt very attainable,” says Stauch. 

Growing up, that something alternated between books, video games, standardized testing, and eventually, biology, which he majored in at Duke (“In an alternate life, I could have been very happy as a TV zoologist”). His junior year, Stauch joined the inaugural cohort in a new house on campus devoted to entrepreneurship, which felt to him like a calling. The house rules were simple: “You needed to be actively building your own startup. If you decided to take an internship or job at another company, you were out. No exceptions,” says Stauch. 

Among the house’s 18 residents, five self-selected to run the show. “We were the ones that were actually serious,” remembers Tatiana Birgisson, Stauch’s classmate, and future coworker and wife. And even within that subset, Stauch earned himself a reputation. “I called him NeuroPrick, because he was obsessed with neuroscience, and sometimes came across as an asshole because he was so intense, and so direct, and unforgiving in what he wanted to achieve,” she says, adding, “but that was like 5% of the time. 95% of the time I knew him to be somebody who was just incredibly sharp, quite thoughtful, and was really making things happen. I didn’t know then where that would take him, but there was a lot of admiration from entrepreneur to entrepreneur.”

The summer before his senior year, he entered an entrepreneurial summer residence where he was awarded $5,000 to pursue his idea of using brain scans to measure advertising efficacy. He called it NeuroSpire. After landing his first client, he decided to take the semester off from Duke to pursue the startup fulltime. “In that time, I realized there was so much I didn't know about running a business, and that I wouldn’t learn it by going back,” says Stauch. “Even neuroscience, I felt like I was learning more reading papers for the business. So I kind of felt like, why would I go back?”

Shortly thereafter, the rise of digital ads made A/B advertising testing a breeze, and Stauch made his first serious pivot and NeuroSpire became NeuroPlus, a hardware company selling headsets and custom video games to improve focus in children with ADHD. “Jake was extremely passionate about this new angle,” remembers Dan Gregorson, an angel investor in NeuroPlus. “He thought he could build a serious business taking on the $12 billion market of pharmaceuticals, all while helping kids to have fun and improve their executive function at the same time.” With this new approach, Stauch felt like he’d found his thing—now he just had to work hard enough to make it succeed.

What he didn’t yet realize was that no amount of sweat could overcome a fundamental lack of available market. “I think startup lore doesn't talk enough about product-market fit and what that really feels like,” says Birgisson, who was experiencing a similar mismatch in her first startup (information Stauch was privy to since the two had recently married). In the absence of that understanding, Stauch kept pushing, refining, tweaking, and slimming, convinced that success was just a pivot, work sprint, or good idea away. Seven years after dropping out, he finally resigned himself to the fact that he’d found something he couldn’t will into a win. So he started searching for an acquihire.

A week or two after Bose delivered the news, Stauch started getting his life back in order. He began by finding jobs for two of his former NeuroPlus team members who required work visas to remain in the US. Then he started considering his own next move, which felt particularly opaque when his only meaningful job title to date had been the all-encompassing and completely ambiguous entrepreneur. “I pretty quickly realized I was not really qualified to do anything,” he says. After surveying his professional network, he concluded that “founders that weren't successful, and are also not full-time engineers, become product managers.” 

For the first few months of 2019, Stauch holed up, tearing through every book on PM interviews he could get his hands on, while simultaneously bolstering his technical bona fides through Courseras and coding side projects. He had little interest in seeing friends and updating them on his life, and the sooner he could land a job, the sooner he could stop “basically living off an allowance from my wife,” he says. He took calls with friends and friends of friends (“Durham’s tech scene was very much some far far away land with respect to Silicon Valley. I definitely felt like an outsider trying to break in.”), and set his sights on a PM role in Facebook’s VR division, hoping to leverage his experience with headset hardware. 

He made it through round after round of vetting, parroting concepts from books he’d read on acing the PM interview, determined to be the best candidate on paper (if not in spirit) he could be. When he was flown out for his onsite in the Bay, whatever veneer of interest he was able to maintain over Zoom cracked. “The PM who was interviewing me said, ‘I just need you to stop trying to win this interview and just figure out, is this what you want? You were just a founder. What's driving you to be a middle manager at a big tech company?,” remembers Stauch. “And I had some very rehearsed storyline because I was still focused on winning this job.” 

On the recommendation of a friend, Stauch had also been in conversation with a Bay Area-based security camera company, Verkada. He was fairly certain he wasn’t keen to jump from neuroscience into physical security, but had been surprised by how much he enjoyed his conversation with their CEO. At least enough to warrant the 15-minute drive to their office from Facebook’s headquarters.  

“Coming straight from Facebook’s very sterile offices, I remember just walking into this gritty, kind of disgusting, overcrowded but highly energetic office where everyone's on the phones, loud, pacing, passionate” he says. “And the vibe just made me think, ‘Maybe this is actually what I want?’” When he learned a few weeks later that he didn’t get the Facebook job, his decision was made for him.

