The founders of Ictus

Liam studied at Wharton, then spent [N] years at BCG, working on [strategy problems for large companies in some industry], the kind of work where the question is never “what could we do” but “what is actually worth doing.” From there he went to BlackRock, where he [did something with portfolios or clients that involved judgment under real stakes], learning how the largest firms in the world decide where money and effort go.

What struck him in both places was [a placeholder observation about how good analysis rarely reaches smaller businesses]. The thinking that Fortune 500 companies pay millions for is mostly about asking the right questions in the right order, and nothing about it requires a Fortune 500 budget.

At Ictus, Liam runs strategy: finding the problem worth fixing, agreeing what “fixed” means, and holding the work to it.

Jonathan spent ten years building software that businesses run on. Four were at Bluefin Capital Management, writing the tools an options trading team used to place and monitor live orders, work where a bug costs real money in seconds. Three were at Korr, an eight-person startup building a claims system for a long-term-care administrator: he helped design it, ship it, and migrate decades of records out of the legacy system it replaced. It went live and the business runs on it today.

Those years taught him what it takes to put software inside a working business. What has changed is the economics: AI means one careful builder can now do what used to take a team. The judgment about what to build, and the work of making it stick, never got automated.

He studied computer science at Stevens, and left in February to build Ictus.