S12 Bonus: The Microsoft File Trap: Moving Beyond Manual PowerPoint and Excel Workflows to Build an AI-Native "Consulting" Layer with Tim Lidman, Co-Founder & CEO of Clyde AI

Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders

Noah Labhart - Startup Founder & CTO

News, Entrepreneurship, Business, Technology, Careers, Tech News

5.0 • 217 Ratings

🗓️ 18 June 2026

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Tim Lidman lives in Denver, CO. He has had an unconventional path to being a Tech CEO. In fact, He moved from London to Sweden when he was 18... to try to be a heavy metal rock star, trying to make it big as a drummer. To earn extra income, he got into tech sales - which went really well. Eventually, he worked with WebEx (around the time it got bought by Cisco), for Success Factors (when they got bought by SAP), and then eventually, doing his own startup (which eventually got bought by Accenture). Outside of his professional life, he is married with 2 girls. From his music years, he extracts skills that drove his success to date, which is the ability to product development and execution down the same way you do music. In the days of his first startup, Tim's solution was used by consulting firms to power client engagement. Post exit, while overseeing things at Accenture, he noticed that the whole industry was powered by Microsoft files (PowerPoint, Excel, Word, etc.) - IE, driven manually. He started to wonder if he could codify the consulting process, to remove the manual burden. This is the creation story of Clyde. Our Sponsors: * Check out Cash App and use my code CASHAPP10 for a great deal: https://click.cash.app/ui6m/mt82fpxl #CashAppPod. Cash App is a financial services platform, not a bank. Banking services provided by Cash App’s bank partner(s). Prepaid debit cards issued by Sutton Bank, Member FDIC. See terms and conditions at https://cash.app/legal/us/en-us/card-agreement. Cash App Green, overdraft coverage, borrow, cash back offers and promotions provided by Cash App, a Block, Inc. brand. Visit http://cash.app/legal/podcast for full disclosures. * Check out Plaud AI and use my code CODESTORY for a great deal: https://plaud.ai Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Transcript

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0:00.0	This episode is brought to you by The Built. A new podcast from the guys behind Cincera,
0:04.7	Michael Sullivan and Ian Myers. They built their company by figuring out clever solutions to a few
0:09.8	important ad tech problems in their industry. And that's exactly what this show is about.
0:15.2	Mike and Ian interview some of the smartest tech minds in the biz to hear about how they
0:19.8	identified opportunities, solve their hardest challenges, and grew their businesses in the biz to hear about how they identified opportunities solve their
0:21.8	hardest challenges and grew their businesses in the process. Listen to the build with Michael
0:27.4	Sullivan wherever you get your podcasts. I think we got ahead of ourselves on using AI to generate just insane amounts of code.
0:41.3	We were pushing so fast.
0:43.3	We unintentionally created some tech debt by just generating tens of thousands of lines of code all of the time.
0:50.3	We ended up with this delta of generated code and then truly understanding what was in that code base.
0:57.4	And so that required us to take a step back.
0:59.9	What we did is we actually took a about a four-week period, migrated over the existing functionality,
1:06.6	added new functionality on top.
1:08.5	And we did that as a way to almost completely clean up our tech debt.
1:13.5	My name is Tim Lidman, and I'm the co-founder and CEO of Clyde AI.
1:20.9	This is Code Story.
1:23.6	A podcast bringing you interviews with tech visionaries.
1:26.6	Six months moonlighting. There's nothing on the backhand. Who share what it takes to change in industry. I don't exactly know what to do next. She took many goes to get right. Who built the teams that have their back. The company is its people. The teams help each other achieve more. Most proud of our team. Keeping scalability top of mind. Yes, we've been fighting it as we grow. Total waste of time. The stories you don't read in the headlines. It's not an easy thing to achieve, my view. Took off the shelf and dusted it off and tried it again. Dry the ups and downs of the startup life. You need to really want it.
2:01.8	It's not just about technology.
2:03.2	All this and more on Code Story.
2:06.9	I'm your host, Noah LabPart.
2:08.2	And today, how Tim Lidman is enabling you to collaborate with AI,
	...

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