Fortunately, Stauch was starting to get a sense for what a fit could feel like. “It felt like actually a match of who I am, and what they were looking for in terms of someone who actually wants to come in and build things like a founder,” he says. 

At Verkada, Stauch found something more than a fit for his sensibilities: “When you're working on a startup that doesn't have product-market fit, it feels like you're playing a rigged game. No matter how good you are at what you do or how hard you work, you can't win. And there’s no feedback, so you don't know if you're actually good at anything because you're just losing all the time,” says Stauch. With Verkada, he finally felt like he was in an environment where he was playing a hard game, but one that was winnable, because they actually had lots of buyers for what they were selling. “If I do good work, I can be successful here.”  

With a few years' distance from NeuroPlus, Stauch had still never let go of the idea that he would someday identify his thing, and that he would do it at the highest level possible. Verkada gave him opportunities for growth, but he always saw it as a temporary step. Four years in, when word came that the product vertical he was overseeing would be shuttered, he realized it was time to have another go at building his own baby. It just so happened he was also about to have an actual one. 

“I was four or five months pregnant and he came home one day and he was like, ‘I'm quitting,’” remembers Birgisson. “And then we got into a huge fight because I was pregnant, and he's going to quit and not get any parental leave, and with your first kid you don’t even know what to expect. So there’s a tremendous amount of fear.”

Stauch acquiesced, agreeing to stay on through their baby’s birth, while considering how to prepare for his imminent exit. He didn’t yet have a concrete idea for a company, but learned enough to know he didn’t want to be a solo founder again, and he had a clear pick for who he wanted his ‘Co’ to be. “Luckily, the engineer that I was paired with when building new products at Verkada was Alex [McLeod],” says Stauch.

A couple of months before his baby was due, Stauch and McLeod went for a walk. He suspected the former startup CTO might still have founder aspirations as well, and hoped their timelines might align. “I remember asking him, ‘What are you doing after this?’ And he was like, ‘Oh, probably start my own thing.’ I was like, ‘Yeah, me too. We should talk.’ And that was really how we decided to start a company together,” says Stauch. 

After Stauch and Birgisson’s daughter was born in December of 2023, when Stauch wasn’t tending to the newborn (and occasionally, while doing so) he was strategizing. He and McLeod had an inclination towards solving problems for IT teams, who they felt they had an “unfair advantage” with after spending four years building for them at Verkada. 

From their time in physical security, Stauch and McLeod encountered a similar storyline across customer types and sizes. IT had grand visions of all these things they wanted to build, especially automations for tickets, system configuration, and device troubleshooting. But very little automation was ever getting built. The line they heard the most was something like “I just want to hire someone to automate all this stuff for me.”

As their ideas were gradually maturing, so was AI. By early 2024, Stauch and McLeod were realizing that the key to solving automation was to somehow make it effortless to build automations. In other words, building the automated process needed to be easier and faster than doing the thing manually. “If somebody asks me for a password reset, and I've got the option of going into Google, finding the user, hitting ‘reset password,’ or going into Okta workflows, dragging up a trigger event and configuring automation steps—you're just going to go and reset the password manually,” says Stauch. Still months before vibe coding or agentic AI would enter the cultural lexicon, Stauch and McLeod predicted that the capabilities of AI agents would soon be good enough to take on this manual work directly. “They were probably one of the first, if not the first, to vibe code a workflow automation,” says Sequoia partner Anas Biad. 

Stauch texted ideas back and forth with McLeod with one hand while holding his baby in the other. By then, convinced that this just might be his thing, Stauch started having conversations with VCs. Within weeks, a small early stage firm, impressed by Stauch and McLeod’s track record of bringing multiple products from zero to one together at Verkada, offered them a term sheet. “That kicked off a frenzy,” says Stauch. By the time he and Birgisson’s daughter was two months old (a date he remembers because he got the call while skiing at Alta, the only slope within driving distance with daycare for eight-week-olds), he and McLeod received offers from First Round and General Catalyst. Suddenly, he had another baby to tend to, one he decided to name Serval, a nod to his zoology past and his new professional domain: service management.

For nearly half a year, Stauch and McLeod had little to show for their efforts, in part because of the gulf between their aspirations and their product. “Alex was doing it all. He had his work cut out for him because we had this grand vision of a product that competes with a giant like ServiceNow. We're going to build a full ITSM ticketing platform, workflow automation, access management, AI code gen agents, all this stuff,” says Stauch. While Alex built tirelessly, Stauch did what he could to sign design partners, which was challenging when there “really was just not enough of the product there yet,” says Stauch. 

