Binomial

Stephanie Harbert didn't set out to build a company. She was burned out from full-time employment and needed something more sustainable. "I felt like I couldn't really work a full time coding job. I was just not ready, not healthy enough," she recalls. With a background in graphics programming—optimizing visual quality for games by working closely with GPUs—she pivoted to consulting instead. This proved to be the incubator she needed. Over two months of intentional networking, making a good impression on four new people a day, she landed her first consulting gig. Shortly after, she met Rich Galdrakus, her future co-founder, through the networking process. They clicked immediately. "It was almost a sense of, I don't care what we do. I just want to work with this person," she remembers.

While consulting, Stephanie and Rich kept seeing a recurring pain point: clients' games were running into memory and storage problems because textures and images were too large. Multiple clients asked if they could solve this problem. Rather than take it on as another consulting gig, they realized this could be a product. Rich had deep expertise in image compression; Stephanie brought graphics optimization knowledge. They spent three to four months prototyping Basis while continuing selective consulting work.

Crucially, they didn't launch in a vacuum. Stephanie kept doing what had served her well from the start: networking relentlessly. Rich blogged consistently about the prototype. They spoke at conferences about it, even though it was still unfinished. "We just totally shifted," Stephanie says, pivoting her elevator pitch from "we're looking for consulting work" to "we're making this product."

The breakthrough came unexpectedly. An engineer at Netflix read Rich's blog about the prototype and thought: "We could use this." He advocated internally, and Netflix approached them with a licensing deal—not as a consulting contract, but as a services agreement where Netflix would fund development in exchange for exclusive access. This was transformative. "We got interest from Netflix, um, who wanted to license it," Stephanie recalls. Netflix became not just their first customer, but their first validation that the market wanted what they'd built.

After Netflix signed on, growth wasn't immediate. "We entered kind of a slow phase where we were starting to get more visibility and more credibility because we had this big name customer, but people were still hesitant. Nobody wants to be first. Everybody wants to be second," Stephanie explains. They continued networking, speaking at conferences, and engaging in community initiatives—hosting free programming classes, helping newcomers learn to code, and working with the Khronos Group on image compression standards. These activities built credibility and word-of-mouth momentum over time.

On sales, Stephanie learned a critical lesson: pricing isn't about hours worked or team size—it's about value delivered. For game studios, that means calculating how much money or storage the product saves them. She discovered an important psychology: "You should either pick a price that's so low that it's like not a big deal for an engineer to just approve it and buy it. Or you should name a price that's high enough to make yourself look really valuable." She avoided the dangerous middle ground. She also learned that collaborative negotiation beats aggressive posturing. "Most negotiations are surprisingly collaborative," she says. When she encountered aggressive negotiators, she walked away, seeing it as a red flag about the working relationship ahead.

Today, Binomial is a two-person company negotiating seven-figure deals. Just before this podcast recording, Stephanie had closed a major contract. When investors offered millions to hire salespeople and take equity, she declined: why dilute control and bring in overhead for a company already generating deals of that size? Her philosophy centers on sustainable business: the company is structured to let two talented people stay sane while remaining extraordinarily profitable. "I limits myself to working 20 hours a week," she notes, embodying the work-life balance she advocates. This wasn't luck—it was built methodically through years of networking, learning by doing, and staying open to opportunities while protecting her own wellbeing.