Built by operators who’ve run the business.
Two founders. One CEO. One CTO. Compound exists because the AI conversation operators are having today doesn’t have an operator on the other side of it.
Cale spent 7.5 years at Gym Launch. He started as a sales rep. He ended as CEO of a PE-backed portfolio of three brands — Gym Launch, Prestige Labs, and GymOwners.com — for almost 4 years.
In his first 2 years as CEO, he doubled the portfolio’s revenue and grew EBITDA 2.5x. He coached more than 4,000 business owners along the way. He’s sat in board meetings with the number on the line, written board decks at 11pm the night before, and watched what works and what doesn’t from inside a real service business running at scale.
He started Compound because the AI conversations he was having with operators all sounded the same. Everyone knew AI mattered. Nobody knew what to actually build. The agencies they’d hired were run by engineers who’d never read a P&L. The consultants they’d hired sold decks, not systems. He saw the gap. He started Compound to fill it.
He lives in St. Augustine, FL.
Sam is an AI-native engineer with a rare credit on his resume: he deployed AFRL’s NIPRGPT large language model into operational workflows inside the U.S. Air Force. One of the first LLM deployments of its kind. Multi-thousand-user environment. Classified, compliance-heavy, no room for error.
Before the Air Force, he was a software engineer at Audible — an Amazon company — shipping iOS features to millions of users.
Today, he’s co-founder of Slant Labs AI, an AI analytics platform. He’s also CTO of Teasers Sports, where he owned every technical and product decision. He works at the LLM API layer daily — designing agentic workflows, shipping full-stack systems, and tuning model performance against real-world use.
He holds an active DoD security clearance. He started Compound with Cale because the firms operators were calling weren’t shipping. He’s the one who actually ships.
Why we built Compound.
The operator’s side of the AI conversation doesn’t exist yet.
There are technologists building demos. There are consultants writing decks. Nobody is combining a CEO’s seat with hands on the LLM layer to actually ship the systems and run them inside a real operation.
Between Cale’s run inside a PE-backed portfolio and Sam’s run inside the Air Force, we have what the market was missing.
Compound is the firm we’d both have hired ourselves.
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