While ambition and ideas alone couldn’t win over customers, it caught the eye of Anas Biad at Sequoia, who were exploring investments in IT automation. “Everyone in the market at the time was building a small point solution, or like a feature on top of a bot on Slack,” says Biad, “and I meet Jake and he was trying to totally reinvent the entire system from the ground up to be the new system of record and system of automation for enterprise IT.” 

Eventually, this vision convinced one team from Ramp to give them a shot as an unpaid design partner, offering feedback on the nascent product. Around the same time, Stauch and McLeod made their first hire, an engineer from a direct competitor (“That was a pretty cool vote of confidence,” remembers Stauch). By the end of 2024, they’d hired two more engineers, and signed on Perplexity as a third design partner. But by April 2025, Ramp decided to end their partnership citing the immaturity of Serval’s product. That’s when Stauch and McLeod went for another walk, this time to consider a pivot. 

“I remember wondering, should we go upmarket and do something very narrow and small? Should we go downmarket and focus more on ticketing?,” says Stauch. But despite being in seemingly similarly dire straits, this low felt entirely different to Stauch than various crises with NeuroPlus. By then he’d spent years of his life having conversations with IT managers and CISOs to understand where they struggled and what they needed. In his gut, he knew there was a real market for their product if they could just buy themselves a little more time to build it; this really did feel like something he could will into being with enough perseverance and thought. “We decided in that conversation that we had to just keep going,” says Stauch. “The product just had to mature.” 

Stauch arranged a call with the team at Perplexity and minced no words. “We were basically like, “what would it take for you to become a paying customer,” and they said, “well we can’t move off our existing vendor because they do X, Y, and Z.” And we're like, "What if we build that?,” says Stauch. “And then we built that, and then they said, ‘Okay.’” Serval closed them as their first paying customer in May 2025.

Soon, others signed on as well. Finally, with a thing that he’d helped build from scratch, Stauch was experiencing how it felt to work towards a goal that meets a real need in a more universal way. The type of product-market fit that, according to Stauch, makes customers start to ‘round up.’ “If you can get a call, and a customer asks ‘can you do this? What about this?’ and instead of saying ‘it’s on the roadmap’ to 90% of things, you're saying it to 10%, customers start to believe you, and to believe that what they want is eventually going to be delivered,” says Stauch. 

By early 2026, workers started embracing agentic AI and vibe coding in droves — thanks in part to the rise of Claude Code & Cowork and its accompanying skills being shared enterprise-wide. Not only did this increase potential customers’ familiarity with Serval’s natural language workflow, it also raised demand for their product by introducing a whole new host of technology and permissions for IT teams to figure out how to service. Today, Serval's product has created an experience described by one customer as "frictionless," where, for example, a ping to a #servicedesk Slack channel for software access — which used to be routed to an IT person with a backlog of tickets — now gets handled by a Serval agent who can immediately provision access, assuming the request meets pre-approved protocols. 

 As Serval’s product has matured, the company has started garnering attention from the Fortune 500, expanding their potential impact not just on the processes they aim to fix, but also the people who implement them. “Ultimately, Serval hopes to automate all this manual work that nobody wants to do in IT, HR, finance—more. Right now, people in these fields get to spend maybe 20% of their job doing the actually meaningful stuff they signed up for,” says Stauch. “We want that to be 40%, then 60%, then 80%. And then eventually, one day we want your entire job to be just the most idealized thing that it can be.” 

Stauch has realized that for him, that thing might just be making lots of things happen. “I am probably uniquely suited to jumping into a bunch of random problems,” he says. This is fortunate, because Stauch expects plenty of jumping and evolving ahead, and he's increasingly convinced that this kind of ambiguity can't be navigated alone. “These AI tools aren’t even five years old. I wouldn't be surprised if in another five years, our product looks nothing like it does today,” he says. “For me, being the best long-term isn't so much about nailing our current product vision as it is about assembling an incredible team that can understand and predict what people actually need as technologies, markets, and the world shift.”

For the first time in his professional career, Stauch is finding a degree of powerlessness exhilarating. “I can no longer keep the entire company in my mind,” he says. “It’s like trying to imagine a five-dimensional object in your head. I no longer know all the deals. I don't have a deep relationship with everyone on the team. I don't know all the work streams that are happening, and it’s incredibly disconcerting and a little terrifying and I feel great,” he says. Amid the constructive chaos inherent to leading a hypergrowth company in the age of AI (“We onboarded more people this Monday than we hired in our entire first year and a half as a company,” says Stauch), he is grateful to feel like he’s in an environment and working on a problem where potential can be realized. 

“What I got really excited about early on with Serval is that we can elevate the IT role,” says Stauch. "I think with Serval, IT has the opportunity to be builders. They become the AI powerhouse of the organization. They’re increasingly seen as enablers for their colleagues — a feeling that everybody deserves to have. We’re bringing this to IT first, but the rest of workforce is next."